What Nick Clegg means by garden cities might be very different from what you mean. Britain's Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, wants to see more garden cities but they will be built by big developers for profit. What a contrast to the most successful garden city in the Netherlands where people can design their own homes (see below)...

Over the weekend Clegg floated the concept that homeowners near to proposed sites for the construction of new garden cities should be able to be compensated for a reduction in the value of their homes caused by nuisance during the construction process, yet it has not even been decided where the three proposed new garden cities are to be built.

In April Clegg published a prospectus inviting bids for proposed garden cities from councils. He stressed at the time that the new cities would not be imposed on communities and must have local support, good transport links and be commercially viable. This followed on the heels of George Osborne's announcement that the eighth "Garden City" would be built in Ebbsfleet on the south of the Thames estuary, the site of a transport hub on the Eurotunnel high-speed rail link.  Will te other three cities be like this?

Ebbsfleet

This development is being steered through by an Urban Development Corporation (UDC) led by the private sector firm Land Securities. Concerns have been expressed at the undemocratic nature of this corporation, despite the fact that the board will include the leaders of Dartford and Gravesham councils and the county council, since it will be chaired by a businessman.

Land Securities has produced a glossy but opaque website full of bland reassurances. Statements such as: "Our development plans for Ebbsfleet Valley wholly meet the Department for Communities and Local Government's requirements for sustainable communities" are not terribly reassuring, not least because the department doesn't seem to have any requirements that are particularly sustainable.

The homes will be built by Ward Homes, a building company owned by large scale developer Barratt Homes. Barratt's owner, Mark Clare, knows about green building. He was chair of the Zero Carbon Task Group that was charged in 2007 with finding a way to meet the energy needs of very efficient homes after 2016 when all new homes were supposed to be zero carbon. So perhaps the new buildings, at least, will be reasonably sustainable. Or maybe not...

Zero carbon or not?

Barratt's is, with 35 other building companies, part of the UK Green Building Council, set up to aim for "zero carbon, zero water and zero waste".

But six years since the report they produced – post-recession and the construction slump – its hard work was undercut when smaller/mid-scale builders decided that having to make homes zero carbon was effectively pricing them out of the market and persuaded the government to water down their proposals.

The original intention was for an improvement of between 56 per cent and 60 per cent over 2006 Building Regulations for homes, and 44 per cent for flats. The Government's new proposal requires only a 44 per cent improvement for all homes (Code for Sustainable Homes level 4). Now, new 'zero carbon homes' won't have to be zero carbon at all, so long as the emissions are reduced somewhere else under a carbon offsetting scheme.

This is the worst of possible worlds because buyers will still have to pay extra for their homes to finance the offsetting but will not receive the benefit of lower fuel bills that a zero carbon home would deliver.

It remains to be seen whether Ebbsfleet, Osborne's pet project, will be a model for Clegg's garden cities. The artists' impressions that Land Securities have released of what Ebbsfleet Garden City will look like do not show homes having plenty of garden space to grow their own vegetables and local food and cycling/walking being a priority.

Instead, we do know that they are expected to be self-financing and that developers will be looking to recoup their investment, needing to make their propositions to buyers as attractive as possible. To do this they will be emphasising in their marketing that life in their garden cities will be as close to "normal" as possible, i.e. residents will not have to do much different than they would if they were to live anywhere else.

^{Marketing the garden cities}

This is the message that developers will have got from Zero Carbon Hub's market research which shows that the branding for 'green' (low-or-zero-carbon) homes is to be along the lines of "A New Way of Living" since talk of "sustainability" apparently puts buyers off.

This document identifies the problem by saying:

"At the moment, consumers do not feel they see the big picture, do not have a clear idea of what they are being asked to do and what it means for them and would not be sufficiently literate in any of the low carbon housing features to request them at point of sale or appreciate and value them if offered. This – and the fact that all the technologies are perceived to add cost at point of purchase – coupled with a currently weak housing market generally – do not bode well in terms of the customer becoming engaged soon in any low carbon housing solutions. However, we know that there is inherent concern about climate change and a fast accelerating consumer expectation that government and industry working together will 'solve the problem'."

Furthermore, developers will have little control over who moves to the garden cities; this is dependent on where they are and the jobs on offer. Generally, affordable homes are bought by young families. Perhaps the majority of people moving into the three and four bedroom homes will be younger families moving out of nearby big cities, or people who wish to move closer to them but be within a green suburban landscape, in which case they will be commuting.

Allotments and gardens may be on offer but will they be enough? Will people want to use them? The original garden cities were built at a time when it was completely normal for people to grow their own vegetables and they had the skills to do so. Now, despite the renewal of interest in growing your own, it's still far from the norm, as any tour of existing or former council estates with their large gardens laid to lawn will show you.

Almere

What a contrast to a garden city in the Netherlands: Almere.

Almere was not built by developers. Instead it encourages wide-scale private and collective commissioning as an alternative to the more common institutionalized ways of building houses. People design and build or commission their own homes.

There are hundreds of building plots available in every possible price range and size. They can either implement their own design ideas or modify a catalogue design to their own specifications. This unleashes the imagination and enthusiasm of the new development's inhabitants and helps build a genuine sense of community by encouraging them to be feel part of something new that they are helping to create. The homes aren't all the same.

A major new town, it was built on reclaimed land and established as a suburban city, providing a sustainable alternative to the dense, urbanised metropolitan region of Amsterdam.

Prospective private commissioners are supported by the municipality and by professionals from the urban building, planning and design sector (architects, contractors, etc.) throughout the entire process of building their dream house.

In line with Garden City principles it has a multi-centred structure, incorporating the surrounding water and nature as much as possible. It is intended by the national government, the provincial government of Flevoland and the municipality to be an icon of sustainability. Almere demonstrates how the garden city principles can be interpreted to inform the development of a new community and the municipality is proud of this approach.

Since its establishment in 1976, Almere has been one of the fastest growing cities in Europe. In just a few decades it has attracted over 193,000 residents and 14,500 businesses. As the seventh largest city in the Netherlands it is still undergoing considerable development.

Members of the Town and Country Planning Association visited Almere eleven months ago, and came back all enthusiastic about it. But their enthusiasm can't be channelled into practice if the government's prospectus already dictates the developer model.

In the country where Grand Designs, a tv programme about designing your own home, is extremely popular, it's a shame that the garden cities in England will be unlike Almere, and, I fear, all but indistinguishable from any other development. An opportunity to unleash the creative potential of Brits has been lost to a politicial agenda to be seen to be doing something about the housing crisis even if it means building on green belt, prime agricultural land in middle England. 

That, and not sustainability, is what lies behind this enthusiasm for garden cities. Clegg's offer of compensation to neighbours of these developments inadvertently betrays this agenda, for if it were what people really wanted why would they need compensation?