1. Living in the future? Low Impact Development
and Energy System Change
Fiona Shirani
Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences
Other team members: Chris Groves, Karen Henwood, Nick Pidgeon
BSA 2017

2. • Experiences of developing the ecovillage –
planning regulations
• Addressing the energy trilemma – different ways of
living – living in the future? Idyllic childhood
• A fashionable lifestyle?
‘I would say three years ago, it's started turning up in the colour supplements
and it's all, it's getting trendy and everyone has got to have a yurt. We've
almost got celebrity status now … I think there has been a certain mad
mainstreaming of this whole thing and I think the whole coffee table
supplement glamorisation of it all has, yeah certainly in our case it has played
into our hands, so now it's no longer something we have to be hopelessly
embarrassed about.’ (Roy, as cited in Shirani et al., 2015)
• Status of a pioneering project
Contextual Overview

3. Policy Context
• Lammas developed in response to
Pembrokeshire CC Policy 52
– 8 criteria, including meeting at least 75% of household
needs from the land by year 3 (later negotiated to 5)
• Superseded by One Planet Development
(OPD) (2010)
– Must meet 65% food needs, minimum household income
needs, all energy, water and biodegradable waste needs
from the land (5 years)
• Buildings covered by
Building Regulations

4. Lammas Tir-y-Gafel
ecovillage
Energy Biographies
3 waves of interviews with 16
residents 2012-2013. 2
multimodal activities
Funded by ESRC under ‘Energy
and Communities’ programme. 3
Other case sites
FLEXIS
Interviews with 11 residents in
summer 2016, once planning
permission targets achieved
Large-scale programme
integrating technical
developments and social science
to address issues concerning the
energy system of the future.
WEFO funded
Researching Lammas

5. • Easily met/unconcerning for some,
pressurising and stressful for others
Meeting the planning targets
‘I don’t really feel a massive sense of achievement you know.
And if anything, kind of things seems to kind of collapse a little
it would almost be, it was almost as though that threat that
we had from planning was kind of holding things together a
bit and when that threat kind of disappeared, I mean we
submitted the annual monitoring report for Year 5 with all our
figures in saying we had achieved the 75% and we didn’t hear
anything from the council at all … So it’s a sort of kind
underwhelming and very odd feeling it’s like you know you’d
almost expect someone to go “congratulations, well done you,
here’s your certificate”, we had nothing like that. We
submitted it into a vacuum and nothing happened.’ (Graham)

6. Community
• Planning targets had been unifying the
community. Lack of common vision
• Wanting an element of control
• Some level of interdependence necessary
due to shared resources
• Informal cooperation working well
• Being part of a community had initially
attracted people
• Anarchy

7. [o]ur dream when we moved here was to have this lifestyle, growing
our own vegetables and experimenting with solar panels and
compost toilets and solar showers and all this kind of thing whilst
our children were young. And having this idyllic lifestyle and have
them, you know, the lovely outdoors and everything, the mill pond,
um, and the reality is when we reach that point where we have our
own house and we’re growing our own vegetables, because this
year we’ve not grown any vegetables at all, we’ve just bought food
in, they’ll be pretty close to thinking about moving out of home…
So yeah, the 75 % thing, I think it’s, like everybody here, although
they have the intention and the spirit of what they’re supposed to
be doing is happening, nobody’s actually succeeded, like we may
have managed to demonstrate that we’ve provided 75 %, but
nobody’s actually built their main house (Laura)
Lack of family homes or personal space
Personal and social costs

8. Social legacy
• Impact on people who come and
visit/volunteer
• Legacy of inspiration not
measurable
• Status of a pioneering project
I can be pretty sure that four hundred and fifty out of five hundred at
least went away more inspired than they came you know? … the
opportunity to come to this place seems to be beneficial to people, just
to see what’s going on. Yeah, so it is a big and important thing. It’s one
of, yeah maybe, our most appreciable output by about a hundred fold
really [laughs] of all the other things we make for ourselves. (Darren)
I have always wanted the plot to give back to people in some way, to
have people coming through to give back to people and I know it’s not
75% or something but if, I am lucky to be doing this … if I can help input
into other people’s lives in a really positive way that is, that is really
important to me. (Ruth)

9. Smart co-operation?
• Plans for smart management of the electricity
supply from the hydro
we’ve got a sort of control system which lets us know about
what we’re using, about what’s available, um, it sort of
facilitates borrowing and lending power between people,
means that anybody overloading doesn’t cause the whole
system to crash, they cause a local thing, and it gives them
the ability to put, so things like water heaters on as sort of
backup loads so that when there is spare power those are
automatically switched on and off again, which is great …
we’ve only got the prototype at the moment, but already
can see we get so much more out of it by having that extra
technology, yeah, it makes it easier and we can use it all up
better. (Darren)
• Reducing need for informal cooperation?
• Place for technology

10. Concluding thoughts
• Challenges of reconciling policy timescales with
those of family life and permaculture
development
• Need for different building regulations for LIDs
• Going beyond what is measured as success to
consider wider personal and social implications
• Place of technology – does this make the
lifestyle more widely appealing?