This New Neighborhood Will Be Net-zero, Off The Grid, And Leaves Room For The Forest To Grow
Source: Fast Company, Adele Peters
Photo: B+H Architects
In Augusta Township in Eastern Ontario, a 67-home neighborhood will be walkable, run off community battery systems, and will protect nearby forests and wetlands.
In a new neighborhood that will be surrounded by forests in rural Canada, you’ll be able to live fully off the grid—and potentially avoid much driving, despite the remote location.
The community, located in Augusta Township in Eastern Ontario, around two and a half hours west of Montreal, desperately needs more housing as more employers have moved into the area. But the developers of the new project, which is planned for construction next year, wanted to build in the most sustainable way possible. The neighborhood is designed to be walkable, the homes will produce more energy than they use, and they’ll be built on former farmland while helping protect and restore nearby forests and wetlands.
“We were looking at where we can add more life,” says Jamie Miller, director of biomimicry at B+H Architects, the architecture firm that partnered on the project. “How can we move beyond this idea of doing ‘less harm’ and how can our buildings become a contribution?”
CABN, the startup that designed the homes, makes prefab, solar-powered houses that use around 20% of the energy needed by a traditional home. “This also reduces cost, as less solar is needed to power the building, making each build not only sustainable, but more affordable,” says Jackson Wyatt, founder and CEO of CABN. (A one-bedroom home will begin at around $219,000, in both CAD and USD.)
The passive house design considers the orientation of the buildings, windows, doors, and shading to shrink energy use. The roofs, for example, have a specific size and angle so they keep the buildings cool in summer but also allow in more sun for heat in the winter. They also optimize solar power generation.
Community battery systems will store energy so the homes can run without a connection to the power grid. The neighborhood, with 67 homes, will also use rainwater collection and storage and modular wastewater treatment on site.
The layout of the development considers what the architects call the “living story” of the local environment—what would naturally happen on the land if it were left alone. The homes aren’t built in areas that could flood. Sections of the land will be left open to allow the forest to naturally spread. Leaving the existing forests and wetlands in place also helps protect the area from flooding. “A lot of what we do as a species is we try to resist and fight nature,” says Miller. Instead of cutting down trees and rebuilding engineered systems, he says, they wanted to keep nature’s ecosystem services in place.
The homes will be built in small clusters to help create community, inspired in part by a study that found that groups are most resilient when they’re smaller than 150 people. (Miller, who grew up in a small town, says that his grandfather used to say if a barn burned down, the whole town would show up the next day to help rebuild it.) Parking is on the periphery of the clusters of homes, so the center of the space is open to pedestrians. The development will also include a grocery store, healthcare, and workspaces, to help residents avoid having to drive.
While there’s a common argument that it’s most sustainable to build in dense cities—since that can reduce emissions from transportation and changing the use of land—Miller argues that building in nature makes sense.
“This idea that we can predict and control nature or that nature could be exploited and used for only human consumption or that we’re separate from nature—those key paradigms are what we’ve built our cities on,” he says. “I fully believe that we need to figure out how to design in a way where humans and nature are reconnected.”
This story was updated to clarify the pricing in USD.