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What is the new better for Community?
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Regenerate LifeDescription text goes here
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Do Good
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Arrest Disorder
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Value Return / Extraction
(C) Carol Sanford Institute 2020The Bottom Line: Nature Towns are the best places to live!
Nature Towns are complete, walkable communities surrounded by large, regenerative organic farms. Towns feature 1280 households and about 3000 residents in single-family homes, multiplexes, and live-work-retail buildings with shops and services.
The farms comprise 75% of the total site area and provide food, energy, water, and climate security for residents, as well as other environmental benefits such as pollination, carbon sequestration, stormwater infiltration, and mitigation of drought, flood, and the heat island effect.
Town and farm are holistically integrated to form a local circular economy that minimizes waste and maximizes ecosystem services and nature. For example, farm products feed residents, while food wastes return nutrients to the farm to feed the soil. Residents gain a regenerative lifestyle with improved health outcomes, community cohesion, and highly sustainable living overall.
Comparing Nature Towns to Sprawl
Nature Towns recently completed a Triple Bottom Line Cost Benefit Analysis (TBL-CBA) to explore the environmental, social, and financial impacts of a new pattern of development. We analyzed two different land use patterns, the typical sprawl development pattern versus a Nature Towns model, to compare the impacts of each.
We worked with McMac Cx / Innova, which provides sustainable best practices evaluation, professional project oversight, and continuous performance outcome verification, and their partner Autocase, the international leader in automated, cloud-based software that assesses impacts of sustainable building and site designs informing green infrastructure investments and policy guidelines.
The TBL-CBA is an evidence-based economic method that combines CBA and lifecycle cost analysis (LCCA) across the triple bottom line to weigh costs and benefits to project stakeholders. Evidence is drawn from ‘gold standard’ sources such as federal government reporting agencies. It expands the traditional financial analysis (capital and, operations & maintenance costs) to account for social and environmental performance as well. It quantifies in monetary terms as many of the costs and benefits of the project as possible and converts them all into a net present-day dollar value. The triple bottom line net present value (TBL-NPV) of the scenarios is used to compare relative benefits and costs that accrue over their lifetime.
The analysis compared a sprawl scenario of 1280 households on 320 acres to a projected 320-acre Nature Town with 1280 households on 80 acres, and a farm on the remaining 240.