Irresistible Community Builders, we have our hands on what we believe is such a trimtab in the form of a prototype urban ecovillage project that, with the $100,000 assistance of BFI, could begin to turn Spaceship Earth in a more sustainable direction. We say this because this one project will introduce a combination of significant new technological artifacts and social systems into the environment at a time when both the global culture and the international economy are crying out for breakthroughs in how we live with each other and in relationship with the natural world.

Reportedly, between 40 and 50 percent of the world’s energy resources are consumed either directly or indirectly by buildings. Of this amount, the vast majority is for housing, so design and construction considerations are paramount in causing a sustainable world. But recent studies show that the social aspects of housing may have an even more profound impact.

Dr. Graham Meltzer in his book, Sustainable Community: Learning from the Cohousing Model, points out that the vast majority of people in industrialized societies say that they are committed to recycling and energy conservation but few make the substantial lifestyle changes that are required to cause a sustainable world. The one exception is people moving into cohousing/ecovillage communities. The key ingredient that ecovillages possess, which is now largely missing in the rest of western culture and to a growing extent in modern culture as a whole, is a community of support or authentic community. There are many ways, of course, to achieve authentic community, but Meltzer found that developing cohousing/ecovillage communities is one of the most effective.

This is because there is a structure that was developed in the early days of cohousing/ ecovillage development in Denmark that always results in authentic community when it is rigorously followed. It entails a unique merging of physical and social design principles, including the physical design for small, authentic neighborhoods where housing is clustered around a common house and homes face each other across courtyards and pedestrian walkways; governance for community, i.e., consensus decision making and nonviolent conflict resolution; scale for community with neighborhoods that contain at least 15 households and not more than fifty. Fewer than fifteen can result in a lack of sustained leadership and sufficient synergy, and more than fifty can feel institutional.

Not all cohousing communities, of course, are in ecovillages, not all ecovillages include cohousing neighborhoods and the degree to which these communities are ecological varies widely, but there is a trend to merge the movements and some, like ourselves, envision future cities that are clusters of very well designed ecovillages.

Our intention is to hasten this process with prototype communities that have the potential to become benchmarks for the combined movements and to develop Irresistible Community Builders as a prototype regional cohousing/ecovillage development company, thus expanding the development capacity of the combined movements, which is the major limiting factor to rapid expansion of both highly ecological efforts.

We believe the Culver Way Ecovillage project has the potential to be such a prototype community and Irresistible Community Builders, such a prototype company for the following reasons:

• Benchmark design:

• Charles Durrett is the acknowledged father of the American cohousing movement and coauthor, with his wife Kathryn McCamant, of the seminal book, Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves and more recently Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living. When he finished working with our buyers group on the design for the first neighborhood in the Culver Way Ecovillage, he said that when the movement was young in Denmark an exceptionally well designed and executed community was built that became the benchmark for all future communities and that it was at that point that the movement really began to take off. He said that he believed our design, if well executed, could become the benchmark for the American movement.

• He was assisted in the design by Greg Ramsey of Village Homes Design in Atlanta who concurs with that assessment as it applies to urban ecovillages. At this point, we expect our project to receive 95 to 100 points on LEED for Neighborhood Development, which would easily qualify it for a platinum rating.

• Introduction of new or new combinations of technological artifacts:

• The Smart Energy Design Assistance Center (SEDAC) at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana has recommended and we plan to use Structural Concrete Insulated Panels (SCIPS) as our building envelope. Irresistible Community Builders manufactures and builds with these panels, and ARKA International, our structural engineers, hold patents to two other versions of the panel. We will be using the three systems interchangeably and in combination, as appropriate.

• There are many advantages to building with SCIPS. They include an air tight, super insulated, monolithic envelope that is fire and disaster resistant, contains high-recycled content, is easy to construct and highly affordable. Geodesic dome structures made with SCIPS will be utilized in our prototype. Building geodesic structures with conventional building materials typically results in a lot of waste in spite of the fact that the overall system is very efficient because of the rectilinear nature of most conventional materials. Our innovations with SCIPS make it possible, however, to build with virtually no waste. In fact, scraps of trusses, mesh and foam from rectilinear projects can be recycled into dome construction projects.

• SEDAC also recommended a ground source heat pump system as the most cost effective heating and air conditioning technology for our region. We will add energy recovery ventilation and cool tube, preconditioned make-up air to further boost the efficiency of the system. We will also include a heat and food producing, passive solar greenhouse attached to the common house, which will utilize an existing hundred-year-old, massive, south facing masonry wall as a thermal sink and a biomass furnace, fitted with a scrubber as backup.

• Other technologies include solar assisted, domestic hot water made more efficient with heat recovery from spent water and sewage, photovoltaics that utilize new cadmium telluride based collectors that represent a breakthrough in affordability. We will also be introducing “Solar Ivy”, a device that can be mounted vertically that produces electricity both from the action of sunlight shining on the photosensitive artificial leaves and from the rustling action of the wind. The product has the added advantage of shading exterior walls against heat gain in summer and heat loss in winter. We are also including both vertical and horizontal windmills.

• A layer cake design will let us park vehicles, provide cold storage, shop space, fish and mushroom cultivation in basements and gardens in courtyards and on flat roofs under trellises that support both vine plants and flat plate thermal and photovoltaic collectors (see prospective drawing) with living and common space on intermediate floors. We will grow most of our food and produce most of our energy on site while still maintaining a density of 44 units per acre. Greater density in our cities without sacrificing livability is essential to causing a sustainable world.

Irresistible Community Builders is collaborating with two non-profits, Justine Petersen Housing and Reinvestment Corporation (JPHRC) and Friedens Neighborhood Foundation to establish a cooperatively owned construction company that will build out much of this and future projects, employing ex-offenders who are graduates of the North St. Louis YouthBuild program.

The neighborhoods will be made affordable through $4.4 million in Missouri State Neighborhood Preservation Act tax credits, City of St. Louis Affordable Housing Trust Fund second mortgage assistance for eight income qualified buyers, property tax abatement, community food and energy production, work from home facilities and sharing of resources, including tool and car sharing.

To build capacity to replicate the Culver Way project, Irresistible Community Builders is collaborating with the owners of a second urban site within St. Louis and a rural site near Eagle River, Wisconsin, which will serve as the first rural ecovillage prototype. Stone Soup Media is doing a video documentary on the development of the Culver Way project, so we will have that as a resource to propagate the model as well in the interest of causing a sustainable world.

The prize money will be used to finish design work on the prototype projects and defer some of the steep learning curve costs of implementing new technology artifacts and costs associated with merging social systems for the first time, as well as for developing a prototype for a grassroots, regional company to develop mutual housing (rental), cohousing and ecovillage communities.