Vauban factfile

Site of a former army barracks
Total area: 41 hectares, of which 16.4 ha residential, 1.6 ha industrial, 2.6 ha ‘green’ spaces, 12.4 ha traffic and two ha public spaces
Population: approx 5,500, or 2,472 households
Population density: 134.9 residents per ha
Energy efficiency of housing: 65 kWh/m2, with many houses (about 50) of ‘passivhaus’ standard, at 15 kWh/m2 and some even producing a surplus of energy
Low-carbon technologies include heating from a combined heat and power station, solar collectors and photovoltaics
Number of cars: 172 per 1,000 residents; some 70 per cent of the population don’t own a car (to own a car involves purchasing a parking space in a multi-storey car park on the outskirts of Vauban, for US$23,350, plus a monthly service charge)
Organic household waste is treated with an anaerobic digester
Planning began 1993, district ‘completed’ 2006
Land divided into small plots and preferably allocated to ‘community construction companies’ and Baugruppen (co-housing groups)
About two-thirds of homes were built by these ‘community construction communities’/co-operatives and about a third by private builders/residential developers
First house completed in August 1999 – subsequent monitoring found that that additional cost of making the building energy-efficient (an additional seven per cent) was ‘paid back’ within ten years.
Detached homes prohibited, buildings to be no more than four storeys in height
In the city of Freiburg, of which Vauban is a district: 400 km of cycle paths, over 9,000 bicycle parking spaces, with 70 per cent of the population living within 500 m of a tram stop, served by a tram every 7.5 minutes
Also in the city of Freiburg, community participation in the city’s Land Use Plan involved 19 working groups of technical officers and local people
Sources: Quartier Vauban (Freiburg marketing), Smartcitiesdive.com, selfbuildportal.org.uk, and world-habitat.org.
Pictured: Vauban, 2010, Picture credit: Steven Tolson
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