The Independent:

Vauban is a southern suburb of Freiburg and home to 5,300 people. Its elegant, weather-boarded, four-storey homes are painted in subtle tones of blue, yellow and red or left as natural wood. They have wide balconies and large French windows that look out on to quiet, park-like gardens. The overall impression is of being stuck in a never-ending IKEA advertisement.

But if the district’s surface texture is eminently middle class, an eco-revolution is bubbling beneath the surface. The windows of all the homes are triple-glazed. An intricate ventilation system fitted with heat exchangers ensures that apartments are kept constantly topped-up with fresh air at room temperature, even when the windows are shut. Most homes are powered by solar panels and smart co-generator engines that run on wood chips which provide domestic heating and electricity for lighting and appliances. One of the consequences is that most of Vauban’s homes generate a surplus of electricity and sell what they don’t need to the power companies that run the national and regional electricity grids.

With their 35cm thick walls, the homes are so well insulated that the temperature inside is directly affected by the number of people in each apartment. “If it gets too cold in the winter, you have the choice of turning up the heating or inviting a couple of friends round to dinner,” Delleske says. He is immensely proud of the fact that his 90sqm, four-roomed “Passive house,” which is almost environmentally perfect, costs a mere €114 a year to heat. “Most people pay that kind of money for heating each month,” he says. The “Passive house” has even managed to dispense with drains for the toilets and showers. The waste is reduced to compost in special biological toilets and shower and washing-up water is filtered and used to water the garden.

and that’s not all:

“If you want to have a car here, you have to pay about €20,000 for a space in one of our garages on the outskirts of the district,” says Andreas Delleske one of the founders and now a promoter of the Vauban project, “but about 57 per cent of the residents sold a car to enjoy the privilege of living here.” As a result, most residents travel by bike or use the ultra-efficient tram service that connects the suburb with the centre of Freiburg, 15 minutes away. If they want a car to go on holiday or to shift things, they hire one or join one of the town’s car-sharing schemes.

Is there a downside to this eco-suburb? “… it is difficult to spot anyone who is non-European, old or poor.”

In a separate article, Michael McCarthy puts Vauban in perspective:

Does it prove we can live without the car? Yes and No. It shows it can be done in a tightly-knit, specifically urban community, where personal motor transport can be in effect “designed out”, especially if there is a solid constituency of citizens with a strong commitment to environmental values, as has always been the case in Germany.

On a wider scale, actually doing without motor vehicles is much more problematic, especially in the countryside. For most rural communities in Britain, for example, the car is an absolute essential, not least as so many of them are hard if not impossible to reach by public transport. It is arguable that no greater environmental damage was done to the fabric of life in this country after the War than by the slashing of the national railway network recommended by Richard Beeching, the portly, self-satisfied industrialist whose 1963 report led to the closure of thousands of rural stations and hundreds of branch lines, leaving myriad British villages and small towns ultimately car-dependent.