Is this the greenest city in the world?

by Andrew Purvis

It is 6C outside, and a dusting of snow can be seen on the Schauinsland - the low hill overlooking Freiburg, where the good burghers of the southwest German city take their children hiking. In Meinhard Hansen's apartment, however, it is perpetual summer; the sun streams in through tall, south-facing windows and a gauge on the wall reads '24C'. Next to it, the words 'Heizung 0' appear in a small glass window. 'Heating, zero,' Meinhard translates. 'In fact, we haven't switched the heating on for weeks.'

While a typical home in Germany (or Britain, for that matter) squanders 220 kilowatt hours of energy a year for each square metre of floor space, this one wastes 15kWh/m2 a year. 'My mother-in-law has an old house in the country,' says Meinhard, 'and she uses 6,000 litres of oil a year to heat it. We use 150 litres.' On one wall there is a radiator, but it is stone cold. 'It's just for psychological reasons,' he says, 'because my wife never believed this was possible.'

The impossible dream was a 'passive house' where no active system is needed to maintain a comfortable temperature. Super-insulated with foam and lagging up to 30cm thick, the flat is triple-glazed and externally sealed. Fresh air enters at ceiling level and is sucked out through a funnel on one wall. 'The heat from the warm air going out is transferred to the cold air coming in,' says Meinhard, Freiburg's chief architect and a world authority on passive houses. So far, his company has built about 100.

Opening a cupboard, he shows me how the cold and warm ducts meet in a knot of corrugated silver piping. The result? An almost constant temperature without the need for heating - because warmth is provided by cooking, lighting, even warm-blooded mammals. 'My wife and I produce 100W of energy each, the dog another 20W,' says Meinhard, bending down to check the animal is still breathing. 'If we hold a dinner party, we have to open the windows.' By his calculation, the entire flat could be heated with 30 candles.

'These ideas are not very complicated,' Meinhard insists - though designing the ducts and ventilation systems 'requires a bit of thinking'. The proof, he says, is in the economics. While a passive house costs 10 per cent more to build, it reduces energy loss - and utility bills - by a staggering 90 per cent.

In Freiburg, passive houses like this are relatively few, but energy-saving houses are the norm. Elsewhere in Germany, the law states that every new house built must waste no more than 75kWh/m2 per year (roughly a quarter of the energy lost from a typical Victorian house in Britain) but the specification in Freiburg is radically lower. 'It used to be 65kWh per year,' says Meinhard, 'but we are now discussing a new Freiburg law of 55, 50 or even 40kWh.'

It is part of Freiburg's unrelenting quest to be one of the greenest cities in the world, helped by the (uncomfortable) fact that it was flattened by Allied bombers in the Second World War and rebuilt on enlightened, energy-saving principles. Now, as Gordon Brown announces plans to build 10 new eco towns in Britain - in places such as Oakington in Cambridgeshire, and Long Marston, near Stratford-upon-Avon - perhaps it is time to learn from the city we destroyed.

'We always compete against Munster as the most ecological town,' says Claudia Duppe, a lecturer and resident of Freiburg's Rieselfeld quarter, 'whether it is the length of the cycle paths, the number of people cycling to work, or the amount of solar panels on the roofs.' Over a glass of local wine, she tells me about her life. As well as living in a passive house, she cycles everywhere ('the cycle routes are brilliant') or takes the tram - a cheap, fast mode of transport that makes car ownership unnecessary. 'We don't own one,' Claudia says, 'but we paid €600 to join a car-sharing club.' She only hires a car for 'big loads' when shopping, or 'to go skiing in the mountains'.

Like all good Germans, Claudia recycles - and her food waste is collected for composting.

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I take a tour with Andreas Roessler, a representative of the Rieselfeld Citizens' Association who has lived here since the pioneering days of 1996. With his shaved head, bomber jacket and shades, he looks every bit the fortysomething communard.

'Rents were too high in the Nineties,' he explains, 'and we had a lot of trouble getting families into affordable housing.' Public money for social housing had dried up, and the city of Freiburg was selling off plots of land to groups of families (anything from six to 16 parties) so they could employ an architect and build their own block of flats - a way of splitting the cost of ownership and making property affordable. Roughly 40 per cent of homes in the district are privately owned and self-built like this, while 40 per cent are rented. The remaining 20 per cent is social housing funded by private investors - a deliberate formula intended to create a healthy social and economic mix.

'For me, it was an adventure,' says Andreas, who moved here with his wife and three children from a village north of Freiburg to be part of the social experiment. 'We already had a neighbourhood when we moved in,' he enthuses, 'because the families in our apartments knew each other before; we'd planned all of this for two years, and that is a very fine quality of life. Our vision was kindergartens, schools, a tram to the city, to live on the border of the city,' he adds, 'but in the beginning many things did not exist. People needed advice on how life should be, but they brought their own ideas, too.'

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In his offices at the Technisches Rathaus, a sprawling prefab complex on the other side of town, Wulf Daseking, Freiburg's chief planner, agrees that Rieselfeld is ugly. 'It was the first projest, the first test,' he says, tapping the side of his nose with a finger. What he means is that Rieselfeld was the first new area built from scratch after his appointment in 1984. The other was Vauban, the radical car-free quarter carved from an old French army base in 1998 - a shrine to colourful Le Corbusier-style architecture and sustainable living.

Before seeing Vauban, I want to know how Freiburg was created from the ashes of a medieval city levelled during the Second World War. 'The main employer here is the university,' Daseking explains, 'so these are brainy people - and when they say something, they mean it. First they said they would rebuild the city with new ideas - and they did.' The old streets were widened to take trams, the tramway became 'the backbone of the city' and the medieval centre was kept car-free. 'Then, in the Seventies,' Daseking says, 'the government in Stuttgart wanted to build a nuclear power station 40km from here.

The brainy people said, "No, we won't have it" - and when they say no, they mean no.'

With nuclear power off the agenda, Freiburg found itself with a problem: a finite amount of electricity, but a growing population. The only solution, the government said, was for the people to come up with an energy-saving plan to conserve existing resources. In the mid-Eighties, when Daseking arrived, the same spirit of public consultation was applied to the planning of Rieselfeld. First on the wish list was a tramline extension, built before residents arrived so they would not have to buy a car. Next came the idea of small plots with a high population density (the group ownership model) so people could afford to buy flats. Because the newcomers were families, 'a garden was essential for every four or five plots,' says Daseking - hence the abundance of play parks.

More enlightened still was the approach to scale. 'From the top floor of every house,' says Daseking, 'parents had to be able to shout to their children in the garden - and hear the reply. It was important to get in touch with the ground.' This limited the height of buildings. To reduce theft, small garages (for those who wanted cars) were built every two blocks, rather than large ones every five blocks. 'From every corner, you could see what was happening in your garage,' says Daseking. 'Criminality had to go down.'

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On the way to Vauban, he shows us two of his projects - the school gymnasium next to Santa Maria Magdalena Church, built partly underground using timber and glass (but no steel), its barrel-shaped roof planted with grass; and a private development on the western fringes of Rieselfeld that includes a sun-filled, minimalist eco-flat straight out of Blueprint or World of Interiors.

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Vauban residents can own a car - but they have to pay €18,000 a year to park it in one of the multistorey 'Solar Garages' on the outskirts of the quarter. On the main thoroughfare there is a speed limit of 30km per hour - and on Vauban's narrow residential streets, hemmed in by housing estates, cars can travel no faster than walking speed.

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From his rooftop terrace, Stefan points out the arrays of blue solar panels on 50 per cent of the surrounding roofs. These 'collectors' don't heat the properties themselves, since Vauban is supplied by a small local power station, but they feed energy back into the regional grid to make their owners a modest income. At the 'Solar Settlement' (or, more prosaically, the Plus-energy Housing and Service Centre) nearby, designed by solar architect Rolf Disch, each of the 60 houses makes €6,000 a year for its inhabitants - an income guaranteed for 20 years by the German government. However, it takes up to nine years to pay for the technology. Built to passive house standards, the homes also have solar collectors capable of feeding more energy into the grid than they waste - hence the name 'plus-energy' houses.

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Her main grouse, however, is that Freiburg's 'so-called Green mayor' (Dr Dieter Salomon) is failing to promote social housing and group ownership while supporting big, lucrative developments thrown up by private investors. Like many I spoke to, she sees this is a betrayal of Freiburg's more enlightened past under a committed socialist mayor. It's proof that it is political will, vision and policy, not some mysterious green sensibility, that has put Germany decades ahead of Britain in terms of sustainable living. An eco town in Oakington is a start, but there must be more to the vision than house-building.

Photo credit: hippocamp29