This is Warren Draper’s third instalment of his six-part series on his vision of what a utopian city in Britain might look like.

“Imagine a town where you’d want to spend your entire life. A town with jobs, schools, open spaces and recreational facilities as well.

A TOWN WHICH OFFERED everything you could ask for and improved the environment at the same time. Hard to believe? Well there’s more – the town will be fully owned and run by the people who live there.

Stop imagining, start living …

Owenstown, the way it should be!”

There are plans to create a brand new town of over 3000 homes in the shadow of Tinto Hill in South Lanarkshire, Scotland. The houses of the town will be of varied design, but each one will be highly energy-efficient, low carbon (aiming for carbon neutral) and built using modular components made in an on-site factory. The town will include offices, shops and other commercial spaces; schools, a care home and a health centre; a hotel, leisure facilities and public parks – in short, all the essentials of a healthy modern community.

The new town will be founded on cooperative principles which echo those of visionary philanthropist Robert Owen. Owen was instrumental in the development of the 18th Century New Lanark model village situated just a few miles down the road – now a Unesco World Heritage Site visited by 400,000 people a year. The idea is to create a community where people can live sustainably and well within their means by creating a strong and mutually supportive local economy. It is estimated that the town will cost of around £500 million to complete – which may sound like a lot, but with the money being used to create an ecologically and economically sustainable community it is an investment which will help secure a self-reliant and resilient future for the residents of the town. A town which, in honour of Robert Owen, has been christened Owenstown (www.owenstown.org).

Unfortunately South Lanarkshire Council – like so many councils across the UK – are largely blind to the long-term benefits of such a project. Indeed, the vast majority of British institutions seem blind to the ‘long-term’ in general. No longer serving ‘the people’ the systems and legislation which were originally created to protect us now act as major obstacles to real change (see part 2 for further details). Too many public bodies are simply trying to ride-out the storm of post-collapse economics by protecting their own interests until the good times come around again – but those days are gone, and such yearning can be likened to the glint in an old man’s eyes when the first days of spring have fooled him into thinking that he might once again feel the uplifting nonchalance of youth.

Owen himself clashed with the local authorities on several occasions and eventually ended up transporting his dream to America (although the subsequent New Harmony development in Indiana would fail largely due to overcrowding and a lack of essential skills). Utopian dreamers and Town Planners are rarely allies; the former seeks ways to fulfil the creative dreams of our species, whereas the majority of the latter seem to be actively seeking ways to contain them.

I fear that the well-intentioned developers of Owenstown have yet to discover that the best way to deal with local councils is to ignore them. It you can’t get what you want by going through the system then you must simply go around it. Add to this the fact that developing similar 2000 acre sites across the UK would bring its own problems (swallowing up greenspace and arable land faster than a billionaire golf-course developer) and it would seem prudent to examine other ways in which these much-needed sustainable model towns can be brought into being.

Luckily this work is not without precedent and in part 4 we shall look at the visionary ideas of that most iconic of idlers, William Morris, before moving on to the practical task of forging our anti-crap, pro-idle utopia.

Warren Draper is a writer, artist and photographer based in Doncaster. He is co-founder of the Doncopolitan magazine (doncopolitan.com) and is a keen Anglarchist. He can be reached via Twitter at @TheLuddicLife