The project was planned as a low carbon development promoting self-sustaining renewable energy production, efficient waste management and reduction, minimum transport emissions and highly efficient water usage.  Its layout was to provide a walkable, liveable, district of 12K+ people in an area of 293 ha at an average density of 40 du/ha with 40% open space.

A new rail halt on the existing passenger line would provide – along with enhanced bus services – inducements to city centre commuters to leave their car at home, or not have a car at all.

At the outset, a freight line spur took advantage of spare train paths on the passenger line to supply a biomass generator at the north, cooled in part by a body of water, which also provided a setting for Dutch-inspired housing. A ‘high street’ connected the new railway station (with café, nursery, bikes etc) to the community trust facility, and a school.

The layout embraced an exclusion zone relating to an underground gas pipe line—by offering a significant landscape zone to the east, re-assigned a former runway as a ‘soft spine’ running north-south in the centre, and deployed urban block sizes reflecting the Vauban district in Fribourg, approximately 150m x 75m.