Architecture & Planning
The current western model of home ownership and land ownership is fundamentally flawed. The idea that you should make money, and others should make money, off you living in your home is not consistent with a community based life. Making your home a burden is not what life is about, so we must look at alternative ways of creating habitation which is already happening by necessity. No one really owns the land even though our society has been based on this concept for centuries.
The Hemp Town concept works on what is a relocatable home park, or RV park model where a modest amount is paid to ‘rent’ the land your home is on. This ‘rent’ essentially pays for your portion of the overall property plus maintenance and costs for communal vege gardens, landscaping, and community facilities. This amount ends up a very small proportion of what a mortgage on a typical block of land would cost.
The housing typology contemplated is based on the tiny home movement. Tiny homes are on wheels and can be moved easily from place to place. This feature also frees them from most if not all of the standard building codes for homes allowing much smaller spaces and more creative solutions to be explored. Tiny homes on wheels also do not require any planning approval vastly speeding up their construction time. Additional, more permanent, but still moveable homes will be constructed out of the variety of hemp construction materials available.
Hemp construction materials are in their modern day infancy with Hempcrete being the current product most publicised. While a good insulator with a variety of other benefits, Hempcrete does not take advantage of Hemp’s most significant property for construction; it has the longest fibres of any plant making it many times stronger than timber if used structurally. There are many emerging technologies being developed to take advantage of this property including structural hemp panels and extrusions that use hemp fibre and hemp resin to make timber type studs and beams. These products are not to market yet, but Hemp Town will be part of the research and development required to bring these products to maturity. These types of products can replace using trees for construction allowing our forests to mature once again.
All construction will be on site with pre-fabrication methods utilised in the on site factory. The building teams will all be Hemp Town employees and construction will happen very cost effectively as this is not to be a source of profit, but rather a means to an end. The businesses of Hemp Town work together to minimise construction costs as part of the overall commercial ecosystem concept where every part of the business is interdependent on every other part.
Below is a master plan showing the components of the overall Hemp Town concept.
