Living Off-Grid in Wales

Book excerpt: Living Off-Grid in Wales addresses broad debates about the possibility of planning for a sustainable future, by an examination of rural development off the grid. Contrasting Wales’s policy on One Planet Development – a planning policy that encourages living off-grid – with a more DIY approach to living off-grid, the book presents case studies from eco-villages that imagine off-grid very differently. The text pivots on the problematic question that if planning is about the spatial reproduction of society, then why should it encourage autonomy from societal systems. The ethnographic case studies in the book comprise an ethnography of rural Wales, and the focus on eco-villages brings a fresh perspective to the anthropological literature on community by considering off-grid as a radical form of social assemblage.