SMAxECO City Sagamihara Hikarigaoka Eco-TownA new town embodying the themes of "environmental friendliness" and "community spirit," where the residents can live in harmony with nature

An eco-friendly community that combines single-family houses with commercial facilities

Daiwa House has developed a "smart community" combining housing with public facilities such as the local city hall. With excellent views of the Tanzawa Mountains and Mount Takao, this new town offers the best of both worlds – the beauty of nature and the convenience of urban infrastructure.
The design of this new town is based on the concept of combining homes with commercial facilities, giving residents the basic conveniences of daily life right on their doorsteps. The commercial facilities are located next to a Disaster-Prevention Piazza which is equipped with light fittings powered by storage batteries that draw their electricity from solar panels, ensuring that this space remains lit even during a power blackout. This will help reassure residents of the community in the event of a major earthquake.

Easy monitoring of energy use by the whole community

The town is attracting attention as a low-carbon community that features cutting-edge environmental protection technologies. Each of the 127 single-family houses in the development is fitted with solar power generation systems (generating a minimum of 3kW) and a lithium-ion storage battery, as well as an electric vehicle recharging plug. All houses also feature home energy management systems (HEMS), that enable the home owners to monitor their own energy usage in an easy-to-visualize manner, allowing them to more efficiently employ the electricity produced directly from the home's solar power generation system or indirectly via the storage battery system.
Additionally, the design facilitates the efficient ventilation of home interiors through the use of natural wind-flow, creating a pleasant indoor environment.
On top of that, we have created a system that allows the ranking of all the homes according to the extent of their contribution to the community's overall energy conservation effort, with prizes given to the home owners who register high scores. This is just one of the fun ideas we have put in place to minimize the environmental impact of the community as a whole.

Our environment-friendly design efforts are not limited to the homes themselves. The commercial facilities area, which is directly linked with the residential area, also features intensive use of equipment for renewable energy generation and energy conservation. These include a 100kW solar power generation system and high-efficiency air-conditioning systems, which promise to deliver a reduction of 54 tons of carbon-equivalent per annum. All the buildings employ LED light fittings, in addition to "light ducts" that transmit sunlight efficiently to the buildings' interiors, thereby reducing power costs for lighting during the daytime.

This commercial facility is equipped with an energy management system, including a monitor panel that shows the amount of electricity generated by the facility's solar power system. On the panel is displayed the energy consumption figures for the whole community. Not only can the community residents view this data, so also can residents of other nearby houses and apartment buildings who use the facility for shopping. This helps to spread the idea of efficient energy usage among the general population, and is one example of the sort of community-wide initiatives we have set in motion.

Located between the commercial facility and the residential area is the Disaster-Prevention Piazza, which can function as a gathering place for residents in the event of a major natural disaster. The piazza includes benches that can be easily converted into outdoor cooking equipment to serve as substitutes for kitchen stoves, as well as seats that can be converted into emergency-use toilets.

Developing a more vibrant community by strengthening ties between residents

The community's Management Association – consisting of the owners of all the houses in the SMAxECO City Sagamihara Hikarigaoka Eco-Town development – takes the lead in providing opportunities – such as gardening lessons and lectures on energy conservation – for residents to meet one another and form relationships. On the eastern side of the community, where it abuts onto previously existing housing neighborhoods, we have provided the Community Center, which anyone in the local district is free to use, and this is linked with the commercial facility on the western side by a pedestrian path that leads right through the housing area. This design ensures that communication and interrelationships with other residents of the local district will take place naturally.

Walking through the development, one is struck by the lushness of the greenery that surrounds each house. Precisely because the broad streets that run north-south through the residential area describe gentle curves, one is even more aware of how green and pleasing to the eye the surroundings are. The residents of this community adopted Sagamihara City's first agreement on neighborhood environmental aesthetics and to complement this Daiwa House has drawn up the Town Planning Guidelines, which include rules on the preservation of pre-existing trees, on the tending of gardens within the privately-owned home lots, and on the placement and brightness of nighttime illumination employed in the gardens. The Company has also taken a variety of other steps to maintain and preserve a visually pleasing and safe living environment, including the placement and operation of security cameras at the entrances to the development.