The visionaries behind plans for a new eco town in Scotland aim to create a better way to live. However, they're far from the first who have tried. By Helen McArdle

BATTERY-powered buses, a dedicated organic farm and solar-panelled prefabricated houses - town planning of the future, or off-the-wall idealism? When the ambitious plans for Scotland's first new town in decades were unveiled on Tuesday, knee-jerk cynicism greeted the lofty claims that Scotland could socially engineer its way back to a utopian paradise thanks to a bit of recycling and a dose of community spirit.

Owenstown, of course, doesn't aim to be paradise - just "the way it should be". Nonetheless, the proposed new South Lanarkshire settlement - named after the pioneering 19th-century industrialist, Robert Owen, and set to be located just five miles from New Lanark, the town Owen established as an ideal community - fits a long tradition of social utopias.

"The Owenite message was always that society is a machine," says Dr Jim Arnold, director of the New Lanark Trust and chair designate of Owenstown Co-operative Board. "He believed you can create the conditions in society which optimise and maximise the benefits you can achieve."

Owen's vision of free healthcare, evening classes, nursery education and a food co-operative revolutionised life for his workers in an era of "dark, satanic mills". But his dream of a establishing a society where "the necessities and comforts of life are enjoyed by all in abundance" was never realised.

Dubbed a "model village for the 21st century", Owenstown is the first attempt by the Scottish charity, the Hometown Foundation, to set up a sustainable community built on the twin pillars of cooperative governance and ecological sensitivity.

The 2000-acre greenfield site purchased by Robert Durward, one of the foundation's four trustees, is expected eventually to support an "optimum" population of around 20,000, generating some 8000 jobs as it grows. Its carbon footprint would be virtually zero, with energy captured from recycling waste from the town and surrounding area at a district heating plant.

If it gets the green light from South Lanarkshire's planning department, ownership and control of the development of the site will pass from the foundation to the Owenstown Co-operative Board. For as little as £1, residents will be able to buy a stake in how it is run and stand for election to the board.

The scope of the board's control over community affairs remains to be seen, given that it cannot opt out of council tax and could not afford to provide its own healthcare and police services. However, there would be nothing to prevent the community establishing, for example, its own private school - so long as the curriculum met national requirements and parents were not forced to send their children there.

"There is an interesting issue about whether they could actually divorce themselves from the public agencies system in Scotland. My personal view is that that's quite difficult to achieve, but it remains an intellectual option," says Arnold.

For Stuart Crawford, one of the Hometown Foundation's trustees, Owenstown is less about creating an impossible social utopia than it is about reclaiming the best aspects of the past - in particular, the "great sense of belonging" he recalls from his childhood in Carmunnock.

"Now that society has become more dispersed, the penalties of not living in the town where you were born, next to your parents are becoming more and more apparent."

Ambitious as the co-operative, eco-town sounds, it is not without precendent in Scotland. In Morayshire, the Findhorn Foundation has created a community of some 1000 devotees across a 25-mile radius. Established nearly 50 years ago, the Findhorn project's ethos of sustainable living was decades ahead of its time. It could be a useful model for Owenstown, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The 400 permanent residents of the Findhorn estate recycle their waste, run Britain's biggest community-supported agricultural scheme (CSA), and generate energy from windmills. While they are involved in private enterprises with the wider community, within the Findhorn project residents are paid the same whatever job they do and remunerated in Findhorn's own currency.

An emphasis on spiritual wellbeing, meditation and holistic therapies, however, moves it beyond a simple eco-village into an attempt to create a pocket of socially engineered harmony within our otherwise chaotic society.

"I wouldn't say it's a utopia," says Australian-born Craig Gibson, 67, who arrived as a "happy hippy" in the late 1960s. "A lot of people find it quite difficult actually, because it's very self-regulating and also self-confronting. But on the other hand, it's very humanistic. We've put a lot of energy into communication, and being honest and transparent."

Gibson adds: "There's a movement of people wanting to reconnect with life. A lot of that goes back to food, landscape, and caring for nature. That mantra of thinking globally and acting locally is what we're doing."

Sarah Trevelyan, 59, is a psychotherapist who has visited regularly since 1996 and plans to move from Edinburgh to the Findhorn estate in October. "We're living in an increasingly fragmented world, so places which help people to find balance again and to find creative, nourishing and sustainable ways of relating to each other are very important," she says.

Recent years seemed to signal the end to utopian dreams, as the rise of gated communities - especially in the US, but increasingly in the UK - suggested people preferred to shut out a bad society instead of creating a better one.

"People will retreat into much more private utopias, and therefore the good life becomes a much more individual and personal quest," says Ruth Levitas, a professor of sociology at Bristol University and former chair of the Utopian Studies Society, an international thinktank founded in New Lanark in 1988.

"But it's always been the case that there have been people trying to do something different, and eco-villages are one of the spheres in which people have gone on trying to live differently."

Notwithstanding Celebration - the Disney compound in Florida which promised "a place of caramel apples and cotton candy, secret forts and hopscotch on the streets" when it opened in 1994 - gated communities are more likely to resemble Alphaville in Brazil, where residents are ferried in helicopters over electric fences and protected by a thousand security guards.

Scotland's postwar "new towns" were hailed as a promised land for thousands of Scots relocated from derelict tenements to newly built developments like Glenrothes, East Kilbride and Cumbernauld. But, for many, they turned out to be dispiriting concrete jungles.

"There was largely a single strata of society occupying these enormous towns, so they didn't have balanced communities," says Mark Thomson, of the Royal Town Planning institute (RTPI). "They didn't necessarily have all the right facilities. Many of these towns have developed their communities now after having a sticky patch."

Owenstown's success could also, ironically, be its undoing. Its designers want to provide affordable homes, and they want to undercut the average market price by not including the cost of the land in the house prices - traditionally a high percentage of any new property's value. But if desirability increases, it may become difficult to fend off rises.

"They talk about affordable housing, but will they achieve socio-economic diversity?", asks Dr Harry Smith, director of Sustainable Community Development at Heriot-Watt University. "To what extent will it be open to all sectors of society? Will it run the risk of becoming some sort of virtual gated community? Not necessarily with the gates at the entrance, but only certain people with certain levels of income able to move there. So there is that challenge."

For Ruth Levitas "the biggest problem of all" is this: what happens when the vision is left in the hands of the residents who inherit the project, and the human foibles that come with them?

Dr Jim Arnold, the man behind the drive to build Owenstown as a 21st-century utopia, believes it's worth the struggle. "Human beings are always going to create challenges," he says. "Communal organisations sometimes only last a decade, but some of them last 100 years. So I would say yes, it can be done, it can be achieved; how long it lasts once it goes out of the hands of the original founders, who knows?. But the aspiration is there; it's worth trying."