People are starting to move into Babcock Ranch, an ambitious development in Florida more than a decade in the making. With a solar field and self-driving shuttles, it’s a suburb that its creators hope will be revolutionary.


Additionally, homeowners are encouraged to grow vegetables in community gardens, landscaping is limited to native plants (with turf covering no more than 30 percent of yard space), and all irrigation water is reclaimed.
Kitson describes Babcock Ranch as “a living laboratory,” with energy self-sufficiency at its core. All public and commercial buildings with good exposure have roofs covered with solar panels, and solar “trees” are dotted around the public areas to bolster the power supply and provide recharge stations for visitors’ cell phones, tablets, and laptops.


Babcock Ranch is still in its infancy. Only about 20 families have taken up residence so far, a number that’s expected to grow to about 100 by the end of this year as more new homes become ready for occupancy. The Babcock Ranch Neighborhood School already has 156 students (who live outside the town). Shannon Treece, the principal, says the development growing up around the school provides hands-on, real-life lessons in environmental stewardship.
“We are in a place that … just evokes that spirit of innovation and that engagement of people,” Treece said. “It’s easy to open a textbook and read and answer questions. But project-based learning has a really specific driving question, and it always has a community-partner piece as well, which is, ‘How is it going to change the community we’re in?’ That’s the connection to here.”
With guidance from the chef of the Tap and Table, Babcock’s gastropub, students aced a recent solar cook-off tournament against other local schools. They harvested ingredients from their own community garden and created a three-course teriyaki meal. The students also track how much energy the school consumes by reading data from a solar tree in their playground.

“Americans are not going to go from one car for every driver to no cars for every household overnight,” Kitson said. “We start by making the cars just one option for getting around. When people can walk, bike, catch a shuttle, use a handheld device to summon an autonomous vehicle, or utilize a shared vehicle service for trips off-site, they will quickly realize they don’t really need their own car.”
“What we are creating,” he continued, “is a suburban–urban environment with everything in walking distance, and [we’re] working continuously to bring more jobs within our town footprint to achieve the goal of a real, multi-generational town where people live, work, and play.”
