A whole new town planned and built from nothing to do as little harm to the environment as possible — houses that need almost no heating, solar panels, rainwater collected and reused, buses and bicycle paths instead of cars, work and shops close enough to walk to. The key idea is that it is new and planned all at once: you cannot easily turn an old town into one, so a government or a developer builds an ecotown on empty land. The word became well known in Britain around 2007-2008, when the government announced a plan to build several; most were argued about, delayed or dropped, so British people often hear the word with a faint sound of 'that plan that never quite happened'. Countable: an ecotown, two ecotowns. Sometimes written with a hyphen, eco-town, especially in British newspapers.

生態城鎮、環保新市鎮