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Solutions
Sustainable Communities
Communities are more than just an aggregations of streets and housing units.
Communities possess a certain dynamism... the synergy which comes from many individuals directing energy toward a common good.
Unfortunately, what we are building today across America and, increasingly, the rest of the world, cannot be classified as communities. Rather, they are places convenient for exploitation. They may offer refuge from an increasingly crazy world, but they offer no alternative vision for those things people abhor about the world.
A few of the most direct threats to true "communities" include:
Sustainable communities offer dynamism, synergy and a reasonable chance for future generations to enjoy some of the comforts we enjoy today.
Components of the sustainable community are:
Economic Activity is at the center of life in any community, even sustainable ones, but it is based on shared goals more than individual needs. Everyone in the community benefits when there are plenty of jobs, the jobs pay well, and both profit and wage is reinvested in the community.
In order for all of these things to occur, the community must add value to its resources, value which is recognized around the world. Exporting raw materials merely exploitive. Examples of adding value would be:
- Milling wood and building finished products rather than exporting raw logs.
- Making finished products from recycled materials, rather than exporting boatloads of bales of filthy old soda bottles.
- Writing software code or unraveling genetic information
Transportation is probably the least sustainable element in most communities. The current transportation model for many communities in the "developed" world, based on the use of the personal internal combustion vehicle, must be changed before it destroys the planet. Modern, efficient, high-speed trains offer real solutions to regional problems. On a more local level, bicycle and electric scooter programs present viable alternatives for many metropolitan areas.
Sources of sustainable economic activity in a community should include:
- Constructing and maintaining housing: Exploring alternatives to single-family homes, such as intergenerational housing, co-housing, dorms and cooperative enterprises..
- Growing food: Supporting local farmers, building and conserving soil, composting, and encouraging local agricultural enterprises and community gardens.
- Developing and maintaining public spaces: Parks, greenbelts, sports fields, pathways, rivers and beaches, wetlands, buffers and community gardens and forests.
- Efficient public transportation: Trains, fuel-cell buses, bikeways and public bike/scooter programs.
- Modern utilities: Waste removal, recycling, composting, solar power, even touch-screen voting, etc. A great example of a sustainable utility company is Working Assets Long Distance.
- Law enforcement: Cops, courts, codes and regulators.
- Social services: Public health, public housing, schools, rehabilitation, putting welfare recipients in a safe, wholesome, learning environment where they can help others.
- Drug policy: Some drug policies cost more, yield less, and degrade our communities.
Books on building communities: from our friends at Amazon.com
Building Communities from the Inside Out : A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community Assets: Advice, tools, and stories based on the authors' experiences working with neighborhoods across America. Shows ways to bring neighbors together, and galvanize blocks of isolated people into neighborhoods and activists.
Community Building: What Makes it Work: 28 key factors for successful community building and identified and discussed. Lots of lists and resources.