Re-imagining Community: if we started from scratch what would we build today?

Close your eyes. Imagine a great place to live. What does it look like? I bet it doesn’t look like a bustling city with cars honking, traffic backed up, and concrete as far as the eye can see. But I also bet it doesn’t look like a sleepy village with nothing to do at night and everybody knowing everybody’s business. If you could start with a blank slate and build whatever you want, what you would make and what I would make might be quite different. But I suspect there are some commonalities that we might all agree with.

One thing that we have learned over time is that people crave interaction with living plants. Greenery and earth are calming and, likely, essential for our mental health. Any community that we build should be integral with the land. Our cities have accomplished this with parks, sometimes just small areas of green and other times huge complexes for outdoor activities. But weaving in trees and plants throughout, not just in select areas, makes a community, literally, cooler and more pleasant. Today, when we build a new neighborhood, we often raze everything growing throughout the entire complex. Then we build the homes and amenities. Then we make a token effort to replace greenery by planting shrubs around the houses and putting small, spindly trees near the sidewalks. And we plant grass in the yards to hold the soil (and require weekend labor for the householders in maintaining it). For decades, this sort of community will be bare and stark until the trees mature. But what we see is that people are strongly attracted to those mature neighborhoods with mature trees and individual landscapes that over the years have been differentiated by their owners into their own tableaus. If we are building from scratch, we would build something closer to these mature neighborhoods than to the usual new development.

In contrast to the nature and greenery, we also want advanced technology around us. But truly advanced technology becomes invisible. We don’t even think about heating and cooling – unless it’s broken. But we do expect our indoor spaces to be climate controlled (including our cars). We are accustomed to dishwashers, electric appliances, TVs, and WiFi being ubiquitous. We like traffic lights that will turn green for us when no one else is at the intersection. And we like being able to call or text or FaceTime or (insert your favorite social media here) whenever we want to connect with someone who is not with us. We like having ALL of our music at our fingertips, ALL of our TV shows on demand, and ALL of our pictures one click away from being seen. We want to travel the world quickly and in comfort and we expect to have a wide variety of foods from around the world readily available all year round.

In many parts of the U.S., we are required to get in our cars and drive to get to anything other than our homes, but in an ideal community, most of what we need should be nearby. And it’s nice to have easy transportation to whatever isn’t nearby. Whether that transportation is simple walking or a taxi or Lyft, a bus, a subway, or a trolley. If it’s easy and cheap (and safe) it works.

An ideal community has connection, things to do with people around us. And many of us like lots of alternatives, different kinds of restaurants, a variety of music venues or theaters, festivals and parties and get-togethers. And having enough variety to suit different tastes and to satisfy people with different perspectives and interests requires some size of population. Now I tread into dangerous waters. What size community would we build if we started from scratch?

Perhaps, though this is the wrong question. Even the largest cities sprung from smaller cities that grew until they touched and merged. And within large cities there are communities that have separate identities even as their infrastructure is common with their neighbors. If we incorporate green space into our communities, then they won’t seem like concrete jungles any more. It may be easier to express community integrity with differences in architecture. But if I must guess at size, communities smaller than 10,000 people will need other communities around them for support and communities larger than 50,000 will need to be broken into smaller units to make them livable.

One key to the ideal community is having everyone’s basic needs met. Ideally, everyone should have a place to stay, sufficient healthy and nutritious food, clothing, and clean water. Even more important is a sense of community, that everyone belongs and that the people around you know you and will watch out for you. This sense of community tends to disappear in larger cities. Other people become competition (for parking, for housing, for tickets, for restaurant seats, etc.) rather than cooperation. And the larger the community, the more challenging it is for basic needs to be met. The largest cities have tendrils that reach globally. They rely on complex and far-ranging supply chains. So, if the weather is bad in Columbia, coffee may be more expensive (or scarce) in New York. The length and complexity of these supply chains make them fragile. The sheer number of supply chains restores a measure of robustness. But when a common fragment of many supply chains (e.g. a trucker’s strike) breaks, there can be massive shortages. It is estimated that most metros have only a few days of food supply on site and that a disruption that lasts longer than that would be disastrous.

In an ideal community, the architecture will be beautiful, long lasting, and low maintenance. All of us have seen pictures of cities where each house is unique and has interest. That’s where we want to go and where we want to live. But modern building is heavily weighted toward building as cheaply as possible, which means identical (or near identical) boxes and construction methods that are only intended to last a few decades (sometimes only a few years). Advanced construction techniques, like 3D printing and even modular design, however, support the ability to build beautiful and long-lasting homes and other structures for the same cost as boring boxes and in substantially less time (and cost) than traditional building techniques. Creating a new community from scratch would leverage the best of these techniques to build homes that could last hundreds of years, include interesting architectural detail, and relate to each other within a neighborhood.

And a new community built today will use smaller, greener, and more local infrastructure whenever possible. Larger metropolises are regularly having brown outs and power restrictions, water restrictions, and other limitations of infrastructure. Electrical power is, of course the key. If you have power, you can have water, recycling, transportation, building, food – everything else you need in the community. With today’s technology, power can be sourced at the neighborhood level which eliminates the loss in transporting electricity and limits the risks of power outage during inclement weather or natural disasters. A dense grid of power generation and distribution will be extremely robust compared to today’s industrial level power generation with a single source of failure for an entire region. And similar, neighborhood level, sourcing for other infrastructure is possible with today’s much smaller and more efficient capabilities.

As we re-imagine the design and construction of communities, we are fortunate to have numerous examples of successful communities as well as even more examples of failed attempts. We can model the better designs and create new communities like them but with effective substitutes for some of the more expensive aspects or parts of the design that evolved over time. Today’s technologies that have advanced from industrial sized production of numerous identical items to the ability to manufacture anything with one machine (a 3D printer) allow us to create custom items and homes for the same cost and effort as exact clones. Our re-imagined community can be largely self-sufficient, integral with the land, and designed to promote health and positive engagement with our neighbors. Sound like a great place to live? Let’s build it!