Imagine living your life among friends, in a beautiful landscape, doing work you love, using local products produced by people you know, watching your children grow up, with no pollution or waste, and this local community development and activities organised by you and your neighbours. These scenes seem to give credence to some dictionary definitions of the words "neighbour" (be near, friend), "neighbourly" (friendly, helpful, civil, compassionate, genial, kind, obliging, social, sociable), and also "neighbourhood" (district, especially with reference to its inhabitants as a community, closeness).

And yet when a female friend moved house a few years ago in the suburbs, we called on friends and family, and people converged from ten kilometres away to help with the simple processes of moving the furniture and boxes from the house to the car and trailer. Why? Because there was no sense of neighbourhood community to call on to help. Our life seems to be lived half at home, and half 20 kilometres away. What about the places in between? Where is our sense of community? Our neighbourhood seems to be dead.

Why the Neighbourhood?

Our neighbourhood community is worth resurrecting. Many agree it is the way of the future. We all live in community. It is just that our existing communities lack definite structural and functional characteristics. Goods and services come from anywhere, and are sent anywhere. We go to work anywhere in relation to where we live. Our friends live anywhere in relation to ourselves. This is an extremely unstructured society.

A common example is the food system. Because two major components of the food production and distribution system, the place where the food is grown (the market garden), and the place where the food is eaten (the home), are often a long distance from each other, then the food system requires support industries in transport, packaging and storage to make it work, including family transport to shops and home refrigeration. This uses excessive energy, materials, time and space. Yet if we reduce the unnecessary distance between the source, the market garden, and the sink, the home, then the most efficient place to produce most fruit, veges, herbs, and perhaps nuts and eggs may be in the local neighbourhood.

And many other economic processes would be the same. Some house building and maintenance, furniture making, firewood, forestry, landscape materials, gardening services, labour, child minding, second-hand materials, and organising bulk neighbourhood importation.

If there are many work activities occurring locally, then our places of work can be very local as well, with many people working within the neighbourhood and local village. This is in comparison to the current work situation, whereby a 1/3 of the working week can be wasted in both traveling to work, and working to pay for the car that gets us to work.

Designed Community Living Principles

In a social and leisure sense our neighbourhoods are "leisure deserts". Many of our social activities, friends and sports, such as golf or tennis, occur ten kilometres away from where we live. Yet if the activities that we want to do most often are situated within the neighbourhood, those activities we want to do once a week are in the next village, and only those that we want to do occasionally sited at any reasonable distance, then life develops an intensity in the local area, and less intensity further from home.

The neighbourhood community can be designed to create these opportunities. The community is designed with each individual at the centre of the system. Life radiates out from our place of dwelling. The activities that we do most often, the products that we need most often, the production processes that are the simplest, are close to us. The transport distances and times are as short as possible. Life takes on definite structural and functional principles and the politics to organise, build and maintain the neighbourhood community processes becomes easier to develop as the vision develops. A systems within systems structure develops of family community within cluster community within neighbourhood community within village community within cities within regions and up to the global level.

The way a modern business such as a medium sized factory pulls processes of production within its control, and maintains what it has an adequate knowledge for, a neighbourhood would have similar characteristics, running itself similar to a business, but in a more social, production and consumption, relaxed, community oriented sense.

Pooling Resources

The benefits of the neighbourhood community are many. Besides the benefit of parents being able to work locally and watch our kids grow up, there are enormous advantages to pooling resources. I once flew over the western suburbs of Sydney, and saw 80% of the houses with swimming pools in their yards. If we currently spent $15 000 on a swimming pool in an individualist society, yet took that money and pooled it with the surrounding five houses, that $90 000 could buy: a more than double size swimming pool for ($30 000), a tennis/basketball court for ($15 000), a games-social room ($15 000), a pool table and games ($5 000), a computer and games ($5 000), a children's playground ($5 000), plus a great musical entertainment and large video setup ($5 000), musical instruments, ($5,000), plus giant bbq and surrounding landscaping ($5 000). A veritable smorgasbord. Imagine every cluster in the neighbourhood enjoying this with a diversity of facilities in clusters.

And when $15 000 per family is pooled at the neighbourhood level, enormous potential occurs for funding community centre buildings, sport and social facilities, meeting places, cafes, storage enabling bulk ordering of products in food, clothes, appliances, and more. Machine, tool, book and toy libraries, pooling of second hand building and landscaping materials, and many more social, ethical, environmental, personal and economic benefits, far too numerous to mention here, become available to us.

Likeminded Compatibility

In order to achieve these plans for community we need to have neighbours with similar desires and dreams, and the compatibility amongst people in the neighbourhood to be able to organise and work together to be able to build community and live these dreams. In the same way that we might currently advertise or choose to have a non-smoker, light music lover, chatty, wine loving, female to come and share rent with us in our house or flat, in the future we might also choose to have likeminded compatible people come to live in our neighbourhood, so that we can unite to envision, organise, fund and work towards the type of neighbourhood life activities that we would like.

In this way a diversity of neighbourhood types would occur for people to choose to go and live in. So that a city may have 5 000 neighbourhood communities, interacting with each other, with different characteristics in housing, landscape, sports facilities, work, political and economic functions, entertainment, community centre facilities, noise levels, and alcohol consumption rates, such as no drunkenness, and more. Most people may choose to live in a middle range, general characteristic type of neighbourhood community. While others may choose more particular characteristics for their neighbourhood. The neighbourhood would have a certain amount of political autonomy over itself, similar to that currently enjoyed at the family home level. Each neighbourhood would be able to have its own guidelines and regulate itself, giving it a greater capacity to develop a vision and achieve its goals. The neighbourhood would come to life.

There are principles in nature that can help promote harmony in the neighbourhood community, encouraging likeminded and compatible activity. The ecological principles of a niche in space - a space to perform a role or function - and a niche in time - a time to be in that space - are the principles which allow a diversity of community types and spaces, and also allow the organisms to move through the community in such a way as to minimise antagonism.

Cooperation

In order to cooperate to achieve these neighbourhoods we can become very good at developing the vision. This is a twofold task. The first is to become very good at asking each other what we really want. To fantasise, to dream, and to delve deeply into what happy living is all about. And secondly, to understand more about what is possible. The principles of community design, processes and mechanisms and skills that can be developed over time to bring these dreams into practice, otherwise the dream can never become reality.

The better the vision, the greater chance that people can find likeminded compatible people to cooperate to achieve it. A poor vision means the splintering of cooperative groups and little activity towards the achievement of goals.

It is through likeminded activity that we can cooperate easily and give true meaning to the root word meaning of community: communication in unity.

Successional Stages

Is this neighbourhood community vision that is becoming apparent here a static vision, or is it growing, evolving and developing. Rather than having an unprogressive, static neighbourhood vision being put into practice, the neighbourhood and its processes would evolve through stages of growth and development, with each stage succeeding the previous one. Each stage sequence would see an increase in either quantity or quality of production and services, landscape, social activity and more.

Ecology can give us a very good model for local community development. In nature an area of land, initially barren of life, will see pioneer species establish themselves in the area, and start to modify the site conditions, making it easier for even more species to establish themselves in the area. A new plant and animal community will go through stages of development from shrubland to woodland to forest to rainforest, where each stage will sequentially replace the previous stage. Each stage will allow a greater quantity of living matter to be maintained. The area will then stabilise in quantity, as a forest, for example, (the old term is a climax community), and then develop in quality as a mature community, achieving greater sophistication and integrity of its life support processes.

So here we can imagine a neighbourhood community going through a series of developing stages, so that more efficient processes of food production, preserving, processing and distribution sequentially replace one another. And more appropriate housebuilding, resource sharing, higher quality landscape design and maintenance, work programmes, skill development, meeting facilitation and envisioning will occur over time. These succeeding stages will initially see the pioneer activities being generally crude and basic, with a broad niche breadth, yet over time and through the stages, the processes will develop a greater sophistication.

In ecology, primary succession is the model for developing new human communities, and secondary succession is the model for changing over existing neighbourhood communities to a thriving, vibrant, living, flourishing ecological community.

The Music of Life

And how can we describe the life and functioning of this local community to give us a feel for a vibrant future? Can we imagine the neighbourhood people and its processes in tune, its production and maintenance in rhythm, its processes melodic, conducted with passion, roles played with pleasure, a composition of activities, people responding to the beat, sometimes planned, sometimes improvised, enjoying, listening to life, feeling, whooping, contributing in the moment, now and again slow, relaxed and easy, later fast and energetic, then easy again. All of the people, facilities, and processes giving true meaning to an ecological definition for community: "organisms united in definite activity".

What would a person's work life be like in a neighbourhood community like this? A person may spend half their working hours for 3 months helping produce furniture in the workshop, then half their time for 2 months helping build a house. Other jobs during these times might include 4 hours a week in the collective permaculture garden, 2 hours a week accounting for bulk imports into the neighbourhood, 4 hours a week in the neighbourhood cafe, 2 hours childminding, 3 hours a week on aquaculture, and 2 hours at meetings to organise it all. These extra jobs add diversity to the working week, enriching our lives with greater experience, while breaking the monotony of the current inflexible employment regimes.

It would be interesting to wonder what ones social life would be like as well.

Steps to Adapting Neighbourhoods

A picture can be drawn of an existing neighbourhood progressively adapting itself towards a living neighbourhood over time. The first steps would be simplistic, basic and crude.

• Have more and more surveys that ask people what they really want.
• People starting dialogue in the neighbourhood, progressively drawing the people together, and starting meetings and looking for opportunities.
• A LETS system for the neighbourhood.
• Neighbourhood garage sales.
• Skill, labour and tool and machine sharing, such as bulk lawnmowing occurring. A large ride on mower that mows all the lawn in the neighbourhood it can get to very quickly. Book sharing, and second-hand building and landscaping materials trading scheme.
• · A neighbourhood bulk ordering and distribution service occurring to import cheaper food at bulk prices.
• · People being willing to buy local produce as long as the quality is adequate and the price competitive.
• · A neighbourhood resident specialist food producer growing bulk vegetables and herbs, fruit nuts and eggs, in their yard, and also tending other peoples gardens, especially the front gardens. A reduction in lawn space for food crops and perennials.
• · The gardens of the neighbourhood being designed in relation to each other, allowing sun and shade to be in the areas that we really want them.
• · Later, some back fences being pulled down, our back yards being chopped in half to form a courtyard for the family, and the remainder being amalgamated into a cluster common area.
• · Still later, an empty house being bought by the neighbourhood as a community centre. Another one as a workshop set up with diverse crafts and activities.
• · Start a Neighbourhood Community Building Association in your suburb.
• · Start a magazine or write a book about creating neighbourhood community.
• Encourage Council and developers to build new neighbourhoods in a more creative way.

Inspiration

We can envision a future that is practical, a model that is achievable, even if we don't know yet how it will be achieved. Let us design free of the existing constraints and limitations, imagining a beautiful landscape, the social facilities that we would like, the small scale economic activities and workshops that are applicable to the neighbourhood, the education to give us the relevant skills, and the small scale politics that can achieve these local aims. Let us become good at asking ourselves and each other what we really want, so that we can form a vision that we can work towards practical creation.

And let us imagine that there are many other neighbourhoods that are rejuvenating themselves, and a good flow of awareness between them, so that we can become aware of what the more successful neighbourhoods are doing and learn and apply our own versions in our own local communities.

The vision is important. If we don't have the goal, then our steps just lead into the corner. To be regularly reassessing the goal and redefining the vision in light of more awareness is important.

If this neighbourhood vision idea seems like most people would not be interested, I am enthused by a neighbourhood survey in the Sydney inner city suburb of Waterloo, whereby 74% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed to the statement: "I would be willing to work together with others on something to improve my neighbourhood". This is very heartening.

Where to now?

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This is the long version of an article that is in the Green Connections magazine in Summer '99. This latest version was updated in May, 2000.

Ian Mason
         futurecom99@hotmail.co

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