HomeTown – Neighborhood Development

INTRODUCTION

Today I want to talk about cultural sustainability in the context of environmental sustainability and why both are so important.

Then I'll describe our recipe for a modern Authentic Neighborhood.

Next I want to talk about the cornerstone of a modern Sustainable Community - free range children.

Then we'll take a tour of HomeTown and describe its major components.

Some where along the way we'll talk about profitability and marketing.

Finally, we'll visually compare HomeTown to a new conventional sprawl subdivision.

I WHAT IS CULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY  and Why it is so important

Amory Lovins, the brilliant physicist and founder of RMI once asked me: What kind of a house would the master carpenter, Jesus, build?

An equally good question is: What kind of a city would God develop? 

Listen to the answer given in the Old Testament of the Bible. Zech, the prophet, wrote down God's plan for the ultimate culturally sustainable city where people live in peace and comfort.

Here is how he described it: "This is what the Lord Almighty says: Once again men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with cane in hand because of his age, and the city will be filled with boys and girls playing in the streets."

This is a city or town that works for children and old folks. Because the old folks and the children are using the streets together,  the children are learning from the old folks the principles and values that will allow them to grow old  and then teach the same principles and values to the next generation of children, and so forth.

When we talk of sustainability in nature we mean that the ecology of a place works in such a way that the plants and creatures of the place reproduce so that the ecological balance and health of the place is maintained and sustained.

A community that sustains and maintains itself in health and comfort can only happen when a community is designed for children, and the children are enculturated by the adults and old folks that they are safely interacting with all the time. The old folks respect and watch the children, and the children venerate the adults and learn the communities' traditions and values from the them.

This culturally sustainable town has streets (not just the fenced in rear yards) that are totally safe for children to play in. Children can safely explore a world that is much larger and more diverse than their own rear yard.  They can play safely in the streets with other neighborhood children without constant supervision. This gives them the opportunity to experience serendipitous natural relationships with other children - not just relationships structured and managed by adults.

Nature is ecologically sustainable because it is complex, diverse, interdependent, integrated, and decentrailzed. For our human culture to sustain itself, it must be founded on similar principles. Until the last 50 years, neighborhoods and communities had always incorporated these age-old natural values. They have been temporarily and inadvertently abandoned as we have accommodated ourselves to technology and the automobile for the last 50 years. 

In HomeTown, the spheres of shared human activity are at once complex, diverse, interdependent, integrated, and decentralized within themselves, and they bear these relationships to each other as each one relates with the other spheres of shared human activity.

Whether we want to or not we are designing and building homes and communities that become subcultures that either sustain themselves spiritually and relationally in health and comfort, or they become places of social dis-ease and sickness.  We have the power and wisdom to build safe, healthy communities in which children thrive and learn and grow and develop strong individual personalities within the context of mutual respect for everyone and everything in the community.

And that is exactly what HomeTown is all about.
 
II  OUR RECIPE

Continued on next page

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