Eco-Community Design: A Proposal

Eco-Community Design: A Proposal

Twist

Let’s say "Business As Usual" (BAU) real estate economics assumes:
— that one does not grow one’s food, or any portion thereof; that one therefore travels to a grocery, and pays someone else for food that has been shipped from dozens to thousands of miles away and largely grown thanks to massive fossil fuel inputs and fossil fuel-based infrastructure, processed, and for the most part unnecessarily packaged, labeled and wrapped ;

— that large power inputs are required to maintain heating and cooling loads for various household functions (not to mention innumerable small electric devices, some irreplaceable, many not);

— that one does not make income from selling excess power back to the grid, or into a neighborhood network, or derive carbon credits from providing carbon-negative services;

— that, generally speaking, no one works or wants to work where they live; one commutes to an external job-site, using fossil fuels or at best electricity in a public transit system;

— that one goes out to shop and be entertained and socialize by paying for restaurants and bars and clubs and movies and whatnot;

— that materials used to construct residences are largely virgin, and transported from distant locations, and that the eventual resident is not involved in the construction process, neither on the design nor construction side;

— that household water is used only once, in excessively large quantities, to be shipped away from the household;

— that rainwater is not captured for use and re-use;

— that human waste is not recycled into fertilizer and/or electricity (via biogas digester), but instead is shipped using electricity or fossil fuels and treated via costly chemical sewage treatment plants;

— that other household trash is shipped off for alleged recycling, rather than being creatively repurposed on site and/or gasified for power and/or synthetic fuel and/or other useful products.

None of this HAS to be the case. Elements of this model have been superseded in innumerable experiments around the world, to varying degrees in different situations.

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