In my wanderings and research into the idea of Place, I’ve come across
many wonderful thinkers on the subject.
One of my favourites is C.S. Lewis, who once described joy as “the feeling we get of being home in a place we’ve never been before.”
That strikes me as exactly right. It’s that quiet resonance between a place and the human spirit, the sense that generations before you have left something intangible but enduring in the air.
The big question, of course, is: can we design that feeling into new places? Can you design in
belonging and community? I’d like to think we can, but only if we remember that joy, like
community, is built out of the small, ordinary things.
The aim of this iniative would be on improving the coordination of existing resources in local spaces, and empower people to potentially create new resources out of collective abundance.
I think you can design for belonging and community, even within the constraints of existing cities and neighborhoods. And, to know which constraints (like fences between your yards) you can remove.
Your comment about the assumption of time and emotional capacity is spot on, I'm so fearful of where society is heading but I barely have the energy to keep my own family liferaft floating in a vaguely positive direction, let alone take on responsibility for a whole little community.
I had the same reaction to that comment on the assumption of time abundance, desire to study/learn etc.
I’m constantly wondering how on earth to reach the vast majority of people who are just trying to get by. It seems like an utterly impossible predicament. And I also hate to admit that bc I refuse to believe it.
YES to all of this! I’d be so primed and ready to road test some tools. And in the spirit of reciprocity, would gladly feed learnings back into the commons you’re building.
I’m recovering from the burnout of building big community assets at scale in Baltimore City where demand outstrips resources many fold. Lately I’ve been translating the last decade of learning into smaller scale experiments that are build around deeper relationships, smaller parcels of land, and sincere dialogue with non-human teachers (especially bees).
We can build ecologies and villages in urban places, and in fact so much supportive infrastructure is here that there are many incremental gains. Long story short, I’ll be following along!
Michelle, you sound like a kindred spirit. I hope your inner restoration completes! Would love your thoughts on what it takes to build parallel, nourishing systems that slowly weaken the extractive ones.
So much to say on this. But a short list of hot tips would include: find your people, give yourself a fun and dreamy job to do, have fun with it, communicate seriously about the serious parts, and allow pieces to be touched and seen and felt by the public.
I feel like divesting our time and energy away from distraction, fear, consumption, and division and TOWARDS creative explorations and community asset building without centering outcomes or profits is a gorgeous first step. And then iterating from there! Truly a million flowers blooming. As many possibilities as we can possibly dream up.
I really enjoyed reading this. Your vision is beautiful, and it lines up so closely with the kind of community life my friends and I have been trying to build little by little: regularly scheduled potlucks; spontaneous bring-what-you-have dinners; freezer meal prep nights and postpartum care packages for soon-to-be parents; curated nonfiction book clubs on current world topics; volunteering our time and talents to local nonprofits like food pantries and third space grassroots movements; and showing up together at our local mutual aid nights. All these tiny "village mentality" things we’re trying to implement feel like our way of living out the phrase, "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
I'm still very new to the worlds of urban planning, activism, and regenerative design, so parts of this piece were hard for me to fully grasp. The ideas are powerful and exciting, but quite a bit of the terminology went over my head. I imagine there are a lot of people like me--really enthusiastic about building community and "village life" (especially in today’s sociopolitical climate!), but we are still not yet familiar with the language that experts and leaders in this field use every day.
I'm especially drawn to the playbook you're creating and the toolkit for spreading these ideas. They sound incredible, and like they could be catalysts for so many neighborhoods and little pockets of budding community. I think they could reach an even wider group of people--and really take off--if they were written in a way that beginners (like my friends and me) can latch onto quickly, with really clear explanations, examples, and steps. I would genuinely love to help test some of the playbook or toolkit content you’re creating; I just worry that my early-stage understanding might make it harder to follow without some more beginner-friendly language. (And maybe this isn’t designed for someone at my level--but I’m curious, and very willing to learn.)
I hope this doesn’t come across as criticism. I’m genuinely grateful for your work, time, and energy in putting this out into the world (and for all your work, time and energy you've already put out into the world and shared here on your Substack). I’m excited to learn more as these resources come to life. Your vision feels like something many of us are longing for (and deeply need), and I would love to keep moving toward it--I just need a little more guidance in language I can understand.
Thank you for sharing this and for building toward a future so many of us want.
Wow, thank you for sharing so much Amanda. How you're already practicing the village mentality is so beautiful and genuine.
I think you've hit something right on the nose as well, because I typically write for very niche, nerdy-about-this-stuff people, but I really want to make this accessible to a wider audience because I feel like that's what will help us reach that tipping point that I talk about.
Honestly, reading your efforts brings happiness to my eyes because this is where we're at. Most people craving for that simple reconnection and care-based life, trying in the simple ways to retain dignity while surviving. I love seeing the pockets of budding community because it looks so many different ways and all of them beautiful.
Even for example, lists of what goes into a post-partum care package, and kits that help you start a tool library, and how to start a mutual aid network, and how to start a cooperatively owned grocery store -- all of these need to be accessible to people. Why should millions of people have to figure out the hard way how to do these things on their own?
That is what I'm looking to build, and I'd love to build that collaboratively.
Thank you for your response! I was a bit nervous to post my first comment here (with the broader topic being out of my realm so to speak). Thank you for helping me understand at my level.
I am very much looking forward to seeing what you build collaboratively. That sounds so lovely and again, much needed. ❤️
As I continue to follow along, I know my vocabulary will grow and my understanding will deepen.
Nicole, I am happy to support you in bridging the "gap", so to speak, between the wording for nerdy-about-this-stuff people and us laymen with a deep craving for revillaging (love this world, btw!!).
Loved reading your essay and kuddos for taking this 10 steps further than where I am (which is, seeing the need for a post-capitalistic model, and speaking about it) and creating the playbook.
Feel free to reach out to me for support, in whatever form this will take.
Amanda, I want to quote you in an article I'm writing for Meander, would you be okay with that and being attributed the quote around the activities you're engaging in?
Building eco-villages from scratch is fraught with landowner and finance issues which usually destroy projects from within.
Starting a movement to regenerate - make existing places better - has the significant advantage that it can start NOW, start SMALL but grow exponentially as more people join.
Even if this is just to make someone's doorstep a more friendly space, it's the small stuff that is often the most effective and can be a catalyst to greater things.
're-village' - brilliant!
Christopher Alexander's 'A Pattern Language' remains one of the best selling book in Architecture of all time, but not many architects have read it - instead it works as an inspiration to 'ordinary folk' that there is a way in which places to live could be better.
Inspiring people to take action, even if it the small stuff, is so important.
Beautiful vision. I've spent many years involved with CoHousing and I can confidently say it is a better way to live. It is particularly a much, much better way to raise kids. So a big yes to an Ecovillage framework.
But we can't just focus on the external. When people visit CoHousing they tend to focus on the external things like the common house, and the fact that cars are parked way off to the side. And then they might be interested in how the meal system works, and maybe even learning about the consensus governing model. But what is harder to convey is the internal work that needs to be done in order to allow a truly different culture to arise. And many times that is what groups struggle with. I think that internal is almost invisible to many people. But it is so important!
When new people join the community we kind of dump them into the deep end of the swimming pool and just shout "Learn to swim!" Not recognizing that even with a relatively modest experiment like CoHousing we already have significantly stepped away from the dominant culture. There is a lot to learn. And then the group stumbles into those really painful conflicts because we don't know any better. Of course we don't -- we are recreating something that we have lost. What we are building is not just external structures, but a new consciousness. We need both the internal and external growth to get to where we want to go.
This is simply the best advice for anyone today, as the institutions have been built upon limiting and dismantling the act of community. Let’s get local.
Hi there, love your efforts. I see both the potential and the critical need for everything you’re sharing here. As someone who has been off grid tending the vision of integrated and contextualized community village, the one thing that is screaming to me when I read this is the importance of people understanding the resources it takes to build cities/villages /sub/urban areas by the act of reciprocity, in tending the wild. The state of the forest mismanagement is not just a metaphor for our collective dysfunction, it shows us a radical picture of our relationship to abundance. As much as core infrastructure and tangible light lifting is incredibly important if it’s not placed within the context of the wild places that make it all possible we will always perpetuate the problems we are grappling with. Of course, localizing food systems is a critical first step… But the materials it takes to build our homes in villages all come from somewhere (else) and if the relationship from those materials is not included in the patterning, we will continue the dysfunction. It speaks to the truth of pace, and pace being directly connected to place.… Where does the Lumber come from? Where does the clay infills come from? How do we relate to our need for metal and plastic? What ways do we recontextualize these in what we might call the inner village… The places that are so far removed from the Forrest and the clay quarries that they grow/develop at a pace beyond the truth of their regeneration, or are clear in the case of quarrying clay and sand what that really means given it is so easy to pat ourselves on the back for them being natural materials. Bless your work and look forward to constructive dialogue on how we can midwife this great turning.
Thank you for sharing this, and for tending the vision.
I feel like the conversation of materials fits into 2 families: housing/place, and economy. For one, we need to ensure that our economy is shifting to local and circular to focus on regenerative materials. Furthermore, we need to choose to build or rebuild or places with materials of integrity.
Knowing the story and origin of what surrounds us helps ground us into place.
Nicole - Yes! Re-village everywhere!! Your focus on the economic, social and cultural evolution needed for this happen is spot-on. As far as the pattern language goes, David Holmgren, does a deep dive in that in RetroSuburbia and Mark Lakeman’s Block Repair Game offers a fun tool for city-dwellers to do their own urban redesigning.
You have requested co-workers reach out, and a partner shared with me your work, I have subscribed. I have a team to help the very same goal in place with a useful economic project. How may I get you a copy? edensbayteam@gmail.com if you reach out there I can do that. best wishes, and I am going to use the slogan you offer too: feed the village starve the empire. Nice!
So cool to see how more and more people building their communities! I actually made a whole series on Instagram with the general strike page, as well as here, called “build the village, starve the empire” and am currently writing the book for it now.
In my wanderings and research into the idea of Place, I’ve come across
many wonderful thinkers on the subject.
One of my favourites is C.S. Lewis, who once described joy as “the feeling we get of being home in a place we’ve never been before.”
That strikes me as exactly right. It’s that quiet resonance between a place and the human spirit, the sense that generations before you have left something intangible but enduring in the air.
The big question, of course, is: can we design that feeling into new places? Can you design in
belonging and community? I’d like to think we can, but only if we remember that joy, like
community, is built out of the small, ordinary things.
Bob
The aim of this iniative would be on improving the coordination of existing resources in local spaces, and empower people to potentially create new resources out of collective abundance.
I think you can design for belonging and community, even within the constraints of existing cities and neighborhoods. And, to know which constraints (like fences between your yards) you can remove.
Your comment about the assumption of time and emotional capacity is spot on, I'm so fearful of where society is heading but I barely have the energy to keep my own family liferaft floating in a vaguely positive direction, let alone take on responsibility for a whole little community.
Remember that community means give and take. Finding our way to Support One Another mitigates your isolation and risk
I had the same reaction to that comment on the assumption of time abundance, desire to study/learn etc.
I’m constantly wondering how on earth to reach the vast majority of people who are just trying to get by. It seems like an utterly impossible predicament. And I also hate to admit that bc I refuse to believe it.
YES to all of this! I’d be so primed and ready to road test some tools. And in the spirit of reciprocity, would gladly feed learnings back into the commons you’re building.
I’m recovering from the burnout of building big community assets at scale in Baltimore City where demand outstrips resources many fold. Lately I’ve been translating the last decade of learning into smaller scale experiments that are build around deeper relationships, smaller parcels of land, and sincere dialogue with non-human teachers (especially bees).
We can build ecologies and villages in urban places, and in fact so much supportive infrastructure is here that there are many incremental gains. Long story short, I’ll be following along!
Michelle, you sound like a kindred spirit. I hope your inner restoration completes! Would love your thoughts on what it takes to build parallel, nourishing systems that slowly weaken the extractive ones.
So much to say on this. But a short list of hot tips would include: find your people, give yourself a fun and dreamy job to do, have fun with it, communicate seriously about the serious parts, and allow pieces to be touched and seen and felt by the public.
I feel like divesting our time and energy away from distraction, fear, consumption, and division and TOWARDS creative explorations and community asset building without centering outcomes or profits is a gorgeous first step. And then iterating from there! Truly a million flowers blooming. As many possibilities as we can possibly dream up.
I really enjoyed reading this. Your vision is beautiful, and it lines up so closely with the kind of community life my friends and I have been trying to build little by little: regularly scheduled potlucks; spontaneous bring-what-you-have dinners; freezer meal prep nights and postpartum care packages for soon-to-be parents; curated nonfiction book clubs on current world topics; volunteering our time and talents to local nonprofits like food pantries and third space grassroots movements; and showing up together at our local mutual aid nights. All these tiny "village mentality" things we’re trying to implement feel like our way of living out the phrase, "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
I'm still very new to the worlds of urban planning, activism, and regenerative design, so parts of this piece were hard for me to fully grasp. The ideas are powerful and exciting, but quite a bit of the terminology went over my head. I imagine there are a lot of people like me--really enthusiastic about building community and "village life" (especially in today’s sociopolitical climate!), but we are still not yet familiar with the language that experts and leaders in this field use every day.
I'm especially drawn to the playbook you're creating and the toolkit for spreading these ideas. They sound incredible, and like they could be catalysts for so many neighborhoods and little pockets of budding community. I think they could reach an even wider group of people--and really take off--if they were written in a way that beginners (like my friends and me) can latch onto quickly, with really clear explanations, examples, and steps. I would genuinely love to help test some of the playbook or toolkit content you’re creating; I just worry that my early-stage understanding might make it harder to follow without some more beginner-friendly language. (And maybe this isn’t designed for someone at my level--but I’m curious, and very willing to learn.)
I hope this doesn’t come across as criticism. I’m genuinely grateful for your work, time, and energy in putting this out into the world (and for all your work, time and energy you've already put out into the world and shared here on your Substack). I’m excited to learn more as these resources come to life. Your vision feels like something many of us are longing for (and deeply need), and I would love to keep moving toward it--I just need a little more guidance in language I can understand.
Thank you for sharing this and for building toward a future so many of us want.
Wow, thank you for sharing so much Amanda. How you're already practicing the village mentality is so beautiful and genuine.
I think you've hit something right on the nose as well, because I typically write for very niche, nerdy-about-this-stuff people, but I really want to make this accessible to a wider audience because I feel like that's what will help us reach that tipping point that I talk about.
Honestly, reading your efforts brings happiness to my eyes because this is where we're at. Most people craving for that simple reconnection and care-based life, trying in the simple ways to retain dignity while surviving. I love seeing the pockets of budding community because it looks so many different ways and all of them beautiful.
Even for example, lists of what goes into a post-partum care package, and kits that help you start a tool library, and how to start a mutual aid network, and how to start a cooperatively owned grocery store -- all of these need to be accessible to people. Why should millions of people have to figure out the hard way how to do these things on their own?
That is what I'm looking to build, and I'd love to build that collaboratively.
Thank you for your response! I was a bit nervous to post my first comment here (with the broader topic being out of my realm so to speak). Thank you for helping me understand at my level.
I am very much looking forward to seeing what you build collaboratively. That sounds so lovely and again, much needed. ❤️
As I continue to follow along, I know my vocabulary will grow and my understanding will deepen.
Nicole, I am happy to support you in bridging the "gap", so to speak, between the wording for nerdy-about-this-stuff people and us laymen with a deep craving for revillaging (love this world, btw!!).
Loved reading your essay and kuddos for taking this 10 steps further than where I am (which is, seeing the need for a post-capitalistic model, and speaking about it) and creating the playbook.
Feel free to reach out to me for support, in whatever form this will take.
Amanda, I want to quote you in an article I'm writing for Meander, would you be okay with that and being attributed the quote around the activities you're engaging in?
Yes, I am fine with that! Thank you for asking.
Hi Nicole
This, Nicole, is a much more powerful idea.
Building eco-villages from scratch is fraught with landowner and finance issues which usually destroy projects from within.
Starting a movement to regenerate - make existing places better - has the significant advantage that it can start NOW, start SMALL but grow exponentially as more people join.
Even if this is just to make someone's doorstep a more friendly space, it's the small stuff that is often the most effective and can be a catalyst to greater things.
're-village' - brilliant!
Christopher Alexander's 'A Pattern Language' remains one of the best selling book in Architecture of all time, but not many architects have read it - instead it works as an inspiration to 'ordinary folk' that there is a way in which places to live could be better.
Inspiring people to take action, even if it the small stuff, is so important.
Let me know if I can help.
Bob
--
Bob Tomlinson
Founder Director. Tel: 07941 548 015
www.village-makers.com & www.thelivingvillagetrust.com
Beautiful vision. I've spent many years involved with CoHousing and I can confidently say it is a better way to live. It is particularly a much, much better way to raise kids. So a big yes to an Ecovillage framework.
But we can't just focus on the external. When people visit CoHousing they tend to focus on the external things like the common house, and the fact that cars are parked way off to the side. And then they might be interested in how the meal system works, and maybe even learning about the consensus governing model. But what is harder to convey is the internal work that needs to be done in order to allow a truly different culture to arise. And many times that is what groups struggle with. I think that internal is almost invisible to many people. But it is so important!
When new people join the community we kind of dump them into the deep end of the swimming pool and just shout "Learn to swim!" Not recognizing that even with a relatively modest experiment like CoHousing we already have significantly stepped away from the dominant culture. There is a lot to learn. And then the group stumbles into those really painful conflicts because we don't know any better. Of course we don't -- we are recreating something that we have lost. What we are building is not just external structures, but a new consciousness. We need both the internal and external growth to get to where we want to go.
I have brainstormed an ecosystem model for self-sustaining urban communities. I’m happy to share for what it’s worth.
Hi Wendy. Where, when do you plan to share? Would love to see it. Yes! Let us move forward 💫
Go ahead and send me an email at wendy@patternsynthesis.com, and I’ll share my thoughts on this.
This is simply the best advice for anyone today, as the institutions have been built upon limiting and dismantling the act of community. Let’s get local.
Hi there, love your efforts. I see both the potential and the critical need for everything you’re sharing here. As someone who has been off grid tending the vision of integrated and contextualized community village, the one thing that is screaming to me when I read this is the importance of people understanding the resources it takes to build cities/villages /sub/urban areas by the act of reciprocity, in tending the wild. The state of the forest mismanagement is not just a metaphor for our collective dysfunction, it shows us a radical picture of our relationship to abundance. As much as core infrastructure and tangible light lifting is incredibly important if it’s not placed within the context of the wild places that make it all possible we will always perpetuate the problems we are grappling with. Of course, localizing food systems is a critical first step… But the materials it takes to build our homes in villages all come from somewhere (else) and if the relationship from those materials is not included in the patterning, we will continue the dysfunction. It speaks to the truth of pace, and pace being directly connected to place.… Where does the Lumber come from? Where does the clay infills come from? How do we relate to our need for metal and plastic? What ways do we recontextualize these in what we might call the inner village… The places that are so far removed from the Forrest and the clay quarries that they grow/develop at a pace beyond the truth of their regeneration, or are clear in the case of quarrying clay and sand what that really means given it is so easy to pat ourselves on the back for them being natural materials. Bless your work and look forward to constructive dialogue on how we can midwife this great turning.
Blair,
Thank you for sharing this, and for tending the vision.
I feel like the conversation of materials fits into 2 families: housing/place, and economy. For one, we need to ensure that our economy is shifting to local and circular to focus on regenerative materials. Furthermore, we need to choose to build or rebuild or places with materials of integrity.
Knowing the story and origin of what surrounds us helps ground us into place.
Nicole - Yes! Re-village everywhere!! Your focus on the economic, social and cultural evolution needed for this happen is spot-on. As far as the pattern language goes, David Holmgren, does a deep dive in that in RetroSuburbia and Mark Lakeman’s Block Repair Game offers a fun tool for city-dwellers to do their own urban redesigning.
These are great suggestions for tools to compile into the framework. Thanks!!
Dear Nicole,
You have requested co-workers reach out, and a partner shared with me your work, I have subscribed. I have a team to help the very same goal in place with a useful economic project. How may I get you a copy? edensbayteam@gmail.com if you reach out there I can do that. best wishes, and I am going to use the slogan you offer too: feed the village starve the empire. Nice!
Sent you an email Emily! Would love to collaborate
Excellent read as always Nicole. I'd love to be in touch with you, elricsala@gmail.com . I'm a community builder based in Mexico City.
If you needed proof that people will subscribe from a title and image alone, this is it! Looking forward to reading.
So cool to see how more and more people building their communities! I actually made a whole series on Instagram with the general strike page, as well as here, called “build the village, starve the empire” and am currently writing the book for it now.
The change starts with the mind. Gathering and attracting those who would not typically be found in these communities is the challenge.
Outreach isn’t enough, invitation isn’t enough, marketing or spreading the word isn’t enough.
I have ideas about how to start, I’m planning on testing out my ideas with a CIC I’m starting up in January. Happy to share my journey.
The Villages 55+ community in San Jose is a successful version of this. Very different politics and not associated with the Florida one