Infrastructure

The way to simplify systems is to remove the unnecessary.  To do so, much thinking is required about the most basic ways of living.  Prior to writing about urban collectivism, I drafted some work on 100% self-sufficient communities; ones that do not import or export anything.  Imagining a utopia in the country is easy - brooks and meadows, artisan structures and gardens with winding paths.  People working together and playing as one without fear of violence or personal strife.  In this type of community, people generally only occupy their time with one of five things: structural building & maintenance, gardening, food preparation, studying and teaching.  Of course there would be other occupations required such as metallurgy, tailoring, medicine, etc., but in a small community, those jobs may not be required constantly.  It started to occur to me that people working together to build and maintain their own homes, and to share meals together, is essential and core.  My totally self-sufficient communities started to look a lot like Amish or Mennonite communities.  The beauty of no loud machinery or invasive advertising on screens, it's a simple solution to an enormous problem.  I was happy with this and I myself considered sacrificing all industry, agriculture, and technology for that kind of peace.  But an important question loomed - is this extreme austerity required to save humanity?  What would happen to cities if everyone decided to live like this?  One idea I had was that we could simply abandon cities, because their infrastructure is unmaintainable without modern technology.  Further, we could scavenge & recycle all the plastic and metal found in cities to make modern tools.  By prioritizing education & science, we could live healthily.  But a new problem loomed that bothered me for some time - don't we love modern architecture, trains, modern science & medicine, and most of all technology?  How could we abandon this?  We love connectivity, air conditioning, washing machines, refrigerators, and electric guitars.  So I set out to imagine a way of life that maintained the eradication of both cars and money, the concept of living and working together, and it was not long before I realized the key is to add a simple piece: external trade.  100% internal self-sufficiency, but a higher-level network of sharing.  The beauty was striking to me because we can have the peace of safe communities, without sacrificing the modern work that we do.  

As of the time of writing this, it's been almost 20 years since I have been trying to imagine a world without cars.  I see them as being obtrusive.  Dangerous, expensive, loud, energy hungry, and incredibly inefficient.  Use of personal vehicles has cultivated a spaghetti system of urban sprawl.  Roads are expensive to maintain and, like the car, must be replaced every decade or so at least.  Roads cross through our neighborhoods with no regard for children, people, and pets.  The costs of insurance, gasoline, and traffic police are debilitating. We feel like we work to afford a car just to get to work, and that's true.

It's easy to view roads and cars as necessary, after all, we need supply-delivery, police, fire, and ambulance, even if we never left the house.  But this is a house where we are all alone and don't have the things or people we need close by to help us or feed us.  Food delivery service is an excellent example of mega-economy inefficiency and inequity - the service cost, the often-poor strangers who deliver to us.  We love this service because preparing meals is a job, or a hobby to say the least.  Young couples who could use this service the most cannot afford it, but use it anyway.

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Roads and train lines could border the community, as travel outside would be the exception.  I propose that train lines should penetrate deepest into cities, and roads should be used when rail is not viable.  Transportation is the only core infrastructure that should be managed by the regional government.  

Fossil fuels are not necessary, and their use should continue to decline to nothing with increasingly powerful renewable technology.  For example, in cold climates, a geo-thermal well loop could be shared by the entire neighborhood to provide a year-round source of heat or cooling, so long as technology exists so that the community can drill and maintain the system themselves.  Simple and affordable well-drilling technology will become increasingly important.

Telecom lines may increasingly become obsolete with increasingly high-quality satellite communications, however in the meantime it is conceivable that in urban environments, fiber optics could be run along rail lines and roads, demarcating at the edge of collectives, but the regional government should have autonomy over that low-level physical infrastructure, at the very least.

Growing our own food and working with our soil cycle is the basis of sustainability and connection to biological life, and should be practiced as a primary function of the community, in suburban or larger settings.

Any plumbing, cabling or any other infrastructure internal to the collective should be built and maintained by the collective. 

Water is debatable because in a suburban setting, water could be provided from wells, depending on viability, however in urban environments, it's more likely that plumbing networks would have to be shared, so long as proper demarcation is maintained. 

Today we abuse our sewer system.  Sewer should be managed within the collective, so that we acknowledge its cycle.  Regardless of who manages the sewer, we can recover a tremendous amount of water and energy.  As science advances, these problems will have better and better solutions. Nobody wants to talk about this, but composting toilets are wonderful and simple things.  You can keep poop in the loop.  City center collectives may not have this ability because there's no gardening happening, but suburban and most certainly rural collectives should be recycling everything, especially the poop.  Plumbers can be ingenious, but however the system works, it should be self-contained within the collective.  Normalizing and improving design on recycling systems is critical, especially so that we can share them with our less thriving nation neighbors.  

Garbage collection and recycling by the city government should be transitional, as we move toward zero-waste, a concept that is popular in “permaculture”, which is a fascinating way of life which proves that it is possible to be completely self-sufficient, even as a small family.

Any company that produces a product should by law also take it back to be recycled, if it is not easily recyclable.

We are an incredibly intellectual civilization - we have achieved many great things in science and technology and I believe that now more than ever, our world is ripe for change - to use science, technology, and engineering to reorganize paradigms.

With less use of money, and fewer strangers interacting, we will see less crime and personal disputes that require public legal system intervention.  We will see the personal insurance and banking systems become almost obsolete.  Energy companies won't be needed.  Interaction with telecom, government, or any external entity will be managed by collective administrators as a single entity.

It's important that collectives can build and maintain their own infrastructure, including structures.  This may be one of the most difficult things to come to terms with - we need to have the expertise amongst ourselves to construct our own homes.  Doing so will ensure their continued care, and encourage the growth of the community.  This discussion needs to be had - it's difficult to build buildings, but technology can help us, and pre-fabricated and modular building products can help us. The timing is great to embark on this change because modular home building is becoming increasingly popular, and individual DIYers are handling it on their own.  By definition, a collective does not hire services.  As technology advances, it will be increasingly easy for smaller groups to build safe and legal structures, even to scale them vertically.  Interestingly, at the time I am writing this, there have been some recent developments in quad-copter drones that are able to work together to 3D print structures.  In the future, building construction may be as easy as using architectural software to design the home, and to vet its structural engineering, then passing the design to the construction drones.

Roads will always be necessary in remote regions because we need to mine and transport resources.  

Before long, supply deliveries will come from drones, directly into the collective, and roads won't be necessary at all in urban centers.