Guiding Principles for a Living Community

The following principles form key elements of the philosophy behind Living Communities™. These principles have been what has guided us through the first 2 years of our development. I thought it may be interesting for everyone to have a clearer idea of where we are coming from.

 

1. Re-Localisation

Relocalisation is the principal that if a community is capable of providing a good or service locally it should do so. It is called ‘re’ localisation because in many cases, these services may have once been provided locally.

 

Generally, assessment of relocalisation of goods/services is based on; the inherent need for the service from within the community, the level of the benefit to the community rather than the enterprise providing the service and the capacity of the community to support it.

 

In relation to the last of the points above; because a product/service may not always be capable of providing a profit for a private owner/s it may need to be provided on a non-profit basis by the community.

 

An example: A hypothetical regional community of 15,000 needs transportation at a cost of $32 million a year and food at a cost of  $30 million a year, to function. It is highly likely that in an Australian rural economy neither of these goods would be provided locally to any great level. However, only one is capable of being highly localised.

 

The community probably has water, soil and the capital, labour, knowledge and expertise to run its own food system to provide a great majority of its food. However it is most probably unlikely it would be capable of manufacturing vehicles or trains without outside ownership and investment.

 

If the population was too small for private operator/s to produce the food required at a profit, then the community may be able to produce it together collaboratively on a non-profit basis.

 

In this example, the community has an inherent need for food, would gain an enormous benefit from producing it (keeping a percentage of the $30 million it usually sends out of the community when it imports food into the local economy) and has the capacity to do so with ample land, knowledge etc.

 

However manufacturing vehicles is not possible because, although the community needs vehicles and one could argue the community would benefit by retaining some of the $32 million it spends on transport it may not necessarily have the capacity to do so. Therefore vehicles are probably best imported.

 

However, as the community and technology changes and develops, it may, in theory, become possible to manufacture transport vehicles or develop a locally owned transport system at some time in the future.

 

Living Communities believes that relocalisation is the foundation of a truly resilient (see resilience below) local economy. Relocalisation increases capital available for ongoing community development of the social, environmental and economic systems within the community. All communities should attempt to relocalise their economy as much as possible in order to increase this resilience.

 

2. Entrepreneurship

Definition: The common definition of an entrepreneur is one of a person who organises, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture for a profit. In the context of Living Communities™ the definition of an entrepreneur can be expanded to; a person who organises, operates, and assumes the risk for a new for profit business venture, non profit social enterprise, for profit social enterprise or one such entity currently in existence that is capable of change, enhancement or development.

 

Context: Living Communities simply do not exist without the organisational effort, implementation and risk taking of local entrepreneurs as defined above.

 

A town made up entirely of employees of non-local companies (or even one with low levels of local entrepreneurial activity) can only survive as long as the non-local companies that employs the population remains in the town.

 

A town with a good quantity of entrepreneurs can adapt and make opportunity out of changing circumstances, both good and bad.

 

Living Communities aims to promote and encourage entrepreneurship in order to facilitate this element of resilience and to plug the leaks in the local economy.

 

3. Resilience

Definition: Jamais Cascio, fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, defines resilience thus;

 

“Resilience, accepts that change is inevitable and in many cases out of our hands, focusing instead on the need to be able to withstand the unexpected. Greed, accident, or malice may have harmful results, but, barring something truly apocalyptic, a resilient system can absorb such results without its overall health being threatened.

Like sustainability, resilience encompasses both strategy and design, guiding how choices are made and how systems are created. Stripped to its essence, it comes down to avoiding being trapped or trapping oneself on a losing path. Principles of resilience include:

• Diversity: Not relying on a single kind of solution means not suffering from a single point of failure.
• Redundancy: Backup, backup, backup. Never leave yourself with just one path of escape or rescue.
• Decentralization: Centralized systems look strong, but when they fail, they fail catastrophically.
• Collaboration: We’re all in this together. Take advantage of collaborative technologies, especially those offering shared communication and information.
• Transparency: Don’t hide. Your systems transparency makes it easier to figure out where a problem may lie. Share your plans and preparations, and listen when people point out flaws.
• Fail gracefully: Failure happens, so make sure that a failure state won’t make things worse than they are already.
• Flexibility: Be ready to change your plans when they’re not working the way you expected; don’t count on things remaining stable.
• Foresight: You can’t predict the future, but you can hear its footsteps approaching. Think and prepare. “

 

Context: Living Communities™ aims to build resilient communities. The principle of resilience enables a community to ensure that they can create strategies that enable their community to thrive.

 

4. Sustainability

Definition: “Sustainability, in a broad sense, is the capacity to endure. In ecology, the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. For humans it is the potential for long-term maintenance of wellbeing, which in turn depends on the wellbeing of the natural world and the responsible use of natural resources.” - Wikipedia

Context: Sustainable communities must take into account their environment as much as their economy as it is the economy that survives based on the viability of the local environment. This is even more pronounced in rural communities where economic fortunes are even more obviously linked to environmental events such as drought and salinity. Living Communities™ introduces principles of sustainability into local economic thinking by ensuring that natural resources are taken into account.

 

5. Community

Definition: Generally, a community has been defined as a group of interacting people living in a common location.

 

Context: In recent years centralised governments, both state and federal, have responded to the problems generated by their implementation of economic rationalist policy by establishing bodies to manage the needs of rural and regional Australia. However, due to the centralised nature of the overseeing department or organisation, this response has focused on ‘regions’.

 

While appropriate at one scale, the regional approach has not accounted for a ‘group of interacting people living in a common location’.

 

Living Communities™ believes that communities are a real physical thing that can be described by location, interacting people and their common interests (although the ways of responding to those interests may be diverse).

 

As people identify with their community (the people they interact with and the land they live on) and not regions, Living Communities™ believes that focusing on working inside a community and making communities resilient is vitally important to the success of any larger system such as a region.

 

6. Thinking in Systems

Definition: We believe a community is a system and is part of a series of larger systems – economic, social and environmental. Like all systems, a community has elements, interconnections and a purpose. The purpose can be found by observing the behaviour of the system.

 

Context: Acknowledging that your community is a system allows you observe how the parts work with each other to achieve its purpose. It also allows you to see how your community is a vital part of the larger economic, social and environmental system too and make adjustments accordingly.

 

We re-label community visioning in a systems thinking context, as a ‘community purpose’, as it can help to highlight the behaviour of the community and connect it to the greater system it influences and that influence it.

 

So, if the current behaviour of a community system is part of a redundant purpose (e.g. a town builds catches and exports fish but the fishery has been depleted) then a new or additional purpose may be required to provide resilience in the system.

When you think about the real reasons humans live in communities it is much more than just an economic one. We come together to be safe (groups provide a level of protection), happy (by having relationships with others, a certain type of lifestyle and sense of place) and wealthy (communities provide better ability to trade). All three are equally important.

However, because our thinking is skewed toward the ‘wealth’ reason, we tend to define our community’s purpose purely from a single economic viewpoint. We start to describe ourselves this way; ‘we’re a mining town’, ‘a farming community’, ‘a tourist town’, a ‘fishing village’, a ‘tree-change’ or ‘sea-change’ community etc.

While these may be entirely accurate, they reduce the capacity of a community to think about itself in any other way, stifling creative solutions and limiting possibilities. Communities are encouraged, by traditional economic developers, to build ‘clusters’ around what they already do (or what they are good at) when they should be able to think about building locally owned clusters of anything they can put their mind to so as to diversify(1).
To remain a single purpose community (and a cluster of farming related industries in a ‘farming community’ is still a single purpose) is to invite brittleness and collapse as opposed to resilience and strength.