Essential Needs

For a short and powerful depiction of how our neighborhoods ended up in the current situation, I recommend John L. McKnight's Abundant community and The Careless Society, Community and it's Counterfeits--Amazon

Almost 20 years ago I read McKnight and Block's book on neighborhoods. I adopted and adapted their seven neighborhood functions. * Wellbeing of Children * Safety * Food * Land & Environment * Health * Care * Enterprising Local Economy

I have come to believe that local affordable land for farming and housing is the keystone aspect of thriving neighborhoods. Only then will food and housing be affordable. And only with affordable food and housing will there be health, safety, care, a vibrant economy and flourishing children.

My guess is that we will need a reliable (consistent) set of social-political-economic attractors at each geopolitical scale to take care of an essential set of Essential Needs and Critical Basic Needs. Each of these attractors will need to communicate with the other attractors at their level (system in focus) and with their type of attractor at the level above (metasystem) and below (subsystems).

>The question for FedWiki designers is what communication tools fit these needs. It is obviously peer-to-peer but it is also level-to-level and group-to-group. Once we can graph-visualize these relationships so the recurrent patterns become the experience of everyday behavior we will have enabled true self organizing and autopoiesis as well as regeneration (after insults).

This year I met Mike McDonald and he shared 26 Mission Critical Functions that are assessed when responding to global humanitarian disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and epidemics.

Since my focus is the day-to-day lives of neighborhoods; therefore, I am calling these Critical Basic Needs which all have neighborhood implications. There are an evolving set of sketches or graphs to explore the systemic connections.

I think of them as the pallet of choices from which neighborhoods can create their capabilities. I have rather arbitrarily chunked the list under five categories: Energy, Health, Safety, Social, and Infrastructure. Energy and Health are smaller categories than Safety, Social, and Infrastructure. Again the categories are porous and overlapping but are my attempt to avoid the overwhelm that a long list creates for me.

We can and should always work to RE LOCALIZE each of these functions. This most often reduces the total cost and increases system resilience.

ENERGY * [ ] Energy -- Temperature Management * [ ] Energy -- Electricity and Gas

Applications * [ ] Net Zero Energy * [ ] Renewables * [ ] Microgrid Infrastructure

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