The Ecology of Redevelopment

A big part of my redevelopment plan (aside from the financial systems reform) is the REBUILDING of neighborhoods to make them walkable for the necessities of life (that is, assuming a goal of a much less harried pace than today, but also assuming that people will have responsibilities, obligations, and desires). Such a plan would include a massive education program in retraining workers and training in youth in the building trades. Human resource management would be utilized to try to maximize the match between where the primary contractors/instructors and student/workers lived and the neighborhood building projects.

Communities would be rebuilt to emulate mature ecological systems, in that they maximize the efficiency of energy and resource input into the community so that once resources enter a community, they stay in the community for the maximum amount of time possible. Once all communities are sufficiently rebuilt (a timeline of 20 to 40 years?) under such guidelines, they would evolve to ongoing day-to-day and maintenence communities and the amount of heavy labor required would decrease and the amount of leisure time increase greatly. Again, (day-to-day and maintenence) workers would be employed in, surrounding, and/or as close to their residency as possible and it would be a priority for real and capital assets to be owned by the workers and the community patrons who ideally would be one and the same. The Neighborhood Equity Union would replace credit unions and of course, other forms of financial institutions. Parks and gymnasiums would be an important part of the plan as leisure time increased and the healthy aspects of physical labor decreased.

Concurrent with rebuilding, and the reallocation of production and distribution resources would be efforts to make office, communications, knowledge and intelligence based labor into primarily home and/or neighborhood based vocations. Occasional travel would be necessary and desirable, but quiet bus and train travel and car-sharing cooperatives could be employed to fill this need along with family visit and recreational needs and desires. With respect to the former, extended families would be encouraged to reunite geographically.