Organigram of the Impending Global Commons
Characteristics
A five-old structure proposed by the Swiss author, "PM":
"As everything else the organigram of the impending global commons will not be an invention of especially clever social engineers, but merely an emerging structure, something that is already here, has been around for ages, and just has to be found and picked up. Following Occam's advice, the social forms would be of a minimal number.
What we find are, as far as I can see, just five organizational social modules, which can articulate a functioning commons.
1 – synergetic neighborhoods (villages, city-blocks etc.) of about 500 individuals, providing lodging, food (via a partnership in the country - 90 ha under European conditions), media, social spaces, free guest rooms etc. These synergems (or bolos,9 as I called them in an older text) can be as culturally diverse as we wish, but must be open, democratic and respecting ecological limits (1000 W per capita). They're echoes of those premodern village communities that were dismantled by capitalism.
2- democratic communal areas (small towns, city boroughs: politems) of ten to twenty synergems (or tega, in bolo'bolo). This is the area of public services, smaller regional industries (organized as common enterprises of synergems), local politics (an echo of the Greek polis), “good governance.”
3 – agrourban regions (metropolitem) of hundreds of thousands or millions of inhabitants, depending on historical conditions: New York City or Zurich. These regions provide such vital metropolitan services as operas, universities, museums, luxury shops, world-class restaurants, stadiums etc. The region (up to 200 km circumference) contains most of the agricultural partners mentioned under 1.
4 – autonomous territories of roughly 40'000 km2, and 10 million inhabitants (in the case of NY, this would coincide with the metropolitem). This is the area of public services for transportation, emergency aid, regional industries (breweries, building materials, energy, water etc.). The AT can combine on subcontinents for train systems, high tech industries, pharmaceutical industry etc. The ATs make those big nations, that cause so much trouble, redundant.
5 – one planetary organization to manage what's left: mainly the distribution of resources, problems between territories, emergency aid, global transportation networks, scientific research etc."