Strategic Planning for a Network of Regenerative Villages
* Article: Liaros, S. (2019), "Implementing a new human settlement theory Strategic planning for a network of Regenerative Villages", Smart and Sustainable Built Environment, Vol. 9 No. 3, pp. 258-271
Abstract
""Regenerative villages aim to dispel the arbitrary separation of urban areas from food producing rural areas and so reconnect people to food production and natural systems. This is not to suggest a return to an agrarian lifestyle for all, as improved technologies related to energy and water management and vastly improved understanding of ecosystem management would make food production far more efficient than in the past. According to Grigg (1987, p. 93), the changes in agricultural practices arising from industrialisation transformed the role of agriculture in the economies of the Western world. “In the early eighteenth century farmers and farm workers made up three-quarters or more of the labour force in nearly every country”. Yet by the late twentieth century this had fallen to as low as two per cent of the workforce in Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA, while in Europe it employs about 8 per cent (Grigg, 1987, p. 95). It is argued that perhaps 10–15 per cent of the population would need to be directly involved in food production as a result of a shift from industrial to regenerative agriculture. "
Excerpts
From the conclusion:
"It is relatively easy to be dismissive of new visions for the future, describing them as utopian, impractical or idealistic or perhaps suggesting there is nothing new here, ecovillages have been tried and failed, so we continue with business-as-usual. Yet we are living in a time of dramatic technological change with the threat of the collapse of ecosystems due to climate change, land degradation and plastic pollution. In many countries, inequality is extreme with significant populations feeling politically disenfranchised and economically excluded. This is not a time to continue with business-as-usual in any field of human endeavour. This paper presents a sketch outlining a new human settlement theory. A different way of living on the land. It is an invitation to academics and practitioners to participate in a debate. How do you imagine a future that is equitably distributed, where people everywhere can work with their neighbours to ensure all in the community have access to basic necessities? How might these necessities be provided as efficiently as possible to create the time and space for freedom from meaningless and unnecessary work – and freedom to pursue our own individual passions? Howm ight human settlements be designed to be in alignment with cyclical ecological systems and so create no waste and other externalities? How do we rehabilitate, reinvent and regenerate ourselves, our societies and natural systems? How do we start thinking, planning, designing and living in systems rather than in the silo of our own worldview?