The creation of something this sustainable (especially for lower and middle income communities) needs an equally sustainable tool-shed and parts factory for use at the same time.
These are not things that industry tends to provide on an individual or even communal basis, so they will most likely have to be built into communities themselves through fabrications labs and community-owned 3d printers.
neil gershenfeld's talk on fab labs and their social applications if anyone's interested (warning: tedtalk)
I love the idea but I have questions, questions, questions.
Will it scale; how do you keep the village to 100 people?
100 seems to be small enough that you can have a social community, but people will move in and move out over time.
Social communities just don't happen, there's a certain amount of trust to be developed.
This seems to be a stepped removed from communal living where a group of people lived in one house. Is this a refinement of that, with groups in separate properties for family privacy.
Who is responsible for making sure everything gets done?
You are correct, who IS responsible for making sure it gets done? Who will teach folks and set up a schedule for garden care? Is 100 people enough to actually do all the stuff? Will the people have time to work outside the community? What happens when folks have another child or two? When the kids grow up, do they have to leave the village if they get married at 18?
If they implement this in different areas, how do you entice people (especially poor folks) into leaving their homes? Can it be adapted to different cultures? Do folks need to give up variety in foods to live there?
A town of 3000 people can seem pretty intrusive if you are a private person and it really sucks being the weird one in such a group. I'm usually the weird one. Now, luckily this particular village is a suburb of Amsterdam so some things really won't be so much of an issue. But I think if it plays out, not all will be such. How do they plan on combating stuff like this... let alone racism and bigotry in such a small community?
I like the idea of vertical farming as mentioned in the article and have been a proponent for some time now, but would like to see it on a more industrial scale so that it can go into existing large cities. New York, Oslo, Delhi, Hong Kong, Manilla, etc. Because this is where many people currently live. I think this is a decent start, but truly in its infancy.
The villages of india are more or less self-sufficient. Only recently they started to behave like a connected economy. So, it can scale, its just the mindset that people need to adopt.
>> would like to see it on a more industrial scale so that it can go into existing large cities
This will not happen in our lifetimes. Large cities with millions of people will never be self-sustainable. "Industrial scale" and "sustainable" are mutually exclusive concepts.
What? That's pessimistic. I can't think of any rule governing the universe that mandates "industrial scale" to be "insustainable." Improvements in science and technology have changed the course of human history, making what seemed previously impossible to be now common place, and taken for granted.
> making what seemed previously impossible to be now common place, and taken for granted.
In lockstep with that progress in science and technology came a commensurate decay in sustainability. Nobody imagined that we could eradicate most of its diversity, burn enough of it to actually drive up its temperature permanently, or create the possibility of exploding and irradiating the entire thing with the press of a button. Now those things are commonplace, and taken for granted. Before improvements in science and technology there was no question that human life as it was lived was sustainable indefinitely; after those improvements, there are very few serious scientists who wouldn't register disgust at hearing that claim made now.
I disagree - we never have really thought that we could live indefinitely and sustain ourselves. Overpopulation has been a fear since Plato at least (https://fee.org/articles/overpopulation-the-perennial-myth/). We hunted things to extinction and knew it. Plus there were more diseases to worry about, death rates for child-bearing women were high as well as the child death rate. Really, if you weren't worried one way, you were worried another.
Different times simply frame problems differently. At least we are more aware of some of the stuff now, even if we haven't scientifically figured it all out nor figured out how to work together enough to solve them.
I don't really think they will be self-sustainable, even on a small scale, but I think they can (and will) do much more than they are doing now with high-rise factory farming. Detroit, for example, has some empty places to start with. Also, these sorts of things can be done right outside of a city using smaller amounts of land - until we have more ecological transportation, that's a good start.
Once we are able to grow the protein (cuts of beef, chicken, etc) in labs, it wil get much closer. Hopefully that is better for the environment than live animals.
But then again, I do not believe people actually want self-sustainability with foodstuffs, nor do I think we should be growing everything in a self-contained community. A lot of folks in Western countries eat a wide variety of foods and spices that aren't best grown in their climates and I think it would take much more energy to grow them where they simply don't thrive. If we get far enough with GMO's, this could be solved.
These are not things that industry tends to provide on an individual or even communal basis, so they will most likely have to be built into communities themselves through fabrications labs and community-owned 3d printers.
neil gershenfeld's talk on fab labs and their social applications if anyone's interested (warning: tedtalk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n-APFrlXDs
he has a bunch of good ideas. if anyone's curious, buy his books or watch any of his most recent talks discussing digital reality