Defining Sustainability: Community
Size.
What the
ideal size of an ecologically and socially sustainable community
should be is seldom mentioned anywhere. What criteria should be
helpful in deciding of what the size of a sustainable community
should be?
Different people might start defining an "ecologically and socially
sustainable community" in different ways;
I would like to suggest that any definitions relating to an
"ecologically and socially sustainable community" should start with
a theoretical sustainable community that would be fully sustainable
in all respects: it would be situated in one location, it would
also get all it needs for all it requires from the same
locality.
Such a community would probably not exist in reality, but it would
be helpful to imagine, to model such a community in order to start
asking questions about some basic prerequisites, one of which would
be--
how many people should comprise such a community? What number of
people forming a socially sustainable community would be too many?
too few?
I think that a sustainable community should not exceed the point
after which not everybody would know everybody else well--meaning
that everybody would know what everybody else's function in the
community is, and how well they are exercising their function.
So that a community is socially sustainable, the governance of such
a community should be as transparent as possible, because the best
government is one that is not needed, to put it simply.
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