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This document does not meet current format guidelines Graduate School at the The University of Texas at Austin. of the It has been published for informational use only. Copyright By Kristin Lenore Donaldson 2019 The Report Committee for Kristin Lenore Donaldson Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report:

Compromises and Comparisons of Complete Communities

APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Supervisor Katherine Lieberknecht

Robert Paterson

b Compromises and Comparisons of Complete Communities

By Kristin Lenore Donaldson

Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements For a Degree of

Master of Science in Community and Regional Planning

The University of Texas at Austin May 2019

c Acknowledgements The researcher would like to start by giving a most humble expression of appreciation to the subjects connected to the case study communities who generously agreed to be interviewed. The volume of information and first-person perspective was invaluable to this endeavor. The researcher would also like to acknowledge SnowMansion Eco Adventure Lodge and Hostel for the exception from their three-month employment commitment. Their willingness to hire the researcher for one month allowed the site visit at Greater World to be conducted. Lastly, the researcher would like to acknowledge the free therapy their friends have provided throughout this process.

iv Abstract

Compromises and Comparisons of Complete Communities

Kristin Lenore Donaldson, M.S.C.R.P. The University of Texas at Austin, 2019

Supervisor: Katherine Lieberknecht

Many planners throughout history have attempted to achieve a holistic society through physical and policy planning. Garden Cities of To-morrow by Ebenezer Howard is a mainstay in planning curriculum, and yet activities today are still considered fringe in the professional field. Howard’s vision of well-connected network of mostly self sustaining towns, provided with local food, jobs, commerce, and recreational space is generally viewed as positive, pleasant, even admirable- but ultimately impractical. Today, no theme is more central to the minds of planners than sustainability. A concept that encapsulates environmental, social, and economic concerns, sustainability is a great challenge. Planners try to find balance between, and often act as intermediaries between competing networks of stakeholders, vying for more power over the two other spheres. However, communities that have self-organized have reached a level of success and sustainability beyond chance. These communities could serve as a model for the wider planning community going forward. This research hopes to address questions surrounding the ways in which communities can increase sustainability through providing services, and if or how these insights may inform planning on a wider scale. This report investigates how these visions and ideals are being attempted in the United States today. There is a range of scales and a variety of approaches to create places that are holistic. Three sites serve as examples of the breadth of communities, ranging from Twin Oaks Ecovillage and Intentional Community, the Greater World Community created by Earthship Biotecture, and the town of Arcosanti. These sites were examined using a two-part matrix including food, water, employment, education, energy, healthcare, entertainment, transportation, and housing in part one and ownership schemes and affordability in part two. Climate and controversies were also

v considered. This matrix was partially inspired by The Austin Area Sustainability Indicators project.

Research revealed that there were common themes among the communities despite their differences, among them being a spirit of revolution, progressive ideals, and novel technology. Further, it was found that the most sustainable or complete community was not necessarily the most applicable to the wider planning field.

vi Table of Contents

Introduction to the Project ...... 1

An Introduction to Utopian Communities ...... 2

Complete Communities in Planning History ...... 7

Garden Cities of Tomorrow ...... 7

Pullman’s town ...... 12

Current Trends: New Urbanism ...... 16

Measures and Methodology ...... 20

Austin Area Sustainability Indicators ...... 20

Matrix ...... 21

Findings ...... 25

Twin Oaks ...... 25

Greater World ...... 33

Arcosanti ...... 38

Other Forms of Complete Communities ...... 44

Corporate Campuses ...... 44

Military Bases ...... 46

Other Models ...... 48

Conclusions...... 53

Comparisons: Themes...... 53

Compromises: Notions of Superiority ...... 54

Replicability ...... 57

Applicability and Limitations ...... 58

Appendix: Austin Area Sustainability Indicators ...... 60

References...... 61

vii

Introduction to the Project

Sustainability is arguably to the most pervasive theme within planning today. In every scale, sustainability serves as a reminder to consider the lasting impact of our designs. Regional planning and the far-reaching impacts of the lifestyles the built environment supports are cause for national attention. The use of insulation and responsibly sourced materials in home building is on the minds of home-owners and architects alike. With so much attention that sustainability is getting, is it time to start seriously considering a broadly sustainable model of community making? In this paper the researcher will be investigating three distinctly different community building endeavors that attempt to reach self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is not a synonym for sustainability, but it is perhaps the natural end to the progress of sustainability. A community that is truly self-sustainable would be reaching goals of sustainability beyond what we can currently imagine in an average city or town. True self- sufficiency would include radically local produce, onsite energy production, efficient water capture and use, and the necessary amenities for people to live their lives and access to what they desire. The idea of complete communities have come and gone and come again in the history of community planning. In 1898 Ebenezer Howard published Garden Cities of ToMorrow. This well known text outlines how a community could be built to meet the citizens needs in a robust way. The book addresses access to quality homes, public schools, placement of job centers, food production, and even social centers such as libraries, museums, and shopping districts. In the 1960s the back to the land movement created an array of communes in which members needs would be met mostly through what could be produced on their parcel of land. While these endeavors emphasize a simple lifestyle which was often equated to scarcity and fanaticism, it clearly indicates a desire for people to be connected to their the resources to which they owe their lives. In the early 1980s, New Urbanism arose in the United States. In 1993, a group of Chicago-based architect-planners founded the Congress for New Urbanism. This affiliated group created a new focus to push back against the bedroom communities of suburbia, which offered their citizens nothing else but houses and roads. The Congress for New Urbanism took a design oriented approach to fulfill people's needs outside of the congested city center. These ideas and others have carried into present day in three case study communities. The first is The Greater World Earthship community. Greater World is a community in the county outside of Taos, New Mexico. This community achieves some level of self-sufficiency on

1 an individual household scale. Each home is completely self-sufficient in regards to water, energy, and (in theory) food, there is also an unintentional presence of a job market. Arcosanti is a town in Arizona which was created as the brainchild of an eccentric architect who believed that ecological premises could be translated into dense, human-scale cities. The city currently has a population of only one hundred people but has a system to provide people with homes, jobs, and at it's conception, food. Twin Oaks is an intentional community in a semi-forested county in Georgia. At one hundred members, Twin Oaks has created flexible business and employment opportunities, access to homes, a large portion of local food, entertainment, and even a rudimentary public transportation system. In this paper, the researcher will discuss sustainability at the community scale. The paper will begin in the following section with an overview of communities boradly, then discuss a few historical examples of complete communities. After methodology is explained, the findings, consisting of the three case studies and an investigation of other kinds of communities, are described. Finally a conclusion consisting of themes, notions of superiority, replicability, and applicability ends the paper. This research hopes to address questions surrounding the ways in which communities can increase sustainability through providing services, and if or how these insights may inform planning on a wider scale.

An Introduction to Utopian Communities

The three cases come from a common heredity of utopian communities. While Arcosanti, Greater World, and Twin Oaks invariably have their differences, they come from a long lineage of settlements to American utopias to ecologically-focused communities. The start of this great endeavor towards complete communities can be traced as far back as 380B.C. when Plato wrote the Republic. This work, which described a vision of a perfect (though by today’s standards problematic) society, has since served as a grandparent to colonial and modern utopian movements through Sir Thomas More’s fictional 1516 work Utopia (Spencer-Wood, 2006). The first record of a utopian society exists in a description of a community of people from the second century B.C. in Palestine and Syria. The community, called Essenes, actually existed outside geographical realms, being widespread and interspersed with the broader society. However, the homogeneity of the group was such that they were easily identifiable. Going about their day in white robes, the approximately four thousand Essenesians shared all their property, ate communal meals, and performed religious rituals that blended pagan and monotheistic traditions (Holloway, 1966).

These three characteristics are still seen in utopian communities today. And yet, they are not definitional criteria for utopias. Rosabeth Moss Kanter begins her 1972 work Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective with the following description, “Utopia is the imaginary society in which humankind’s deepest yearnings, noblest dreams, and highest aspirations come to fulfillment, where all physical, social, and spiritual forces work together, in harmony, to permit the attainment of everything people find necessary and desirable.” This passage describes a social order that is chosen by the members who are committed and not coerced into the communality. This means that generally they operate under the assumption that human nature favors cooperation over competition. Kanter goes on to describe utopian communities as a political unit, a family unit, a religious unit, and a production unit all at once. This holistic approach to life and society means that utopian communities can be studied in many different ways, as organizations, as primary groups, as a geographically- defined community, or as complete societies (Kanter, 1972). The historical study of utopian communities in America is rich and long. Christian sects took the opportunity of a New World to realize their new vision of a perfect society. The Shakers, Soarites, and Rappites became well-established and by the nineteenth century other ideological groups began their own great experiments. Europeans fleeing the woes of industrialization began utopian projects in America (Holloway, 1966). As Kanter describes utopian motivations, founders were partially in flight from some imperfection, but they were also in flight to some grander vision. The decision to create communities was indeed to some extent based on personal desires for one’s own living situation, but further, people hoped to model ideals that the world would eventually follow. In America, one hundred thousand people pursued a grander vision in over one hundred communities before the twentieth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to a friend in 1840, “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket” (Holloway, 1966). There is evidence that these many people’s efforts to model their ideals towards a new normal succeeded to some extent. For one, Western society’s slow movement from Patriarchy towards egalitarianism is partially due to the visions of gender equality found in utopian communities. Women’s roles in the communes of the past century are strikingly opposed to women’s roles in the broader society of their time but are not so far from what is accepted today. Even further into utopian history, religious communities were some of the first places that a woman could be a leader and figure-head (Spencer-Wood, 2006).

However, there are some concerns that utopian and cooperative endeavors are in danger of losing their ability to change the broader social form from within the current paradigm. The concern stems from the idea that capitalism is exceedingly good at appropriating anti capitalist movements and trends. It may be the case that many seemingly revolutionary utopian settlements are expressions of neoliberalism repackaged. Many intentional communities are mostly made up of white people, many from a middle class background. Some schemes you must buy into, and cohousing models are often more expensive than their suburban counterparts (Schiffer, 2018). Despite these concerns, truly utopian and anticapitalist communities have endured. While it is impossible to say for sure whether any one community will stand the test of time, there are some trends. There is a positive correlation between the longevity of communes and the degree to which they abolish familism and private property (Spencer-Wood, 2006). Group size is also an important indicator of the expected longevity of a particular community. Matching the natural and fractalesque layers of population in hunter-gatherer societies, it is theorized that groups of people with fifteen, fifty, one-hundred and fifty, five-hundred, and one- thousand and five-hundred members are the most stable. A study found that groups that were founded with approximately fifty or one-hundred and fifty members were significantly more likely to succeed than communities with members in between the two quantities (Dunbar and Sosis, 2018). There was some variance depending on whether the community was secular or religious, with religious communities tending to be larger and last longer as the figure below indicates with religious communities in black and secular communities in white (Dunbar and Sosis, 2018). In the nineteenth century, secular communes were four times more likely to dissolve in any given year than religious communities (Sosis, 2000).

Figure 1: Graph indicating the duration of communities based on founding size (Dunbar and Sosis, 2018) It is theorized that the reason religious communities last longer and maintain more members is because communities depend on commitment instead of coercion. Religious communities avoid the free-rider problem because members of the religion display their commitment to their faith and by extension the community through what are known as costly rituals. Costly rituals are behaviors that signal devotion and therefore promote group cooperation, but require time, energy, or sacrifice. Examples include fasting, abstinence, tithings, and time-consuming rituals in general. It could be that secular communities can achieve higher success if they adopt costly rituals (Sosis, 2000). The research however, was done on pre existing communes from the nineteenth century. The New Utopia movements of today exhibit much blurrier lines between secularism and religiosity. Communities tend to have a large proportion of a kind of religious minority that identifies as spiritual. These individuals may not adhere to an organized religion but are aligned with what has been described as neo-paganism. There is a belief in God, but not the traditional external understanding of God. Instead this spiritual minority tends to believe in God as some kind of internal entity (Gómez, 2019).

In the following section, the researcher will describe a few secular examples in planning history of sustainable communities. These examples, while not religious, tend to still exhibit characteristics such as a charismatic leader, group cooperation, and strong ideology.

Complete Communities in Planning History

The endeavour of creating a complete community is linked to many disciplines and area of thought: political philosophy, religious studies, sociology, environmental studies. There are certainly notable examples of historic communities in each, but since one purpose of this paper is to investigate what the discipline of community and regional planning can utilize, the researcher has chosen the urban planning examples of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow and Pullman’s company as historical case studies.

Garden Cities of Tomorrow

Figure 2: Howard’s Diagram of the hypothetical Garden City from his book Garden Cities of ToMorrow (pg. 22) Ebenezer Howard's work on Garden Cities of Tomorrow is well regarded within the planning community for historical value and in some schools (like the University of Texas) is held up as the first true example of comprehensive planning. However, its value as a plan for self-sufficiency or sustainability is mostly lost. Part of the reason for this is the association it has now with suburbia. Before Howard's release, there was no kind of suburban lifestyle. There were overcrowded cities full of people, smog, and opportunity. And there were rural agricultural

7 communities with fresh air, open spaces, and not much to do for one's own future. After Howard's release of Garden Cities of Tomorrow there was a bit of interest in England. A couple "garden cities" were created, and to the delight of its inhabitants they experienced proximity to jobs and enough land to raise a healthy family. Unfortunately they offered very little else. Unlike Howard’s holistic plan, these towns didn’t include a town center or manufacturing district. Citizens began commuting to get to work and recreational activities. We did not know at the time that this model would spread in post World War Two America to create the suburban sprawl we now see in the planning community as the antithesis to sustainability. However, the suburban developments of today are far from the original vision of Garden cities. Subdivisions are disconnected, causing them to be auto-oriented beyond the simple need to commute to work. They are also crucially different from Garden Cities because they are not commonly-owned. The only similarities the suburban development of today has in common with the book it is often blamed on is the town-country magnet itself- the desire for the best of both worlds. Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow begins with a quote from the November 27th, 1891 issue of The Times. It is a call for revolutionization and boundary pushing, far from the blase acceptance of suburbia today. The book is then properly introduced with references to how a community, where one lives, touches all aspects of life. The context of the times is then described in startling parallel to our own challenges. Howard describes how the farming population is rapidly aging and that young people are rapidly populating the large cities. Even social attitudes today echo what Howard was writing, both ages dealt with “problems of intemperance, of excessive toil, of restless anxiety, of grinding poverty—the true limits of Governmental interference, ay, and even the relations of man to the Supreme Power," (Howard, 1898, pg. 12). And these social attitudes are just what Howard sees as the flint for the garden cities. He describes the attraction to both cities and to rural districts, and suggests attracting people through psychological measures instead of legislating them into a forced lifestyle. The kinds of attractors Howard mentions are still talked about today, though in different ways. Howard talks about the need for water storage systems and proper pipelines in rural areas. Today the desire to store and use rainwater has put the town of Dripping Springs, Texas on the map (Templin, 2014). Further, utilities that sprawl out require more pipes and cable, which means higher costs. This sometimes forces municipalities to raise their prices, even for the cost- efficient city-dwellers. Howard also talks about common gardens and communal kitchens as attractors to the garden city. These things which have just begun to be researched and shown to contribute to health and wellbeing (Teo, 2017). Even electrical energy for transportation is

8 mentioned in Garden Cities of Tomorrow. At present, cities and even entire states are attempting to electrify their bus fleet (Peters, 2018)(Stansbury, 2018). Many of the things that Howard recommends were revolutionary in his time and still were just thirty years ago. For example, today even large cities are using biosolids from sewage for agricultural use (Austin Water). Additionally, there are over two-hundred nonprofit organizations who own and lease land to keep housing affordable (Community Wealth). Even the connection of small cities with passenger trains appears to be on the horizon with a high speed rail proposal in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal (Ocasio-Cortez, 2019). Howard's plan for Garden Cities was a design "for humanity at large" (pg. 27). The revenue of rents, which today are a cause of controversy in growing cities like Austin, would be reinvested into the city for the people of the community. And further, the city would not have to attempt to buy and barter land for necessary works. Expansion of transit or schools would not need to be bought at exuberant prices which stalls growth and development today. There would also be less need for these kinds of additions and edits as the city would be planned for efficiency at its outset instead of being cobbled together by differing land owners and developers trying to turn a profit. “Garden City secures sites which are larger, better placed, and in every way more suitable for educational purposes, at a mere fraction of the cost,” (pg. 50). He goes on to say that “there should be unity of design and purpose—that the town should be planned as a whole, and not left to grow up in a chaotic manner" (pg. 51). This concentration of design is not favoring one politic over another. While the idea of master planning and indeed affordable housing, particularly in South America, is associated with welfare and socialism, more and more today it is being seen as not only compatible with capitalism, but more and more a hallmark of it with corporate campuses like Google and Facebook. Howard promoted a different ideal than pure socialism or pure individualism. He, like Joseph Chamberlain, believed there must be balance. The appropriate space for municipal activity in their eyes was where things that were best done by the community as opposed to an individual or corporation. Howard's efforts to create a community that has a quasi-public body possessing the rights of the landowner would enhance the capability, well-being, and empowerment of the citizens. The idea of empowerment was extended by Howard to the even more progressive view of gender equality. He proposed that it would be best to have both men and women serving on the board. Again, the researcher would like to emphasize that though he had progressive ideas, Howard was not attempting a forced equality through socialism. He mentioned that not only should the government not own all of the means of production, but it would be best even if there

9 were multiple means of production. His reasons are well accepted in the field of planning, like the benefit of workers to have more than one possibility of employer, and employers having a pool of workers to choose from (Quigley, 1998). However, Howard's opinion on shops is a bit different. He outlined a system where the shops in which people buy their goods should be one of each kind unless the people see the shop or shop owner as insufficient in some way, whether it be in quality, price, or service, in which case they can vote to open another. This would, by Howard's estimation, not only keep prices down but also reduce the presence of goods made by workers forced to toil under unfair and unsafe conditions.

Figure 3: A diagram of a ward from Howard’s Garden Cities of ToMorrow (pg.22) The physical plan for Howard's Garden Cities had each city broken into wards, which would be complete units on their own that could be built one at a time. These wards could serve as testing grounds for different techniques and ideologies to see what would work best in the entire Garden City, including regulations and temperance. Garden cities themselves would ideally be testing grounds as well. Howard says "“It is quite true that the pathway of experiment towards a better state of society is strewn with failures. But so is the pathway of experiment to any result that is worth achieving” (pg. 94).

The great test itself would be of people's ability to manage themselves. In his time, as they are today, some people were calling for the nationalization of banks, or to have someone from the working class run them, but without much prior experience in the matter. The system of Garden Cities would allow for people to attempt community ownership in not only their land and town, but also in novel ways like financial institutions. The funding of each Garden City, while in total cost is quite high, does not actually need, in Howard's example, 1,000,000 pounds to all be raised at once. Known now as the multiplier effect. Howard describes that even in increments, there does not need to be 1,000,000 unique pounds. Much of what will be built will be done through the funding of the land occupant. In this way the money will come from that person's individual efforts within the community. For example, just two-hundred unique pounds can actually fund a great deal of each lot, ward, and city. A man may pay two-hundred pounds to a contractor, who can then pay a timberman two- hundred pounds, who can then put two-hundred pounds towards a plumber, who can then put two-hundred pounds towards his own home. In this way the same two-hundred pounds can be recycled to build the community many times over. Howard believes that Garden Cities, by being grounded in individual action in a scheme that ensures social welfare, can dodge much of the criticism of communism, socialism, and capitalism. This would allow for the inhabitants of a garden city to be from all different political beliefs including individualists, cooperativists, and others, ensuring they are not restrained by the system of community, but freed by it. Howard believed in JW Parker's theory that communities and colonies should act much like a body or natural system, in which there are a variety of actors contributing to a whole (pg. 102). This would mean that all classes of people are necessary. This is in contrast with some other master plans of the times. Particularly, Buckingham designed a physically similar plan, but it's social structure was much more controlling. When drawing this comparison, Howard goes on to say that there are two kinds of industrial reformers, one which believes that the productivity and output of the current system is sufficient for the population where they to be more equally distributed- and the other, which believes that if production were to increase, then people across the spectrum would have enough. This debate is as relevant today as ever with the political debate around attracting and subsidizing megacorporations who act as employers, or to tax these corporations to fund welfare systems. Howard believed that Garden Cities would at once please both camps. He believed “society may readily become more individualistic than now—if by Individualism is meant a society in which there is fuller and freer opportunity for its members to do and to produce what they will, and to

11 form free associations, of the most varied kinds”; and that “it may also become more socialistic— if by Socialism is meant a condition of life in which the well-being of the community is safe- guarded, and in which the collective spirit is manifested by a wide extension of the area of municipal efforts” (pg. 117). Howard's grand plan went beyond one garden city, one pearl of design, he believed that his plan can be executed over and over again in different iterations to suit the environment in which it was laid. He had a vision of a community serving as an efficient system to benefit its citizens. This idea is congruent with that of the author of Merrie England, which Howard quotes as saying “We should first of all ascertain what things are desirable for our health and happiness of body and mind, and then organise our people with the object of producing those things in the best and easiest way” (pg. 122).

Pullman’s town

Less than a decade before Howard’s Garden cities, in 1880, George Mortimer Pullman formed the Pullman Land Association and bought about 4,000 acres twelve miles south of Chicago’s central business district (Lillibridge). This location was mostly flat and fronted a natural harbor on Lake Calumet and two railroads, the Illinois Central Line and the Rock Island Railroad (Andrew H. Bullen). Pullman’s desire to create the town came from the need to expand the manufacturing capacity for his business, the Pullman Car Company, which specialized in luxury train carriages. The location was well suited for Pullman’s company as he already had connections in Chicago from an engineering project he oversaw years earlier (Bullen, 2007). The inspiration for the town came from the need to create an ideal employee base. The labor revolt of 1877 was fresh in Pullman’s mind, and he sought out to create a wholesome environment where his employees would not need to rebel against the conditions they were forced to live (Hudson, 2013). A further inspiration came from Saltaire, a company town built by Sir Titus Salt in 1853 to process wool (Measure, 1990)(Minnery, 2012). Pullman believed in the idea of arbitrary control. In his view, if he could control every aspect of the citizen’s life he could make his workers happier, more productive, and make money from collecting rent. He believed that with enough micromanagement and restrictions, he would create the ideal populace- happy, productive, and moral (Baxter, 2012). A few examples of this strong paternalism are recounted in Baxter’s 2012 paper: “People were not allowed to sit on their front porches, leave their homes improperly attired, or make too much noise when out and about in town. The absence of bars and taverns created a landscape devoid of public indoor spaces for purely social purposes, and while people were encouraged to use parks and walk the

12 streets, large outdoor gatherings were prohibited” (pg. 659). These efforts were compounded by the fact that the town of Pullman was surrounded by a prairie, further isolating the citizens from the outside world (Baxter).

Figure 4: An engraving of the original design of Pullman (Baxter, 2012) Despite being effectively cut-off from Chicago, the town did have almost everything it could need in just five hundred acres. Even the buildings of the town were created using local materials. Clay was harvested on the property, and lumber was shaped in shops which were built at the onset (Lindsey). Then quickly, the rest of the town was created under the designs of architect Solon Beman and landscape architect Nathaniel Barrett (Baxter) (Buder). The final layout included, of course, the Pullman factory and housing for the employees, but also a school, a green stone church, the Florence Hotel, the livery stables, the market building, and the arcade which included the library, theatre, offices, and some retail. Other areas of note include the Lake Vista, Arcade Park, the playground, and Athletic Island (see figure below for locations). There were also production sites to supply the population with their needs including a farm, dairy, greenhouses and tree nurseries on the prairie and gasworks and coal yard in industrial areas of town (Lindsey) (Baxter).

Figure 5: Labeled map of Pullman. The original author of this diagram could not be found, but it was retrieved from pinterest.com and was verified for accuracy against historical maps by the researcher. Unfortunately the regulation of these sites did not sit so well with progressives of the time. Jane Addams referred to Pullman’s management of the town as un-American (Hudson). The church, for example, was owned by the company (like everything else in the town) and had to be rented out for use. Every congregation was required to share the church which caused distress and protest (Lindsey). Pullman also had to lower the rent of the church because it was left vacant for an extended time. Some worshippers would chose to instead rent event space in

14 the arcade. Eventually Pullman did allow for new churches to be built in the prairie surrounding the town and rented the green stone church exclusively to a single denomination. The many greenspaces of Pullman were well-used by all citizens of the town. Part of this was due to careful programming. There were yacht races, spring games which occurred annually, and a bicycle race which drew up to fifteen-thousand people to watch up to four- hundred cyclists compete (Lindsey). Other social activities included a multitude of clubs in which membership was encouraged. The most successful of these was the Pullman Band which not only delighted the citizens of Pullman once a week, but also had a touring circuit (Lindsey). The arcade was the central element to life in Pullman, but it was also a cause of distress and a sense of control over the citizens. The theater within the arcade had performances regularly but which their production was contingent upon the direct approval of Pullman himself; as were the books in the library (which also had a fee to use) (Baxter). Further, the shops in the arcade, and the architecture of the building itself, was much more suited to middle and upper class suitabilities. It is proposed that the majority of citizens living in Pullman would have seen the retail space as out of their station and a source of discomfort. There is also evidence that the items sold in the town were more expensive than in Chicago (Baxter, 2012). The market, which sold food items, was supplied by farms and dairies on the surrounding prairie. There were also greenhouses and tree nurseries in the prairie. The farms produced enough food that surplus could also be shipped to Chicago to be sold at a significant profit. These farms were especially prolific because of their fertilizer system. The sewage of the town was pumped out and then sprayed over the farms, saturating the soil with nutrients (Lillibridge, 1953). The housing stock was not all equal. There were levels of quality in the homes, with the homes furthest from the factory being allocated for unskilled laborers. Moving inward, the hierarchy was apparent. Skilled laborers were a bit closer, and management the nearest to the factory. It is believed that making the average citizen walk past the houses of the elite was by design, and was intended to inspire the employees to work up the ranks. Pullman himself opted not to live in the town, instead settling in on Prairie Avenue, an elite street in Chicago (Baxter, 2012). For those who did choose to live in Pullman, there were many restrictions and stipulations. The rental agreements were infamous for not only the abruptness in which the lease could be ended, but also the lengthy list of rules. The lease “prohibited any type of modification to the interior or exterior of the property, regulated the types of activities allowed in homes, and allowed the company to clean, repair, and modify the property without notice,”

15 (Baxter). It was also forbidden to hold gatherings outside, including on one’s front porch, to leave the home in improper attire, or to make too much noise (Baxter). All houses, however, included state of the art amenities. In a time when it was uncommon, every house included electricity and indoor plumbing. The yards were also maintained by the town in addition to general cleaning and trash pick-up. All of these services, and all other municipal services were covered by a single rent; there were no separate taxes or fees imposed on the citizen (Baxter, 2012). These rents were eighteen to twenty dollars a month. This price was a bit steep compared to nearby rents which were averaged twelve dollars a month, but they are hard to compare since the rents include so much more than housing in the town of Pullman. For the first couple years, employees were making more than enough to cover their rents at four dollars a day (Los Angeles Times, 1894). Unfortunately, due to an economic downturn in 1894 that especially affected the railroad business, the factory became less profitable. To save money and avoid layoffs of people living in the town, Pullman decided to cut pay from four dollars to as low as two dollars (Los Angeles Times, 1894). This now meant that approximately half of an individual’s income was now going towards rent. The unaffordable wage/rent ratio, the paternalistic control, and a general sense of being unheard culminated in a massive strike in 1894. The strikers gained support of wider unions and eventually gave the town of Pullman a reputation of a failed experiment (Almont, 1939). Pullman died just three years later. Soon after that the company bowed to Chicago’s pressure to subdivide and sell all property unessential to production (Minnery, 2012). According to Jane Eva Baxter: Pullman’s community fits many of the fundamental characteristics that define utopian settlements: (1) It was designed to remedy some perceived imperfection in the dominant society, (2) It was designed in the belief that specific types of changes could improve the dominant society, (3) The physical layout of the community as well as the philosophy to guide life there were deliberately chosen, and (4) It was believed that by demonstrating the benefits of an ideal form of social organization the community would be emulated and replicated elsewhere. (Baxter, 2012, pg. 654)

Current Trends: New Urbanism

A more modern example of sustainable community development is found in New Urbanism. New Urbanism is a model of design created by the wife and husband architecture team Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany in Florida. The idea for New Urbanism was

16 that new communities could be created that had a bustling life all throughout the day instead of being a bedroom community. The pair started with Seaside, Florida (Redmon, 2010). The experiment was a success, having many people move and buy properties in the town. It was such a success that the cost to move their increased as the area became more desirable (Flint, 2012). The concepts behind New Urbanism are straightforward. New Urbanist developments must have spaces that are easy and desirable to navigate by the transportation method of choice. And there must be present the kinds of buildings and structures that allow for people to live, work, and play in the town. Although New Urbanism began as a fringe, design-oriented movement, it has since grown into a widely accepted planning style that encourages sustainable practices. New Urbanist principles are even being used when designing infill in urban areas and to retrofit formerly one-dimensional neighborhoods (Freilich and Popowitz, 2010). While New Urbanism does not attempt to include everything a community could want or need, and is not designed to be inherently affordable, it has served as a model of the suitability and desirability of places in which commuting is not a necessity or a chore. Work, live, play is a mantra that is very similar to self-sufficiency. It is a less ambitious goal, but has surpassed the threshold of acceptability and replicability. Mixed-use development is a central characteristic of New Urbanism. As well as a level of density required to have a large human settlement have all its needs met within a walkable, bikeable, or transit-accessible community. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) created a Charter which emphasizes another key characteristic of self-sufficiency: interconnectedness. The charter states that in addition to social problems, one should view "environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge." The CNU also advocates for neighborhoods which have diverse uses, pedestrian- friendly streets, and equality of access to public spaces and institutions.

Principle 5 Where appropriate, new development contiguous to urban boundaries should be organized as neighborhoods and districts, and be integrated with the existing urban pattern. Noncontiguous development should be organized as towns and villages with their own urban edges, and planned for a jobs/housing balance, not as bedroom suburbs.

Principle 7 Cities and towns should bring into proximity a broad spectrum of public and private uses to support a regional economy that benefits people of all incomes. Affordable housing should be distributed throughout the region to match job opportunities and to avoid concentrations of poverty.

Principle 8 The physical organization of the region should be supported by a framework of transportation alternatives. Transit, pedestrian, and bicycle systems should maximize access and mobility throughout the region while reducing dependence upon the automobile.

Principle 18 A range of parks, from tot-lots and village greens to ballfields and community gardens, should be distributed within neighborhoods. Conservation areas and open lands should be used to define and connect different neighborhoods and districts.

Principle 26 All buildings should provide their inhabitants with a clear sense of location, weather and time. Natural methods of heating and cooling can be more resource-efficient than mechanical systems. Figure 6: Table of relevant New Urbanist principles, text from the Charter of New Urbanism (pg. 2) Some of the strategies of New Urbanism have also been accepted strategies in sustainable development. Similar to Howard’s Garden Cities, the CNU's fifth principle states that "Noncontiguous development should be organized as towns and villages with their own urban edges, and planned for a jobs/housing balance," This emphasis on balance and urban edges lends itself to the idea that new development should be self-contained and unreliant on metropolitans far away. Also reminiscent of Garden Cities is the eighteenth principle which compels designers and planners to integrate a diversity of parks within the community and to use conservation lands to surround and define the community. A specific kind of park mentioned is community gardens which are a practical way to integrate local food and urban agriculture into a locale. The seventh principle also states that the uses within a New Urbanist development should be regionally based and supportive of people of all incomes. These together imply an importance of sustainability first through a consideration of ecology, but also social sustainability from reaching across socio-economic status. Equality and environmental impact would also improve with the adoption of the eighth principle which pushes beyond making space for pedestrian and alternative modes of transportation, and goes as far to say that "dependence upon the automobile" should be reduced. If automobiles were not required it 18 would reduce housing costs well as greenhouse gases. Similarly. principle twenty-six recommends designing structures with the local climate in mind so that natural methods of cooling and heating the building can be utilized. This resource efficiency would be more sustainable at the environmental and the household level. While New Urbanism has done a great deal for changing the rhetoric around urban and suburban planning, there is still room to continue the conversation. The following section, outlining the methodology expands on way to conduct the sustainability conversation in planning.

19 Measures and Methodology

Preliminary exploration on standards of sustainability led the researcher to the Austin Area Sustainability Indicators project. This project, described below, informed the researcher of what factors to consider when assessing a standard of completeness within a community, and what elements were required for a level of sustainability. The researcher then adapted these elements into a matrix of their own design. When investigating communities, the researcher began by doing preliminary online research on the case study sites: Twin Oaks, ArcoSanti, and Greater World. The researcher then compiled a list of questions, informed by the matrix, to ask in the interviews with subjects connected to the communities. Interviews for Twin Oaks and Arcosanti were done over the phone. The researcher conducted a site visit of Greater World, received a guided tour with follow up questions, spoke freely with people in the area, and conducted a face to face interview.

Austin Area Sustainability Indicators

Sustainability is certainly in the minds of the public and public planners and has been for some time. In 1987 the term Sustainable Development was first popularized (A2SI). In Austin, stakeholders began talking about beginning a sustainability indicator project in 1996. Three years later, the Central Texas Sustainability Indicators project was launched from the Center for Sustainable Development in the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture. In 2018, the project which is now known as Austin Area Sustainability Indicators (A2SI), released their tenth report from the RGK center for Philanthropic and Community Service in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. The project is ambitious, it includes 180 indicators under nine sets or themes (see Appendix). These themes include civic engagement, demographics, education and children, economy, environment, health, land use and mobility, public safety, and social equity. These themes are filled out with both primary and secondary data sources. The secondary data is gathered from publicly available data, including from the United States Census Bureau, Texas Health and Human Services Commission, and County Election Offices among others. The primary sources are collected through local surveys including approximately thirty questions in three groups- environmental, economic, and social sustainability. These three pillars and nine themes overall served as a guideline for the researcher’’s matrix and interview questions. The exact same data points could not be used for this project. For one, it was not within the scope of this project for the survey to be distributed throughout

20 the small communities to be filled out by residents. Second, much of the data sources are specific to Texas or central Texas. Lastly, the census bureau data was not available at the community scale and would not have been useful for making meaningful comparisons after being obscured by the larger geographical area.

Matrix

To assess the self-sufficiency and sustainability of each community the researcher has created a two part matrix with the ability for a breadth of possible responses. The first part of the matrix consists of nine necessities for human life. These necessities have been selected based on a Western perspective, but have been increasingly viewed as base-line for a good life around the world. To follow are descriptions of each of these necessities and the individual justification for including each of them. Please note, that even if these necessities are not provided by the community itself, it is important to know where the community members are seeking out or attaining them. The first necessity is food. Food is a foundational element to all animal life. The human requirement for food is not debated; however, the benefits of local food have been growing in the public consciousness. Local food is often produced through a medium or small-scale system, this opens up the process to specialized considerations unlike factory farming. This allows for a reduced use in herbicides and pesticides which contributes to the health of those eating it. The benefits to the environment are also major. Small scale farming is more finely tuned to the environment and can avoid fertilizer runoff which can cause algal blooms and cause less of an impact on the local fauna from pesticides. Local food production also includes diversified crops, which is more suited to the rotation of crops, creating healthier soil less prone to erosion and demineralization. The second consideration is water. Again, water is understood to be a necessity to human life, but is also a necessity to industry, production, and construction. Municipal water is often secured from strained resources such as fossil groundwater, dams which cause environmental havoc upstream and downstream, or rivers which run dry before reaching their natural outlet. Local water can be collected and stored and should be carefully monitored to ensure there is not an over-use; this monitoring may be possible on a local scale. Further, the reuse of water allows for environmental systems to be less burdened by the community. Energy, much like water, is at present usually provided from a regional source at the expense of the regional environment. Many power plants depend on fossil fuels to create electricity for the surrounding communities. Reliance on fossil fuels causes air pollution, water

21 pollution, and the accumulation of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. Dams can also create energy, but again can cause harm to the surrounding ecosystem. Local production of energy, particularly through wind and solar, is clean energy that can be stored on site in batteries. The need for electricity is crucial to a standard of living that will not cease in the West. Further, it is becoming an increasing focus around the globe to allow people to control the temperature in their dwellings, to study after dark, to pump water, and to allow them connection with global society through the use of the internet. Housing is another necessity accepted without argument. Housing, especially in the West is expected to be of a certain caliber, to be accessible to all citizens, and to create at least some sense of privacy. Today in the United States of America, many people are not able to get reliable access to shelter, or can only afford housing below a basic level of decency. This is more true than ever in areas surrounding major urban centers such as Orangi Town in Karachi, Pakistan, the slums in Mexico, and shanty towns surrounding Nairobi, Kenya (Berrebi, 2017). The need for healthcare by definition is necessary for human health. Whether access to it is a human right or not is up for debate, but it is generally accepted as something to be striven for. Access to healthcare is not only a challenge for individuals who can not afford it, but also for people in communities far away from sites of service. The next consideration is not necessary to life, but is necessary to life in a society. The need for work is well-regarded in every economic system, and has also been found to be good for the well-being of the employee. However, unemployment rates are at an all-time high in many countries, and even in America people struggle to avoid being unemployed or underemployed. Further, the need to commute to work is a reality for the majority of people in the West who have increasingly settled in suburbs and spend upwards of an hour commuting every day. This lost time is not only detrimental to the quality of life of the people, but also detrimental to the quality of the surrounding and global environment. This leads to the next consideration which is transportation. A reliable and accessible way to travel around the community, and if necessary outside of it will contribute to a community’s sustainability. Education is also a necessity that contributes to a community or society’s sustainability. Children need some kind educational structure to gain skills and knowledge. School is also often the way children learn to adapt to their peers and socialize. A system of childcare for younger children is also beneficial to the productivity and well-being of the community. If school or childcare is only available outside of the community, it again decreases the environmental sustainability and increases the time cost to the family. This is especially true if there is no school bus in the area.

Finally, there is entertainment. The presence of entertainment may not seem like a necessity, but there are three defenses for this inclusion. The first is anthropological. So called cultural universals are elements that manifest in every society though the particulars may differ, music and entertainment are one of these universals (Roughley, 2013)(Reuell, 2018). Often times singing and dancing is involved, sometimes instruments. This gathering of people being present across cultures and developments shows that it is not only a luxury but a human necessity. It also shows that entertainment can be relatively simple. Secondly, in planning there is a lean towards what is called live-work-play. This idea is prominent in New Urbanism and mixed-use development, but even beyond that it gets at the fact that play is an intrinsic part of people's lives that needs to be accounted for. The idea of third spaces also comes up in some academic circles (Mehta and Bosson, 2009). Finally, research done over the course of this project has shown that if entertainment is not accounted for or provided, people will go outside the community to find it. People are willing to lose time and resources, pollute the environment, and seek out a place with less familiarity and safety to gain a level of entertainment.

The second part of the matrix includes what the researcher has been referring to as "other considerations." These factors are not necessities or needs that must be met in the community, but are instead elements that can contribute to or detract from its sustainability. They are a useful set for comparing communities against each other, and for understanding their level of replicability. These include climate, ownership scheme, affordability, and controversies. Climate's impact on sustainability is apparent. It contributes to the amount of energy required to make living comfortable, it contributes to the ease of growing food, and it also contributes to the methods and systems most adept to collecting and storing resources like water and energy. Ownership schemes influence the sustainability of a place in one key way: if the ownership scheme is somehow collective and members of the community can not opt out, it lessens the chance of people flipping or selling their property at a profit. It also influences the feel of the community, perhaps in unforeseen ways. Affordability touches on social sustainability. If a community system is not affordable, it can not permeate all layers of society and cannot be truly replicated on a global scale. Finally, controversies illustrate what a community has withstood or been degraded by, and can possibly contain lessons for future communities in what decisions should be avoided and how challenges can be overcome. It may also serve as an element of comparison if sustainable communities experience similar controversies.

24 Findings

Using the previously described methodology, the researcher found the communities to be exceptionally varied despite their comparability. These differences seem very much in line with the aspirations of the founders and the initial conceptualization of the communities. The three case study communities: Twin Oaks, Arcosanti, and Greater World, achieved success to some extent and are worth studying further. While they seem somewhat fringe at first glance, many of their elements are being implemented in more mainstream spheres such as corporate or military, as can be seen in the other forms of complete communities subsection. Further, the breadth of intentional communities is not contained within these three varying examples, as also shown in other forms of complete communities. The culture, focus, and techniques vary widely across these small counter-cultural societies.

Twin Oaks

Figure 7: Satellite view of Twin Oaks from Google Maps Twin Oaks is an intentional community in rural Virginia. It started in the 1960s through the efforts of a group of graduate students inspired by the behaviorist BF Skinner and expedited by a generous land-owning family member. It was founded in a time that is well-known for back-to-the-land movements and grand social projects. The air of revolution was thick in many social circles and communities. Twin Oaks was unique in that it was created not just with the idea of being sustainable and natural but also scientifically grounded (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). Today, many of the necessities of life are handled within the acreage of the property and life outside of Twin Oaks is also supported by the communal action of its members. There are three and a half acres of land dedicated to the uncertified growth of organic vegetables; further lands are dedicated to herbs and cattle. Half of the food that is eaten in Twin Oaks is grown on site and the other half is provided to the community through UNFI, a restaurant-scale importer they use for staples like rice, salt, oil, eggs, and bananas. These foods are provided to community members free of charge. They also eat food that is value-added onsite. They process their milk into cheese and yogurt, and make tofu from soybeans (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). Twin Oaks supplies itself with water through two wells. One large, government tested and certified well supplies all the drinking water and most of the other uses. The second well supplements the first for more industrial uses. They are currently drilling a third exclusively for tofu production (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). For energy, Twin Oaks has tapped into a local electric co-op called Rappahannock. Twin Oaks takes from this grid when necessary and supplies it with electricity from their seven solar panels when possible; this subsidizes their costs. Each solar panel produces 2 kilowatt 10000 watt main field. Further, a great deal of their energy is produced and retained onsite through two means. One is the passive solar design of buildings. The other is wood-fire heating which is supplied by wood gathered and chopped from the forested area of the property and from scrap materials used in hammock making, one of their production avenues. Approximately ten percent of the community is completely off grid (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019).

Figure 8: Image of building with solar panels used to heat water from twinoaks.org Beyond these basic needs, Twin Oaks also provides other necessities that are now recognized by the planning community, among them work, education, healthcare, and entertainment. Every person in the community is required to work 42 hours a week. There is no set shifts, and no one position an individual community member fills. Each person has multiple jobs they complete at their leisure, including domestic work and work on income generators. Activities that count towards hours worked include cooking, cleaning, gardening, childcare, construction, seed packaging, hammock weaving, and tofu pressing among others. The only required work is one kitchen clean up shift a week. There is a great deal of care and order in this system with work crews, a labor sheets, and labor coordinators. There are also "off the farm" jobs community members can perform such as yoga instruction. If the money collected goes back into the community, it counts towards their 42 hours a week. If the individual (e.g. yoga teacher) is doing off-farm work additional to their 42 hours they can keep the money. People in the community get a great deal of satisfaction and self-identification from the work they do (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). For the children, education is up to the discretion of the individual families. At present there are approximately fifteen children. All of them are homeschooled with the exception of one. For children five and under there is a "preschool" on the farm. For children aged six to twelve, for three hours a week there is group education (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). All residents have their necessary healthcare services covered by the community. What is necessary is decided by the community, but if an ailment is deemed serious enough to warrant 27 professional attention, they visit the teaching hospital which is a forty-five minute drive away. Members of the community qualify for subsidized healthcare. For smaller ailments, basic care and alternative medicine is provided on site by a fellow community member which counts towards their work hours. There have been times when the community had certified nurses and doctors among them (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). Transportation is very well-thought out in Twin Oaks. They have a fleet of fifty to one hundred bicycles to help community members get from point a to point b. Some members have especially fixed up bikes for their own use. There is a culture of using bikes to get around. There are also twenty community owned vehicles, among them are six Priuses and trucks and vans. To use a car, a community member must check it out for twenty-five dollars. These checkouts are often done by groups of people for some special purpose but there are also free community trips. Six days a week there is a free trip to the nearest town of Luissa and three days a week there is a trip to the nearest city, Charlottesville. There is also a trip to Richmond once a week. Shopping is mostly done during these trips. There is a shopping list that people can add things they want to such as personal groceries; there is also a community list where necessary items can be added, for example replacement parts for farming equipment. This way there is a reduction in the number of people that need to go into town (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). Entertainment at Twin Oaks is more robust than one would expect in a community of just one hundred members. There are often birthday parties, game nights, and ultimate frisbee tournaments. There are also study groups; currently there is one on philosophy and one on feminism among others. There are multiple bands who perform for the community including a all request dance band who has a special set on New Years Eve. Other occasional events include kamikaze theatre weekends1 and "singing saunas" (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). Housing consists of seven buildings all built between 1970 through the 1990s. Ten to twenty people live in each building, with each individual person getting their own bedroom but sharing bathrooms and kitchens. A unique feature of the housing structure is that there are no locks on the bedrooms. People are expected to respect one another's space and there have not been issues with theft. The belief of members is that the lack of theft stems from their egalitarian value of radical sharing (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019).

1 In kamikaze theatre a show is written, rehearsed, constructed, and performed within a short amount of time. 28

Figure 9: Map of Virginia from Google Maps, Twin Oaks is marked with a red pin Other considerations that impact sustainability in Twin Oaks include for one, climate. The climate in Luissa County, Virginia is typical of the East Coast forest climate. The climate gets hot and humid in the summer. The community still does not have air conditioning, though. The climate is exceptionally good for food production (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). Another factor that can influence the sustainability and replicability of a community is the ownership scheme. In Twin Oaks each full member is technically a partial owner of the whole community. Twin Oaks incorporated is a recognized organization that owns the land, the means of production, the buildings, the cars, and everything else not in people's private rooms. The legal way this ownership scheme works is through a 501D which is not a charitable nonprofit but is a designation given to groups like monasteries where the group as a whole is responsible for the needs of the members. This status was defended in the 1980's in a court case in which Twin Oaks proved their qualification for this designation. However, the legal structure is not prominent in people's minds as their daily life involves interacting with materials and furniture that has a public or communal nature to them (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). While the communal nature of what is present on the site is not an uncommon idea, the manner in which someone becomes a member and co-owner is unique. Many intentional communities require a buy-in, but in Twin Oaks there is no monetary exchange. Twin Oaks is exceedingly affordable to live at. There is no cost to join and after joining there are no necessary outside expenses. A person must only be approved for membership by the existing community and be able to work in some capacity for forty-two hours a week (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). Many factors have shaped Twin Oaks, among them the founding vision. Twin Oaks was founded very specifically around Walden 2 by BF Skinner. It was built to be a behaviorist

29 community in the 1960s. However, over time behaviorism lost its public prominence and its impact on Twin Oaks faded. The back to the land movement was still strong though, and people continued to join (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). The four key values of income sharing, cooperation, nonviolence, and egalitarianism remained significant. Twin Oaks grew slowly which allowed it to be measured in its evolution. Many intentional communities of the time exploded in popularity, causing them to grow too fast and ultimately become uncontrollable, controversial, and unsuccessful. Since Twin Oaks didn't have this problem with burn out, the structure has mostly stayed the same. However, the culture has changed over time. In the 1980s Twin Oaks reached approximately one hundred members and has remained steady in membership since. There continues to be cultural changes within their membership, as there has been in the broader world (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). The politics of the region have also effected how Twin Oaks has grown. Though they are in the county, there are many restrictions and regulations that Twin Oaks must follow. They have been diligent in receiving the proper approval. The political climate of the area is more conservative, which has caused the community (with more progressive views) to remain tight knit and not form as many social connections outside of the site (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). From an insider's perspective, the benefits of Twin Oaks compared to traditional suburban development is first and foremost experienced through the quality of life for each and all members of society. Since everyone is guaranteed a place to be sheltered from the elements, eat nutritiously, and live a life free from violence, it is immediately and undeniably better than the status quo for people in the broader society experiencing food insecurity, eviction, and family or interpersonal violence. Since Twin Oaks has a basis of egalitarian values, there are no haves and have nots (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). The western culture the majority of people live in is very much not like that. Further, the argument could be made that holding egalitarian beliefs is inherently better, independent of the results of these beliefs. Perhaps what we can learn from this community for the sake of society at large and the planners who instrument the acceptable patterns to move and create the form of our populations, is that the culture can be exported. Twin Oaks is one of only six intentional communities to meet the rigorous standards of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities and become a member (Federation of Egalitarian Communities). Elements of the culture don’t only need to exist in other towns and populations of people, but also within organizations and initiatives, which also serve to shape our lives and society. For example, someone from Oregon created a car-sharing co-op before Lyft and Uber (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). These elements of culture, though, are inherently linked to the circumstances and context surrounding a person,

30 community, or organization. Egalitarian values in particular are multifaceted and must be heavily integrated into a system to take hold since it is in contrast to the defining element of the dominant capitalist culture. Perhaps Twin Oaks can only serve as a model that another world is possible. Within its niche, Twin Oaks is highly replicable. It would be possible to build new sister communities across the country. There is a case to be made for having a community like Twin Oaks in proximity to every metropolitan center. It is true that not everyone would want to or agree to live in this way, and it is not something that could be forced with the same effect. However, that does not eliminate the reason for creating them in other areas. It is certainly true that the location of communities dictates their accessibility to people further away and creating new communities wouldn't be forcing a local population to adopt the lifestyle but would instead give them the option to it. A member of Twin Oaks was shocked, in fact, that more people don't choose to create egalitarian communities like the one they live in since they have witnessed the advantages first hand. Her belief is that this is because people are so acculturated to an individualistic lifestyle, partially because of the cognitive and economic impact of capitalism constantly reinforcing competitiveness and separatism. These social habits and forces act as barriers. In the interest of fairness the researcher believes it is important to point out that just because the members of Twin Oaks are devoted to egalitarianism and cooperation, they do not act as a hivemind or even always act in agreement with each other. It has been admitted that conflict arises, and it is the belief of a member at Twin Oaks that it is bound to happen anywhere there is a group of people. However, the conflict is always resolved peacefully and does not upend the mood or productivity of the group. Conflict arises between people who have differing ideas about what is normal or appropriate in a very domestic sense. What to build, what to eat, etc. are where disagreements arise. At Twin Oaks this is not avoided or even frowned upon, it is their belief that a sign of a healthy community is not whether or not conflict arises, but how it is dealt with. Perhaps the greatest challenge for Twin Oaks has been membership issues. There have been tensions in how to navigate dealing with incoming members or members who are problematic (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). Outside of the community, Twin Oaks has largely avoided controversy. They have benefitted from the fact that they mostly focus on themselves and have not attempted to make a splash. They did not grow too quickly and didn't capture the public imagination. Some of this has to do with circumstances in their control, but also, they admit, part of it is luck (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019).

At Twin Oaks, their ideas of what is sustainable is different than what is currently being held up by our society through official recognitions and industry greenwashing. For example, building an ecosolar mansion, and luxury goods created from renewable energy still isn't sustainable because it isn’t socially sustainable. True sustainability requires living within one’s means, or even less since in the Western world people have become accustomed to over expending their worth. The cultural and societal system is so strong and self supporting through the interrelation of government or corporateship, it is in the least improbable that the accepted means and concepts of sustainability would be able to surpass that system. This is why some of the people who live in Twin Oaks decide to live there partially because they believe it is more fruitful not to fight against the paradigm but instead use their energies to do something different (Twin Oaks Subject 1, 2019). If enough people do create or invest in systems that are incongruent with the ruling system then these structures might collapse.

Greater World

Figure 10: Satellite view of Greater World from Google Maps. Greater World Community, the brain-child of Mike Reynolds is a neighborhood surrounding the Earthship Biotecture center in Taos, New Mexico. Reynalds founded Earthship Biotecture after he found the current method of architecture to be unsatisfactory (Earthship Biotecture). The organization designed stand alone houses called earthships, reminiscent of a

33 ship out at sea, untethered and unconnected to the grid. The idea has expanded and there are earthships across the continent and across the globe. These houses implement passive cooling and heating, large windows on one side and three biomass walls on the other three sides (Earthship Biotecture). However, there was a recognition that individual earthships and a solitary life wasn't for everyone. Thus came Greater World community, one of now three earthship communities in the area (Greater World Subject 2, 2018). Greater World can theoretically supply its own food, all of the homes in the neighborhood are more recent earthships which include a greenhouse element in the front windows. The largest earthship on site, the Phoenix is designed with the capacity to grow enough food for a family of four. Unfortunately in general the inhabitants of the earthships do not have the ability to take the time and effort to grow their own food (Greater World Subject 2, 2018). There are no nearby grocery stores or restaurants. Water, however, is a passive process in the earthships. All water in greater world is collected on each individual site, then filtered before reaching the tap. The water is then used at least four times before being unavailable to the household. The first time is the tap, then the water is trickled into the greenhouse which sits on a slight incline, the water then can then be pumped back up to filter through the green house again. Eventually, that water is used to flush toilets, it is separated from the solids in a septic tank and finally released to a a part of the yard growing fruit trees specifically safe for blackwater use. This method has proved effective even in times of drought in the Taos Mesa (Greater World Subject 2, 2018). Energy is also supplied via attachments to the roof. All earthships are completely and individually and renewably powered through solar and wind (Earthship Biotecture). The are also designed very specifically to minimize heating and cooling costs. All the earthships in Greater World are built with south facing windows with an overhang designed to block the summer sun and allow in the lower winter sun (Earthship Biotecture). The eastern and western walls as well as the stone floors of the building retain heat and give it off as the temperatures drop in the night (Greater World Subject 2, 2018). The third, north facing wall is long and sloped, it is essentially a hill built into the back of the house, this allows to excellent insulation and biomass, but also it allows for a cooling tube which takes cool air from under the hill to flow into the house when it is opened (Greater World Subject 2, 2018). The expected cost of a household on electricity and gas is a total of three hundred dollars for an entire year, this is compared to the average spending of two thousand and two hundred dollars spent a year (Earthship Biotecture).

Figure 11: An Earthship at Greater World Community. Image from realtor.com The housing is of course central to the model of the earthship, the neighborhood itself officially consists of single-family homes. But there are also other, less luxurious options for people who stay temporarily through the workshop or internship process (Greater World Subject 2, 2018). As for work, many of the inhabitants do work onsite, either in the earthship school, office, or in construction. Individuals who work outside of the neighborhood face long commutes. Additionally, not everyone who works for Earthship Biotecture lives there. Some people commute in from Taos or Arroyo Seco while others have set up their own dwellings further out on the Mesa (Greater World Subject 2, 2018). Education is also not inherently available onsite. Approximately half of inhabitants choose to send their children to public school while the other half home schools. The homeschooled children meet together up to three times a week to learn skills as a group. (Greater World Subject 2, 2018) Healthcare is not found in the community and is up to the citizens to obtain individually. There is also no dedicated space or programing for entertainment. Many of the biotecture students and employees drive down the road to Taos Mesa Brewing which has music, events, performances, food, and drinks (Greater World Subject 2, 2018). 35

Figure 12: Map of New Mexico from Google Maps, Greater World is marked with a red pin The climate on the Mesa is particularly dry. The nearest town, Taos is considered a high desert which does have a rainy season, but the Mesa which Greater World lays on gets even less rain than Taos (Greater World Subject 1, 2018). In 2018 they suffered the worst drought many of the people living their remember. Still, with careful and measured use by the people who live there the water system of the earthships made it through. Fortunately, this climate also provides

36 an abundance of sun, which is excellent for solar power generation (Greater World Subject 2, 2018). The ownership scheme of Greater World is relatively simple. At the onset, the entire site was owned by Mike Reynolds, he then sells the property to buyers with specific stipulations that they must contract his company to build an earthship on the site to the owner’s specifications. There is a list of bylaws people agree to when moving into the property, among them assurance that they will not build a fence around their property to ensure that desert migration patterns are not adversely affected by the development. There are also a few examples of plots that Earthship Biotecture has already built onsite and are for sale. Until they sell, they are up for rent on AirBnB (Greater World Subject 2, 2018). The affordability of living in Greater World is not high. The cost of land and the Earthship combined is significant, especially compared to the cost of land nearby. Some of the people who live there have made it work through connections with the company and reduced cost of construction by having their friends and neighbors help build (Greater World Subject 2, 2018). This does not bode well for the long-term economic sustainability of the community though. If a significant portion of people are living there is only finding work building the earthships and a good amount of people who want earthships live there, they will be exhausting their pool. The political climate in the area is significantly lax. People are allowed to build or pitch their own homes out on the Mesa with no connections to sewage, water, or electricity. Nearby people live in trailer homes, campers, yurts2, strawbale houses, and other homemade dwellings. Mike Reynolds himself ensured his ability to experiment and build Earthships in New Mexico when in 2005 he pushed House Bill 269 “The Sustainable Development Testing Site Act” through the New Mexico legislature. This legislation now allows for land to be set aside for the experimentation in creating sustainable design (Van Buren, 2009). This act is allowing for Reynold’s most ambitious and largest project which is under construction now in Greater World. Controversies and challenges at Greater World have been mild. The press the community gets is overwhelmingly positive and there have been numerous documentaries, podcasts, and articles written about the site (Earthship Biotecture). Reynold’s is often the central character in these works, and even the gift shop sells items bearing his likeness. He is known for being abrupt, but is incredibly respected around the community. There have, however, been economic

2 A yurt is a circular semi-permanent tent with a thin wooden frame and wool walls, often with waterproof outer layers which can be constructed in as little as two hours. Many of the people in the United States who live in yurts add more permanent elements such as decking, and additional rooms. 37 troubles. Many of the people who graduate the program are not offered full-time jobs. And in the summer of 2018 cutbacks were occuring (Greater World Subject 2, 2018).

Arcosanti

Figure 13: Satellite view of Arcosanti from Google Maps Arcosanti is a community of approximately one hundred people in Arizona founded by Paolo Soleri. Begun in the 1970s as Soleri’s grand pet project to prove that ecological principles create quality architecture and quality interactions of people, Arcosanti has gone through some compromises since its inception but has kept the same basic economic model (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019). Today, Arcosanti's food is not self-sustaining. There is no attempt to grow food for the community, though even when there was an agricultural program, it was still never enough to feed everyone at Arcosanti. Since Arcosanti was on a budget, they could not justify continuing the agriculture program. Currently, there are a couple greenhouses in the city that are available

38 for community use. There is also a cafe that people can patron, but they use an outside vender. One community member said that he leaves about twice a month to shop for groceries. Unfortunately, an agricultural program was especially hard to maintain because when people leave, the collective memory of how to farm in the specific location is lost (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019). As for water, Arcosanti owns the rights to 365 acres of surface water. In Arizona, certain kinds of groundwater are counted as surface water. Arizona does not regulate true ground water. Arcosanti uses this unregulated groundwater for their city. To maintain its sustainability, they also use a recharge system with a human-made lake three to five acres large to capture rainwater. This lake directly filters into their groundwater source. There is also some above ground rainwater capture and cisterns and some greywater reuse (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019).

Figure 14: The Soleri Office Drafting Unit. Contains a meeting room, office space, studios, and housing. Image from arcosanti.org In regards to employment, there are two quasi-independent organizations that employ people living in Arcosanti. The nonprofit employs one third of the people who live on site. An additional one third of the community is employed by the for-profit entity. And the final third are either volunteers, workshoppers, semi-retired, or on family policy. Workshoppers pay tuition to learn at Arcosanti. Many of the people living in the family policy are spouses and just three are children (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019). 39

In both organizations, the departments are mostly self-managed. The departments include Habitat, Outreach, Cafeteria, Gallery, Bronze Foundry, Ceramics program, and Information Technologies. Within Habitat there is woodshop, metal, construction, maintenance, and site utilities. Within outreach there is tours, guest services, development, and planning. The majority of people who work in these departments live in Arcosanti. There is though, an additional gallery and bell-foundry owned by CoSanti where about twenty employees, or one half, live off site (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019). As for education, there is no standardization in Arcosanti. Since there are only three children, the education choices are left up to the individuals and their parents. In the past, some have chosen to homeschool and some have chosen to attend public school in the local school district. However, daycare is provided by the community (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019). Entertainment at Arcosanti is present. The cafe serves as a third space as does the amphitheatre which regularly hosts events for the community and for the public (Arcosanti). The cohousing model also allows for passive socialization. Energy for Arcosanti comes from the grid, Arizona Public Service Electric Company. They have just under one hundred solar panels which are mostly hooked up to the water system. Some are used for heating, and some are connected to a battery array. There was a desire to expand their solar capacity, but Arcosanti was set back by the recession of 2008. Additionally, there are added challenges with regulations coming from the state of Arizona which makes solar hard to implement. There is a high and successful focus on passive heating and cooling though, the buildings in Arcosanti use one fifth of the energy of comparable traditional structures (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019). Healthcare is well-organized in Arcosanti. One resident is a nurse practitioner and is licensed to do basic check ups and write prescriptions. She handles non emergency and non- long term care. All other healthcare is handled by outside professionals, funded by insurance available through the foundation. Residents who are not official employees of Arcosanti, such as contractors are on federal healthcare (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019). Walkability was a driving principle of Soleri's. All his designs consisted of dense, human- scale communities. It is no surprise then, that Arcosanti is incredibly walkable. It is only fifteen acres and most people get around on their feet. However, there is a need to go outside Arcosanti but there is only one shuttle bus that goes to Phoenix and Flagstaff, used almost exclusively for the airport. Because of this Arcosanti is still car-dependent (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019). Everyone in Arcosanti is provided some kind of housing. All housing is in mixed-use buildings, which was key to Soleri's vision. Sixty percent of housing is shared in some way. A

40 common structure is four to five roommates with a shared kitchen and living room. Family housing is a housing option that do not require having roommates. They are smaller but more viable for couples with children. The allocation of different kinds of housing is at the discretion of a community board called the ALP (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019). On one occasion, the community met and made recommendations to the ALP when there was both a new-hire with a family and a senior employee who applied for an individualistic family housing unit. The community sided with the family to get a unit, placing a greater importance on the family structure over the seniority claim. There are also studio apartments. These are the most sought after. Often times, members will use their seniority at the organization to move into housing in the available housing pool, like single units. Attainment of a single unit typically takes three or four years. The discretionary housing was established to ensure the community would never be lacking necessary professionals. A lack of desired housing may exclude a person or people that are urgently needed. For example, the ALP may give a plumber a studio apartment even if he is not a senior employee if they are in desperate need of a plumber. As for shared housing, groups decide who their roommates will be if they can do so within six months. However, some people have used this time period to delay moving out of more desirable units, so it is being shortened to three months. If a group of roommates can not be selected by that time, it is of the community’s choosing (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019).

Figure 15: Map of Arizona from Google Maps, Arcosanti is marked with a red pin As for considerations that impact Arcosanti outside the necessities, there is climate. The climate of Arcosanti is that of a desert. There is, of course, difficulties in growing crops in the desert which likely contributed to the dropping of the agricultural program. More unexpectedly, this desert climate has been ingrained in the culture. People become lethargic in the heat of the summer and develop a wry sense of humor. The desert location also has many perks. Since the desert is a challenging place for life and growth it is an ideal proving ground. Further, deserts in many ways are the future. With drastic climate change taking place on the planet, many areas are succumbing to desertification (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019).

The ownership scheme in Arcosanti is very straightforward. The nonprofit owns everything. The people who are employed in either the non-profit or for-profit pay three hundred dollars a month for co-use privileges. Full-time volunteers live and work for free. The for-profit organization rents the use of the means of production from the non-profit and revenue that is generated by the for-profit is donated to the non-profit. This was Soleri's original vision, the non-profit entity being funded through the for-profit entity (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019). While the co-use fee is relatively low, there are still complications in regards to the affordability and economic accessibility of Arcosanti. According to a member of Arcosanti, many white people are interested in sustainability; and most people who live in Arcosanti had the option for a middle-class existence. One of the reasons that many people at Arcosanti come from upper to middle class backgrounds is because they are paid usually between $10.75 and $12.00 an hour with executives being paid $13.00 an hour.3 With this kind of income it is hard to pay off loans, including student loans or to save money for retirement. In this way, people who have access to Arcosanti are people who already have investments or savings, or have had their way paid through higher education without loans. The organization as a whole can not afford to pay people higher wages at this time since they are just breaking even. The new CEO, Patrick McOrder is attempting to increase revenue for the purpose of paying a living wage in addition to building new construction (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019).

The controversies surrounding Arcosanti have not done a great deal in destabilizing the community structure. One of the largest controversies occurred after Soleri’s death when his daughter, Daniela, accused him of abusing her. While the community experienced a disturbance at the news, the members of the community largely view Soleri as an egomaniac who was separate from his ideas. At the onset of the project people did follow Solari as a charismatic leader, but after his death there was a transition of the population to commitment to the cause, This transition meant that the community could acknowledge the flaws of the founder without compromising their way of life (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019). A more costly controversy Arcosanti faced in 1978 when there was a large car fire onsite. During a concert seventy cars in the parking lot caught fire and burned; which led to the community facing a hefty lawsuit and incurring a financial loss (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019). Today, Arcosanti is experiencing only management challenges. After Solari's death, the executive team was seen as unqualified so the board hired a CEO. This pressure form the

3 At eleven dollars an hour, for forty hours a week, and with just over four weeks in a month, monthly earning would calculate as follows: 11*40*4.3=1,892. This means living expenses equal 15.856% of income before taxes. 43 community may be connected to the mindset of such a small group of people. The community aspired to have a sense of community like that found in a village coupled with the universal thinking of a metropolitan city. However, it seems that within the community, there is still an inclination towards provincial gossip. This is mostly dealt with through conflict mediation tactics (Arcosanti Subject 1, 2019).

Other Forms of Complete Communities

While these case studies are enlightening, in order to understand a greater breadth of complete communities, the following subsections will describe efforts self-sufficiency efforts in corporate campuses, military bases, and utopian communities in the United States of America and abroad.

Corporate Campuses

First, with a focus on sustainability, corporate campuses are making a come back in a big way. The industrial parks of the 1950s which were adjacent to white flight and auto dependence in a suburban setting had been replaced by the long-term leasing of floors in office buildings (Chevez and Huppatz, 2017). Today some corporations are still attracted to the cheap land of suburbia but urban campuses like Salesforce’s in San Francisco are also growing in popularity (Patton, 2016)(Arieff, 2017). Companies with enough employees and the capacity to invest enough in a corporate campus are taking advantage of the benefits a dedicated site can bring once again. Now companies see a campus as a means to express and invest in their culture and values, and of course, to increase productivity (Caglar, Couto, and Trantham, 2019). It is now common place for corporate campuses to include cafeterias, recreational facilities, daycare, and shuttle buses. Outdoor spaces and pathways for pedestrians and cyclists connect pieces of the campus where cars are often left in the periphery (Patton, 2016). Indeed, today corporate campuses fill to some degree many of the daily needs of their employees- food, transportation, work, childcare, even entertainment. However, the most glaring gap in a corporate campus being a complete community is the lack of housing. As of yet, there are no major corporate campuses that include housing. Las Tablas, just north of Madrid, Spain, decided against the opportunity when redeveloping Distrito C, a formerly residential area. The entire district will adhere to the typical structure of a corporate campus with an architectural twist. The new design includes a cube shaped photovoltaic-glass canopy that will provide energy and shade to the campus. The buildings themselves will include the typical, offices, restaurants, parks, and gymnasiums and 44 also clinics. This is revolutionary for the Telefonica firm which up to this point has not had a truly central headquarters and has operated instead in disperse offices (Lomholt, 2018). Companies known for pushing boundaries are choosing similar techniques. Apple’s new multibillion dollar campus is a circular shaped building surrounded by trees and parking lots. The development has an approximately one to one ratio for office space and parking, even with the inclusion of shuttle buses. The environmental impact is apparent. The amount of cars on the road and miles commuted will impact the air and water quality directly, but the congestion caused will also worsen the impact of cars already on the roads in the region. Further, the amount of impervious cover will weaken the surrounding environment, causing polluted runoff, flow disruption, and flood risks (Frazer). Google also has opted for a corporate campus without housing. Google’s design, like Telefonica, includes a massive translucent canopy shading the campus. Their redevelopment plan for the North Bayshore campus includes bridges, bike paths, and retail space. Of course, it also includes acres of parking. Specifically, the proposal includes underground parking, a cyclist bridge over Highway 101, and eleven miles of bike paths. Their original plan though, did include housing but was repeatedly rejected by the former City Council of Mountain View with fewer pr- housing candidates than today’s. Google is still attempting a way to include housing but plans to move forward with or without it (Dougherty, 2015). Meanwhile, at Facebook, housing is central and integral to their ambitious corporate campus development in Menlo Park, California. The plans, which are expected to be approved mid 2019, include over a million and a half square feet of housing in fifteen hundred units. one hundred and twenty five thousand square feet of retail will also be added, and not just restaurants, there will also be shopping venues, a pharmacy, and a grocery store. Facebook is attempting to create a “mixed-use village” on the site, emphasizing their desire to form a sense of community. Media has referred to it as a town instead of simply a corporate campus and there is an article that jokingly refers to the site as Facebook-ville (Hartman, 2017). While Facebook does aim to have everything one would need in this new development, it is also attempting to integrate with community through the surrounding street and rail corridors, gridded design, and pedestrian friendly amenities like tree-lined streets and pocket parks or gardens. Facebook also believes the campus will move them forward in their largest goals of becoming zero net energy and zero water waste (Facebook Community, 2017). While the site is expected to become a model of possibility, Facebook is already attempting to implement green urbanism. For example, the Menlo Park Campus already has a weekly farmers market filled with organic and local vendors that is open to employees and the wider community (Facebook Community, 2015).

Military Bases

Military bases, like corporate campuses, are first and foremost about the job. However military bases also provide housing, and often grocery stores, restaurants, and schools (US News, 2015). The majority of military bases do depend on the surrounding community for power and water, but not all of them. Military bases were not designed to be model town, or utopian havens, but their need to provide “mini-America” to the personnel and their families have created nearly self-sustaining communities (Goldschein, 2016). It is odd to refer to military bases as isolated since the military is be nature a global endeavor, but they could serve as a model of what other towns could be. The United States military has taken a hard turn towards sustainability in its outposts and domestic bases. Reasons for this include, cost, efficiency, security, and climate change (Baillie, 2011). Some military bases already have solar arrays like Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, but the United States Department of Defense is also toying with the idea of using renewable energy to run their own microgrids (Nichols, 2018). Bases are also using passive techniques to reduce their energy consumption, thus making it more feasible to produce enough of their own. The use of solar shades on tents is projected to reduce cooling costs enough to cut energy use by half (Baille, 2011). A specific example of base pairing efficiency with renewable energy is Fort Irwin in California. In 2010, Fort Irwin proposed installing passive measures like Cool Roof material, shaded overhangs, kitchen heat capture, and automatic shut off for lights and television sets to achieve their goal of going Net Zero through the use of solar energy (Underwood et al., 2010). The army’s Net Zero initiatives are defined as all energy produced on site, the same amount of water being returned to the watershed as is being taken out, and no use of landfills (Schueneman, 2012.)

Figure 16: Diagram of Microgrid installation at an Air Force Base from sustainingourworld.com Beyond the use of renewable energy, the military is also adopting other strategies planners often use to enhance sustainability, though this may not be the reason the Department of Defense is implementing the changes. To curb the likelihood of obesity and unfit recruits, the Department of Defense created the Healthy Base Initiative in 2013. Following this, the Department of Defense published a memorandum on how a military base may start a farmers market. Since then multiple documents and tools, including a complete guide, have been published to aid in the establishment of a farmer’s market on military bases (USDA and DoD, 2015). This will increase healthy food access and increase the amount of local produce being consumed. Due to public demand, military bases have also taken an interest in increasing transportation options for their residents. In Arlington Virginia, a base is now allowing citizens of the base entry to a connector which improves pedestrian and bus access. There are of course, security concerns with allowing a bus into the base though, and many residents still use single- occupancy vehicles to get around.

Finally, planners have been proposing using conservation lands as a buffer between communities since Howard’s Garden cities. These buffers are commonly utilized in England and one famously surrounds Portland. The military is now calling for land buffers around their bases. The purpose of these buffers are to separate these military communities (and their training exercises) from the sprawl of nearby cities (Wheet, 2013). Looking to military bases as models for complete communities brings in some interesting considerations. For one, military bases are federal property. This has a two-fold effect. One one hand, the federal government is an entity that already exists and has the capacity to expand. If the federal government wanted to begin creating complete communities for the purpose of long-term sustainability, they already have a proof of concept, resources, and experience to do so. On the other hand, just because the United States government could execute a complete community, does not mean that it would be easy for another entity to do the same. Very few, if any, organization has the funding and power of the United States military. Second, military bases are by nature connected to the federal government and government systems in ways that means the amenities on bases are part of the country’s system of laws through legislation. For example, Veterans Affairs provides healthcare in a way that can not be replicated in a model town. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service also has ways to siphon profits from businesses and franchises on bases to be redirected to the community (Goldschein, 2016). The legal systems are not in place for other communities to act in the same way.

Other Models

Nationally and internationally, people and groups unaffiliated with the larger government are attempting to create sustainable communities with their own unique systems. Ecovillages have taken many forms and shapes, intentional communities exist across the globe, and values focused international villages, even at a grand scale have captured the imagination of more and more people. Some people simply want to help the environment, others want less government interference or to be independent in case of disaster. As of 2012 there was an estimated 180,000 off-grid homes in America (Williams, 2012). While some of them are indeed completely on their own, a good portion of them exist in communities. Some communities focus very much on the cooperative lifestyle. For example, Dancing Rabbit is an ecovillage in Missouri. They are a self-proclaimed sustainability demonstration project with a village council and committees. There is a keen focus on a sense of community and feminist and environmental ideals. Sharing between members is emphasized

48 and the use reclaimed and recycled materials as much as possible. Much of the food is harvested onsite in a mixture of gardens, food forests, and permaculture plots. The living is simple but comfortable, and the inhabitants are fairly young (Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage). Ithaca Ecovillage in New York has a completely different feel. Their website is sleek, their buildings are designed by architects, they have an apartment complex; each structure is built to a higher standard than the last. There are three neighborhoods; the first reached energy-star certification, the second had LEED certification, and the most recent has reached platinum LEED certification and seven have also attained the rigorous Passivhaus standard. The two- hundred and forty inhabitants reach across every age group and live in private homes, there is no collective employment and only three hours of volunteering a week is required. Village life is very embraced though; there are thirty three businesses owned and operated in the small village. They range from the kinds of businesses that are common in ecovillages like yoga studios and crafted homewares to more unexpected endeavors like photography studios and an organizational development specialist. A total of forty-five percent of residents work from the ecovillage. Twenty percent are retired and twenty percent are stay-at-home caregivers, leaving few left commuting. In total, residents of Ithica Ecovillage use 30% of the resources as the average American. Currently there is a three bedroom home for sale for $280,000 and a one bedroom apartment for sale for $196,000. For these prices, the homeowners also have access to community gardens, a library, and a common house which includes laundry facilities, playrooms, a gym, a sauna, and a community kitchen and dining area (Ecovillage Ithica). A third stateside example is Breitenbush. Unlike Ithica Ecovillage which markets itself as a serie of neighborhoods, or Dancing Rabbit which is centered around the community culture, Breitenbush is more like a business. Though it has the title of intentional community, their full title is Breitenbush Hot Springs Retreat and Conference Center. Their homepage advertises workshops and day trips. Information on joining the community is found under the “employment” tag. Twenty percent of their population is lost in the winter and those twenty to thirty people are not necessarily the same people from year to year. Additionally, the governing structure, while democratic, does not elect community counselors or the like, instead opting to elect a board of directors who oversee a business director (Breitenbush Hot Springs).

There are at least 788 intentional communities in the United States, but there are also many internationally (Fellowship for Intentional Community). Near the head of Mary River in Queensland, Australia there is Crystal Waters Wildlife Sanctuary. While considered an Ecovillage of two hundred people, it does not have much of what a village has to offer. For

49 example there is no public transport, retail, or cellular service in the village. Animals are prohibited to preserve the wildlife habitat and the Crystal Waters Community Cooperative focuses on running the camping and cabin accommodations. Currently, the cost of buying a home in Crystal Waters in 475,000 AUD ($336,000) (Crystal Waters Community Cooperative). In south India there exists a sustainable community on a grand scale. Auroville is a round development five kilometers (just over three miles) across. Inaugurated in 1968, Auroville now has a population of 2,500 people from forty-nine countries. The township is still growing and is designed with a maximum population of 50,000 people. At present, the residential zone is approximately forty-five percent built up, with some green space purposefully left within the zone. The greenbelt, which is by far the largest zone of Auroville is reserved for “organic farms, dairies, orchards, forests, and wildlife areas.” Like Howard’s Garden Cities, this belt is also meant to act as a buffer from the expansion of urban settlements.

Figure 17: Diagram of Auroville from auroville.org Currently Auroville produces all its own dairy products and half of its fruit and vegetables, but they have the goal of reaching 100% local production. Self-sufficiency and independence is high in Auroville overall though. For example, they have a cashless economy, opting to use an Aurocard, which works like a specialized debit card. The community is successful in meeting its own needs in two other ways. For one, the other zones include almost every service a person could desire. There are restaurants, book shops, banks, a health center, an amphitheater, and even a veterinarian’s office. Second, residents of Auroville receive a

“maintenance” or an allowance that is meant to cover the basic expenses of a simple life; this money comes from the commercial unit. There are also employment opportunities in the village and job placement services. Similar to the maintenance, a basic level of electricity is provided free of charge to the residential units. Auroville produces this level through wind power but it is provided through the main power grid. The community is currently working on expanding their solar power arrays which are more reliable than the grid and have already been implemented in many residences and businesses (Auroville). Finally, Damanhur, a site fifteen kilometers squared (just under ten square miles) in the alpine foothills of Italy, is an ecovillage that has a culture all its own. The community has six pillars: Spiritual Vision, Research and Experimentation, Create Sustainability, Live Community, Share Experiences, and Art and Creativity. Like Auroville, Damanhur has a variety of shopping options and their own credit system, but Damanhur opts to use coins to serve as credits instead of a digitally connected card. Also like Auroville, grand ideals and spiritual energy unite the people; however, while Auroville has no standard religion or practices, Damanhur has an agreed upon constitution, way of life, and even adopted names. Each of the 600 residents are called by their animal-plant name, for example Cigno Banano (Swan Banana). Despite, or perhaps because of their strong focus on a unified culture, Damanhur has found success in organic food production, renewable energy, land stewardship and even architecture. Their Temples of Humankind was hand carved into a mountain and consists of eight halls decorated with stain glass, mosaics, paintings, and sculptures. It has been called the eighth wonder of the world. Thirty years after its founding, Damhur received recognition at the 2005 United Nations Global Forum on Human Settlements as a model for sustainable society (Damanhur).

Figure 18: Across-section of the Temples of Humankind from TheTemples.org

Conclusions

There is no one conclusion to be drawn about complete communities, but there are many things worth discussing. Complete communities, despite their temporal, motivational, and executional differences, exhibit some recurring themes, some of which were unexpected. The differences the communities exhibit can also be used, through the matrix, to create a ranking. However, the ranking must be qualified by its usefulness. Even if a community has reached complete sustainability, if it is not replicable, it does little good to our global society going forward. Finally, these categories and systems of analysis have their own limitations, and the inherent biases within them need be addressed.

Comparisons: Themes

First, the researcher would like to take a moment to speak on the things that these communities have in common. While comparing Twin Oaks, Arcosanti, and Greater World, along with historical and alternative examples, a few elements appeared consistently enough to become themes. The first of which was a spirit of revolution. Each community found in this essay illustrates a zeal and energy inspired by the belief that what is being done has the capacity to revolutionize the character of daily life for people for the better. All the way back to the turn of the century with the Garden Cities, Howard cites rhetoric that inspires change and idealism regarding the future. Pullman, too, believed that his town would serve as a model for not only living but the economic system. The majority of intentional communities and ecovillages, including Arcosanti and Greater World, were designed and had their inception in a time when young people were questioning and pushing against the status quo. Today, the political milieu, the change of millenia, and the internet age has begun sparking interest in collective action and the possibility of change. Technology and all-pervasive mega corporations like Google are moving forward with the idea that what they do could have world-changing impacts. An additional theme that has arisen from the research is that of diverse homogeneities. Each community is significantly different from one another, not only in their organization and design, but also within their populations. However, within the populations, a distinct sense of culture is found. The people of Greater World exhibited in general different attitudes and lifestyle choices than those in Arcosanti or Twin Oaks. As expected, culture on military bases are somewhat uniform, and it is a common criticism of the tech industry that they are too homogenous in demographics and perspective. The research done in service of this project suggests that these models of compleet communities are perhaps more homogeneous within

53 themselves than society at large. Perhaps this is not a criticism though, as early adopters must always have something in common to have them pursue something outside the norm. Another aspect some of the communities exhibit as a theme is progressive social values. With the exception of the military bases, the other communities are heralds of not only the pushing of sustainability practices, but also social practices. The values of feminism, egalitarianism, right to human dignity, and cooperative responsibility are hallmarks of the progressive agenda. The reason for this could be partially due to environmentalism being a progressive ideal so the kind of people interested in it having a set or collection of progressive beliefs. Complete communities also, a la Garden Cities, tend to be more self-organized. In contrast, at Greater World the community depends on each other for nothing, having everything they need on their individual site. Lastly, the use of novel technology has a high usage rate for these communities. Of course with Google and Facebook's designs for corporate campuses, one would expect a great deal of technology, perhaps also with the military, and yet the more back-to-the-earth movements also use the technology yet to be adopted by municipalities or individual citizens at a critical mass. Even in Pullman and Howard’s time they were proposing and installing technology that was mostly unknown to the common man at the run of the century. If one were to dig below the surface, this would seem not only to be a coincidence but an element deeply connected to the reality of designing a model town. These projects were seen as much as experiments as they were settlements. Pullman’s town is referred to as an experiment throughout its time. Damanhur has experimentation as one their central pillars. Electric wind turbines, batteries, and solar panels are no longer in their infancy, but are still rapidly advancing and have been adopted by what people may perceive as more rustic development like Twin Oaks and Dancing Rabbit. Mike Reynolds and Greater World have developed, in addition to novel architectural designs, a water system technology that rivals the efficiency of corporate and large-scale engineering. All of this use of technology though, works in harmony with an emphasis of the need for natural green space which is found and mandated in Howard, Pullman, Greater World, Twin Oaks, Ithaca Ecovillage, Dancing Rabbit, Auroville, and Damanhur.

Compromises: Notions of Superiority

Despite what they have in common, the three case study communities do have their differences. There are inherent biases in the criteria for judging, and this particular basis has

54 additional space for bias because of its qualitative form, but just the same, there does seem to be some levels of superiority between the communities. For food sustainability, Twin Oaks surpassed the other two cases as the only one where food is reliably produced and dispersed in the community. Not all of it is grown on site but a significant amount is. Additionally Twin Oaks makes an organizational effort to do so. Finally, what is not grown is brought in at an industrial scale to feed the community. Arcosanti has a cafe on site but no culture, incentivization, nor enough space to grow their own food. Greater World has accessible space for citizens to grow their own food but it is not carried out. Energy production in Greater World surpasses the other two cases in sustainability. Each household in Greater World produces and stores enough energy for their daily use. Twin Oaks produces much of their own energy and sometimes in access pays it back to a co-op. Arcosanti also produces a significant amount of energy, but still must be connected to a grid. Water in all three sites is self-sufficient. Greater World, again rises above the other cases due to their remarkable recapture and reuse efficiency. Arcosanti and Twin Oaks both depend on wells but Arcosanti has the additional stewardship of a recharge reservoir. All three sites also provide adequate housing. They each have their own advantages. Greater World has the most private and secure housing but they are not readily available to new community members. Twin Oaks has the most available housing but does not have the customization of the others. Arcosanti has the greatest variety in housing but the selection of it is not up to the community member in question. There is no clearly superior provider of housing. Transportation is best provided by Twin Oaks. Twin Oaks supplies bicycles to community members to get around the site they provide regular shuttle services to nearby towns and cities and also provide vehicles for car share. Arcosanti is visited by an airport shuttle and is designed for walkability. Greater World has no motorized transportation or pedestrian infrastructure. All three sites have some connection with employment; however, Greater World is the only one that is not directly linked. Arcosanti has more traditional work structures and pays an actual wage. Twin Oaks has more flexibility and options for work, but does not pay a significant wage or salary. Arcosanti is therefore the superior employment provider. All three supply some kind of education or childcare, though only narrowly. Assessing the quality of education and care was beyond the scope of this paper. However, Greater World provides supplemental homeschooling lessons, and Arcosanti provides young childcare, but Twin Oaks provides both of those so was therefore chosen as the superior education provider.

As for entertainment, Greater World offers no entertainment onsite. Twin Oaks is enthusiastic about the home-grown entertainment and annual events it provides. Arcosanti, however, provides curated monthly events in a specially designed space so it has been chosen as the superior entertainment provider. The non-necessity elements of the matrix included in the superiority index are ownership scheme and affordability, found at the bottom of the matrix. Climate and regional politics are informative but not within the control of the community. Controversies are simply too difficult to objectively analyze. As for affordability, Twin Oaks is the clear winner. There are zero costs or expenses associated with living at Twin Oaks. Arcosanti is the next most affordable option by providing enough in way of benefits and income to allow for a moderate lifestyle. Living in Greater World is not particularly expensive, but requires an individual to have enough money to buy a house. The ownership scheme of Greater World is also the least favorable; each home is individually owned meaning that there is no legal structure tying the community together. Arcosanti has a fair framework, with a nonprofit organization owning the entire town, but it provides less security for the citizens. Twin Oaks has the best ownership scheme sense each member has equal ownership over and stake in the community as a whole.

Key Most Moderately Least Successful successful Successful

Figure 19: Completed superiority matrix of Twin Oaks, Arcosanti, and Greater World. The table above is a representation of the complete matrix. Green represents the best ability to satisfactorily meet the needs of the citizens. Orange represents the poorest ability to meet the needs of the citizens. Yellow represents a comparatively moderate ability to meet the needs of the citizens. Please note that the colors do not indicate whether a community has done poorly or well in the criteria, but only better or worse than the comparative cases. In both the pure necessity portion of the matrix, and the complete matrix (including the other considerations), Twin Oaks has emerged as the superiorly complete community.

Replicability

Twin Oaks excels in self-sufficiency in large part due to its radicalism. However, this radicalism detracts from its ability to be replicated to a scale of critical mass. In theory

57 communities very similar to Twin Oaks could be created in multitude, particularly near a source of lumber, but it is unreasonable to think that there would be enough adopters to create a true cultural shift. Twin Oaks definitely could and perhaps should be replicated in other states and near other cities to give people a nearby option for a sustainable lifestyle but it may well never compete with the metropolitan centers and the surrounding suburbs of today. Greater World in some ways is very much approachable to the average person. Interviews suggest that people working for Earthship Biotecture believe that it does not take a particular kind of person to live in an earthship because they do not need to give up any of the comforts one would find in an average suburban home. At present, Earthship Biotecture is a relatively small operation incapable of designing and developing American Suburbia. However, the organization hosts workshops and internships where they teach their techniques and to this day have interested parties eager to learn and workshop the method of building an Earthship. Arcosanti, ever the moderate, also has some chance at replicability. The town is beautifully designed, has modern sensibilities, and would feed well into today's economic system. Any given individual that is truly dedicated to or inspired by their place of work, would be a potential resident of a replication of Arcosanti.

Applicability and Limitations

Finally, there is need to express the limitations of the study. While the three case studies are significantly different and they have been supplemented by research on other communities, this is not in any way an exhaustive list of types of ecovillages, intentional communities, or societies attempting some level of self-sufficiency. Further, there are limitations to the way communities are compared. The limitations of quantitative data comparisons were discussed previously, but it is also important to articulate the challenges of qualitative analysis. The data in the case studies were self-reported and the reality of report-bias needs be mentioned. Each member of the community has some stake in its well-being and further, given the nature of the communities, has an ideological affiliation with their community. It is not only possible, but likely that the interview subjects reported the state of their community in a somewhat better than usual light. Qualitative data is also less immune to the biases of the researcher. The researcher has no conflicts of interest on the subject, but admits that any given person’s analysis of superiority in the matrix criteria could be significantly different from their own, even given the same information.

Even withholding the particular challenges of this project, sustainability is a difficult subject to say anything definitive about. The idea that there are three pillars to sustainability- environmental, economic, and social is widely used, but is only a theoretical framework. Today greenwashing is causing people to revisit what they consider to be environmental, ecological, or sustainable. The fact of the matter is, sustainability cannot be truly considered with an outsider's perspective because the concepts and frameworks the encompass it are still being defined and redefined. The researcher’s hope is that this paper may serve some use in understanding the current landscape of sustainability in community planning.

Appendix: Austin Area Sustainability Indicators

(Bixler, 2018)

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