The+Modern+Village

The Modern Village is based on the premise that the majority of individual needs are __best__ met by a community using local resources. Modern knowledge and technology enable the local production of the majority of individual needs at the community level with local or recycled materials. Modern villages are resilient because they maintain the ability to be self-sufficient (individual resilience); they build networks to manage the resources of their local watershed (ecological resilience) and they develop strong cohesive relationships within the community (social resilience).

The modern village as the foundation of sustainable civilisation: The foundation of civilisation is its ability to protect individuals from famine, plague, war and injustice. Modern villages provide a stable base on which to build complex systems of supply and expansion and secure protection from retraction and disruption of supply. If things crap out, modern villages are set up to sustain their community with food, shelter, health care and education until things picks up again; or not, in which case, villages maintain the knowledge and skills to build up again. Modern villages are designed to be sustainable - efficient users and producers of resources; villages are held responsible for the natural resources of their surrounding environment through government-accountable environmental funding; villages are held responsible for the health and education of their residents through government-accountable funding.

I want to write this so anyone can understand it, but it's a chicken and egg situation - it's hard to imagine a chicken from an egg if you've never seen one before.

The nearest I've found in existence is Playcentre which is pretty close - the modern village is like full-time Playcentre with parenting treated as gainful employment, with sick leave and annual holidays.

The modern village provides an environment - physical, social, and educational - that deliberately provides for the development of resilient people. Premise: Resilience is principally provided by responsive, reciprocal relationships in a rich environment (as per Te Whariki and Playcentre) in the early years - as a child develops a sense of trust in the world to act as a foundation for his/her world ([|Erikson's Stages of development)]. Continuity of care is also essential so a stable population enabling continuing relationships is a requirement for a modern village. Pareto's principle suggests that 80% of the village population should be stable over the 25 years of a child's development to adulthood.

Health - prevention is better than cure.

While scientists usually focus on infant-parent relationships, broad studies have shown that [|it really does take a village]. According to research presented in the journal Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development in 1995, children seem to do best when they have at least three adults who consistently send the message: Hey kid, I got you. Researchers such as Sarah Hrdy, author of Mothers and Others (Belknap, 2009), theorize that spending time with non-parental caregivers – a grandparent, a daycare teacher, a family friend, a doting aunt – helps infants learn to read different facial expressions and expand their ability to take the perspectives of others. Babies use adult mental processes for deciphering others' emotions by the time they are seven months old, [|research suggests].

Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of the [|University]  [|of]  California, Davis, maintains that this pair-bonded scenario is old-fashioned and probably biased by what Western culture thinks is "right." Instead, Hrdy thinks, there are other, even better, ways to bring up babies. In her book "Mother Nature" (Ballantine Books, 2000), Hrdy claims that humans are really a cooperative breeding species, meaning that in the ancient and not so ancient past, groups of people took care of kids. Only recently has parenting been relegated to only Mom and Dad. But in modern times, there really wasn't any need for that male-female bond.

It may have been that groups of sisters were the best caretakers. They share genes in common, and therefore would be compelled to take good care of their nieces and nephews. [|Grandparents] would also be likely candidates since they should be very interested in making sure their grandchildren, with whom they share so many genes, make it to sexual maturity.

Beyond Western culture where we favor idea of a monogamous pair-bond as the ideal caretakers of children, there's lots of evidence that even today cooperative breeding is still around. In many cultures, children are brought up by extended families that live together or across the compound. Studies of non-Western cultures also show that older siblings are also routinely involved in baby and child care. Even in Western culture today, daycare is a form of cooperative breeding even if those caring for our kids are not relatives but employees. It's still communal care of children.

If Hrdy is correct and our species has a long history of cooperative breeding, then there is no real reason for a lasting pair-bond between adults. In fact, many romantic bonds don’t last long enough to insure that a child will make it to adulthood maturity, let alone past grammar school. One look at the divorce rate and it's clear that even if our species has a hint of pair-bondedness in us, it's obviously ebbing away. []