What is a Flourishing Community?

Castropignano, Campobasso province, Molise, Italy by Giuseppe Nucci for National Geographic.

What is a Flourishing Community?

First published on One of One Collective, 2020. Lightly edited.

Asking what a flourishing community looks like is more like asking what a tree looks like than asking what an iPhone looks like. Each one will be different. And yet there are characteristics you'll find in all of them. Here are six.

1. It's alive. A flourishing community is a living thing, not a product. That one shift changes how you design it: you're not manufacturing a unit; you're setting the conditions for something to grow.

2. It's unique. Copy-paste works well for machines and badly for living organisms. A tree could be a lilac, an oak, or a sequoia — and even then, each oak takes a shape unique to its soil, its weather, and the roots of the trees around it. There are as many ways to meet the criteria below as there are places and people in the world.

3. It's self-determining and adaptive. A community needs its own agency: the ability to adjust to changing circumstances and meet its needs in ways that fit that time and place. A plan that can't change isn't a plan for a living thing.

4. It's designed to cultivate flourishing. On purpose. You can reverse-engineer a place from the outcomes you want for the people in it — connection, health, meaning, wholeness — instead of from the parking count.

5. It's full of nature. This could be part of the point above, but it's worth its own line. Researchers in Japan, China, and South Korea have documented the restorative effects of time in forests on physical and emotional health — "forest bathing" — with evergreen forests in particular boosting immune function. In the West, healing gardens in hospitals have been shown to speed patient recovery, and the most effective ones run about 7:3 green to hardscape. [Roger Ulrich / Clare Cooper Marcus's healing garden research.] If we know this about a garden, why not scale it up to a town? More plants in cities also raise property values, improve air and water quality, lower noise, and moderate temperature.

6. It's whole. Flourishing, healing, and peace all mean, more or less, wholeness. (Trauma is fracture and separation.) So a flourishing community has to function as a whole. That doesn't mean self-sufficient — living things never are; they depend on exchange with everything around them. It means the parts add up to one thing.

So what makes something whole? Think about what makes a human whole and healthy. Now zoom in: what makes a single cell whole and healthy? Wholes nest inside each other, and the same rules show up at every scale. Which gives us a set of principles for the scale we're interested in — a community of humans.

Five principles of a whole community

A permeable boundary. Cell walls, skin. Every healthy whole has a point where it ends, and something else begins. We've gotten so used to sprawl that this is easy to miss — but a place with no edge isn't a place. The boundary also has to be permeable: able to breathe and exchange with what's around it. It's a Goldilocks problem. Too much boundary and you can't eat or breathe; socially, solitary confinement is one of the worst things we do to people. Too little, and you ooze all over the sofa. (A cell that ignores the boundaries of the cells around it is called cancer.) So: good, permeable boundaries, and respect for the boundaries of others, including non-humans.

A nucleus. Below, on the left, a neighborhood laid out by typical current zoning. On the right, the same land with the same number of homes, plus a small commercial center and a real greenbelt.

The version with a center gets you better walkability, more open space for growing food, wildlife, and views, cheaper utilities and infrastructure (less pipe and pavement per home), and a stronger sense of community.

Human scale. In a body, everything is sized to work in that body. In a community, that means designing so a person can walk to their regular daily needs in about five minutes without getting in a car. People argue about whether the pedestrian shed should be five, ten, or fifteen minutes; since most of us are used to driving, five feels like the realistic place to start. Another lovely example of human scale: build no more than four stories, because that's roughly the height at which someone on the street can still recognize and call up to someone on the top balcony. [Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, pattern 21, "Four-Story Limit"] Guidelines like these aren't aesthetic preferences. They're how a place takes care of the bodies in it.

Whole and diverse. Most current zoning demands the opposite: fractured, single-use places that require a car for everything. Put all the industry in one place, all the housing in another, all the parks in a third, and you get fragments instead of a community. Mixed-use, polycentric zoning lets us make smaller, whole places. And just as we segregate by use, we segregate by race and class. A whole community has the whole pie: in a place with 250 homes, an appropriate mix of sizes and prices to house something like the actual range of people in the region, not one slice of it.

Organic, non-toxic. Everything in a healthy body is good for that body. A flourishing community builds the same way. Use minimally processed, natural, local materials wherever possible — the way whole foods are better for us than ultra-processed ones. The earth can't metabolize most of what we build with today; construction and demolition debris is one of the largest waste streams we produce. Natural materials also use less energy to make and move, give a place authentic local character, and, it turns out, make us calmer. And take care with air, water, and soil: buildings and systems that don't pollute the people inside them or the life around them.

In short

A flourishing community is alive, unique, self-determining, designed to cultivate flourishing, full of nature, and whole. And it's whole the way a cell or a body is whole: a permeable boundary, a nucleus, human scale, diversity, and materials and systems that don't poison it. Mostly green.

There's much more than this. But it's the direction.