Building Conscious, Joyous Communities
invitation
to brainstorm, to discuss, to exchange ideas
and to share some good food, a little music and a glass of wine.

How to make it work?

Being accepted and membership of a valued community seems to be a core need in most of us. Humans not unlike other primates like to live together in harmony and cooperation. Humans love to love. Yet cohesive extended family groupings held together by long-term bonds are rare in the west. Nuclear families, single parent families and social isolation particularly in industrialised countries are widespread.

Human cooperation and living together in community has of course a long history, yet technological and industrial advances in the past 100 years have radically changed the social landscape. Our physical, social and emotional environment has changed. We are faced with new challenges.

Social structures and communities based on religious observance or authoritarian leaders have been successful from time to time yet are untenable for many non-starving, educated, free thinking and independently minded humans. As we are moving towards the post industrial area our need to have more material wealth may tend to fade in favour of better social connectedness, sharing, harmony, playful learning, kindness, cooperation and ultimately joy.

There has been many experiments in the last 100 years and particularly in the last 50 years aiming to create intentional, self reliant, harmonious, cooperative communities. There has been a lot of creativity, goodwill, intelligence and hard work invested. There is much to learn from their efforts, successes and failings.

Some of the issues for discussion:
- Bioregional and social catchment planning, land ownership and patterns of human settlements
- Social, legal, economic and ecological parameters in design
- Social ecology & design in the physical landscape
- Working with planning laws and legal frameworks
- Land tenure options, residents agreements, community management, governance & by-laws
- Design for the full human life-cycle & diverse lifestyle needs
- Practical approach to diverse settlement types and forms: co-housing, expanded houses, hamlet,
  urban & rural village design, building new & retrofitting existing communities
- Innovative options for services & technologies: household to community scale
- Facilitating participatory planning, community consultation, problem solving and participatory design
- Decision-making, conflict resolution & mediation
- Personal consciousness and inner emotional harmony

You are welcome to contact us for the date and place of our next meeting

byronevents@optusnet.com.au

+612 6684 4146