Greater Community Planning🌎🌍🌏Local-Regional Scales: Looking ahead to 2023 - Bringing together many strands of Community Motive for our Local Planet

Greetings All –

In 2020, Sustainability: Cooperation Industry Earth 2300 – “Think local planet, act regionally,” was published as Chapter 25 of The Elgar Companion to Geography, Transdisciplinarity and Sustainability. The research for this led me to focus on the Technosphere as that which Humanity must manage.

In 2011, the notion of "community motive" came to the fore and pushed my thinking. These slides summarize it.

April 9, 2023 will be the 20th Anniversary of the Small World Geocode, original mind map shown here.

Regional Community Development News was begun November 11, 2003 to work toward a use case for "Regional Communities of Communities" and the geocode. The e-newsletter was published through November 5, 2012, with copies maintained on this blog.

Work since then is reflected by this list of major presentation titles, dates and events since 2013. There are videos of some presentations at icRegions YouTube.

A Solution to the OMB recognized Geographic Need: “a territorially exhaustive classification that covers all of the United States and Puerto Rico,” State Determined Sub-State Districts - Applied Geography Conference 2022 – Virtual - October 22, 2022

“Standard Sub-State District National Dataset Design and Implementation Proposal for Area Development” - Applied Geography Conference – Virtual - October 15, 2021

“Unaffordable: American 1950s Cold War Population Dispersion produced U.S. Highway Urbanism; Drive until you qualify" - American Association of Geographers - Annual Meeting - Virtual - April 9, 2021

“Regional Infrastructure USA ~ The Defined Sub-State District Advantage: 1968 Virginia Area Development Act; Local & Regional Planning For Economic Development; & Northern Virginia – Only Region In Amazon’s Top 20 Cities” - Regional Studies Association, North American Conference 2019 McGill University, September 26, 2019, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

“American City-building Interrupted: 1950s Cold War Population Dispersion begets #FearOfDensity, Suburban Sprawl and the Regionalization of Everything" American Association of Geographers - Annual Meeting April 6, 2019, Washington, D.C.

“Whole Earth Nations Technosphere Sustainability Challenge & Worldwide City-Regions Spiritual Community Motive Response” - Parliament of World Religions – November 4, 2018 – Toronto, Canada

“The Whole Earth Technosphere Sustainability Challenge and Worldwide City-Regions Network Response: An Urban Planet Theory” - Regional Studies Association – June 5, 2018 – Lugano, Switzerland

“2020 Census Challenge: A Functional Sub-State District/Regional Council Dataset for Research, Policy and Programming in the U.S.” – Applied Geography Conference – November 10, 2017

“Right to the City-Regions-Earth Everyone, Everywhere wants the Benefits of Civilization's Built-environment this is the Challenge of Regional Development” – Regional Studies Association – June 6, 2017

“Be a City, Serve a Region: A Built-environment Scaled Network Vision for City-Region-Local Planet Earth” – Regional Studies Association – June 16, 2016

“Cooperation Industry Earth: “Think Local Planet, Act Regionally!” Inclusive Future- oriented Meme-Paradigms to integrate Geographic Knowledge to inform Community Motive and Profit Motive in achieving Sustainability through Human Unity and Cooperation – American Association of Geographers – April 1, 2016

“The Cooperation Industry – ‘Think Local Planet, Act Regionally:’ Inclusive Future-oriented Meme-Paradigms for Integrating Community Motive and Profit Motive to Serve Greater Community Spirituality Goals of Worldwide Human Unity and Cooperation”- World Parliament of Religions – October 2015

“Cooperation Industry: A Vision and Branding for Regional Studies as the Integrative Discipline” – Regional Studies Association – May 2015

“The Region as Place: Regional Geographic Naming as a Strategy to Foster a Sense of Greater Community Identity and Enable Local Government Cooperation” – American Association of Geographers – April 2015

“The Regional Cooperation Challenge: Codified Substate political sovereignties require enabling legislation for effective multi-jurisdictional program implementation – The Virginia Experience” – Regional Studies Association – December 2013

“Community Motive: The Untapped Identity Factor for Regional Development” – Southern Regional Science Association – April 2013

Consistent with my observation that overnight success takes at least twenty years, this is the period where there may be some progress with these ideas, as the necessities for Human civilization increase.

Feedback and questions welcome. More integration of this thinking will be provided in the months and years ahead. A Sub-Stack may be in the offing.

Please follow me on Twitter and consider connecting on LinkedIn.

Prototype for Global Coding of Political Geographies Library and Data Management – Wikipedia Example

The system is based on a geocode scheme set up for earth that focuses on established political boundaries as a basis for regional grouping of nations, states and localities. It is decimal system based to take advantage of the sort criteria for numbers in computers. It utilized the Sector Group and Region codes of the United Nations and ISO. Geographic information system technology does not solve the problem, but its tools can be used with the geocodes.

The geocode system effectively organizes Wikipedia entries as a library management and the geocodes can be used for data aggregation. This has been developed under a Creative Commons license and would benefit from a global network implementation where local users cooperatively related subnational geographic regions and component political geography.

Examples are at the links which follow:

1. Global Geocode Library Use Organizes Wikipedia Pages Geographically

2. Global Geocode Library Use Organizes U.S. State Wikipedia Pages Geographically

3. Global Geocode Library Organizes U.S. Sub-state and Multi-state Region Wikipedia Pages Geographically

4. Why focus on COGs/Regional Councils in the U.S.? "the substate district is essentially an administrative tool of states"

Contact: Tom Christoffel

Community Motive – Three Thoughts by Tom Christoffel, FeRSA, 3/16/09-revised 9/29/09; 9/26/11

Based on my experience as a regional planner and agency director, 1973 -2008, and in recognition of emerging "regional communities," I developed three thoughts about community that relate to the challenge of working across-boundaries as greater or regional communities. The thoughts/theses apply for communities at the scale of bonding or bridging social capital as defined by Robert D. Putnam, which is alternately local or regional. (link below)

As of 2011, considering the global financial crisis brought about by pursuit of the "profit motive," it struck me that this has come to dominate modern life. This is a relatively new invention of civilization and wasn't a concern for most of the time that homo sapiens has been on the planet.

The three thoughts below that had emerged in my experience of working on regional cooperation now represent what I now posit as the "community motive." Concern about "profit" can emerge within an established community over time, but, to my mind the "profit motive" does not exist in the wild.

1) Community precedes cooperation.
2) Community is how life solves all problems.
3) Security is the primary purpose of community.

These three thoughts, theses if you will, are the basis of the "community motive." Following is some exposition about each one.

As I see it, security has always been the priority for humans since the plains of Africa. That's why communities first seek to establish defensible boundaries. After the basics are in place, security focus shifts to the social and economic. Boundaries work like the membrane in the osmosis experiment most of us have seen in a science class. The membrane is a filter that lets the good things pass through, but keeps unwanted things out. (Osmosis -YouTube - 45 sec.)

The evolved political boundaries of today have consequence. The rules change when you cross them. Though marked on the ground and fortified in some instances, they are conceptual, as pictured above, with Universe Man. The boundary divides the space between local, that within, and regional, everything outside, as labeled in the second panel. The third panel repeats the image within, to show, without graphic elegance, that the land on which Universe Man sits is regional at another scale, as determined by other boundaries, and another area that's local. A territory is both local and regional, depending upon the perspective.

Communities of communities, “regional communities” are greater communities organized to solve a problem, be it managing a watershed, strengthening an economic cluster or ensuring peer competition for school sports. Regional boundaries can be imposed for administrative purposes within states, but for these to be a basis for effective cooperation, a greater community sense is needed for that geography among the people. This is true for multi-state and multi-national regional communities as well. The leaders with such a vision can build a regional community by finding that which is already in place.

This is not to suggest that community is easy to build in order to solve problems. In a crisis, humans of any culture, belief or politics can quickly come together and self-organize to save themselves and others. It was the on-the- ground response to the 9/11 attacks that demonstrated to me the deep responsiveness of human community, as well as the fundamental importance of security. Community is how humans have always survived. This, I think, extends to all life forms.

The "community motive" comes into play when there is a problem to be solved. In a monetized civilization, the "profit motive" may be an incentive for some action, but most of the problems of life don't have a check at the end for their solution. They are things that must be done. Because this is the case, humanity has been able to perpetuate. ©

For more on Regional Community and Scale, see the Slideshare box below.

To learn about bridging and bonding social capital, read Chapter 1 of Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American community By Robert D. Putnam

Greater Community Planning🌎🌍🌏Local-Regional Scales

Looking ahead to 2023 - Bringing together many strands of Community Motive for our Local Planet

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"Community Motive" - What is it?

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