Villages

1. Describe the actual community to which you belong. In what areas is your community self-reliant (fuel, food, building materials, health, education, employment)? What functions and resources must be imported into your community? Suggest ways to make your community more self-reliant.
We live on a cul-de-sac on the Whitehawk Estate, situated on the eastern edge of the city of Brighton and Hove. The community consists of approximately 1400 houses and is built on Whitehawk Camp which is believed to be a Neolithic camp that was inhabited approximately 2700 B.C. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehawk) The community is not really self-reliant in any way. The provision of healthcare, schooling is through local and national public sector bodies such as the Local Education Authority and the National Health Service. The provision of utilities is from one of a few large corporations (like SSE, Southern Water, NPower, EDF etc), no fuel or water supply is from the community. What the community does have a plethora of and explains why we chose our site for the permaculture project, are allotments. These are unfortunately not organised along collective lines (except The Food Project) and are simply managed as individual plots.

Sadly ALL functions and resources are imported into the community, which is not unlike pretty much every other community in Brighton and Hove, and a majority of communities in the wider UK.

We could wax-lyrical about the need for x resource or y resource in order to make the community more self-reliant, the single biggest factor affecting this is modern-man(woman) isolation from their neighbours. Of the 1400 abodes in Whitehawk it is questionable that any are run on a collective basis, sharing shopping trips, ride-sharing, home-schooling, or simply pooling the communities resources! But this is not untypical of UK communities. But this these reasons and a host more, this is why we have chosen to find alternative place to live. Our NEXT project is to turn a 15-acre plot of mixed land, in rural Basse Normandie into a self-reliant, sustainable, community-friendly, permaculture-sympathetic place.