With a population of 10,000 persons living on 50 hectares of land, there is a definite need both to enable people to get along and to operate certain services that benefit the community good. Known as governance and administration, this article explores how this can be done within the legal framework of the country, without becoming bureaucratic or unfair.
Mainstream
The village has no political, ideological or religious affiliations.
In as much as possible, it looks in a pragmatic way to what has proven to work best in the past and to implement this benefiting from new technology and knowledge in a way that gets the job done best.
The parallel village is not an experimental exercise in utopia, as are many intentional communities. It is not socialistic, communistic or new-age-istic, to coin a word for some of the more contemporary experiments of ways to get people to live peacefully in close proximity to each other as good neighbours. People will own private property. The village accepts the utility of market forces, especially those of a strongly-defended local economy, and the village takes no position on how much wealth a person may amass. It seeks to avoid having poor people by lowering the cost of living and focusing on the fundamentals of wealth creation, so all can afford to live comfortably. It does this through smart development of markets, as in using collective purchasing power, and by eliminating the need to drive a car or use as much energy to heat and cool buildings. It is not an eco-village, commune, ashram, kibbutz, nor on the other end of the spectrum an exclusive, gated community with guards. The village gate is about welcome and transition, not defence. The village walls are to keep predatory pets, wandering young children and confused elders inside the village, and to make a clear statement that once built, the village shall not sprawl.
The parallel village seeks to be a normal place of habitat in which the demographic spectrum of people presently living in New Zealand will feel comfortable calling the village home.
Governance
10,000 people living on 50 hectares is known as medium density housing, one person per 50 m². While architecture and design will specifically focus on balancing public and private to enable people to get along, in the real world people also need rules and enforcement. Some of this is better managed at a community level rather than solely relying on the state and the surrounding regional government; hence the need for good governance at the community level. In addition, some public-good services are better run by an organisation owned by the people who live there rather than rely on the private sector which may place too heavy a bias toward pecuniary interest over the common good. A community of 10,000 living in close proximity needs its own governance, its own non-profit services and community owned profit-making ventures.
Democracy - rule of the people, tends to work best when people know their leaders, when they encounter those leaders in the street, so that governance is personal. Governance also works best when the leaders see the effects of their decisions while going about their day-to-day life. For this reason (and others), the population target is capped at 10,000 people, and the point of the village wall and greenbelt is to say that once it is built, it will neither expand nor sprawl.
Checks and Balances proves to be the most effective way to achieve good governance. When one distributes power and authority among different people who have different interests, the outcome generally proves to be more favourable.
Unless a state or national government provides a charter for parallel villages, the best way to accomplish good governance and administration is through the use of contract law. One forms a corporation that owns all the land in a single title, and one becomes a voting shareholder when one purchases the right to build on the land. Villagers will own their home and workplace, but lease the underlying land from the Village Corporation in which they are a shareholder.
Typical corporations have a two-part system: governance and administration and when things go wrong the board appoints a quasi-judicial committee to resolve matters. This tends to lack an appropriate level of separation between those who make the rules and those who decide if they have been broken (and what penalty should be assessed). Better is a three-part system where the judicial functions are formal and separated with a hearings panel, prosecutor and (sometimes) ombudsman. We favour the latter, and this can easily be established under corporate law. In the village case, this shall be established in a formal document, perhaps called the Village Charter, that will underlie all deeds and titles, therefore binding all who wish to live in the village.
Typical three-part governance
Policies and rules: The villagers - adult residents elect leaders to a Village board of directors. The directors will make rules, policies and will speak by resolution. While there will be regular elections, because each building will have a computer terminal linked to the village Intranet, the villagers may also have the right of referendum and recall. With everyone linked in to the village computer, direct democracy becomes administratively easy.Executive: The villagers will also elect a CEO, a paid, full-time position who runs the village corporation. The corporation may have two subsidiaries, one for-profit and the other non-profit. For example, sewage handling is traditionally a non-profit service where the users pay to have their sewage treated and then disposed of. However, recent science finds that sewage can become a profit centre, where it is used to produce energy products or its nutrients used in certain forms of agriculture (noting however that some of the heavy metals and pharmaceuticals found in sewage restrict appropriate applications). The CEO will probably oversee such ventures as the motorpool car rental, that may be run as a co-op, the freight depot local delivery system, the food buying cooperative, the wholesale purchasing system (to specify low-waste packaging in bulk purchase contracts as well as lower the cost of living), the electronic local-content Eft-Pos system and other comparable ventures. The CEO will oversee non-profit services such as street maintenance, public utilities and fiscal management of village affairs.
Judicial: The villagers will elect legally trained people to form a village hearings panel. The villagers will also elect a legally trained part-time position of village prosecutor and village ombudsman. The prosecutor will represent the collective village against the individual. The ombudsman will represent the individual against the collective village. The hearings panel will hear two types of cases: violation of village rules (as made by the village board) and breach of the underlying deeds or titles to property, most notably someone buying a subsidised, parallel market home when they are not qualified to do so. The prosecutor will bring the charges, and as much as possible, the case will adhere to the legal framework as used in New Zealand. The villager may defend themselves, use a private lawyer, or in some cases the ombudsman will choose to defend the villager. The underlying Village Charter intends to provide swift justice, so that decisions once made do not then get lost in the larger court systems.
