Making a Village: The Process of Community Design with an Agricultural and Sustainable Focus

By: Zoe Lieb '13

Advising Faculty: Jeffrey Cole

The United States is faced with decomposing industrial areas, enlarged bedroom communities and a population with little control over or understanding of its own sustenance. This project presents a model sustainable village based on guiding principles and best practices of community design, alternative agriculture and building, ecology, existing intentional communities, ongoing experimentation with plant varieties, and participant-observation in a Danish eco-village. The model addresses the community building and linking needs of humans, effective and experimental technological solutions to water, waste, and heating needs, and practical and economical approaches to valuing land and food production with an emphasis on permaculture. As the unfriendly food system we know today deteriorates, or leaves more people out of the equation, community design, responsible and innovative applications of technology, and redefinitions of agriculture are invaluable to re-imagining this human landscape. (Lieb received a Connecticut College ConnSSHARP grant (Connecticut College Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts Research Program offering summer research stipends in the humanities and social sciences) for this project and presented the study results as a poster at a national conference on food and agriculture issues, in June, 2013.)

Related Fields: Anthropology