In recent weeks  H.R. 875 (Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009) has occasioned the expression of a considerable amount of alarm on the Internet.  The bill, it is variously said, will outlaw organic farming, criminalize seed banks, and do to community-supported agriculture what the CPSIA (Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act) does to small apparel and toy manufacturers.  It will impose costly inspection and certification regimes on even the smallest producers.  It was introduced by Rosa Delauro, whose husband is supposedly a Monsanto employee, and is an attempt to use the regulatory state to suppress competition from small-scale organic producers.

On closer inspection, it’s probably not anywhere near the bogeyman it’s being made out to be.  Tom Philpot at The Gristmill, who is a pretty reliable source on issues involving collusion between the USDA and big agribusiness, dismisses it as a tempest in a teapot.  Most of the worst alleged features of the bill, as attributed to it by the wild surmises of the blogosphere, simply aren’t found in the bill itself.  Even the bit about Delauro’s husband and his ties to Monsanto, it turns out, is a wild exaggeration.

But we probably dodged a bullet, in any case.  If most of the conspiracy theorizing is unfounded in this particular instance, we still have every reason to be suspicious until proven wrong, and to remain vigilant against legislation that really does such things.  The danger that any federal safety regime for agriculture will embody such features is very real.

The simple fact of the matter is that most food safety regulations, in classic Baptists-and-Bootleggers fashion, are written by the big producers and have the primary effect of imposing minimum overhead costs on small producers.

The primary offenders in the food contamination scares of recent years have been large-scale agribusiness operations and large-scale food processors, whether in California or in China.  The spinach e. coli deaths associated with “organic farming,” for example, actually occurred at a nominally organic factory farming operation producing for Earthbound Farms, where crops were contaminated by fecal runoff from the grain-fed cattle at yet another factory farming operation nearby.

But if the USDA ever takes large-scale regulatory action to address the problem, you can be sure it will be a costly and paperwork-intensive inspection regime that the factory farms actually causing the problem can easily absorb, but that will destroy small, community-based market gardeners who weren’t killing anybody in the first place.

That’s exactly what happened with the above-mentioned CPSIA, in a different industry. In response to scares of phthalate and lead contamination in toys and clothing imported from China, some consumers started buying handmade toys and clothing produced locally in people’s homes, in order to have a better sense of where the stuff they purchased actually came from.   People attempted to take back control of their lives from distant and unaccountable corporations, by turning instead to relocalized economies outside the corporate supply chains.

But what did Congress do to address the lead and phthalate scares?  It imposed a costly testing regime whose primary effect could well be to drive the small-scale local producers of handmade toys out of business.  The giant transnational corporations that farm toy and apparel manufacturing out to sweatshops in China, of course, can easily absorb the cost of mandated testing and paperwork.

As described by Eric Husman, of GrimReader blog, the small apparel industry works like this:  First, you develop a couple dozen or so different designs.  Then you see which ones sell, and produce them on a just-in-time basis as orders come in.  This a business model that can be followed even by someone operating out of their own home with a few sewing machines. Because there’s almost no initial capital outlay or overhead, there’s also no pressure to achieve some minimum level of business to amortize the overhead cost.  Consequently, there’s no risk involved in taking it up as a moonlight operation to supplement wage income and then gradually replace wage labor with self-employment a few hours at a time.

The CPSIA, by mandating test costing hundreds or thousands of dollars for every separate product line, essentially criminalized this model of production.  It added enormous levels of overhead, which could only be paid for by large-batch production to spread the cost over a large number of units.  In other words, if you can’t afford the initial startup capital to do it full time and on a large scale, you can’t do it at all.

That’s the central function of almost all safety regulation:  to impose mandatory minimum levels of overhead on small producers.

Consider all the forms of production that are amenable to small-scale production in the home, using only the spare capacity of ordinary household capital equipment that most of us own anyway, if only government-imposed entry barriers were removed.  Roderick Long, in a November article at Cato Unbound, mentioned microbakeries using ordinary kitchen ovens, unlicensed cab services with only a car and a cell phone, cooperative daycare arrangements in which parents in a neighborhood paid someone to care for children out of their home, home-based beauticians with only a chair and sink and a basic set of cutting and styling tools, etc.

Because of mandated overhead, most of society’s economic functions are carried out through the model of organization Paul Goodman described in People or Personnel:  high-overhead, with bureaucratically defined procedural rules, job descriptions, prestige salaries, rents on artificial property rights, management featherbedding, and all the rest of it.  The cost of paperwork and bureaucratic rulemaking, in many cases, is the inevitable result of the fact that people lacking any intrinsic motivation or control over their own work can’t be trusted to use their own judgment.

Our society is run by an interlocking directorate of enormous bureaucratic organiations:   corporations, government agencies, universities and charitable foundations.

As a result, most forms of production are characterized, in Goodman’s words, by “the need for amounts of capital out of all proportion to the nature  of the enterprise.”  “Everywhere one turns, … there seems to be a markup of 300 and 400 per cent, to do anything or make anything.”

Their overhead costs are compounded, in addition to the initially mandated capital outlays themselves, by their bureaucratic style:  the  layers of bureaucratic overhead and administrative costs associated with such organizations.  Compare the total charge for a service call by a plumber,  most of which goes to office rent and clerical staff, profit and interest on debt, utilities, etc., to the portion that actually goes to the plumber.   A skilled tradesman’s wage is typically about 40% of the cost of a service call.  When we do business with each other indirectly through bureaucratic organizations, we pay a 150% markup over what we’d have paid to one another directly (for example, a plumber working through a LETS system, simply taking calls on his phone and buying materials at the local hardware store).

The effect of criminalizing such low-overhead production, Paul Goodman said, is to erect barriers to transforming one’s labor directly into subsistence,  and to render comfortable poverty impossible.   We often hear that the per capita GDP in Italy or Ireland is a fraction that of the U.S., and yet the actual quality of life doesn’t seem to be anywhere near that small a fraction of our own.  The reason is that much of our increased GDP results, not from a proportionate increase in the value of the goods and services we consume, but from the increased ratio of overhead cost to the value of what we consume.

Suppose we decided we could meet our need for bread by baking it in our own ovens, or producing some other good in the household to exchange with a neighbor’s bread, with a fraction of the hours of wage labor required to buy it.   Suppose we decided that we could meet a major part of our needs through such informal and household production, and non-monetized exchange through a neighborhood or community barter network.  The portion of GDP resulting from that wage labor and the purchase of those store goods would simply disappear.  But our quality of life would be improved.

Of course it would cause a lot of hand-wringing among econometrists.  In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, an English political economist dismissed as “of no importance” a village which met most of its needs internally rather than by participating in the money economy.  “What, sir,” thundered Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  “Are seven hundred Christian souls of no importance?”

In the case of large scale mass production, the modest unit cost savings from economies of large-scale production are easily offset by all the mountains of overhead, open and hidden, required by the push-distribution system.  Sloanist manufacturing, as described by William Waddell and Norman Bodek in The Rebirth of American Industry, requires enormous buffer stocks of goods in process, and enormous inventories finished goods produced without regard to orders, in order to keep the machines running at capacity and spread out unit costs over the larget possible output.  To keep the wheels turning also requires expensive mass-marketing, brand-name markup of generic commodities that previously sold for 75% less, enormous consumer debt, and planned obsolescence .

Ralph Borsodi described the effort to market the output industry was capable of producing at full capacity as the equivalent of making water run uphill.  His book The Distribution Age was a study of this paradox:   modest decreases in unit production cost, more than offset by an explosion in the cost of distribution and high-pressure marketing.

Compare the mountains of crystallized labor and resources embodied in those inventories, and in the landfills full of discarded goods that could have been repaired for a tiny fraction of the cost of replacement, to the alleged cost savings from running the “more efficient” specialized machinery 24/7.

We live in an age of cost-plus markup and mandated minimum overhead, buying stuff from public and corporate bureaucracies for several times what they would cost to produce either in local manufacturing organized on a lean basis or in the informal and household economy.  The system adds Rube Goldberg steps between effort and consumption, much like adding all sorts of baffles and eddies and reservoirs, and twists and turns, to a plumbing system.  On average we force in forty hours worth of effort into one end of the system, and get a trickle of consumption goods out the other end that could probably be produced in sixteen hours if production were organized rationally without the added overhead cost and subsidized waste.

Cap in Hand, U.S. Postmaster General John Potter has gone to Congress and joined the long line of those looking for bailouts at taxpayer expense.  Citing a dramatic slump in business due to a waning economy, increased overhead and pension benefit costs, Potter has said that the Post Office will go entirely broke by 2010 unless it receives an infusion from the Treasury, and raises postal rates across the board (already, rates are slated to increase again in May, 2009).  In turn, Potter has also expressed his desire to see Saturday mail delivery eliminated, the closure of smaller rural post offices, and encourages long-time postal employees to accept early retirement deals.  If Congress approves such a bailout plan, it will be only the second time in American history that Congress has used tax revenues to do so.  The first time was in 1978 in the midst of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

This is all in the name of maintaining a government monopoly.  There is not a shred of justification for this otherwise.  It can’t even be successfully argued that this is in the name of fulfilling a constitutional duty.  The Constitution of the United States only authorizes Congress to “establish Post Offices and Post roads.”  Note that later in the same section it lists “To provide and maintain a Navy,” as a constitutional obligation of Congress (emphasis mine).  Clearly, there was no Original Intent to establish permanent governmental control over mail delivery.

All of this, however, is entirely beside the point.  No socialist monopoly (which is what all government is, foundationally) can compete with private enterprise.  Note how Potter is asking for taxpayers’ forcibly extracted money, while simultaneously calling for reductions in available services.  Does anyone seriously think that, the overall state of the economy notwithstanding, firms such as Federal Express, UPS, DHL, US Express and others are going to even suggest doing the same?  They will continue competing for each others’ business in the voluntary free marketplace, each attempting to provide the best and widest array of services at the least expense.  This is how capitalism does and is supposed to work.

It’s time Americans stopped tolerating this kind of outrageous abuse and economic coralling at the hands of government.  It’s not time for more bailouts, higher postage rates, and less efficient services.  It is time to remove government from the business of mail delivery altogether.

And next, we need to think very strongly about removing government altogether.

There are all too many people in American politics whose real concern, concealed behind all the “free market” rhetoric, is not so much “statism” per se as statism that benefits the wrong  class of people.  A good example:  it was quite amusing to hear some Republicans, during yesterday’s Congressional hearings on the AIG bonuses, wringing their hands over the prospect of “interfering with the management of private business” and “altering the terms of contracts.”  Last night Rachel Maddow ran clips of some of the very same people, last December, crowing about how they were forcing the UAW to renegotiate it’s contract and accept lower wages in return for bailout loans to the auto industry.

Another example:  I don’t advocate Social Credit or greenbackism, but I don’t understand the reasoning of those who object to either as an increase in statism over the present system.

By way of background, Social Credit is a proposal to remedy corporate capitalism’s chronic tendency toward overinvestment and overproduction by periodically depositing a sum of interest-free new money, equivalent in aggregate to the demand shortfall, in the citizenry’s bank accounts.   Greenbackism is a proposal that countercyclical deficit spending, rather than being financed by interest-bearing debt in the form of government bonds, should simply take the form of directly spending money into existence by the Treasury.

It seems to me the sticking point, if there is one, should be at the idea of government as regulator of the money supply by creating fiat money, or of deficit spending to meet demand shortfalls, in the first place.  But these things are overwhelmingly accepted in principle by the mainstream public.  So the sticking point about Social Credit and greenbackism can only be the sacred principle that the fiat money must be specifically lent into existence at interest, and that deficit spending must be financed by government bonds.

The problem is not the function itself, but only carrying it out in a way that doesn’t enable a class of coupon-clippers to skim the cream off the top.

It also seems to me, on the other hand, that if these basic functions are accepted in principle, it makes it more statist–not less–to compound the injury by doing it through private accomplices, and empowering them to charge interest for the function, rather than simply doing so directly.

It’s just another instance of a broader phenomenon, what the Libertarian Alliance’s Sean Gabb calls “economic fascism.”  Economic fascism is his term for the phony regime of “privatization” advocated by such organizations as the Adam Smith Institute.  It doesn’t get government out of the business of performing particular functions.  It just delegates the function to nominally “private” corporations that perform the function with public money, with government protection from free market competition, and with a guaranteed profit for performing the function (on the regulated utility’s “cost-plus” model).

Under this vulgar libertarian model of “free market reform,” the only thing that matters is the comparative percentages of functions which are carried out by nominally “private” and nominally “public” organizations–not the substance of things.   But it seems to me that if a corporation receives its revenue from the government, is protected from competition by the government, and is guaranteed a profit by the government, it IS the government.  The only significance of the entity’s profit is to increase the overall cost of performing the function, and thus increase the total injury to the taxpayer.

And while we’re at it, let’s be honest about something.  Given the existence of a corporate economy on the present model, countercyclical government spending is absolutely essential to prevent its collapse.  Those who advocate a return to the Reaganism and Thatcherism of the ’80s, or the cowboy capitalism of the ’90s, absent high government spending, are either delusional or disingenuous.  Reagan was the biggest Keynesian of them all.

There are only two alternatives:  to eliminate the existing–statist– structural causes of overinvestment and underconsumption, or to continue adding new layers of statism to counter the chronic crisis tendencies.   Either more and more statism, or forward to anarchy.

The American corporate economy has been statist to its core since its beginnings in the late 19th century.  There wouldn’t even be a national market at all, or national corporations serving it, had it not been for the land grant railroads and other subsidies to long-distance shipping that made possible artificially large firms and market areas.  There wouldn’t be stable oligopoly markets had it not been for the cartelizing effect of patents, or the stabilizing effects of the Clayton and FTC Acts’ restrictions on price warfare.

To repeat, the system was statist from its beginnings.  There are all too many on the Right who like to refer to a mythical “free market” system that prevailed before 1932, and to pretend that the “statism” only began when government started intervening on behalf of workers and consumers.  But in fact, all the “progressive” interventions of government under the New Deal were secondary, aimed at ameliorating the side-effects of the prior interventions that created corporate capitalism in the first place.  Had it not been for the secondary, ameliorative interventions, corporate capitalism as we know it would have collapsed in the 1930s.

Returning to my earlier point:  if we are to have statism at all, and we are reduced to quibbling between Democrats and Republicans over what kind of statism it is to be, I make no secret of the fact that I prefer the kind of statism that weighs less heavily on my own neck.

If phony “free market” Republicans accept NLRB certification of unions in principle, and only want to quibble over the Employee Free Choice Act because it makes it easier to certify unions without harassment, intimidation and punitive firing of organizers–well, why would I, a worker, prefer a system of certification that suits the bosses’ interest?

If we’re going to talk about a genuine free market labor regime, then let’s eliminate the Wagner Act–and with it Taft-Hartley’s prohibitions on sympathy and boycott strikes, and its mandatory arbitration and cooling off periods.  Let’s eliminate the Railroad Labor Relation Act’s provisions that prevent transport workers turning local and regional disputes into general strikes.  In short, let’s eliminate all the legal prohbitions on the tactics that unions were using to win before Wagner was ever passed.

But if we’re going to have government certification of unions, let’s have a form of certification that fulfills its stated purpose–determining the intention of workers–as accurately and automatically as possible.

Likewise, if we’re going to have a welfare state, let’s eliminate the costly and intrusive welfare bureaucracies and spend the same amount of money on a guaranteed income.  If we’re going to have a regulatory state, let’s eliminate all the agencies and replace their functions with pigovian taxation of negative externalities.

My goal is the abolition of the state.  I would welcome all these things tomorrow, if I thought they were genuine steps toward the abolition of the state altogether the day after tomorrow.  They certainly wouldn’t be net increases in statism.

In my first quarterly research paper for the Center for a Stateless Society (C45SS), “Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles,” I argued that we’re almost certainly in the terminal crisis of state capitalism and the Sloanist model of mass-production. Unfortunately, all the major players in American politics seem bound and determined to jump-start the Sloanist industrial system.

The “Progressives” want to do it through Keynesian aggregate demand management to get the wheels of industry running at full capacity on the old “Consensus Capitalism” model of the mid-20th century, with a few coats of greenwash slapped on.

The Palin/Santelli/Joe the Plumber contingent wants to do it by preventing the further deflation of the bubble, propping up the inflated values of housing and other assets at taxpayer expense, piling up more money in the hands of the same plutocrats and CEOs whose income mushroomed over the past twenty years, and encouraging “investment” to “create jobs”–as if overinvestment and the inability of industry to dispose of its full output with the capacity it already has wasn’t the problem.

And Obama  is splitting the difference.

All the while, the real solution is to REDUCE the amount of time we spend in “jobs,” and REDUCE the astronomically high ratio of capital investment to output.  It is to cut out the unnecessary intermediate steps between effort and consumption, that result in most of the time at our “jobs” being spent running like rats in an exercise wheel just to service the overhead costs of those extra steps.  We need to reduce the unnecessary labor that goes to producing for waste or to paying rents on artificial property rights, and live better on a two- or three-day workweek.

The obvious danger of the mainstream approach is that trillions of dollars of resources otherwise available for building the successor economy will no longer be available, having already been sunk into white elephant projects to prop up the old system.

The good news is that some of the most important building blocks of the successor economy can be financed dirt cheap. Let me mention just a couple of heartening examples.

First, Open-Source Ecology’s “Factor E Farm” demo project. The project, located in the Kansas City area, is engaged in developing what it calls an “Open Village Construction Set”: an open-source toolkit of technologies that can form the nucleus of resilient local economies. The technologies are open-source and publicly available, and vernacular (cheaply reproducible from local resources). They are therefore amenable to viral or rhizomatic expansion (the way bermuda grass spreads in your garden no matter how many times you think you’ve killed it off), capable of unlimited replication using only labor, local resources (including scrap metal), and the publicly available designs.

The Open Village Construction Set includes over two dozen designs, in various stages of completion. Two of the projects have been prototyped and demonstrated. The first is a compressed earth block (CEB) press for construction using the cheapest and most universally available building material there is. The second is a small tractor (which can also be used as a prime mover for the CEB press and other machinery). A third project, also fairly well along in the development timeline, is a solar-powered steam generator, which is expected to offer electricity at a cost per watt far below existing photovoltaics (and significantly below coal).

Unfortunately, the limited funding and staff available to Factor E Farm (almost entirely crowdsourcing and volunteer labor working most of their waking hours) mean that only a few projects can be developed at a time. The others, some of them vitally important, must remain on the back burner.

The multimachine, for example, is a multiple-purpose machine tool for small-scale manufacturing. Besides being able to machine most of the parts for the other items in the Open Village Construction Set, it can also be used to make other multimachines from scrap metal! The multimachine has been prototyped and demonstrated elsewhere, but Factor E Farm so far hasn’t had the resources to give it the attention it deserves.

Factor E Farm is also developing tools and techniques for intensive raised-bed farming (including a greenhouse built using local materials and vernacular methods).

What’s amazing, as I already said, is the potential for viral or rhizomatic expansion once the technology is demonstrated. Even absent any large-scale publicity, local word of mouth in surrounding pockets of population are likely to be sufficient for the viral spread of the technologies where they exist. The coming time of troubles is apt to provide very strong selective pressure for “best practices.” Where multimachines are up and running, for example, they will likely be used to replicate themselves as fast as raw material can be acquired, to satisfy the need for replacement parts to keep appliances and machinery when the corporate supply chains break down.

The second project is something proposed only recently by Dougald Hine of Changing the World blog: “Social Media vs. the Recession.”

Looked at very simply: hundreds of thousands of people are finding or are about to find themselves with a lot more time and a lot less money than they are used to. The result is at least three sets of needs:

• practical/financial (e.g. how do I pay the rent/avoid my house being repossessed?)
• emotional/psychological (e.g. how do I face my friends? where do I get my identity from now I don’t have a job?)
• directional (e.g. what do I do with my time? how do I find work?)….

Arguably the biggest thing that has changed in countries like the UK since there was last a major recession is that most people are networked by the internet and have some experience of its potential for self-organisation…. There has never been a major surge in unemployment in a context where these ways of “organising without organisations” were available.

As my School of Everything co-founder Paul Miller has written, London’s tech scene is distinctive for the increasing focus on applying these technologies to huge social issues – rather than throwing sheep! Agility and the ability to mobilise and gather momentum quickly are characteristics of social media and online self-organisation, in ways that government, NGOs and large corporations regard with a healthy envy.

So, with that, the conversations I’ve been having keep coming back to this central question: is there a way we can constructively mobilise to respond to this situation in the days and weeks ahead?…

If the aim is to avoid this recession creating a new tranche of long-term unemployed (as happened in the 1980s), then softening the distinction between the employed and unemployed is vital. In social media, we’ve already seen considerable softening of the line between producer and consumer in all kinds of areas, and there must be lessons to draw from this in how we view any large-scale initiative.

As I see it, such a softening would involve not only the kind of online tools and spaces suggested above, but the spread of real world spaces which reflect the collaborative values of social media. Examples of such spaces already exist:

• Media labs on the model of Access Space or the Brasilian Pontos de Cultura programme, which has applied this approach on a national scale
• Fab Labs for manufacturing, as already exist from Iceland to Afghanistan
• studio spaces like TenantSpin, the micro-TV station in Liverpool based in a flat in a towerblock – and like many other examples in the world of Community Media

Again, if these spaces are to work, access to them should be open, not restricted to the unemployed. (If, as some are predicting, we see the return of the three day week, the value of spaces like this open to all becomes even more obvious!) In order for this to work, such spaces would need to be organised with the understanding that hanging out can be as valuable as more visibly productive activities – both because of the resilience that comes from building social connections, and because of the potential for information sharing and the sparking of new projects. There would also be a need for incubator spaces for projects that emerge from these spaces and are ready to move to the next level.

Nathan Cravens (a member of the Factor E Farm project–small world), in a post for P2P Foundation Blog, built on Hines’ idea with the following concrete proposal:

The Open Cafe / Community Supported Agriculture / Fab Lab Alliance

Open Cafes:
The physical hub for activity. A place where meals are prepared by people for people to eat for zero money. Its hip and empowering to dine/work/have a chat here.

Community Supported Agriculture:
Enough participants work in DIY gardens or community farms and donate the produce to the Cafe and or from government issued food cards. (I play both sides for the same aim)

Open Source Fab Labs:
Cafes align with OS Fab Labs to fill out the resource necessity gap to further save financial cost.

Wikis provide only an example for the communications medium used until better mediums are made: easy to use and easier to organize. For now, let’s work with the communications we have ready-made: e-mail and wikis.

Here are a few, but hardly all, hoops to jump through to make this Alliance a reality. This is just to prime the creative pump.

The Cafe is the focus:

• A space and resources are donated for this purpose by those that see the benefit. It can begin in your home and branch out. In urban settings, it can begin with what is already public domain, the local park.
• Food and beverage donation. Donations for the day/week can be viewed in advance on the Cafe’s wiki. Most everyone will want to participate in production because everyone can go here for free. There are no consumers here, rather, this is where producers are born willingly. There is not much difference between consumption or production here.
• If money is needed, a wiki shows expenses that need to be met and what is generating them; those in the Fab Lab then have something to make to reduce or eliminate that cost.
• Event planning. This too is done in wikis and is a place for people to perform or have specific discussions at the Cafe or elsewhere (like at the CSA or Fab Lab) to benefit the Cafe and the people that go there. The Cafe is our focus, because its where all of our interests can unite: in putting food literally on the table.
• Elaborate and replicate the Cafe as needed…

Hines’ hints about softening the distinction between employed and unemployed and the three-day workweek, coupled with Nathan’s Cafe proposal, are reminiscent of a lot of older social analysis by left-wing decentralists like Colin Ward and Keith Paton. Under pressure of necessity from unemployment and underemployment, historically, workers have shifted to production in the household, informal, and barter economies to meet a significant portion of their needs. Ward and Paton, as well as Karl Hess, specifically proposed neighborhood or community workshops quite similar in concept to Nathan’s Cafes. Such workshops would pool individually-owned power tools in a common public space, repair and recycle non-functional machinery discarded by members of the community, etc. They would form the basis for production for subsistence outside the wage system for the unemployed and underemployed, as well as for the fully employed who wished to reduce dependence on wage labor.

Tied in with the kinds of technologies being developed by Factor E Farm, the possibilities for such a community-based countereconomy become even more exciting.

As I suggested to Nathan, housing is so pressing a need as to merit elevation into a fourth and separate leg of the stool. Providing a minimal but secure safety net against homelessness for the unemployed would fill a huge gap in the overall resilency strategy. It might be some kind of cheap, bare bones cohousing project associated with the Cafe (water taps, cots, hotplates, etc) that would house people at minimal cost on
the YMCA model. Squats in abandoned/public buildings, and building with scavenged materials on vacant lots, etc. (a la Colin Ward), might tie in with this as well.

And it might be tied in with Vinay Gupta’s work on cheap, open-source life-support technologies for refugees and residents of tent cities, shantytowns and Hoovervilles (LED lighting, solar cookers, solar water purifiers, etc.).