| Green Village Philadelphia is an educational nonprofit, organized to inform and increase the ability of people to create URBAN ECOVILLAGES (UEV).
Along these lines, we apply examples from around the world, including Gaviotas, Earthaven, Findhorn, Dudley Street, Ganas, etc. The basis for a deeply sustainable UEV might include an Earth Charter-based mixed-use development, threaded through the fabric of an existing major city—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. An economic business model from BALLE local-living economies can start with an incubator facility and service company to house and develop sustainable businesses sharing triple bottom-line operating principles.
A goal is 1,000 residents and hundreds of jobs, connected with the local Sustainable Business Network and its business chains. GVP uses shared learning and knowledge to reshape our existing institutions, corporations, associations, universities, and neighborhoods through active participation with the principles of the eco-economy into a local, equitable, efficient, respectful-living future.
Cities should restore urban land to its original, inherent functions of being the medium for supporting life of all kinds, of managing water from sky to earth and back again, so one of our precepts is that the land(s) we use will be held in a Community Land Trust. One of the forms of life that land has supported and will continue to support is human life. Human life will be held in the context of other forms of life and the natural systems that support all living things in the essential interdependence of ecological systems, in all of nature.
We don't favor building new; when doing so we teach the use of materials that come either from former buildings or from rapidly renewable and local sources.
GVP espouses integration into the fabric of the city—at its edges and through its connections—in all aspects and categories of what a city is composed of.
Green Village Philadelphia intends to spin off separate entities, legally defined for each purpose—business development and incubation, green jobs creation, land acquisition, organizational structures, design and construction operations—for creating a zero-carbon, zero-waste community of living and work, learning and play, in the heart of our city.
It will serve as a model for other older cities, to demonstrate how the learning we gain from this deeply sustainable development can be patterned and made useable for other urban aggregations, small and large. | Community location is placed at the center of the zip/postal code, city/state, or city/country (not based on street addresses) |
