← Part of: The Built Environment

The Ten-Mile Square

Every NewVistas community begins as a ten-mile square — measured in the plat’s own long miles of 6,336 feet — twelve statute miles on a side: 144 square miles, or 92,160 acres. That is an acre, streets included, for each of the community’s 92,160 permanent residents.

Four communities, one square

The first community stands in the lower right quadrant. As its farms learn to use less land, a second follows in the lower left, a third in the upper right, and a fourth in the upper left, each in its own quadrant of five plat miles. At four communities the square feeds 368,640 people on a quarter acre each, with grain and herds supplied from the hinterland. Bureau 18 measures the falling land requirement as it happens — the combined effect of the dietary order, walkable and vertical farming, and the refusal of food crops for fuel.

The farm block

Farmland lies on the same ten- and fifteen-acre blocks and 132-foot streets as the community itself. A barn or packing house is built on a factory’s module, by the same kit, robots, and utility companies. A farmer leases from two acres up to one fifteen-acre block, and no farm is larger — the square is farmed as permaculture by many small Business Enterprises, never as one estate. The streets themselves grow fruit and nut trees, berries, and vines, and small food animals may be raised on farm blocks under the daily clean-ground rule.

The hinterland

Beyond the square lie the things that need land by the thousand acres or the square mile: grain, herds of cattle, sheep, goats, and some hogs grazed by the herd method and in silvopasture, and the wells, mines, pipelines, freeways, and airports. The hinterland is leased across a region of communities under each community’s own title and coordinated by the Council of Fifty. With no feedlot, refinery, open pit, or long haul, a community’s remote posts number only in the low hundreds, each worked by two Business Enterprises in rotation.

Constitution, §7.11.