← Part of: The Built Environment

The Ten-Mile Square

Every NewVistas community starts as a ten-mile square of statute miles: 100 square miles, or 64,000 acres. The farmland is measured in statute miles; within the community itself, feet, perches, and the 0.625-metre grid govern.

Four communities, one square

The first community stands in the lower right quadrant. As permaculture productivity rises and the farms need 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 five statute miles on a side. The goal is 25 square miles for each community in all, counting its built community of 2.88 square miles and its mirrored villages, which also grow a great deal of food. At four communities the square feeds 368,640 people on about a sixth of an acre each, with grain and herds coming from the hinterland.

Bureau 18 measures the falling land requirement as it happens. Seven things combine to lower it:

the dietary order
the refusal to grow fuel crops
the footprint fee
the planned meal
the productive landscape
the orchard village squares
the nutrient loop

The farm block

Farmland lies on the same ten- and fifteen-acre blocks, half-acre lots of 66 by 330 feet, and 132-foot streets as the community. It has the same breezeways, hubs, and one-way traffic, but it is open to the air, and walking runs both ways. The community’s middle row runs on through the farmland as a fifteen-acre row. Processing and storage stand on farm lots beside the hubs, and 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 (four half-acre lots) 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 farm village squares are leased for fruit, nuts, and berries alone. Small food animals may be raised on farm blocks under the daily clean-ground rule.

Fitted to the land

The square and its quadrants are the plan; the land decides the fit. A community’s centre may stand off its nominal corner as far as the land requires. Its plat, with its mirrored villages, stands clear of every fixed conflict:

towns
large rivers and their floodplains, and lakes
freeways, railways, power lines, and gas and oil pipelines
airports
burial grounds, historic sites, and schools

It never crosses a great river from its square.

A small stream may be redirected into the easements or between blocks; a large river is never moved. Where one crosses a quadrant, the blocks and the community centre stand clear of the river and its floodplain, and the farms may lie on both sides of it.

Where the land near a city offers no clear site, the founding moves outward onto the farmland, and neighbouring communities farm the nearer land until it is absorbed. The easements between communities then bend to follow the land. Each community’s farm area is the land nearer its own centre than any other community’s, so it may be larger or smaller than 100 square miles. What is fixed is the plat itself, the order of founding, and the joining of every easement into one network. Each community’s centre and farm boundary are recorded at its founding.

Where gravel, sand, clay, or another raw material for the community’s key products lies under the farmland, it counts in favour of placing a square there. It is worked a lot or a block at a time under Bureau 22’s rules, and each lot is restored to farm as it is finished.

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
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. It need not adjoin the community and may lie in another country. With no feedlot, refinery, open pit, or long haul, a community’s remote posts number only in the low hundreds, each held by two Business Enterprises in rotation, so that nobody lives at the mine.