What Is Townsteading?
Townsteading is the deliberate rebuilding of community by concentrating families and friends in existing small towns. Here is the problem, the proposal, and the limits of the idea.
America’s worst issue
America has developed an infrastructure that has caused the mass fragmentation of communities. All areas of social interaction are contained and spread out to the point where a car and direct planning/coordination is needed for everything down to having a cup of coffee with a friend.
Extended families are spread across metro areas or even the country. Friendships survive on group chats and video games. The institutions that used to carry local life, the congregation, the church, the league, the neighborhood business, thin out year after year, not because people stopped wanting them, but because the people who would sustain them no longer live near each other.
People are taught and expected to move for better houses and jobs. What has ended up happening is that everyone lives around strangers.
What Townsteading proposes
Townsteading aims to reverse this design. Instead of one family moving into the woods to start a homestead (and further isolate themselves), Townsteading has a network of likeminded families or friends with various skills/roles move into an already existing small town to create proximity between each other. This creates a shared way of life and unplanned, natural interactions that lead to stronger bonds between people.
Why small towns
Small towns near mid-sized cities are the perfect scale for this project. In a town of 2-3k people, a group of three families acts as a much greater presence than if they were in a city. Local governments and institutions can actually be impmacted by less people through ordinary effort. Houses are cheap which lowers risk, a small city nearby with available jobs lowers the entry-point, and small towns are usually built around a central downtown that is walkable.
There is a minimum population of 1000 people place on the towns in this directory. When the population is lower, a “town” often isn’t even a town. It usually lacks the necessities that many of us base our lives around like banks, grocery stores, and parks.
Why proximity matters
Community is not a feeling; it has to exist in your daily life constantly. Mutual aid, shared meals, watching each other’s kids, starting a business together, showing up to the meeting, all of it depends on being physically near the same people, week after week.
The Homesteading “Solution” and why it solves absolutely nothing
Homesteading is the genius idea of becoming even more alone and giving yourself every chore in the book. We like raw milk, we like thr fresh eggs, but taking on everything is unrealistic and puts stress on the children (talk to any kid who grew up on a farm). Homesteaders are just as strangers to their neighbors as a suburbanite is; if anything, the Homesteader lives the same experience with a longer drive to Walmart.
Interdependance is what we need to create. With multiple famalies taking on various responsibilies in proximity to each other, the difficulty of acquiring what you need is much easier.
Townsteading isn’t a utopian project
Townsteading is simply rebuilding normal life. The way our cities have been built has robbed us of what used to be a basic part of human experience. Every Townstead will have it’s own difficulties, drama, etc.