sunflower farm

Okay, here's my community. It wasn't supposed to look like a flower, but when I added the sidewalks from each house to each other house and then to the center area, it did. So here's what's going on here:

*There are 7 houses shown, I would think 7-10 families would be optimal.

*Every house faces toward the common area, where there is a children's play area, with swings, slides, sandbox, etc. In the common area is also a covered picnic area for nice-weather eating or gathering, or watching children play. Each house could have big windows on the front to facilitate keeping an eye on children.

*The sidewalk that goes from each house forms a walking path around the common area. In nice weather you can exercise there. (If you don't mind everybody watching you pant and sweat.)

*The open spaces between the sidewalks could be garden area, either common to everybody, or one area per family/house.

*In my original design, shown here, what looks like a garage is actually a workshop, so that each mother (or father, or both) could do some type of craft, for fun or sale or just sanity, and the workshops would have big windows or garage doors where parents could watch the children playing. I wanted to have all the cars park over there near the farm stand, and not need garages at all, but I have been informed that no guy would want to live in my community unless there were a place to drive his car in a garage and work on it. So that requires some other solution, I guess.

*Each house could have its own backyard, because family privacy is as important as community togetherness, I think. So you have your own backyard to do campfires, grow gardens, etc.

*There's a "farm stand" up there at the top. It would be a place where we could sell our extra produce, and any other products you made in your workshop, say you do pottery, you would sell your pots there. (Of course you could also sell them elsewhere, but the farm stand's just an option for you). I think a farm stand would be valuable on several levels.
-It would bring in a little extra money to support your hobby, or save up for college, or whatever
-It would be a forum for children to meet strangers and interact with them in a semi-controlled environment, see adults interact, and learn economics and money management.
-It would give parents a common purpose with their children, which also would be a common purpose to the community.
-It would give the parents some other people to meet, relieving some of the tiredness of isolation and the same old friends.

*This community would also be on a larger piece of land, so that adjacent to the houses and yards (but far enough away not to be offensive) we could have a pasture and farmyard. Then if you opted to, you could maybe milk a cow once a day, collect your eggs, teach your children a little about farm work and raising their own food, caring for animals and so on, but not have to do ALL of the work of a full-on farm.

If it were my community, (and of course a community means the community decides stuff like this) I'd have several programs to help out families, like this:

*Each morning, while a couple of mothers watched the children playing, the others could go clean one mother's entire house. Then rotate duties, so everybody's house gets a thorough cleaning on a regular basis.
*Each house could have a big dining room, and we could rotate having big dinners. If these were only several times a week, then the main emphasis could still be on family dinner.
*If you decided to homeschool, then we could set up some kind of co-op where our children would learn and be together with other children more than they are in a traditional homeschool, but still have a lot more personal attention than they can in public school.

My community is not a commune-everybody has his own income, house, and personal (family) space. Everything would be optional, the dinners, the programs, the farmyard.

So now you know about my "ideal" community. What do you think? Shall we start packing?