ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a summary by François Schneider of Hans Widmer’s (P.M.’s) 2014 work on ‘the power of neighbourhood’. It shows how Widmer’s vision of degrowth has been based on the principles of commons and resilience and offers perspectives from neighbourhood to planetary scales. P.M. has pointed out that ‘having big schemes is not a vice, but a necessity’: comparable forms and sizes of organisation are essential for global equality and fair exchange. This chapter sketches out details of five symbolic ‘modules’ that incorporate most commons and activities distributed at different scales and effectively organising, say, 3.5 billion households: 16 million neighbourhoods; 400,000 boroughs or small towns; 4,000 big cities and regions; 600 territories; one planet. Such emergent entities would enable general features of stable, resilient systems such as minimising transport, economies of scale, and integrating communicative and political functions. Modules would be applied according to local conditions. They are, simultaneously, open-spaces and meeting points.
