Another Hometree destroyed - Dale Farm eviction
 

This serves as a reminder that it is not just happening in remote areas in South America to people we call indigenous. Violent actions to drive people off the land they regard as their home happens also here in Europe:
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/...avan-d-006.jpg

This is from the eviction of a close-knit community of travelling people, who have been forced to stop travelling and instead find a place to settle. They settled in a place that was not designated for building houses, but that was instead a waste dump and barren land. They restored the land and made it their home. The government did not care about their resoration efforts but only looked at the fact that they lived permanently on a piece of land that was not zoned for that purpose. A long struggle over 10 years followed (legal battles, people resisting eviction, protesters gathering in solidarity), but in the end they lost. Now they are homeless again but still are not allowed to return to their traditional travelling lifestyle.
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/...t-gear-001.jpg
This eviction as can be seen in the pictures was extremely violent. The people living there probably had not much of a chance ("going up with bows and arrows against gunships") in the face of a 18 million GBP expense that was put into the eviction. Still they resisted with all they had and now are pretty much broken (physically and psychologically). I cry for them. :'(

Here are some more pictures:
Dale Farm evictions - in pictures | UK news | guardian.co.uk

Now, I'm not sure, so I'm going to ask.
Is it not illegal to just pick a field and choose to live there?? Is that land not already owned by someone?

EDIT: As I uderstand it now, it is not public land as I previously thought, but they actually own that land for over 10 years. The issue is then not land ownership, but just land use. The land is zoned as non-habitable and by that it is not allowed to live there permanently. Nevermind that elsewhere middle class people get permissions to turn former green land zones into suburbs or shopping malls... END EDIT

And in any case - nothing really is a good reason to stormtrooper their village, carry old ladies and young children out of their homes and then destroy the whole place, leaving these folks without a home.

Please dont argue in favour of that eviction just because it was me who posted it...

Don't flatter yourself. I would never disagree with you just because you're you. I'm sure there are things we'd probably even agree on.

And I agree. By the looks of it they didn't use the best methods they could have in removing these people, but I also doubt asking them nicely to leave would've worked. And when you're living on land that isn't yours you can't really expect to be asked nicely and then given a goodie bag.

Don't take it as blunt-force as it would seem...

The police did not set those caravans ablaze, it was in fact the result of a tussle between police and protestors, when a riot ensued. It is not a case of the police deliberately setting fire to them.

I do not believe that saying "they have been forced to stop travelling" is a fair statement. In fact, they were not "travelling" at all. They had been settled on that land for over 10 years. What they were actually choosing to do was to live on the fringe of society, only taking what they thought was best for them, disregarding everything else. Even the law, in most cases. They *can* continue to travel, but this is not the mentality they have, generally. They are not a good bunch of people who simply move from place to place, they root themselves in, often illegally or in already owned or used land and subsequently proceed to stake their claim to it, even if it is to the detriment to local people or the 'owner' of the land.

As far as I am concerned, when you choose to live life outside of a system, in the name of traditionalism or culture, you choose to do so fully. You do not and can not simply pick and choose to follow the benefits of the systems, laws, whatever it may be that is set out, and refuse to pay for them in return. They were living on that land - even if it was a portion of it, and not the entirity - illegally. That is the simple truth. And while I do support the idea of traditional cultures, I cannot say I support a culture that has no regard for other things like existing local communities and people, the natural environment of the land they live on, or even basic human rights like female equality and basic civil standards. (I realise this might be an awful generalisation, but from what I know and have experienced of gypsy culture, these things are true.)

A good example of this that I have is that our local leisure centre had a lot of room in the carpark due to underuse (and an overflow carpark, too). This space was subsequently taken over by 'travellers', where they proceeded to ruin the loacl community. Crimes shot up, there were complaints of disturbance and people began to felt threatened by these people. After a number of months, the council managed to move them on, but in their wake, they left rubbish tips, tyres and rubbish in rivers and a sizeable pile of bare human waste. Surely, you cannot sit there and tell me that was fair for the people who lived in that area, to have to endure such hassle and disgusting behaviour from anyone - be they gypsies or even just a regular people who lived there. Also, unfortunately, when you experience such behaviour, having threats and insults shouted at you from passers by, as well as having watched many documentaries on the way their culture works, you simply lose all faith and respect for a group of people. (This is something I have experienced, too.)

I know I agree with a lot of things when it comes with what you have to say, Aurora, but unfortunately this is not one of those subjects.

...really?!

This was illegal use of greenbelt land without planning permission - I thought you would be ranting AGAINST that.

That picture of a fire you post in an appeal to emotion was a fire set by the 'occupants' themselves, and police put themselves at risk to ensure that they were safely contained despite some fires being set near gas canisters and other dangerous objects. Police were trying to move people on peacefully, and were mainly successful, despite being attacked by groups of anarchists, many completely unconnected to the site, who had come there specifically to attack police.





Do those look like peaceful protesters to you? Watch at 0:20.

These are not people you can romanticise. They flout the law, abuse every single system they can (many of the people who lived there are known to own homes in Ireland), and often cause damage to local areas through fly tipping and theft.


...oh,and this might be illuminating to you.






Stop commenting on things you have no understanding of just because a small group can be romanticised. Some t travellers are fine, and legally purchase land and acquire planing permission, or else use allocated sites, while others are not, and deny it all you want, but there IS a very strong link with criminal activity, especially with the latter.

I have never seen so many riot police...

Idk who the "good" guys are either, but damn... that is a ton of riot police

It's good that they waited for them to make the place look nicer and THEN throw them out. I would've done the same. Free labour, y'know?

I am not romanisizing them so much. I am aware that their culture is not the best and that they have their flaws. What I know is that these people used to move around a lot but that this has been made more or less illegal or at least very hard. Try to get a job when you cannot give a permanent adress, try to get permission to park your mobile home on public land or even on private land. I personally know a couple of people who face that kind of problem, though they are not of that culture (see last paragraph). Heck one person in this forum can even tell you about his personal experiences in that respect. So they were forced to settle. As I understand it, they then bought or rented that land. They cleaned it up and started to live there for the last 10 years. The problem thus is the zoning issue.

I have no personal love or lack thereof of these people, but from what I get, they are part of a minority that can be subject to discrimination, they do not have another home to go to (and obviously do not want to participate in the regular system of having a fulltime job in exchange for a rented flat). I suspect that some of their "bad behaviour" comes from being under pressure, but I cannot say this for sure. That would not be an excuse - if they really do harm to others - harassing, stealing or whatever - I have not much problem with people getting arrested for these things.

What I do not support is the way this was handled. You just dont storm such a place with that many riot police and you just dont spend 18 million pounds on getting these peole to leave - considering that for that amount, one probably could have bought properly zoned land 10 times the size. And even if there are people there resisting the eviction from the land they lived on for 10 years, the dedication of those resisting certainly does not come because they are having a ton of fun doing this. No one risks damage to health, property and possibly prison time for defending a bunch of trailers if he could easily switch to different living conditions or "just move".

If someone who is not a "gypsie" is trying to do something similar, they have better chances, but still are in quite a bit of trouble: Lammas Home Page , index . Regarding the land use as "green belt" or land to live on. You are right there that I am split in opinion a bit. Of course I want more green zones and less city or suburbs. On the other hand I would prefer to have low population densities if people are good stewards of the land they live on. I am not sure what the situation there was - from what I read, they did clean up that land and did not trash it.

And yes, that image of the burning caravan is certainly emotional. I am sure riot police did not set it on fire intentionally, but in the end that whole scene happened because they could not just let them live there or give any other acceptable options.

So again - I do not know these people - I do not know if they deserve sympathy for who they are, how much racism they have to deal with or if their culture is a good one or not. But I know that spending millions of GBP to get rid of them and to storm that place violently seems way out of proportion. Even IF of course the whole thing is totally lawful.

Maybe my sympathies come from personal experiences. My home was once torn apart on the inside by police. Such a violation of personal space drove me to move away for years. A neighboring garden community was bulldozed for "development" by the owners (all the gardeners "only" had rented their gardens for some decades), one guy died of heart attack at seeing his garden go to waste. Later homeless people settled there in the garden houses in winter to have a shelter, then they bulldozed the houses. The land is now a vacant lot. My best friend was evicted by police several times because she became homeless and lived in a tent. Other friends of mine live in an abandoned military base for decades. They regularly have trouble with the threat of eviction because the zoning is not right. They wiggled around up to now by declaring the house a workshop and officially no one lives there permanently. Officially... Then some other friends of mine lived in caravans. They built beautiful caravans with low impact stuff - good insulation, wood stove, solar panels, rainwater collector. They were not allowed to park on public land and whenever they managed to rent private land, they faced discrimination, overburdening regulations (how do you connect the smoke detector to the main power line if you are off-the-grid?), people who want "them hippies and gypsies" to go away and usually inthe end eviction and the search for another safe and legal place to set things up anew. Most of these situations did not come because people were lazy, deliberately illegal or anything like that. All one can call these people upon is that they are either poor by chance or poor by choice. They may not have a job, not a lot of money and maybe some are artists, showpeople, theatre actors, writers or just hippies. Some are already looking for some way back into mainstream society, many actually like to not be mainstream society because they have different ideas of what one needs, desires and wants. Of course all these evictions and raids are probably lawful, but I do not think they are just.

So this is my personal connection to this sort of thing and it is why I get really angry if something like this happens to anyone, even people I may not like personally.

I better stop now, because I just get really angry thinking about all these experiences and am probably biased.

That's what I was thinking. You know which side I'll be on if the government suddenly has a new, big plot of land...

I see you have strong feelings against these people. I assume you have had personal contact or experiences that form that opinion, while I obviously did not meet any british travellers in person yet. So I will accept that your view on them is a different one.
You already put "owner" in quotes, I appreciate that, because I think it is a certain assumption that land can be owned and these people obviously do not think so - which position makes more sense I will not try to determine here. Obviously if they go and interfere with someone elses life to his detriment, this is not acceptable (e.g. setting up camp in a destructive way on land that someone else is using as grassland, garden, nature retreat).

What I know is, that travellers in general ("gypsies, Roma, circus people,...") have never been regarded as particularly nice people in history. They were always - no matter the personal behaviour - judged with prejudice. I think this kind of behaviour is not appropriate as it infers certain things about people simply from their lifestyle, culture or descent. If these people there specifically have been criminals (beyond the violation of zoning regulations), destroying land, or damaging other peoples lives - fair enough, then they do not deserve sympathy. But my impression was that most of them were not.

But again - I accept that there are different views on these folks and that mine has possibly less foundation as it springs only from people I met in a different country and from news and articles. I still object to the way they have been treated.

Perhaps i'm a little biased too. And I will admit that what I said was a sweeping generalisation of such people - i'm sure there *are* people out there who simply wish to live a different way of life with the respect and dignity that both they give to other people, and -in turn - that other people will give to them. But these things are definitely a two-way street.

Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike them just *because* they are gypsies, I dislike them for the people that they more than often are. I don't think it's fair to excuse them for acting in a way that is crude or destructive or loutish, just because they are under pressure, that serves as too much of an easy way out of the issue for me.

No matter what position you're in financially or culturally, things like common courtesy and care for your fellow man are free.

The issue of 'owning' land is a difficult one. I do not fully believe in the concept of property ownership - I still believe that if one acts as (in your words) a steward of the land, they look after it, care for it and actually make someting of it beyond simply a patch of land to root into and abuse, then yes, land should not technically be owned (unfortunately, many of these people do not act in this way) - but on the other hand, I can't say I support the idea that people can freely pitch up anywhere they like and start making a mess, then being able to simply wave a hand and justify it as their 'cultural right'. Unfortunately, in this world, there are laws. Not all of them are right, not all of them are wrong,but there *are* some very basic laws that I see not as a government restriction or control system, but simply as a guidance - a formalised reminder of the values we shold all uphold generally, as people who have to live together. These people, I believe, were in contradictions to these 'laws of common decency', and they simply should not be allowed to disregard them for their own personal reasons.

We live in a society, all of us.

Yes, I understand - it may be a reason, but it is hardly an excuse. It may be an exuse in the way that I give them the benefit of the doubt about whether or not they would act the same waqy under different circumstances

Oh definitely I dislike people making a mess, leaving trash in rivers and therelike.

Well I dont know - the rules they did not follow are not even laws, they are building and zoning regulations. Which is why they were not arrested, but evicted. So I think this is a rather low priority violation. More comparable to jaywalking than squatting. Which is why I think the reaction was disproportional to the violations at hand.

I wonder also, what would have happened if some rich white guys would have bought that land and would have built a little summer house on them - I somehow imagine that there would not have been a yearlong lawsuit and then a forceful eviction involved :s

Were the people evicted not white?

Of course they were white.

...oh, and here, they actually own the land - they were just evicting them from living on it without planning permission.

...then I don't understand why you jump to defend on this. While some are fine, they are generally law-abiding in general, and will use land that they own and have legitimately gained permission for its use, or else designated sites. It's people who will park up on someone else's land or a public space, damage it and leave rubbish everywhere, fly-tip in local rivers and steal anything that isn't nailed down who won't care about laws regarding planning.

I assume you saw the videos. The police were expecting violence, particularly with anarchists/communists there who were there for no other reason than to have a fight with some police. If they went in unprepared, they would likely have been murdered.

You'd be surprised - even where planning permission has been breached, you can usually get it applied retroactively where there aren't specific laws governing what can be built in certain areas. Not ever caring to try, on the other hand...

(Oh, and these ARE rich white people :P )

I never knew that you could be evicted for doing such a thing. You learn something new everyday.

Oh, indeed, such things can happen... and getting a planning permit for land where people settle (even if there's already a house standing there) is not as easy as one might think... especially where travelling people are concerned, who put trailers onto such grounds. These are, by definition, not buildings, therefore not meant to live in them permanently and any attempt to get them put into a planning permit is futile.

You can buy or lease land - the latter with long-term contracts, lasting up to twenty years, for instance, but you're still subject to the municipal mercy of not throwing you off that land. As for travellers squatting unused land: OK, granted, it is against the law, but in a lot of cases, these people treat the land well, not leaving their trash there and trying to and succeeding in living in an environmentally friendly way (such as building alternative ways of human waste management... a composter toilet, for instance, where you'll get good and healthy fertilizer from the merry folk's poop). Most often, these people are mainly a thorn in the side of investors who wish to put some cash cow building onto such a place...

http://www.barefoot-spring.net/wagen...-picture12.jpg
composter toilet tower...

http://www.barefoot-spring.net/wagen...-picture11.jpg
an adventurously self-built shed (a bit unsafe, so we took it down ourselves later on)

http://www.barefoot-spring.net/wagen...d-picture7.jpg
one of the trailers standing on a squatted grassland site - in this case: my trailer.

In case of the site I personally know about (since I lived there for more than two years, before we were forced to move), a large and shiny car sales place was erected on a large piece of empty grassland, that had been vacant for more than twenty years...

So, while there are travelling people living on the fringe of society, a lot of those I have come to know personally and still visit at times are far more decent people than some of those so-called law-abiding members of the society we live in all together, as has been claimed. And about the bias when commenting on such things happening: yes, of course these comments are biased - by individual experience when dealing with such things, by experience with official boards and municipical administration, by experience when encountering general prejudice... I, having been among a group of "such people" living on the fringe of society am biased, too, and I share a lot of the feelings Aurora has shared with us.

My heart and good wishes go out the people of Dale Farm as well as all others who just try to live the way they wish without bothering others.

Wiggling bare tos,

~+Txim Asawl*~

I am confused - they are generally law abiding but also they are people who do not care about law??? What are you trying to say with this ^

Yeah not even trying would be stupid. Which is why these people have applied and re-applied and appealed and took every legal step to get retroactive planning permission to keep living on their owned land. But unlike in many other cases by "normal" people, their chances were not so great and in the end they lost and within a week (!) after the last decision by the judge they were forcefully evicted.

Thank you for sharing your experiences with us. I had similar experiences up to now, though I never lived myself in such a way, just knew people who did personally.

...that some follow all the various laws with regards to planing and similar, while some do not - and it is the latter who are more likely break other laws as well, by doing things like fly-tipping or stealing, while the former try to avoid causing problems since they know it will come back to them. Surely that isn't that hard to understand.

Within 10 years, actually. The number of legal steps makes it complicated.

Maybe some of the roots of this problem is the idea of owning land, that an individual can buy a lot of land and then close it for all other people, putting up signs with no trespassing. A resource like land ought to be owned by everybody together, not by rich individuals. At least there should be a sort of law, or rule of public access to land as there is in Scandinavia (at least in Sweden).

You can be evicted from public land also in Scandinavia if you put up houses there, but at least you are free to walk, pick berries, and camp (you can camp for one day and night without the owners permission). That is a step in the right direction. Noone can put up a lot of fences on his land in order to stop other people from visiting it and enjoy the landscape and nature.

I would agree with that, but one of the larger issues with landuse like that over here in the UK is that we simply do not have the vast expanses of land that places like Sweden, other scaninavian countries or even the US has. We have 94,060 squared miles to house almost 70 million people.

Now, that's not to say that I think land should be held at a premium and only sold and allowed to the highest bidder, it just means that while it may be alright to simply pitch up in the wilderness in other countries, the wilderness we have is either so small that it needs special attention and care - thus, is very fragile should any 'invaders' draw up on it, it would lead to irreperable damages to the delicate ecosystems that remain - or the land is actually, genuinely needed for something. (More often than not, farming, for things like rubbish tips - as in the Dale Farm example - or for 'proper' housing.)

That said, maybe to a degree, you are right. If people collectively owned land, maybe it may instigate a sense of pride and duty to protect and enhance the land, a sense of community, instead of it feeling like you are wrestling it from the upper echelons of society. Unfortunately, people rarely think this way, instead ending up trying to claim such 'free land' as their own, and doing what they like with it... Which often ends in side effects like we have discussed.

HNM - I would not really deduce that people who violate zoning regulations and try by legal means for 10 years to solve that issue are thus more likely to also commit theft, robbery or whatever other criminal activity. The previous inhabitants of the house I am living in violated building regulations by building a balcony to the house without permission (not knowing they needed permission). I probably violated building codes by building a carport and a shed in the garden. Yet I assure you that I have not stolen any items or money from anyone, nor have I dumped trash on public land (actually I usually return with more trash than I went out there) and definitely I have not practiced extortion or fraud. And while I cannot say with certainty, I do not think the person who lived in my room before me was anything but a law abiding apprentice of a plumber who thought having a balcony would be a good idea.

Re land ownership in general - I think private land ownership is not really good idea. Private land use is a different thing - if someone builds a house, tends a garden or plants an orchard, she and her family should also benefit most from that, though I think especially land used for food production is much better put into the hands of the communality and commonly tended to. This actually works, even if economists want us to think otherwise claiming for a "tragedy of the commons". But actually for hundreds of years there was land that was used by a community in a way so that all members profited and everyone was interested in keeping that land in a good shape because ones own livelihood as well as ones families and grandchildrens depends on it. Its not something one needs to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. And of course if people trashed the land, took more than their share or tried to claim private ownership, the community dealt with that appropriately (and sometimes even harshly).
And guess what, it still is in place in some pockets. There are still cow farmers in Bavaria that have the right to use land that is "owned" by the community as a whole - they take care of that land and they need to resist the state which thinks that this model is no longer modern enough and wants that land to be owned by only one person or a company.

I think there is a fundamental difference between regarding land as a common property that belongs to all and one has the right to be on that land, use some things of that land and make a living with the land in a way that future generations can do the same - and claiming land is "free" in the sense that it is not owned by anyone, so anyone can just claim exclusive ownership and shut others out. A land that is "free" does not belong to anyone alone but belongs to all and should be treated that way. Not as "Its not mine so I dont care", but rather as "it is mine and everyone elses, too, so I DO care"

As wonderful as it would be, humans don't work in the way you're implying. Small groups can manage commons areas, as mentioned, just fine, but the dynamics completely break apart for larger groups. This breakdown is also pretty much inevitable in today's society, because smaller groups are, in general, less effective at making wealth. (This is impotrant because the cost of living not zero for anyone, even the dirt poor.) For reasons I haven't seen an explanation for, cities make all of their citizens richer than the same amount of people spread out. Hence, this sort of mess. :P

Which is why I think what is NEEDED is to break down society into smaller bits. Allt he things that make humans comfortable get lost on a larger scale. This is completely logical because we as a species have come from a long history of smaller group sizes. That is the environment we do best in. If it is possible to keep the characteristics in larger groups, then that is fine, but what we see is that they break down very much to the detriment of the "inner" quality of life of the individuals. They may have more material wealth, but they loose immaterial wealth. The result is that while people in cities are more efficient, more productive, work more hours and accumulate more money and goods, they also are much more depressed, unhealthy, stressed, and suffering from physchological problems. There is a nonlinear connection between population density and crime (crime per capita goes up), drug abuse and sexual assault. People do not regard others as people anymore because there are too many. Instead they are treated like "others" that one can do stuff to that is not reflected back upon oneself.

The inevitability of this happening, you speak of, Clarke is only then an inevitability if people see efficiency at making wealth (which usually is just an euphemism of extracting wealth from others that are less efficient or able) as their prime objective. I think that paradigm is not holding up because people actually start to think again about what they really want in life and no second car replaces a good friend, no elaborate safety system with CCTV and panic room or even a guarded community replaces living in a community that is open and free but still not prone to crime.
So again it is a matter of what is primary and what is the priority - cities, economic growth, rapid development, material wealth, gadgets, new cellphones, 50 pairs of shoes and a second car - or a healthy natural world with wild places, people that know and trust each other, low or nonexistent rates of crime, rape and "screwing people over", houses that do not need to be locked. In many aspects these are incompatible. Some things go along well if the society is striving actively to do so but most just are not. The first impulse of people seems to be to want the former - but only because they think they can somehow manage to keep or regain all that is lost in the process later (by improvements, restoration, rebuilding) - only once they become aware that this is not possible they realize that they actually have to make a choice (or that they actually already made a bad choice). So I think it is of vital importance to humans and the natural world for people to realize that this is a choice. It is either or and one cannot simply have both.

Smaller communities does not by default mean living in straw huts. It could conceivably also work in some cities that are not too dense for actually forming neighborhoods. Though certainly I think cities with millions of people and neighborhoods with thousands of people will keep showing the characteristics that we see now in cities...

Clarke - I bet you will argue again that one solution to that predicament is your transhumanist dream that we somehow will be able to engineer humans or whatever that will be able to deal with high population densities just fine. I will not reply to that as I cannot even begin to describe the mountain of problems (ethical, practical and philosophical) with that.

I'm calling bull****. I'm sure there are a lot of people who prefer living in large communities. In fact, I'm more comfortable in a large city. And that is the environment I do best it.

Exactly.

If I was isolated, I would rapidly turn completely insane - the irony is that I'm definitely not a 'people person' by such traditional standards, but I still need to be somewhere to feel happy.

Well, so not everyone is built to be a "small tribes" person - however, I've come to experience alternative living and, indeed, a smaller, somewhat tribal-oriented group works best, considering group dynamics processes.

Wiggling bare toes,

~*Txim Asawl*~

I was not talking about isolation.
I was talking about small groups of people.
Imagine living together with friends rather than live alone.
In fact the paradox in a city is that it at the same time has massive amounts of people - but also people in fact are isolated. The remedy is then to visit friends or go to a club. So one shuts itself off from what makes a city - one does not interact with 99.9% of the people living there - does it still have a benefit for ones own well being to have all of them around? Or would it not be more rewarding to only have to deal with people one knows and not needing to ignore the others in the subway or street?

Certainly isolation is not good - most humans would go insane if they have to be completely alone and isolated. But I say that having too many people around is also damaging - in two ways, one is because one has to ignore these masses of people - you cannot say "hello, how are you" to every person you meet on the street - and the other is because this in fact leads to a certain isolation with people spending wuite some time sitting in their flats alone with a TV or computer.

As you peobably have the image now of me calling for people sitting around the campfire with no computers and no warm water, let me say that this is merely one option for this particular issue. There are plenty of "intentional communities" of all sorts - from co-housing to rural villages and in some of them people have their own house or flat, use computers all the time and watch TV. In addition they cook food together, have evenings around the campfire, work together to improve their community, maybe grow food together, take care of each others kids or pets and have weekly movie sessions with a video beamer.

Thius has been said quite frequently here, that the ideals I advocate - more egalitarian, democratic, socially controlled structures in which each person has a meaningful task and place and is respected for what he does - that all this works only on a small scale and cannot be applied to mass society. The argument is then made that mass society is a given and that thus these ideals are impossible to be reached. Now what if mass society was not a given? I think it does not have to be and in fact it cannot be. It has to go because it causes so many problems. That does not by definition mean that people have to become trapped in tribal groups they do not like, that the only acceptable housing would be log huts and that people cannot have laptops - it just means that the immediate social vicinity of each person is overseeable. That a person can know his environment, the physical locality as well as the human and nonhuman beings living there. It does not mean he can not also travel, go someplace else, build new relationships or whatever - it just means that it makes much more sense to break down a mass society into smaller, cooperative pieces that in itself can show these otherwise idealistic or utopian properties of democracy, freedom, social support and relationship.