Resilient communities aren't only about surviving successive global shocks and instability (retrograde motion). It is also a societal configuration that offers sustained and accelerated improvements in quality of life for the participants that are potentially an order of magnitude faster than the current societal configuration. The drivers for this will be:
- Lower costs.
- Faster innovation cycles.
- More equitable distribution (less distortion and fewer excesses).
The trend lines in technology are shrinking the requirements for physical production of everything. From the 3D fabrication labs that MIT is seeding across the world, to factories on a chip for rapid genetic engineering (not to mention biobricks), the scale required for physical production are dropping at an exponential pace. Even the last bastion of centralized production, the semi-conductor, is currently being assaulted through "grow a CPU" and self-assembly efforts. Better yet, there have price breakthroughs at this level. For example, the costs of small and rudimentary 3D fabricator is between $300 for the DIY model to $5k for corporate version.
Design Globally
Increasingly, the most difficult and potentially expensive element required to produce a product is the informational manipulation required for its design. Fortunately, nearly every product that can be produced can be designed virtually over the Internet using modern software tools. That allows the ultimate in decentralization -- you can work as easily at home in mountains of Colorado as in Silicon Valley or New York City. An interesting aspect of this post-industrial configuration is that it makes it possible for open-source tinkering networks to produce most of the design configurations necessary for many of the worlds products (at a lower cost and a higher degree of customization than ever before).
END NOTE: While this approach won't become common accepted for another decade, it will eventually happen. In fact, my personal experience building and running companies shows that it is ALREADY possible to use the design globally and produce locally model to great success.
For example, while I was the CTO of a start-up a couple years back, my team built a decentralized manufacturing system that produced products from digital designs that used a standard format. To make this possible, we virtually grafted our centrally controlled production process onto small manufacturing lines at companies (usually small companies with <$5m in revenue) located in thirty different countries to ensure precise quality control and rapid runs. This allowed our customers maximal design flexibility, since the design work was done centrally through a flexible Web site, without regard to the location of the actual physical production.
The result: as companies adopted our system, their production runs got much shorter. There was little waste (no over production or excess inventory that needed to be stored in a warehouse). Designs were updated frequently (more customization and more precise reflection of current needs) since large production runs weren't required. Transportation costs dropped to a small fraction of previous costs since the point of delivery was local rather than global. There was also a corresponding drop in time needed to deliver the product. In effect, we saw STEMI (space, time, energy, mass, and information) compression across the board that added up to a plethora of benefits for our customers.