ABSTRACT
Imagine that a group of like-minded people wanted to establish a new community at a specific site. How should they design it? The planners would have to address a broad range of issues, including physical facilities and economic and social arrangements. The design work could begin with the drafting of a charter for the community that would set out the major guiding principles for its operation. How should they design the community’s food system? More specifically, how could the food system be designed to fulfill the vision of food-as-a-commons? What sort of community charter would be proposed by advocates of the food-as-a-commons idea, such as the contributors to this volume? A consensus statement on that would make our collective understanding of the concept readily visible and debatable. However, building that consensus could take months, maybe years. This chapter can be viewed as the initial concept paper, to be discussed while preparing the first draft of the community’s charter.
