HOME — A resilient model for human coexistence

Starting point

Most of today's cities and societies were built for a world that is now changing fundamentally.

Housing, work, energy, supply, social relations and technological development are largely treated as separate systems. At the same time their mutual dependence is growing.

That produces a paradox: our systems are becoming technologically more capable while many people experience their own basis of life as less secure.

The United Nations' World Social Report 2025 describes economic insecurity, high inequality, declining social trust and growing social fragmentation as forces destabilising societies worldwide.¹

Housing, too, has long been more than a property question. Across the OECD, on average just under 40 per cent of people in the lowest income quintile who rent at market rates are overburdened by housing costs: they spend more than 40 per cent of their disposable income on it.² The OECD lists the lack of affordable housing as a structural challenge.

At the same time, despite digital connectedness, we are living through a crisis of real human connection. According to the report of the WHO Commission on Social Connection, between 2014 and 2023 roughly one in six people worldwide — across all age groups — was affected by loneliness; the WHO calls for social connection to be treated more firmly as part of public health.³

HOME starts precisely at that intersection.

The question

The central question is not: “How do we build a better housing estate?”

HOME is an attempt to give a practical answer to that.

It is neither a commune in the classical sense nor a closed state, a religious community or a drop-out project. It is a modular structure for living and supply.

People can live in it, work, build companies, start families, learn or grow old — without giving up their individuality.

Why now?

Several developments are converging at once.

Automation and artificial intelligence

AI can enable enormous gains in productivity, but it also changes the economic role of human work. The IMF estimates that around 40 per cent of global employment is exposed to AI, and about 60 per cent in advanced economies.⁴

That does not necessarily mean mass unemployment. It does mean that a society in which access to housing, food and basic security depends almost entirely on individual earned income can come under increasing pressure to adapt.

HOME therefore asks a different question: what happens if technological productivity is used not only to make companies more efficient, but also to lower the basic cost of human life?

Housing

Today housing is largely organised as an individual economic good. Every household buys or rents separately: floor space, kitchen, vehicles, appliances, energy, internet, storage, tools, services, supply. Many of these resources are actually in use for only a small part of the day.

HOME attempts to combine privacy and shared infrastructure intelligently. The aim is not collective ownership at any price. The aim is: less resource consumption per person alongside a higher quality of life.

Energy and infrastructure

Large central systems are efficient but can be vulnerable to single failures or bottlenecks. Decentralised generation, storage and local grids increase the resilience of supply systems.

A HOME installation should therefore remain connected to its surroundings while being able to provide some central basic functions locally. Not: self-sufficiency at any price. Rather: redundancy.

Three possible developments in the coming years

HOME is not based on the assumption that a catastrophe must occur. The model makes sense across very different futures.

Scenario A — technological acceleration

AI, robotics and automation raise productivity considerably. Many goods and services become cheaper. Certain activities disappear, others emerge. People may need less traditional paid work; at the same time the question of how prosperity, access and social participation are organised grows louder.

In this scenario HOME would be a laboratory for a society with markedly lower living costs.

Scenario B — persistent instability

Housing costs stay high. Energy prices fluctuate. State systems come under pressure from demography and financing.

In this scenario HOME would be a stabiliser: local supply, shared infrastructure and lower individual fixed costs increase resilience.

Scenario C — sharper regional crises

Regions can be affected at times by power failures, extreme weather, conflict or supply difficulties. Global food systems, too, remain vulnerable to conflict, economic shocks and climatic stress; the FAO therefore stresses the importance of resilient agrifood systems.⁵

In that case HOME would not be a “bunker”. It would be a decentralised network of robust living environments whose basic functions keep working even under disruption.

Rule of this file: an external figure is taken up only if the HOME structure is an answer to it. Figures to which HOME offers no structural answer are not carried as a justification.

The smallest unit

The whole system rests on a repeatable unit: the single HOME installation. Its limit is 300 people — absolute (chapter 6).

An installation is not a housing block but a small, complete living environment. Its order is not a loose list of functions — it is a ring order, from the edge to the centre, with the holdings from the survey (sheet 2):

Functional on the outside, human towards the inside — what the individual rings carry is documented by the plan sheets of this file.

Food supply

A fully occupied installation (300 people) has 575 m² of arable land per head within its boundary — it cannot feed itself within its own boundary. Roughly 76 ha of outer land per installation is a condition, not a reserve. This point is kept as H-06 in the register of obstacles.

Why 300 people?

A city with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants is anonymous to the individual. A small group of 20 people, by contrast, cannot carry many tasks on its own.

About 300 residents form an intermediate level: large enough for different skills, trades and age groups; small enough for responsibility and community to stay visible.

Growth by founding a daughter

The waiting list creates the pressure from which new installations arise. The mechanism is the founding of a daughter:

• A founding group leaves the mother installation and builds a daughter installation. The mother installation fills back up to 300 from the waiting list; the daughter installation is otherwise occupied from the waiting list.
• If no founding group comes together, no new installation arises — the waiting list grows longer. That is not a defect but the safeguard against the network growing faster than the ability to run it.
• A daughter installation can found daughters of its own. What arises is a tree with traceable descent, not a headquarters. Every installation carries its origin: HOME 004, founded out of HOME 002, founded out of HOME 001 — descent is registered like a file number.
• The mother installation has a duty of visitation and a right of objection where the standard is departed from — but no authority to direct the daughter's operations. What is passed on is the rule and the plan. What is not passed on is authority.

How large a founding group has to be is not set but calculated: the group must be able to fill the functions an installation needs from day one. The concrete number follows from that list (H-09).

Open in the register of obstacles: size and composition of the founding group (H-09) · procedure for the waiting list (H-11).

The geometry

The basic form of the installation is an octagon — not because the octagon has to be credited with any supernatural effect, but because a regular geometric order opens up several design possibilities: a clearly defined centre, eight equivalent directions, short paths, ring-shaped infrastructure, modular extensibility, recurring building types, unambiguous orientation, symmetry without a classical block structure.

To place the paths: the maximum direct distance within the octagon is ≈ 580 m; along a direct route that is about 7 minutes on foot, via the ring path with a detour factor about 8–9 minutes.

The geometry is therefore not decoration. It becomes the design language of the system.

From the single HOME to the alliance

The decisive idea is repeatability. The following figures are an illustrative calculation — not a target, not a total capacity, not an end state:

This expressly does not mean that a single closed complex has to arise from it. The installations can be organised contiguously, spread regionally or as a network. What matters is their common system architecture.

The twelve domains

Above the single installation there are tasks that no installation carries alone: common standards, supra-regional supply, exchange of knowledge, coordination. These tasks can be divided functionally — the division follows from the tasks, not from a set number.

In the illustrative calculation from chapter 8 this yields twelve domains of 40 installations each, for example: supply, health, education, energy, nature, technology, production, mobility, culture, research, coordination, security & resilience.

Each domain develops particular competence but stays connected to all the others. What arises is not a classical central government but a distributed network of competence.

Leadership without a pyramid of power

One of the most important parts of the project is not the architecture. It is the governance.

HOME must not depend on “the right people” being at the top for good. A robust system has to work even when people make mistakes. Power should therefore be distributed, limited in time, transparent and reviewable.

Decisions are taken as far as possible where their effects arise. The single installation decides local matters. Several installations coordinate shared infrastructure. The network as a whole intervenes only where common standards or supra-regional tasks make it necessary.

Within this model, leadership means primarily: taking responsibility for a function. Not: ruling over other people.

Founding a daughter (chapter 6) is the first concrete case of this principle: whoever leads a founding group does not rule over people but carries a task with a defined end.

Freedom remains a precondition

HOME is not meant to replace the whole of existing society. Nor does everyone have to want to live in it.

People may still prefer cities, live alone, own companies, build wealth, travel, consume or choose entirely different forms of community.

The project works precisely because it needs no system of compulsion. It merely offers one further option: a person can be part of a highly developed community without their basic existence depending permanently on earning as much money as possible.

Basic provision is not levelling down

The model distinguishes between basic value and additional value.

Basic value

Every person needs shelter, food, water, basic energy, basic medical care, education, security and social participation. Within the system, access to these should depend as little as possible on individual wealth.

Additional value

People can still found companies, develop products, make art, do research, take on particular responsibility, offer additional services — and derive additional economic benefit from that.

HOME therefore does not abolish achievement. It merely tries to decouple existence and achievement from one another.

Technology as an operating system

Such a model would once have been extremely laborious to organise. Today AI changes what is feasible.

A digital operating system could coordinate, among other things: energy consumption, food stocks, maintenance, mobility, buildings, procurement, production, medical resources, learning provision, internal projects, democratic votes, financial flows, spare capacity, skills and voluntary contributions.

AI is not meant to govern people. It is meant to reduce complexity and make information available. Decision-making power stays with people and with clearly defined institutions.

Not self-sufficiency, but resilience

A common mistake in comparable projects is trying to produce everything oneself. HOME should do exactly the opposite. An installation need not run a steelworks or make computer chips — and it cannot grow all its food itself (H-06).

Instead, three levels are distinguished:

HOME thus stays part of the world economy but becomes less dependent on single points of failure.

Entities and funding

This chapter describes principles — with no amounts and no timetables. It is purely descriptive: it does not solicit money, offers nothing and promises nothing.

Four functions, four entities

The open fourth row is published along with the rest, not papered over. None of the structures named acts here beyond its actual state: what is not incorporated is not incorporated.

Four separate levels of funding

Core statements

• Funding comes from our own productive undertakings; donations, public funding and equity investments have not been drawn on so far.
• Redistribution is anchored before relevant revenue exists — not only once it hurts.
• HOME 001 is development expenditure. The actual result is the replicable set of plans — measured against what chapter 17 demands: that the second installation can be built and run more cheaply than the first.

Open questions of money and structure in this chapter are kept in the register of obstacles: capital architecture (H-01), land and planning law (H-02), eligibility for charitable status (H-07), flow of funds (H-08).

Why 480 installations must not be the beginning

The full vision is large. Its realisation has to begin small. The order:

HOME 001 has to prove that the model works economically, socially and organisationally. Only then may it be repeated.

What actually has to be proved

Success is not measured by how impressive the site looks. What counts are measurable results:

• By how much do housing costs per resident fall?
• How much energy can be generated locally?
• How much food can sensibly be produced locally or regionally — under the condition of the outer land (H-06)?
• How many resources can be shared?
• What is the real staffing effort?
• Does quality of life improve?
• Do residents stay voluntarily?
• Does community arise without restricting individual freedom?
• Can the model work economically without permanent donations?
• Can the second installation be built and run more cheaply than the first?

Only once these questions are answered in the affirmative does a vision become a system.

What is actually at stake

HOME does not have to prove that today's world will collapse. That would also be the wrong starting point. The decisive question is rather:

If AI makes work more efficient, the residents benefit. If energy becomes cheaper, the residents benefit. If automation makes production cheaper, the residents benefit. If the world stays stable, HOME works as an attractive living environment. If the world becomes less stable, HOME has additional resilience.

The model therefore has an unusual property: it does not need a crisis in order to make sense. A crisis would merely make it clearer why resilience is valuable.

The project in one sentence

HOME is an attempt to develop a new basic unit of human coexistence that combines modern technology, shared infrastructure, individual freedom and decentralised resilience.