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[strum]

I'm not sure if this is the best place for this but I couldn't find anywhere else I thought more appropriate to put it.

I maybe naive, coming as I do from a very peaceful and crime free place, but the idea of walls and watchtowers around a community strikes me as being wrong.

Aren't walls and watchtowers exactly the antithesis of where we should be heading to make a real social change that can spread out into the wider community?

Is this perceived "need" for "security" really a projection of our own inner fears and insecurities?

I would like to think that our community could be of such value to the wider community around it, due to it being a hub of social, cultural, spiritual and economic activity, that there would be no threat from the local community, and that the local community would actually assist in defense of it if faced with an external threat.

On a more practical level, walls, especially high, strong, defensive walls are labor and resource intensive to build, towers even more so. Such a waste of resources it would seem. Do we have enough labor and resources to encircle the 30-40 acres (minimum) I would envision a community would need to produce enough food to sustain itself?
Could those resources be put to better use?

Do you want to live surrounded by a wall?
What does the wall say about us to the wider community?

I won't go on, hopefully you get where I am coming from.

Some other walls you may have heard of:

The wall(s) dividing Palestine
The Berlin wall

defensive walls that failed:

The great wall of china (look into the costs of that one)
The Siegfried line


you become that which you would destroy. ( who said that? )

[European American]

What about the four walls that you live inside of at night? Don't they "protect" you from something?

Now maybe you are one of the fortunate ones. The sky is your ceiling, Mother Earth your floor, and your walls are somewhere on the horizon.

[Hantayo]

One of the main concepts of forming a community is the idea of a refuge of like minded folk should the "shtf." Towers and walls of some sort may sound dreadful, but in a complete economic and socal breakdown they just might help to save lives.
Oliver

[strum]

The walls of a shelter are there to protect against the elements not against other people , the walls talked about in the posts I was referring to were not the walls of shelters but defensive walls dividing us from the rest of the world.

Nothing exists in isolation from it's surroundings, to pretend so just creates problems.

"I would like to think that our community could be of such value to the wider community around it, due to it being a hub of social, cultural, spiritual and economic activity, that there would be no threat from the local community, and that the local community would actually assist in defense of it if faced with an external threat."

was what i said in the original post.

Is that hard to understand?
Protection comes from openness and engagement not from isolation, the peace and joy and beauty we make in our community radiates outwards into the rest of the world, but walls get in the way of that.

Am I getting through?

[Hantayo]

Do you lock your doors at night before retiring?

[strum]

Do you lock your doors at night before retiring?

no

[Stexie]

Well we went down to Building Dept. and asked if we could build a house out of wire, adn cover it with vines?
What kind of wire? Oh how about chain link fencing? Ok, then what, well maybe some chicken wire or maybe small mesh hardware cloth...Ok, then what? Well a mist system, and a nice door(s) and some windows, oh yea, a nice stone floor, flagstone, saltillo or tiles.  Ok and then what ...well it ended up being almost exactly the same as all the rest of suburbia by the time all codes were met... although it was more beautiful and you could pick grapes off the walls ;-)