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The Great Big Family
Understandably, the ekistical sciences dominate operational planning here at Expert Housing, but that doesn't mean we've entirely forsaken personal needs in the interest of more efficient social architecture and population dense schema. Take, for example, our flagship development community in the periphery Taashtiten Amaatu, also known to residents and cosmopolitans alike as Taasham. With a nine percent alien saturation--most of those distributed in the upper two tiers of socioeconomic worth--you would expect an elevated STH (that's strife-to-harmony) ratio. Taasham, however, routinely boasts one of the lowest STHs of all our communities. As EH shareholders, we're sure you're curious as to how that works. The planning department refers to it as the "escalating redundant support system", but in marketing and we just call it the Great Big Family.
Planned communities exist all over the Caldari State. This is to be expected in a society where the good of the whole is valued over the good of the individual. Especially in the patriotic and practical blocs of the pre-Provist reformation State, people were expected to make both small sacrifices of convenience and large sacrifices of choice when it came to their lifestyle. Contending with spiking crime rates and reduced production efficiency in many of its urban industrial and support centers in the early YC70s, the Sukuuvestaa Corporation commissioned NOH-subsidiary Expert Housing to come in and remodel their basic residential plan. After several trial runs, the Great Big Family concept emerged as an effective solution. It would go on to dominate real estate development in the State through the end of the century and remains popular as a basis on which planned communities are built even in the age of Heth.
At the heart of the Great Big Family is a large structure shaped very much like a doughnut. This unit, essentially a two-storied ring building, consists of twelve modules that are laid out like the slices of a pie. Each module has the same interior volume and all are constructed with an inward focus, meaning their main entrance opens onto the interior of the ring-shaped unit rather than its exterior. There are only four entrances to the unit from the outside, each leading to a hallway that opens onto the unit's central common space. Interiors can be significantly redesigned with modular flooring, walls, stairs, and doors to accommodate the residents' needs. The modules themselves can be unanchored from the structure one by one and removed to facilitate easier relocation, maintenance, or upgrades. When structurally reinforced for high-density accommodation, the entire twelve module unit becomes stackable to enable the quick construction of a residential tower.
A particular vocabulary was developed to refer to the levels of organization within a Great Big Family community. The "residence" is a single modular unit within a "hamlet" of twelve. Each fundamental ring-shaped structure thus represents one hamlet. Every standard residence has space and utilities sufficient to house five people in what EH considers "40% Luxury" (referred to in Caldari Real Estate circles as "40-Lux"), a widespread industrial standard of living based on a formula assessing cubic meters of space, available wattage and bandwidth, and volume of conditioned atmosphere per human occupant. Institutional studies found out long ago that 40-Lux was just above the minimum standard of living required to ensure more or less permanent complacency in the working classes provided they had no routine exposure to higher standards. Propaganda efforts in some regions have sought to establish the 40-Lux label as a mark of truly desirable accommodations, portraying anything more lavish as wasteful and unpatriotic.
Each unit or each level in a tower of units directs the traffic and attention of its residents to the central space in the middle, known as the "commons". After all, it isn't possible to enter the building and reach one's modular slice of home without passing through the common area. Residents are encouraged to find consensus as an entire unit as to how this common area should be used and decorated. In places where units can be arranged without stacking, this space is often left roofless and a garden planted. Elsewhere, each unit's common space serves as a canvas upon which to display the residents' loyalty and love for their corporation and the State with annual contests for most creative and decorative modifications. In other communities where the law permits, the space has a directly capitalistic function with residents creating small marketplaces, restaurants, or gambling halls in their common area to attract the credits of their neighbors in nearby units. This is more common in higher density communities built along the Great Big Family plan and especially within communities in the practical bloc. Even in places where independent or unlicensed businesses are discouraged or illegal, once may still find black market gambling dens in the common areas of stacked housing towers.
Twelve hamlets, housing sixty people each, comprise a "village" of just over seven hundred. With the ability to stack reinforced hamlet units to a height of twenty-four levels, this allows for housing of thousands of people within a relatively small geographic footprint. Villages can, of course, be spread out as well, and when they are deployed in unstacked single-level arrangements each hamlet unit is ideally placed in a ring. The resulting interior space serves a purpose similar to the smaller common area inside each hamlet. Village commons feature shopping, food, entertainment, and workspace appropriate to the corporate policies in place.
The scheme by which units are populated is dependent upon the authority managing the community, but the Great Big Family philosophy is one of equal distribution blind to socioeconomic status. Although there was a great deal of resistance to this before the Provist revolution, this plan fits the ethos of the New Meritocracy especially well, and it is not uncommon to find a senior director's family living in the same unit of twelve with the families of street enforcers, manual laborers, and mid-level clerks. Before Heth, and very much still, those Caldari elite forced to live in such communities by environmental circumstances or corporate directive often ended up in hamlets populated only by wealthy and empowered families. In such places it is not uncommon for walls to be cut open and two or more modules combined to create double or triple-sized luxury suites. These phenomena were vehemently concealed in decades past and remain a dirty secret even now in many of the cities built on the Great Big Family concept.
Proximity of living space and workspace is a paramount idea in the Great Big Family. A factory fully integrated into the system may be surrounded by six two-unit towers, and all of its staff housed virtually on site. Maintenance and constabulary forces were an early integration into the system as well. Each unit is expected to nominate two residents as its local watch, making it their responsibility to know their neighbor's business and keep the peace inside the unit. Whenever possible, certified mechanics or engineers are also distributed evenly within a community so that there is always a handyman somewhere nearby.
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I have more to follow on this.