In the USA there is a special type of corporation called a 501c3 corporation, more commonly referred to as a nonprofit.

We have this in Europe as well. However, as soon as such an organization is intended to provide the means to its owners to pay for their life, what is the case with our project, you have no chance to be acknowledged as a non-profit corporation. Maybe there is some more leeway with this in US, but from all I learned to create such an organization as a non-profit in Europe is virtually impossible. If you could do that in the US, you should definitly try for it, though.

Actually, I don't know if I would want that, since as a genuine corporation you won't stand out as something different and would fit better into the role of the wolf in sheepskin. Additionally, since this corporation won't earn much money, it won't be taxed either. The only advantage of a non-profit organization would be the possibility for tax-deducted donations, but we are not aiming for donations.

I think one of the most important questions that has to be addressed is what level of autonomy is required, acceptable, and ideal. There is a big difference between what you need, what you want, and what is perfect. Also the process of going from need to perfect tends to be linear. Beginning small with few people and little autonomy and working up to many people and fully autonomy. Starting with a full city's worth of people is logistically not practical. It is like if I want to become a master painter,but instead of practicing from the beginning on the small nuances of the brush/colour work, I learn everything there is to know about painting theory and then attempt to paint a masterpiece. There are growing pains that are required in order to create a strong foundation upon which to base a social group.

In the beginning there will only be so much that can be done self sufficiently. This is simply because in this stage most of the resources are going to the building of the communities infrastructure. After some of this infrastructure is in place then a space opens up for engaging autonomy. The GVCS would accelerate the speed towards autonomy of a small community. It would be a gradual process however and would take years. As people come to the community greater levels of self sufficient living become possible. There is a pinnacle of autonomy that can realistically be achieved in one community however, unless we are expanding the community to millions of people. High technology, global telecommunications, and varied manufacturing requires a very large base of people to carry out. Although if you are not talking this kind of autonomy than just ignore the last statement.

There are a number of co-ops, Eco-villages and planned communities around the world. Some have endured and some have not, but the one thing that may be seen as lacking from most of them is the ability to draw in new members. This may be for any number of reasons, but hope for any new planned community to prosper will have to have the drawing power that is not present in most others. It needs some hook or catch that makes people want to inquire on their own so that they do not need to be 'convinced'. The community needs to stand out among all the others, and be presented in such a way as to look both modern/technologically advanced and ecologically conscientious with a cherry on top.

I like the points you're brining up, Danial, very helpful to me I'm my thought process.

I think degree of autonomy is important to consider. Different people will want different levels of separation from the mainstream society and its economy.

I personally want to be free from the current economy except for what cannot be produced internally.

Because my goal us to spread sustainable lifestyles to the general public, separation from mainstream society as a whole will be impossible. I do not want to hide on a commune, I want to bring alternatives to people who have none.

Another thing I thought of in reading your post is that strangers when thrown together suddenly have a lot of friction until they find commonalities. For example I went to a general assembly meeting a week before occupy Portland started its occupation. There were several hundred people, maybe over a thousand, all gathered in a park for a common purpose, but it was chaos. No one knew what they were doing. Even the organizers only had a sketch of a plan. Eventually over the following months the group grew organically into a coherent entity, but they lost hundreds or thousands of people that would have stayed in the group had they had more of a plan and a unified core group from the start.

An example of the friction is when the group decided to block the street between their two camps. When they started the occupation the route was fenced off for the upcoming Portland marathon. After the marathon was over the city wanted to reopen the street, which is the main exit for one of the bridges that comes into downtown. The general assembly put it up for consensus but a group of anarchists refused to give the road back to the city. This went on for days. The city and the general population were furious at the entire occupation. Internal rifts within the occupation also started growing over the issue. I stopped participating in the online side of things myself in protest. Eventually the police came and arrested the few people that wouldn't leave the street. The rest of the occupation just stood by and let them be taken away.

What I'm trying to illustrate with this is that large groups that don't have a mutual bond to each other tend to experience friction and fall apart. To grow a city of 10,000 it may be wise to grow that number slowly. Set up an online community. Collectively choose a decisionmaking process. When new people join that aren't willing to follow that process or to follow the decisions of the group, don't let them move in in the first place when the city actually gets its land.

Also, a test village with a smaller population, let's say 500, might be a good intermediate step to develop skills and a community charter that could be applied on a larger scale. Especially if there's eventually supposed to be more than one city in the organization anyway. The prototype village could become autonomous by interacting economically with the full sized city when it gets built.

Danial, it's like you read my mind.
I have seen communities that try to be independent and people could not trust them because they try to separate fanatically from the rest of the society.
How can you trust a community that doesn't care about your future and doesn't pay your social contributions (unemployment insurance, health insurance, retirement fund)? That's almost impossible. The people must fell free to join but they also must feel free to leave the community permanently or for a while. Sometimes people have to leave to take care of their family, they get married and decide to move, etc.
The supporters must feel that they can join the community for a while, making it better, without risking anything. It's the feeling of being free and the feeling of leaving something useful behind that can attract the people and make them join and to come back.
This is not a religious sect like People's Temple where those who want to leave are "evil". The supporters should not feel like they will become slaves of the community once they join (If you join, you have to stay here forever, if you leave, you lost years of retirement contribution).
Also, ideas like not paying taxes should not be encouraged. Not paying taxes can even lead to war. It should only be achieved if the community buys an island and creates it's own country. Conflicts are the last thing the community needs. When the community is big enough, a branch of it can buy such an island. But the community should never be at war or hostile with the rest world, in the name of hating capitalism.

Yes the profits must be invested into creating infrastructure, and only after infrastructure is built the profits should be invested in building more autonomy.

@kriswood
I think that building an online community is vital for the success and for attracting more supporters. The supporters can check the community anytime, keeping their enthusiasm alive.

@Rabert
I think that donations can be vital especially at the beginning. There might be a lot of enthusiasts interested to make donations, from the curiosity of participating to such a social experiment. It can help a lot to build the infrastructure. OSE is also accepting donations and it relies on donation money. And some of the supporters can even be rich, making sudden big donations.

Another idea I just thought of would be to set up an alternate economy between existing intentional communities. Building an infrastructure so that these communities could begin meeting their own and each other's needs without relying on the mainstream economy could only help any eventual village or city to be more free from the existing system.

To grow a city of 10,000 it may be wise to grow that number slowly. Set
up an online community. Collectively choose a decisionmaking process.

That's true. I'll try to do this in a kind of virtualization. I just provide the starting point. A detailed plan how such community could work. People can read it and can say yes, great! and join. Or no, nonsense! and stay away. With this we have the first conflicts avoided. Some people might say Sounds good, let's start from it and improve it! There will be a decision making process which refines the ruleset over time. We will not start to actually do something before we don't have an accepted and solid ruleset the majority will accept. I mentioned already the intrinsic problem with minorities, those who will find parts of the ruleset that unacceptable that they can't live with it, will leave, when it gets down to business and start building everything. Others will see the chance to modify things slowly, to influence the majority, to eventually become part of the majority. That's natural and intended.

The most important part of this project is not the rough idea as I tried to roughly describe before, it is to develop a ruleset which will be accepted by a majority, will be committing to all subscribing to it, and will be legally enforcable to make subscriptions not arbitrary. People need to know what they decide for before they join in as much detail as possible. This does not mean micromanagement, but it does mean a consistence set of rules covering most principles of living together in such a community, the formal basis of creating a new future.

We need that mutual bond before we start the real construction. To start bonding after facts are set in stone, literally, will seldom work.

Another idea I just thought of would be to set up an alternate economy between existing intentional communities

I can only speak for Germany, where I know a bit about such attempts. It is not as if that never was tried. But all attempts during the past approx 40 years have failed. The reason is simple: Each community consists of few leaders and many followers, who have developed their own particular identity and ruleset over time. No attempt so far was succesful to generate solidarity among those leaders. What we have achieved in this country is peaceful coexistance, lots of communication, but no collaboration, and definitly no integration of concepts, believes and rulesets.

@gonzo, I think that is my single favourite of your posts so far in this thread. :) The point of people being free to leave is an important one that I've never thought of in my past ponderings, and I think that is very true. If people must sacrifice everything to move in, and if they must sacrifice everything again to leave, it will be very difficult to convince people to give it a try. The idea of letting people visit the community once functional to see what it's like and to see if they'd like to join before committing to it is also a very good one. One community here in Oregon that has values similar to Rabert's does that also. People may stay for three days (I think it's five if they're from out of the area) to experience the community. If they want to move in they must sell all their belongings and donate the funds to the community. I've never visited though so I cannot say how successful they are. It seems like a 1960s style commune so I haven't been interested in checking it out personally. When I get closer to making more tangible steps forward I'll probably visit as many intentional communities of all kinds as I can to see first hand what works, what doesn't and what I do and don't like about them. For now though that's too far off for me to spend time and energy away from my day job traveling around like that.

@ gonzo

It's very important to build the infrastructure as fast and efficient as possible. Extra money can help.

I favour thorough and good planning over quick realization, especially, we are not under any time pressure in the meaning of normal business timelines. I mentioned it before, I plan for 10 years of community creation and fund raising (fund raising is not donations, but commitments t purchase partnership shares by people who like to join!) before land will be bought. That should be enough time for most people make up their mind and possibly prepare to join.

Sure, if someone would force money upon me without any obligation or favourism demand, I would not say no. But I don't want to create a business model which relies on donations or is dependent on this, so I simply choose not to spent work and time in order to generate donations. If, at some point, someone will join the project and is very interested in expanding the focus to donations, I would not object. I'm German, and in Germany donations are by far not that big a part of culture and society than in the US, for instance, so maybe I'm just not sensitized enough in this regard to develop the stance that it will be needed or even indispensible.

The community has to buy land, it can't create land, for example, no matter how many members it has.

You may have overread my posting where I explained my basic idea. I propose to create a corporation with 10,000 partners. All partners will buy an equal share of this corporation. With this funds, we can buy we can't make.

They must feel free to take a holiday, testing the new life for a while.
They must feel free to get back to their old life anytime if that's
what they want. Only when they will feel free they will be comfortable
to join. Without such an essential policy, the community will only
gather followers who will execute the commands of the leaders, and it
will become more or less like a religious sect.

Well, that's a tough one. When you have a great idea and start a business and invest everything in it you have, you may succeed or you may fail. You don't just take a holiday to try it out, and you definitly don't create a business with the mindset on the backdoor to opt out. That's what we are doing, we create a business, even legally so. The only diffference is, that the goal is not profit but freedom. Partners of this business cannot, due to the nature of this business, have obligation which are required to be answered in payments, since they will earn no or only very little money. But nobody stops them from having a stash of cash somewhere on a bank account as a fallback solution, if they don't like in this corporation. What I don't think would be a good idea, that those people buy things and stuff and bring it into this community bolstering what they now have and others not.

The people who left Europe for America in the 18th and 19th century, the Americans who left the east for the west, did not do that with a backdoor. This mindset is needed. This project is no holiday, It is nothing you do for fun, because you can afford it. It is an attempt to save our civilization under the impression of growing resource scarcity, failing growth paradigm of capitalism and steadily growing world population. You should probably read a bit of Richard Heinberg, who is much more blunt in describing what will come to us than I am, when do not change things radically. Either you want to change and rescue some of the future for your grandchildren, or not. I personally see it as black or white, no grey in between.

What we are planning here is not community with leaders. It is lead by itself by continous votings. That's even required by law, since it is a partnership with equal rights for all partners. The only leader to follow is the majority, not one single person or a small group of persons. There will be some who will be empowered to officially execute the decisions of the majority, but they will have no right to ignore decision, modify them or invent some of their own. Luckily, incorporation allows for such regulations with legal support and enforcement.

We don't need leaders and followers, we need to engage the people into community decisions.

That's exactly what we are trying to do.

Thank you for the extended info Rabert, I think I'm starting to see what you are saying more clearly. Here are some observations and ideas.

The ten year time span over which a 10k city would be planned is reasonable, as it would likely take as long to design a fully functioning and properly integrated city. My concern is how such a long time span would effect the people who join at various stages over the course of the planning. Those who join early on in the project will have much more time to decide they do not want to do it, for whatever reason, and are more likely to leave it behind. Those who join later will be more likely to stick around. Ten years is a long time. It is the difference between and entire generation graduating school and having children of their own in school. It does not mean that it is impossible by any means, only that planning on attracting people to the project will have to be enticing enough to keep them attracted over a long period of time. This can be very tricky and logistically very challenging. There would have to be an entire PR and advertising group just to keep putting out new material about how the project is coming alone. One of the ways this could be lessened is by taking the first five years to plan with a core group of 20-25 people. The people would have to have knowledge of engineering and city planning, but at least after the five years was passed the world could be presented with at least a partial model of the city. It would then be much easier to hold onto peoples attention over a shorter time span.

The second concern, and an idea to follow, is about the "buy in" price of 10oz of gold. Given today's price of gold that buy in would be 16,620USD, giving a total of 166,200,000USD total for all of the members. If we look at the price of gold ten years ago of 309.73USD we see that the buy in for one member would have been 3,097.3USD, with a total of 30,973,000USD. Looking to the future the projected price of gold in ten years is 5.000USD, or 50,000USD per member yielding 500,000,000USD for the membership whole.

This means that the unstable nature of the gold market, while being a great investment, is a very poor measure by which to measure a buy in option to the project. The reason for this being that the price of gold climbs much faster than the average wage in any country, meaning that the longer someone waits to buy gold for the city the more costly it will be relative to their income. Using myself as an example, with the price of gold ten years ago it would be very easy for me to buy ten oz. of gold, current prices would be doable but not easy, and the projected prices ten years from now would be nearly impossible. The advantage here is always on the side of those who commit earlier on in the ten year span. They have longer to save and may spend less to get it, where as anyone how comes in late will have less time to save and have to spend more.

My idea to this would be to make the cost to join in a common currency, preferably the most stable, and allow a pay over time option. Lets say that each person has to pay today's value of 10oz of gold. If someone was to join from the outset that would have ten years to pay the 16,620USD, breaking down to 1662/year, 138.5/month. Someone who came in halfway through would have to pay the same amount in total only the yearly and monthly totals would be doubled, 3224/year, 277/month. Going this route would be easier than scrambling to buy gold at the price possible and would be more fair than basing it on a fixed weight of an economically volatile metal.

Well, that's a tough one. When you have a great idea and start a business and invest everything in it you have, you may succeed or you may fail. You don't just take a holiday to try it out, and you definitly don't create a business with the mindset on the backdoor to opt out.
..
But nobody stops them from having a stash of cash somewhere on a bank account as a fallback solution, if they don't like in this corporation.
In this case, you don't have to invest everything. And that's a main factor for success. Once you know you are connected to enough safety nets, you can work with pleasure, investing all your energy and enthusiasm in the project. You don't have to live with the fear that you will fail.
The point is that such a community is not about one great idea. It's success will depend on literally thousands of ideas and decisions of other people. Risking everything you have in such an experiment is crazy.

One community here in Oregon that has values similar to Rabert's does that also. People may stay for three days (I think it's five if they're from out of the area) to experience the community. If they want to move in they must sell all their belongings and donate the funds to the community.
That is a very bad idea, to ask them to sell all their belongings and to donate the money to the community.
It is a good idea to request the members to come with a minimum initial contribution. But it's a disaster to ask them to sell them everything, making it very hard for them to leave the community if they will have to do it or if they will be excluded.

USA is very attractive to immigrants because of the abundance (lots of resources) and freedom it delivers to it's citizens, comparing to the rest of the countries in the world.
The community must be even much better than USA. It must provide resources in abundance, it must create as much profit as possible (without hurting anyone) and it must guarantee best freedom to it's members.
For example the children of the members should not be indoctrinated at all. They must not be educated that "the rest of the world is bad". They should just know exactly what are the benefits and dangers of being outside. But they should be encouraged to leave the community for at least a few years when they become adults, so they can test on their own skin the both worlds. Only then, when they are outside, they should be encouraged to join the community, just like anyone else will be encouraged to do it. It's a very bad idea to indoctrinate children, like religious sects do. They should not be treated like slaves for a second. This approach can ensure there will be no negative press about the community (press that can make it look like a strange cult). It's not their fault if their parents joined the community before or after they were born, so they will have no obligation to stay in.

I think it's not a good idea to implement just visitor centers. By the contrary, the people who volunteer should be able to do some voluntary work for the community in the most flexible way possible.
Some people might live close to the community and have 2 hours / day. Others might have 1 day / week. Others might have a few weeks / year. All of them should get something to do. It's too artificial to impose a limit of maximum 5 days of visit.
Once the people have the freedom to join when they want and when they can, that will create a much better publicity than a visitor center. It's like the difference between visiting a shop or the factory that produces the goods which are sold in the shop.
The people should have the opportunity to do voluntary work for the community and even work for products/money as long as their participation is producing more for the community than the community has to spend on them. The same with visitors - they should stay as much as they want, provided they produce more than they consume.
Providing jobs to unemployed, without obligations, is the best publicity the community can ever make, especially in these times.

I suspect that with the technology the world has today, a decent life can be ensured even with 2-3 hours of work per day. Eliminate corruption and theft and you will see that it's already possible. I disagree with the idea that the community has to produce only what is necessary and make almost no profit. 3 hours of work / day can provide the goods needed to survive, and 4-5 more hours more can provide abundance. Once the community is rich, it can pay to have it's own specialists and researchers: historians, geologists, astronomers, anthropologists, it can build telescopes, and, why not - even satellites and spacecrafts. The purpose of the community must not be to get back to a primitive life. By the contrary, it has to open the way to going forward, to make more scientific discoveries, to colonize the space, and so on.

Extra profits can be used to pay insurances for the members in both worlds: inside and outside the community, increasing the freedom and safety the members and future members will enjoy. The community must provide more safety nets to it's members than the rest of the world, not less.
Extra profits can be used to allow joining to those who can't come with the minimum participation needed.
The members must afford to make vacations and travel around the world, if they enjoy doing that. There should be a special fund prepared to compensate those who want to leave the community (or those who will be excluded from the community). Those people should get a fair compensation for their contribution of building the community. If someone has to leave, he/she might not be very happy to have to starve and keep their children outside in the rain and snow, just because the experiment didn't work for them. In the same time, the community should be free to exclude those who are lazy or misbehave, without having to settle in court and pay expensive compensations as punishments for hurting those who are excluded.
It's a social experiment after all. It might be very successful but it must focus on increasing freedom and safety of both the members and community.

The point of leaders and followers is I think exactly the crux of the issue. In order for any of these community ideas to work, whether RBE, capitalist, etc, they must involve all members equitably (notice I didn't say equally, as long as everyone's getting a fair share, not all successful systems give an equal voice, for example representative democracies vs direct democracies vs consensus).
That's a very important and vital issue. Yes, it's a mess to involve everyone into every single decision, that's not even possible. So they have to trust the leaders (call them decision makers if you want) to a certain extent. The question is how to make them trust the decision makers.
- I think the people must have a minimum participation into taking decision, in a minimum spectrum below and above them.
- A key feature is the transparency. A wiki with all the relevant statistics: production of every sector of activity, expenses, etc. So the people can check easily the decision makers.
- Also the people can become part of the decision makers group by rotation. Sure, if they don't want to bother, they should not be forced to.
- But the members must have an obligation to participate to a minimum of decision making. For example if they live in an apartment building, they must participate at least once per month to meetings where they decide what that small community needs.
- Everyone must have the obligation to check some aspects of the community. Check if the pipes are broken, check if the wikis are updated, check if the managers are doing their job, etc.
At the bottom line: checking is the thing that can make it work. Managers must check the people they manage, and the people must check their managers - it must be both ways. It must be clarified everything that has to be checked, how often, by whom, and how to rotate the checking duties. We must make sure we can see quickly if someone did his/her checking job or not, no matter how high or low they are in the checking chain of command.

When the people do not check and they don't have a minimum participation into decision making, they will leave space for abuses. Then the community will only work as long as the leaders are doing their job honestly. But once the leaders will stop doing it, the whole community will fail. Therefore everyone will have to do their part of the job of keeping the community democratic. If they refuse to do that, maybe they will have to be excluded.

It's just the other way around. It is not the gold which is unstable, it is the currencies. I have two reasons for gold: First its stability in worth in an unstable time.
Why not simply to pay the amount of money needed to buy 2 hectares of land at the moment they join? Sounds more practical to me.

And anyways, the more the community will be successful, the less money and resources it will need in order to allow others to join. One day it will even be able to provide regular jobs to those who don't want to join the community, and to make profit from it. So the newcomers won't have to donate anything, since the community makes enough constant profit, and it will make profit from any newcomer's work since the first month, while supplying their necessities of life.

.. The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”
This joke I heard it last year, from a German, in a shorter version:
A German goes into a vacation in Greece. There he meets a Greek fisherman who was working just a few hours per day and spent the rest of the time on the beach. The German said: you can work more, you make more money and then you can have a bigger car, bigger house, and everything you need! And the Greek replied: "But I already have everything that I need!"
I hope I don't hurt anyone's feeling, it's not a racist joke - at least I'm not putting it like that. Just to show differences between North and South of Europe.
Anyways,

This is not about getting rich, or creating abundance. It is about preserving what we have for future generations, what is exactly the contrary of getting rich or creating abundance. There is no room for profit in that concept, especially no "extra profits".
It should be about getting rich. The community must be rich. USA could sent people on the moon because it was rich at that moment so it had enough food/resources to feed those people working to make spacecrafts. Only a rich community can be resourceful enough to invest in research, to discover and to send explorers out there.
World's Untold Stories uncovers the regenerative medical breakthroughs allowing doctors to regrow body parts. - http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2010/02/24/wus.body.from.scratch.cnn
Those discoveries that allow today to grow some body parts from scratch were made in rich countries (most of them in USA). You can't believe that subsistence self-sufficient rural communities in Albania can do that.

A community of fishermen like in the joke who are happy to just play guitar, sit with their family, play with the kids, enjoy a good meal etc, that kind of community can't colonize another planet or send spacecrafts to the nearest stars.
Some people simply can't feel happy to just play with kids and friends. They need to discover, to create, to understand, to explore, etc. And, in my view, that's the very purpose of the human life - to expand horizons. Sure, not at the expense of forgetting about family.

So it's all about extra profits (community profits first of all). Extra profits means extra resources, and then a part of community can spend their time researching and exploring, instead of creating food or buildings.

But anyways, abundance can be provided in a smart way, making sure goods can be recycled efficiently, consuming very little energy, making sure the future generations will have even more, not less.

Can you guarantee, that the other 9,999 partners will get their 2 hectares right beside of what was already bought? If so, this would be good idea!
It's not their land. They have to come with money. The community gets the money and it will buy land, rights besides the already acquired land. Of course, 2 hectares South of the community land might cost a bit more than 2 hectares positioned at the North so it has to be an average.

I would only ask to people to not bring their Cadillacs and Gucci shoes and wallet full of 100 dollar bills with them.
I totally agree with that. It's not the individuals who should get richer. But it's the whole community who has to get richer, all members in the same time.
I am for encouraging inventive and revolutionary new business models, to encourage the people to create a lot of profit for coming with a new business idea, but probably the taxes should be very high for those who make very high profits. Maybe someone creates a very successful website, for example. But the whole community should benefit from it.
However, I'm not sure what's the best way to make sure people don't display their extra wealth. But once everyone has a very good life and everything they need, then probably nobody will be hurt by occasional display of wealth. I noticed that the people in Scandinavian countries are quite indifferent to such shows.

Sorry but I think you are wrong in that example.
Trains are also a property of someone (you claimed that any kind of
property is bad). Governments own those rail companies. But some of the
rails are even owned by private companies, or by companies owned by it's
very customers (public limited company). So it has nothing to do with
being a private or public property.

Don't bother responding to a mathematical argument in natural language.  I really don't care if you think that I'm wrong, because frankly, you have demonstrated quite the deficiency in reading comprehension.

I think you may be underestimating the amount of work required to create a planned city. We can think of it like a highly advanced version of the Sim City game franchise. Finding a suitable and large enough piece of land, surveying and zoning, takes a long time with the area involved here. After that is done we have to consider basic infrastructure like roads, water and power distribution, power generation, and waste treatment. Laying this crucial foundation first eliminates redundancy in construction later on, creates an efficient overall system, and allows each building to have the same utilities from the start. We also have to consider the architecture of the buildings themselves. Building design and solar orientation can have a massive impact on the overall efficiency of the city's systems. More areas of subtle planning is the impact of the building plan on the people who are going to be living there. It is well known that residential areas that are separated from industry by commercial zones tend towards creating happier and healthier communities. Integrating parks, ponds, rivers and other recreational centers has to be planned as well.

One of the amazing benefits of planning a city is that it can be made incredibly efficient because you have blank canvas with which to work. It is also the keystone that makes the entire structure of the city stand, and as such, its importance cannot be understated.

It is of course possible to have a community develop organically. This is how almost all settlements started here in Ontario, Canada. There are some planned cities that were created once the surrounding communities were in place, but all of the small communities developed in an organic way. The small town I grew up in has 1500 people and was founded a couple hundred years ago. It started as a small cluster of buildings on the banks of the local river (main form of transportation at that time) and as more people came to the area the settlement grew outwards in a way not dissimilar to an infection or bacteria. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach to community building, but there are several inefficiencies built into it. Building use as an example will have to be re-purposed later on as the community grows, wells initially dug before utilities were available have to be closed or filled as city water becomes available, and so on.

One great example of city planning, even though it is not popular on these forums, is TVP. Setting aside the social aspects and mandates of the project itself we can take a look at the city model that has been created. It is an example of the level of planning that should be achieved before the construction of a project as large as the one we are talking about.

Can you guarantee, that the community can buy the other 2 hectares parcels right besides the already bought land next year, in three years, in seven years? If yes, good idea!
No but the community can own different 5-7 patches of land. In the case that it can't buy land near the places where it already has, then the gold won't help also. If the community needs certain materials (for example construction materials needed to build one house), then the newcomers can bring those specific materials or the money that can buy those materials.

I think you may be underestimating the amount of work required to create a planned city.

Probably. I am thinking about building houses using GVCS tools and machines, something standardized and easily to be build with bricks. Actually I'm thinking about a giant infinity sign, aprox 2 km in lenght and 1 km in width, which consists of one large chain of two story row houses. Where the line is crossing in the center, there I envision the community center and the university, schooling an and other central public facilities. The rest of the construction would be homes, offices, workshops, storage rooms and barns. Along this line would run the utility installation, piping for water and waste water, cable for electricity. Telecommunication would be wireless. That's it. Everything else is farming and landscaping.

I do not say that this is easy, but it is not very complicated to what I know. The only remarkable thing is the scale.

However, I'm no architect. Probably I simply don't see the problems and catches. But right now, I think that with utilizing the GVCS several thousand people could build all that within a year.

The project won't work with separated patches of land, because of logistics, transportation requirements and all the legalities with driving on public streets.
The project must be capable to replicate itself everywhere. Every community should be like a cell in a bigger organism. If you can't buy more land to expand the community, you won't be able to buy it either with money nor gold, Then you simply have to find a solution: replicating smaller remote communities or sell the land and buy a bigger area of land somewhere else.

Ever thought about using the GVCS tractor on a public street?
Why not? Is the GVCS tractor in it's final design? I suspect it can be modified/redesigned/improved. And is there any requirement to use the GVCS tractor? Until it can be used on a public street, the community can use another kind of tractor.

On a side note, I wonder what 10,000 people buying collectively nearly 3
metric tons of gold would do to the price of gold on the open market...

Virtually nothing, since it is only a tiny fraction of what is traded globally on a daily basis (approx 600 tons), and not all of them would buy all the gold on the same day, not even in the same year. When all this would become a huge success, and suddenly millions of people would try to copy that, they might probably need to find a different way to collect the needed funds, though.

Do you believe humanity as it is today is an emergent phenomena or that it is bounded and controlled by some outside force?

It is impossible to make the distinction between need and want. The human only has his/her wants based on limited perception, limited decision making, and lots of fears (mostly justified but some irrational ones too). To add to this complexity what the human wants at 5 is different from that at 15 or 20 or 50.

Rabert - please understand I am very sympathetic to your vision - it is just I can't see how it will happen the way you say it could happen. I wish we could continue to progress without all the struggles and conflicts of competition and excess but I can't figure it out.