Rewriting the #NeighborhoodStory

Tools of Success: The Anti-Fragile Playbook

Ruth Glendinning
3 min readOct 13, 2020

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The world outside our homes is changing faster than anyone could have imagined, and what we really need is a blueprint for a way forward, a codex for communities rooted in wisdom, and written by the people who are going to live out the story of a shared future.

The Anti-Fragile Neighborhood Wealth Production model is designed to bring forward the hidden wealth of neighborhoods, creating an accessible, inclusive story of the future for all, no exceptions!

The Anti-Fragile Playbook is an easy to follow guide for self-governance, and will feature a neighborhood franchise, where the neighborhood goes into business with itself to create a citizens assembly that’s entirely self-supporting and regenerative.

What is meant by Anti-Fragile?

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better”. ~ Wikipedia

Image via Art of Manliness and Ted Slampyak

While this term is more common in the sciences & engineering, we’re using it as the framework to test solutions at the neighborhood level, creating places that emerge the natural anti-fragile characteristics of the residents and those with whom they interact.

What we’re proposing is activating this anti-fragile property to unlock the potential for rooting and growing strong neighborhoods in which integrated economic and community development is practiced as organized collaborative action to:

  1. Coordinate the local capacities for learning & earning, activating the potential of technology, arts, crafts, food production and funding assets;
  2. With the mission of triggering a continual stream of commercially viable innovative products and integrated systems.

We believe this can be best accomplished by the creation of a neighborhood wealth production engine for prototyping a new SLOW Tech™ model in integrated…

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Ruth Glendinning

Poet // Future Story Lab // Lexicon of Future // Anti-Fragile Playbook // Peace Economics // FundHer Network // Originator S.L.O.W. Tech // #womenswork