Infrastructure reveals what we really mean by abundance. Do we believe that prosperity is engineered from the top down (cities as a complicated machine)? Or do we recognize that it must be cultivated from the bottom up, one place at a time (cities as a complex, adaptive system)?

Abundance without humility is a dangerous fantasy, especially when it comes to infrastructure. We’ve tried the grand solutions before, and we’re still living with the fragility they created. The true abundance worth striving for is the kind that comes from co-creation: from neighbors working together, from feedback loops that keep us honest, from the dedicated effort of building prosperity in place.

That’s not abundance as a one-time breakthrough. It’s abundance as compound interest: a steady accumulation of small, thoughtful choices, year after year, generation after generation. It’s not always flashy, but it lasts.

This article doesn’t use the word “degrowth” anywhere, but its vision for a sustainable, abundant community is the ideal of a degrowth community - a community that doesn’t need to obsessively expand in order to survive, that meets the needs of its people not through massive projects and government grants but through the small, humble, incremental work of its people’s own hands.