As I have stated before, my view of an alternative to Capitalism starts with the notion of a federation of semi-independent city states. The idea here is to turn things around from what we've been doing, as in specialized workers each playing their part in manufacturing, or services, so that various items can be made available for purchase, to a model where we use a mix of automation, and our own involvement to create all of the basic items that end use products come from. From there, instead of going to a store to purchase an end use item, you would utilize your share of basics produced to build your own end use item. You would have that share of basics because you participated in your city's maintenance and management operations.
The idea, in that arrangement, would be that a city would determine all of the tasks it would take to keep its various systems functioning. It would then group these by type, difficulty, and desirability. Every citizen would then be required to select some number of tasks from each of these groups, with each city making its own determination on the specifics therein. For our discussion here let's say it was something between six and a dozen, and further that you had to have at least one in every group. You would then rotate through that list of selected tasks, spending at least a week in each. The result would be a citizenry fully engaged with not only all aspects of what keeps a city functional, but with everyone working with each other, on a continually changing basis, and nobody left stuck doing one or another of the least desirable tasks.
What does it mean, however, when one indicates an at least semi independent city?
In this each city would strive to produce as much of its own basics as it possibly could, knowing of course that complete independence might never be possible; and in this a lot of what would be required would be obtainable from the recycle of what is already there, but certainly not all. At the end of the day each city would have to identify something that they could produce in excess that other cities might need, and for which trade arrangements could be established. One area, however, that each city may not have to worry about, whether they had farmable land (in the ordinary sense) or not is food, and I say this because some remarkable creativity has been demonstrated in recent years on how to grow crops indoors. And in that regard it's not a question of acres under the sun, and favorable growing seasons, but one of enclosed space and energy. I have already described how hydrogen can be created relatively effort effectively, that leaves where you do it. And in that a city could either build up, or dig down.
The question then becomes: what do you put in these spaces to obtain the best results per cubic meter. For that one simply needs to search on "rotary rack, indoor farming," or "large scale indoor farming," to get a place to start from. Just check it out for yourself.
Some Link Examples:
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