Relocalization is a development strategy.  It seeks to restore the capacity to produce food, energy and durable goods at a local level.  This involves not only economic development but a redress of social, cultural and political dimensions of your community.  Relocalization is, first and foremost, environmentally sound.  It seeks to live in harmony with nature, to become a part of the ecology, and to establish the balance that will permit our descendants to live well for centuries and millennia to come. 

Relocalization is about not only what we produce but how we live.  It is about community.  A local economy is virtually synonymous with a local community.  You can’t have a sound local economy without a vibrant local community.  This suggests scale:  How large can a self-sufficient community be?  It also suggests locale:  Can you achieve self-sufficiency in an urban environment?  New Urbanism, and the experience of the Cubans after the collapse of the Soviet Union, suggests that urban dwellers can achieve a higher degree of self-sufficiency.  Our global economy no longer mandates a city to be supported by local agriculture as it once did.  Suburbs have destroyed millions of acres of prime agricultural land and now consume the water once used for growing food.  Sustainability requires the restoration of a balance between population and the carrying capacity of regional productive soils.  Suburbs will have to be reclaimed for the maintenance of the city.  For most rural areas in America there is sufficient land to provide abundantly for local populations and to provide, via a more sustainable transportation system, for regional cities.  Many cities in the US have already started to set up local supply chain networks which can serve as a foundation for future development.

Transition US grew out of the Relocalization Network.  The Relocalization Network was started in 2003 as an affiliate of the Post Carbon Institute.  Some 150 local groups were formed under the network prior to its transformation into Transition.  Transition simply proved the best-case business model for achieving relocalization.  Many Relocalization groups have become formal Transition Initiatives.  Boulder Relocalization was the first of these.

The model pursued at this site consists of a synergetic geometry based on the works of R. Buckminster Fuller.  A synergetic system requires a minimum of four “events” organized in the form of a tetrahedron.  The four events of this self-sufficient community model are:  Village, Farm, Mill and Academy.  The village is the community, the social and cultural dimensions of a human-scaled communal association.  The farm and mill are the means of production of a sustainable and self-sufficient community.  The academy is an educational institution that provides life-long, open enrollment and individualized practical learning.  The four events are joined by a complex of mutual interaction .  Each event is interconnected to all the others.  Thus we can see that if we start with the “farm,” there is an established, logical connection to the “village,” to the “mill” and to the “academy.”