Terrarium

What it is

Terrarium is a framework for neighbourhood resilience. The premise is small and checkable: most streets already hold real pieces of what they would need in a disruption, a generator here, stored water there, medical supplies in one home, tools in another, but nobody knows who has what, so the gaps stay invisible. Terrarium’s job is to make those gaps visible and easy to fill, without meetings, pressure or ideology.

Resilience is measured in twelve household domains rather than as a checklist. Each domain has three tiers: three days of capacity for the household; thirty days with a little surplus; and specialisation, where one household becomes a resource for five to twenty others in one or two domains. The strategy is simple: everyone reaches the first tier, then the second, then specialises.

Two layers run side by side on purpose. One produces and competes: it rewards building capacity and generating surplus. The other connects and distributes: it routes surplus to where it is needed. The design documents call them Father Tree and Mother Mycelium. Keeping both means the framework never forces a choice between self-reliance and mutual aid.

The maths underneath treats a household as a point in a twelve-axis space, each axis from zero to one, tracking what it could do, what it does, and what runs on its own. Six adoption-resistance axes (capital, space, time, authority, skill, patience) explain why a household does not close a gap it can see. Threats and resistances each map onto the twelve axes in a table, and a product’s fit is the product of five factors. A formal test for when a street becomes a self-sustaining cell is written but not yet computed. The Capability Space paper on this site is its write-up.

None of the underlying techniques are new. Permaculture, small-scale growing, tool libraries, community land trusts and decades of off-grid practice already work at the household scale. Terrarium’s contribution is coordination: a shared, computable way for a whole street to adopt them together.

The twelve domains

• Shelter & Hospitality
• Food & Nutrition
• Water Security
• Sanitation & Hygiene
• Energy & Power
• Health & Medical
• Security & Safety
• Communication & Information
• Transportation & Mobility
• Tools & Manufacturing
• Governance & Coordination
• Culture & Recreation

What exists today

The framework is a set of design documents from November 2025: the twelve domains with their three tiers, the capability maths, a street-retrofit playbook and a product data model. The only code that implements any of it is Terrarium Store, whose readiness score is a first published formula over three of the ideas: capability, connection and sharing. No neighbourhood cell exists; a physical site is parked.

Not done

How household scores combine into a street score, and the rule that stops the number being gamed, are not written down yet; only per-household scoring exists.

The design documents use two slightly different twelve-domain vocabularies. The store’s code uses the one listed here, and the two were deliberately not merged.

No physical site, no property, and no zoning research beyond a parked note.

Next

Finish the scenario suite in the store, measure one street’s use of it, and only then look at a first physical site.

Further out

If the coordination layer works, the destination is a real place: a walkable neighbourhood cell run on shared solar, water, food production and tool libraries, closer in feel to solarpunk than to bunker prepping, founded one at a time and specialised by geography, with the same twelve-domain maths at every scale. The store, the scenarios and the maths are the on-ramp; the place is the destination.