Intentional cities have a vision and a plan for the future that is owned by a broad cross-section of people in the community.  In the process the stakeholders have learned about the assets in the community that are currently meeting human needs, and about how the community systems work to either enhance or erode future capacity.  The plan has goals and targets that reflect the community’s needs for economic development, wealth creation and well-being.  Unmet needs have been identified, along with underutilized resources, as well as an inventory of all the assets needed to provide real wealth.  

Now it’s time to start seeing the community as an enterprise, and its citizens as the owners.  With this lens, the capacity the community has to create real wealth and well-being can be characterized as the community capital used to produce that wealth.  A dictionary definition of the word capital is “assets available for use in the production of further assets.”  The word’s origin comes from capus, the head of a cow, dating back to agrarian societies where people counted their productive capacity from the number of cows they owned. If assets are examples of the real wealth we have to meet our needs, then community capital represents the capacity to create this real wealth on an ongoing basis. READ FULL CHAPTER