BEST USE for COMMUNITY
Best Use for Community
begins where communities already are.
We're a behavioral lab studying how communities build cohesion, defend their land, and shape what comes next — and an open invitation to learn, organize, and invest alongside the communities already doing this work.
What This Lab Is
Most land use decisions get made by asking one question: what is this site worth, to whom, for what return? Best Use for Community starts from a different question — what does this place need to become, for the people who live around it and the land and water that sustain them?
We call this a lab because that's what it is. We're studying how trust moves through communities facing land use pressure, corporate overreach, and institutions that have stopped listening — and we're building tools alongside the communities doing that work, not handing tools down to them. Community Intelligence (CI) is the behavioral layer underneath that study: 140–145 indicators typically populated per census tract, read at census-tract resolution, zero personal data collected on anyone. What it produces is a read of how a community is organized, where its cohesion is strong, and where outside pressure is most likely to find an opening — so that the community sees it first.
Before any behavioral question gets asked, CI reads a community at three levels.
What the community is carrying — the civic, economic, and institutional conditions that shape how people receive information and act on it.
Whether the community's different groups — long-time residents, newer neighbors, local organizations — are moving in the same direction or pulling apart.
Whether there's enough shared civic fabric to sustain collective action — a campaign, a legal fight, a long defense — over time.
Where This Shows Up
The same behavioral understanding applies wherever a community is organizing around land, resources, or institutions that aren't listening. These aren't separate services — they're examples of the same underlying work, in different settings.
Understanding where cohesion already exists — and where it needs to be built quickly — before a zoning decision or land sale moves forward without the community at the table.
Legal strategy depends on a plaintiff community staying connected and aligned over months or years. Reading where that cohesion is strong, and where it's fraying, early.
When a city council or local board is no longer representing the community it serves, understanding how trust and information move outside those formal channels — and who communities already turn to instead.
Where industrial siting, waste, and emissions decisions land hardest on communities with the least formal power — and how those communities already organize around shared experience.
Every brownfield site carries two questions: what would it take to remediate and convert it, and what does the surrounding community actually want it to become. Best Use of Land × Nature asks both.
Some defenses take years. Understanding whether a community's organizing structure can sustain that — and where outside support is most needed to keep it from fraying.
Best Use of Land × Best Use of Nature
These are two indices we're developing — part of a growing body of work that communities, researchers, and partners are helping shape. Neither one is the point on its own. Together, they ask the question that usually gets skipped: what does this specific place, at this specific latitude and longitude, need — for the people who live there and the land and water around them?
A read on land use potential that starts from the community's own sense of what's needed — housing, gathering space, green space, economic use — rather than starting from what a developer's model says the land is worth.
A read on the ecological role a specific site already plays or could play — water, soil, habitat, shade, flood buffering — quantified using existing environmental data at the precision of a single location.
One place this comes together is a place-based partnership working through brownfield sites — understanding what's there now, what it would take to remediate and convert each one, and what the surrounding community actually wants it to become. That work is one expression of Best Use of Land × Best Use of Nature, and one of several active threads in the lab right now.
The indices themselves are still being built. That's part of the invitation — this is work that communities, researchers, and funders can help shape as it develops, not a finished tool being delivered.
This is a lab, and labs grow through partnership. If you're a community organization working through any of the situations above, we'd like to learn alongside you — understanding your community's behavioral architecture is something we can offer at no cost, because it's how the lab learns.
If you're a funder, researcher, or values-aligned partner, the growing body of work here — the Best Use of Land and Best Use of Nature indices, the brownfield partnership, the behavioral architecture studies — is work you can help shape and grow. We're early. That's the point.
Communities decide what "best use" means for their own places. Our work is building the tools that let that decision be seen, supported, and defended.
Everything in this work is derived from aggregate behavioral signals. Zero personally identifiable information is collected, stored, or used at any stage. No individual is named, tracked, or profiled.
The unit of analysis is always the community — never the person.
In theory, we do not own the community data — nor do our partners. The community does. We believe this is the only ethical way to do this kind of work.
It is also, as it turns out, the way that respects what the instrument can actually claim: community behavioral architecture is what this reads, structurally and repeatably — not a judgment on any one person.