Shepparton's 'shed dwellers' showing the way

Shepparton’s “shed dwellers” are at the leading edge of how life will be in coming decades.

Shepparton's shed dwellers
 are another critical piece
 in the jigsaw in the picture
of life in the future.

Our shed dwellers, a metaphor for those who chose to live where they work, is more common than we might think.
Those who have chosen this approach have done so for a variety of reasons, from economic to convenience and from an interest in reducing their carbon footprint to just good sense.
Man’s voracious appetite for energy is eroding our finite fossil fuel resources so much that anything we can do to reduce the distance between where we live and our work will be critical.
Most of our shed dwellers leave home in the morning walk a few steps and start work.
Such beautiful convenience in our emerging energy starved world makes absolute sense, but is objected to by many who, despite repeated warnings about collapsing energy networks, are addicted to a way of life that only exists because of fossil fuels.
Beyond that, many say they simply don’t want to be so close to their work; they want a physical divide, they want their work and their homes to be in different geographical places.
The news about that, sad or otherwise depending on you stance, can just as easily be in your mind and so as expansive, or as distant you want it to be.
Drive around Shepparton and within minutes the opportunities for a “live where you work” life becomes apparent and just awaits the arrival of some creative and entrepreneurial person to exploit the opening.
For centuries humans have created living spaces in what at first glance seemed like most inopportune places, but which eventually evolved to become hugely comfortable, community building, personally satisfying and, importantly, a wise economic decision that greatly reduced energy consumption.
Home-based enterprises were once commonplace, but a few things changed that – humans learned how to access and exploit fossil fuels, bringing on the Industrial Revolution that saw the gestation of corporations, that profited from labour, which enjoyed the products made possible by those fossil fuels, leading to the motor car, that produced suburbia built around a detached home on a large block, often many kilometres from where the home owner worked.
These sumptuous neighbourhoods lacked intimacy and so the true sense of community that are mostly connected to intensively settled and developed places in which, in times gone, your neighbour could have been a blacksmith on one side and the other, a fellow who repaired and built, by hand, furniture.
Times, obviously, have changed, but the shed dweller next door might be an engineer, or a computer specialist, but whatever they might be, the intimacy of the living and working locally is a resource upon which our future will hinge.