The words, explained.

A settlement that holds the warmth of a village and the ambition of a city at the same time. The name is a claim, not a label — every design decision is tested against whether it keeps both.

Specifically the Anatolian village — small, known, land-attached, with the quiet assumption that every person is someone's someone. Kont keeps the face-to-face scale at the neighborhood level (≤150 ppl, the Dunbar ceiling) so this condition is structurally possible.

The city as cultural and economic depth — schools, clinics, libraries, workshops, the density that makes a FabLab economically real. Kont borrows the infrastructure ambition of the city without the anonymity.

In Anatolian vernacular houses the hayat is the shaded open room between the yard and the private interior — life happens here. The Aegean Kont housing type is built around a modern hayat: the room where the family and the street still meet.

A contemporary Anatolian vernacular — limestone walls, low-pitched clay-tile roof, central shaded court (the hayat), vine-covered south face. Passive cooling, deep reveals, generous threshold. Not nostalgia — the type that actually works in the climate.

A donor funds a cause and moves on. A patron joins the commons — gets the same transparency every Core Member does, receives the journal, and is expected to say when the work is off-principle. The language matters.

The unit of the network. Walkable end-to-end, productive landscape within reach, shared service core at the hinge. Each settlement is locally autonomous; the network provides standards, mutual aid, and a knowledge commons.

The face-to-face scale. Every resident can hold a meaningful relationship with every other. A settlement is 2–3 neighborhoods around a shared core — enough to fund the shared services, small enough to keep governance direct.

Named for Robin Dunbar. The neighborhood cap. Above 150 you lose the quiet assumption that you know who you're disagreeing with; below 300 (aggregated across 2–3 neighborhoods) a clinic or a FabLab doesn't have the population to be viable.

A GP clinic needs 250–400 patients. A K–8 school needs 40–60 children. A FabLab needs 40+ makers. The service floor is the reason we share a core across neighborhoods — one neighborhood alone can't make the numbers work.

The infrastructure hinge. Sits between neighborhoods on the e-bike spine. One of each, not one per neighborhood — that's what the service floor makes possible.

Walkable for the willing, e-bike for everyone else. Cars live at the periphery. The spine is what replaces the street grid; it's also where the farmers' market, the evening promenade, and the outdoor classroom actually happen.

A quarter of the land is built environment; three quarters is productive landscape or natural reserve. Village character is preserved regardless of population — density lives inside the built 25%, not across the site.

Z0 is the building itself; Z1 the kitchen garden; Z2 the greenhouse; Z3 the field crop; Z4 managed forest; Z5 wild reserve. Each zone outward demands less daily attention and is zoned to match.

Building-level detail — where the clinic sits, where the hayat-houses cluster, where the market square is, how the spine runs. Distinct from the network plan which only shows settlements as pins.

Different from consensus (everyone agrees). In consent, you're only asked: is this decision good enough for now, safe enough to try? Members who object must name the principle they're defending. It scales to 300–450 where full consensus doesn't.

Every general assembly and every circle rotates its facilitator. Keeps knowledge distributed, prevents the concentration of quiet authority, and — critically — trains every member in how the meeting actually runs.

The living document that binds the cooperative. Version history is public; every amendment runs through the consent process and is numbered. Draft 1 is written by the 28 committed households, not handed to them.

Every canonical doc carries its open questions inline, marked OQ-1, OQ-2, etc. Per DECISIONS §28 the interactive submit/upvote surface is portal-only, never the public website; the full read-only register (REF-005, 92 questions) is published at /docs/kont-ref-005-open-questions-en.

Turkish Law 1163 governs cooperatives. The Aegean settlement registers as a cooperative under this law, with Art. 4/1-k tax exemption for qualifying member-benefit activity. Pairs well with the 300–450 scale.

A hybrid RAK ICC foundation + mainland LLC is the current working structure for the UAE site. Whether it survives contact with actual cooperative governance is an open question — counsel in RAK is engaged to pressure-test.

Capital raised from members, grants, and aligned patrons. Returns cap at a regulated rate (typical cooperative practice); surplus reinvests in the commons or redistributes to members as patronage rebates — never to external shareholders, because there aren't any.

Phase 0 · Foundation (cohort, legal vehicle, site shortlist). Phase 1 · Validation (land, bylaws, first neighborhood). Phase 2 · Build (construction, move-in). Phase 3 · Active (operating settlement). The Aegean site is Phase 0 → 1; UAE is pre-Phase 0.

Every region study names its decision gate and the criteria that have to be met to pass it. UAE's 2027 gate depends on the water-model outputs and the governance-vehicle question both holding. If the gate doesn't open, the region defers — not a failure, a working method.

At v1, two active studies — Aegean Türkiye and UAE desert fringe. These appear as filled pins on the atlas, each with a dedicated region page and a published narrative.

Shown on the atlas as outline pins — but only after the founder validates each. Empty on purpose at v1: the map stays honest until there's something honest to show.

Not a Kont, but working from adjacent principles. They register via the communities form and appear as a separate pin layer on the atlas once an editor reviews. Knowledge flows both ways.

Every region walks the same seven rungs. Moving up is a decision by the cohort, not a timeline. The ladder exists so progress is legible — to the cohort, to followers, to patrons — and so no region can quietly skip a rung.

Before a Kont exists, a cohort does. The Aegean cohort is 28 households as of this writing; they write bylaws draft 1 together and commit capital at land acquisition. Names stay private until the cooperative registers.

The why of the project. VIS-001 is the manifesto; VIS-002 is the seventeen operational principles.

The how of the cooperative. GOV-001 is the bylaws; GOV-003 is the conduct charter.

The jurisdictional vehicles. LEG-001 maps the legal framework across the two active studies.

The numbers of the project. FIN-003 is the feasibility study, kept public on purpose.

The doing of a Kont. OPS-001 is the spatial program — the single most-cited doc in this glossary.

The membership framework, MEM-001, names the five tiers (Core Member, Resident, Researcher, Volunteer, Guest) and the path between them.

Supporting material. REF-005 collects every open question in the archive; REF-003 is the translation guide for anyone working on localized versions.