WHERE TO DIG: Forging a Collapse-Aware Grower Community in the City, Suburb, or Country

Survival doesn’t hinge on the perfect location—it hinges on guts, graft, and the people beside you. Whether you’re boxed in by concrete, fenced in by suburbia, or wrestling the wilds, collapse doesn’t wait for ideal conditions. What matters is digging in, forging trust, and growing something rooted and collective.

Photo by Sandra Cohen-Rose and Colin Rose of Flicker, via Community Gardening as Social Change, Sierra Club

For most people, there’s no perfect patch of soil to dig into and face collapse from. There are only hard choices—but they’re still worth making. Whether you’re in the city, the suburbs, or wrestling wind and weeds in the wilderness, every setting brings its own mix of grit, risk, and raw potential. What matters isn’t the address—it’s whether you’re ready to dig in, stay put, and build something rooted, collective, and future-facing.

This guide lays out some hard truths and practical decisions for three different locations. It is far from exhaustive and doesn’t cover every survival need—food sovereignty, water security, comms, transport, medicine, and the rest all matter—but none of that gets off the ground without a grower community. This is where it starts. And once it's started, the rest follows.

Not everyone will be ‘the grower’. Fair enough. But that doesn’t get anyone off the hook. There’s work either side of the planting line that needs doing—lifting, fixing, preserving, defending—and growers can’t do it all. So toughen up, get close to the soil, and learn to think like a grower. At the very least, become grower-adjacent.

1. The Inner City: Concrete, Community, and Cracks in the System

The Merits

Urban areas might seem like the worst place to ride out collapse—but don’t underestimate them, at least not for the medium short-term. Cities hold power: density, proximity, momentum. Community gardens grow more than vegetables—they grow neighbours, muscle memory, and political will. There’s untapped land hiding in plain sight: verges, rooftops, alleyways, balconies, blighted lots. Hospitals are nearby. So are tools, trades, and helping hands. And when systems crack, cities already know how to organise fast.

The Risks

Most urban soil is poisoned, and rainfall can be as useless as concrete without a tank or trench to catch it. Water is heavily regulated—storage is restricted, using grey water is likely illegal. It’s going to take time and commitment to get these things sorted. But they can be sorted, with will and commitment.

But choosing this route takes clear-sight. Make no mistake: when the web snaps, cities also bleed. There is danger in the density. Food chains vanish. Services collapse. Theft, violence, and burnout will stalk even the strongest city communities. And when the grid goes, freezers full of abundance turn into slow rot. There’s no spare room for storage, no cellar for cool keeping. So city resilience and safety lives and dies on what you build together.

Machinery, Tools & Seeds

Few urban growers own serious tools. I’ve seen countless Instagram posts for fancy mechanised tools, aimed at this urban market. Don’t buy into the consumer myth. Power tools become dead weight without electricity. Gas? Forget it. When things get tight, the humble shovel and fork are king. Most seeds are store-bought, and those stores will shutter fast. Start saving now. Seed banks that survive disaster will be built in tenement kitchens, not just silos in the hills.

Crossing Lines

Collecting rainwater is banned in many cities. There are health concerns about sanitation, rooftop materials, and storage. But you are going to need that water anyway. In collapse, the law often lags behind necessity. Build passive water catchments. Use grey water. People in the country have been using raw rainwater for generations. You are going to have to toughen up.

Moreover, guerrilla gardening isn’t legal, even if it is frowned upon. Plant anyway. Garden at night if you must.

And network like your life depends on it—because one day, it will. Set up food swaps. Tool libraries. Shared water systems. Talk to the woman across the hall. Train kids in fermentation. Save seeds and save stories. When things go sideways, people matter more than produce, and in an urban setting you have tonnes of people power. Your strength is your street.

How to Think It Through

If you're in the city, you need to become a pattern recogniser. Walk your neighbourhood like a forager with a shovel—what’s fertile, what’s fallow, what’s worth digging into? What’s under-used? Who's already growing? Where’s the shade, where’s the runoff, where’s the rot? Read local planning laws—see what they restrict and what they miss. Figure out how to get around the rulebook. Join local permaculture or urban resilience groups. Ask: who controls your water? Where are the bottlenecks? Learn to read a city like a grower, not a consumer. That’s how you find the cracks to plant in.

2. The Outer Suburbs: Awkward Edges, Abundance, and Isolation

The Merits

The suburban fringe is messy but promising. There’s space to grow, fewer rules, and just enough infrastructure to fake resilience. Someone in your street has probably got a truck, a rainwater tank, a dehydrator, maybe even a coop full of chickens. Sunlight hits your soil. Front yards can become food forests. If collapse trickles in slowly, you might just hold the line.

The Risks

But the outer suburbs weren’t built for collapse. They were built for gas-guzzling cars, six-burner barbecues, and weekend consumerism. When the fuel dries up, so does your mobility. Neighbours are often strangers. Shared food systems are rare. Blackouts cripple storage. Freezers become tombs. Tools break and no one knows how to fix them. And when fear sets in, fences get higher. Hoarding replaces helping.

Machinery, Tools & Seeds

Like city growers, suburban growers love their machines—until the gas runs out. Start weaning off them now. Manual tools, hand pumps, scythes—get skilled with them. Share repair know-how before the parts stop arriving. Seed saving is also weak in the suburbs. That has to change. There won’t be any stores for supplies, no overnight Amazon delivery of seeds and fertiliser. Nor rows and rows of flush, verdant seedlings at the nursery.

Crossing Lines

Trading eggs, raw milk, or cured meat? Technically illegal. So what. If systems break, the people who fed themselves quietly will feed others. Build networks. Trade in the shadows. Make the fridge in your garage a cold pantry. Think black-market bartering—but with zucchinis and wrenches instead of whisky and bullets.

Go hyper-local. Five to ten households. Street-level action. Map out who has what: solar, water, tools, surplus. That’s your ground zero—dig in there. Build shared food storage. Dry, can, salt, ferment. Store fuel for your tools, then learn to live without it. Shift from private prepping to collective provisioning. Collapse doesn’t care about property lines. Neither should you.

How to Think It Through

Suburbia fools you into thinking you're self-reliant—until you aren’t. Read everything I wrote about the city and think how it also applies to you. Make a brutal list: where do you rely on the grid, the truck, the shop? What breaks first if fuel vanishes? Practice walking your supply chain backwards. Join local resilience meetups or disaster-ready groups. Study post-collapse scenarios—what happened in Venezuela, Syria, post-Katrina New Orleans? Then plan accordingly. Don’t just read gardening blogs and dream of Instagram posts of beautiful tomatoes. Read collapse analysis. Follow water law changes. Watch how suburbia responds to heatwaves—then get ahead of it.

3. The Country: Land, Autonomy, and Loneliness

The Merits

The land has long memory. If you’ve got water, skill, and staying power, country growing can feed dozens. There’s space to build proper systems: swales, compost toilets, dam-fed irrigation, animal rotations. When the roads are still open, you can stockpile. And when the harvest hits, you can feed the valley. Most importantly—you can grow seed at scale.

The Risks

But don’t romanticise the wide open spaces. You’re on your own. Labour is capped by what you can physically do yourself. You have none of the people abundance of the city and suburbs. When fire tears through or flood takes the bridge, there’s no ambulance coming. Drought can gut a farm. Bore water runs dry. Machinery breaks and parts vanish. Diesel is precious, and once it’s gone, your tractors and pumps are scrap metal. Isolation is brutal. Abundance can rot in a shed if you’ve no one to share it with. Even paradise can become a trap.

Machinery, Tools & Seeds

You likely have the gear—but you’d better know how to fix it blindfolded. Learn now. Get manuals. Stock spares. Then build manual systems anyway. Draft tools. Pulley lifts. Levers and ramps. As for seeds: treat them like gold. Distribute them like medicine. Rural growers can become lifelines—if they plan for it.

Crossing Lines

Stockpiling diesel? Questionable. Foraging timber in restricted zones? Illegal. Slaughtering off-grid and swapping meat for raw milk cheese? Regulated. Probably illegal. Seed stock? If you live in a commercial farming region, seed potatoes or seed varieties are likely banned. Know all of this.

And don’t isolate. Your first mission is not self-sufficiency—it’s interdependence. Trade seeds across valleys. Share tools and teach repairs. Start a freezer co-op or build a regional cold store. Make your farm a node, not a fortress. Dig trenches of trust across fence lines. When collapse bites, rural people will do what they’ve always done: what needs doing. Do it quietly now, before times require it. Build trust. Share water. Share knowledge. Share risk.

How to Think It Through

If you’re rural, study like a wartime farmer. Read historic homesteading manuals. Learn what broke people in the Dust Bowl. Build your own weather log. Start tracking fuel dependency, water depth, rainfall patterns, firebreaks. Know your catchment intimately. Learn not just how to grow, but how to hold a region together.

So Where Should You Make Your Stand?

Anywhere you’ll dig in and stay. Anywhere you’ll show up again tomorrow. Survival rewards courage, commitment, and community. A thousand shallow preppers on acreage won’t outlast a stubborn handful of growers and their helpers who’ve chosen to belong to each other.

This work—this slow, defiant act of growing food in a dying system—it isn’t about purity. It’s about grit. It’s seed saving over seed hoarding. It’s shared water, shared storage, shared resilience. It’s asking for help and offering that in return, showing up with water when someone else’s tank runs dry.

You don’t need perfect land. You need people. You need skills. You need trust that holds under pressure. Urban. Suburban. Rural. It’s all rough ground now. Choose your patch. Fight for it. And forge the systems that will carry others through, not just yourself.

Solidarity & Soil.

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On Not Being a Grower

If you are not a grower yourself—maybe you are restricted by age, physical limitations, knowledge or, frankly, interest—cultivate an appreciation for the commercial small-scale market gardeners near you. Meet them. Support them. Recognise they are doing it far tougher than you imagine. In a world governed exclusively by money, they are among the lowest paid, least valued, most invisible workers in every community. Change that. Ensure they feel appreciated. Help them with whatever skills you can bring. If that means propping up their business so they don’t go belly-up before collapse rolls through, dig deep and do that. DO THAT! The world needs their skills, now more than ever.

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I walked away from the algorithm’s choke-hold to work where it counts: hands in soil, words on the page, shoulder to shoulder and word to word with those adapting to climate chaos. This is fire-and-flood writing—scorched, storm-beaten, and stubborn. If it moved you, pass it on like a sandbag in rising water.

There’ll be no paywalls—collapse is brutal enough. But if you’ve got coin, become a paid subscriber. Every dime fuels the RESILIENT ROOTS GROWER COLLECTIVE, where we’re seeding trial-by-fire systems and hard-won knowledge.

And if you’re looking for practical tools, maps, and field notes for the road ahead, start with A COLLECTIVE GUIDE TO SURVIVING CLIMATE COLLAPSE.

This post is part of a Resilient Roots Growers Collective Series with deep gratitude for funding support from the Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal (FRRR).

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