Okay, so one more link for today, since I don't know that I have a whole lot to say about it. It's not strictly energy stuff, but it's useful info, I think. According to Kevin Harris, who is a pretty good source on what's going on in the UK to improve neighborhoods from the ground up, what makes the biggest difference (in terms of positive factors) for happiness with your neighborhood is that the people are friendly. This isn't ground-breaking stuff, but it is stuff that's easy to forget about. Kevin's post is about forgetting about friendliness while focusing on community involvement and influence (i.e., self-determination at the local level), but you could probably come up with a dozen other things that people focus on instead of friendliness.
Of course, that "instead of" is tricky, because I don't think you can solve everybody's problems just by forcing everyone to smile at everyone else, and at some point you do have to deal with self-governance or whatever else. But maybe while you're working on all those things, we need to also find ways to spread friendliness. These things work together, after all, and how much can a smile cost?