Humans Uniting for Better Sustainability (HUBS)

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As part of the ongoing evolution of the experiment in community that is Black Rock City, in 2022 Burning Man introduced the idea of Humans Uniting for Better Sustainability, or HUBS. It is a chunky bite of word salad, but the acronym works and the idea behind it is great.

In a nutshell, it provides a way for camps who share resources (water, power, tools, and transportation for example) to request placement next to each other so you can, you know, share those resources more easily. Let me take my moderator hat off for a bit and provide some background.

Before the introduction of HUBS, the only way camps could assure being placed near each other was to form a village. That process became its own institution and had its own challenges (for interactivity, art themes, etc) for theme camps and village organizers, as well as posed some challenges for things like emergency services, rangers, and placement.

In 2024, Burning Man's placement team announced that the Village placement category would be going away in 2025. That did not (and still does not) mean that Burning Man is making Villages go away. Basically, after a couple years of success with the HUBS program, the placement team felt like this was a better process to manage the placement of groups. HUBS groups can still have common themes and decorate and behave like a village.

By announcing the change a year in advance, it helped give camp and village leaders plenty of lead time for planning and preparing (which was helpful, as a theme camp leader I can confirm that many of us are already thinking or working on plans for next year). At the same time, by announcing the change a year in advance, it also gave people plenty of opportunity to weigh in on social media and other outlets, prophesize doom and other stuff like that. That was understandable, people on the whole are resistant to change.

That brings us to 2025. HUBS have been around since 2022, and they're a solid way for camps and groups who share resources to request placement together. This page contains information from the placement team for camp leaders and leaders of HUBS (essentially village leaders) to better plan and share resources. There is some great info on those pages, it is definitely worth checking out if you're either a camp or village leader or a team lead on a project.