Components of New Settlements — One: Parameters 1

A parameter is not a component, but this is the first post in an effort to use words to describe what I have clearly in my mind relating to the creation of new settlements. Here I simply want to begin noting parameters of such settlements.

1. They will contain within their bounds most if not all the elements of ecological sustainability. Their own recycling capacity for all or most waste. Collection and distribution and recycling of water. It is important to understand that we are talking about creating duplicable elements that could be used in many settlements.

2. They will have no private automobiles and trucks within their borders. Most transportation will be pedestrian with all mechanized transportation limited to public and service vehicles. Communities will be designed to make access to private vehicles possible only outside of their boundaries. Important that this not be seen as a complete rejection of private vehicles. They will have a place, but they will not dictate design as they now do.

More parameters will be discussed in future posts, setting the stage for a discussion of actual components.. In essence, the parameters will be suggestive of the components.

pattern language, politics

Jane Jacobs Saw It All

READ THE ENTIRE JANE JACOBS INTERVIEW ON THE NEW ECONOMY

Here’s a salient quote:

A lot of the production work, design work, economic work that is being done now has a much higher proportion of what we call human capital in it and a much lower proportion of natural resources and other materials in it than in the past. And that is an important change that is very promising for sustainable economies because, after all, human capital – the experience, the skills, the inspiration, the imagination that goes into these things – is not a resource that is subject to the laws of diminishing returns. The more human capital is used, the more it grows.

pattern language, politics

How To Get The Jobs Back

I have more than once insisted that things are working reasonably well considering. I assume the untold story now is the number of entrepreneurial and visionary sorts who are completely content with the fact that the jobs that are vanishing need not come back.

The first things they think about are values. What in god’s name will people pay for these days? People will pay for comfort and health but these are no longer to be identified with houses and cars. They are identified with new forms of dwelling and new forms of transportation. It will be hit or miss for a while but a transition from ownership to renting is a hint in the right direction.

Values — what people want is a chance to enjoy public space without being placed in an interminable line, subject to mayhem and hassling and feeling lost in a crowd. Where are the visionaries and entrepreneurs who will put this value into practice by advocating for and creating decent new public spaces where people can sit in some security and enjoy the passing scene?

I have pattern language posts here with tons of specific ideas that suggest new products and economies, but all I am hearing is restarting so we can have more of the same — cars and single homes scattered from here to the far reaches of Mongolia. We are not in a credit crisis. We are in an idea crisis.

THE ONLINE PATTERN LANGUAGE SUMMARY

We get the jobs back by letting go and putting our minds to work. We acknowledge that there are already people working to create a new way of living. We give up cautious capitalism for adventurous investment in real things that are on the ground. We acknowledge that the market is working fine. When we say no, it means that we want something else. People cannot spend for what is not being offered. Where there is no vision people perish.

We give up on the idea that we just need to get credit flowing. What we need to get flowing is ideas and visions. Let’s stop living on credit and live on new values that raise us from lemming status to something a trifle more dignified.

Please read Our Crisis Is Not Economic for context.

pattern language, politics

Obama Pattern Language Primer — 14

Continuing a series of looks at Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.

Please read Our Crisis Is Not Economic as a starting point.

THE ONLINE PATTERN LANGUAGE SUMMARY

OBAMA PATTERN LANGUAGE PRIMER POSTS — CUMULATIVE

This section considers amenities in a viable, integral human settlement.

The local shops and gathering places.

Individually Owned Shops

Street Cafe

Corner Grocery

Beer Hall

Traveller’s Inn

Bus Stop

Food Stands

Sleeping in Public

Individually Owned Shops [May be part of Shopping Street, Market of Many Shops]

Alexander states: “When shops are too large, or controlled by absentee owners, they become plastic, bland and abstract.”

Clearly this sets up a conflict and even a debate. Mall culture and Wal-Mart hangar-sized boxes are the seeming default. But there may well be an argument for precisely the smaller.more niche-type outlets that Alexander wants. I use “outlets” with some care because I see storage and home delivery as the future of much if not most shopping. This enables a store to be more a node where someone places an order. Perhaps it has tables and chairs and is social. The proprieter in knowledgable in the niche area. And so forth. Clearly there is no room for huge stores in a settlement that is car free within its perimeter.

Street Cafes [May be part of Identifiable Neighbourhood , Activity Nodes, Small Public Squares]

Alexander states the obvious: “The street cafe provides a unique setting , special to cities: a place where people can sit lazily, legitimately, be on view, and watch the world go by.”

I would ideally place such nodes ever 300 feet or so and make them places where people could both gather and schmooze. And also where they might be able to get enough to eat to count as a viable meal. I am convinced that the kitchen’s days are numbered and that the pedestrian settlement would pretty much make eating out cost effective.

Corner Grocery [May be part of Market of Many Shops, Web of Shopping, Identifiable Neighbourhood]

Alexander: “It has lately been assumed that people no longer want to walk to local stores. This assumption is mistaken.”

Alexander’s right and one should be able to meet basic grocery needs within 800 yards max of one’s residence. These communities should also have a kid business for elderly folk, where they carry the groceries for a small honorarium.

Beer Hall [May be part of Neighbourhood Boundary, Promenade, Night Life]

Alexander asks: “Where can people sing, and drink, and shout and drink, and let go of their sorrows?”

And answers: “Somewhere in a community at least one big place where a few hundred people can gather, with beer and wine, music, and perhaps a half-dozen activities, so that people are continuously crossing from one to another.”

In Capri there are such spots including some that are, cleverly, underground, diminishing intrusive sound.

My ideal is a community built on a futuristic matrix shere there is a good deal underground, including the mechanism needed to recycle everything in the community onsite. The matrix would include wind turbines and extensive solar paneling and operate as a shell for the community. In some cases even collecting and processing rain water.

“Traveller’s Inn [May be part of Magic of the City, Activity Nodes, Promenade, Night Life, Work Community]

Akexander makes a cool point: “A man (sic) who stays the night in a strange place is still a member of the human community, and still needs company. There is no reason why he should creep into a hole, and watch TV alone, the way he does in a roadside motel.”

And elaborates: “Make the traveler’s inn a place where travelers can take rooms for the night, but where- unlike most hotels and motels- the inn draws all its energy from the community of travelers that are there any given evening. The scale is small 30 or 40 guests to an inn; meals are offered communally; there is even a large space ringed round with beds in alcoves.”

Bus Stop [May be part of Mini-Buses]

Alexander argues: “Bus stops must be easy to recognize, and pleasant, with enough activity around them to make people comfortable and safe.”

Adding: “Build bus stops so that they form tiny centers of public life. Build them as part of the gateways into neighbourhoods, work communities, parts of town….”

In my ideal settlement there would be “rides”. I can see a default vehicle of some sort that simply goes through the various promenades and picks people up and drops them off. They could be operated at modest speed by persons trained to ensure safe movement. They would not be frequent enough to discourage walking and not infrequent enough to cause impatience. Five minute intervals comes to mind. They could also double as security vehicles as they would in effect be patrolling the community.

Food Stands [May be part of Activity Nodes, Road Crossing, Raised Walk, Small Public Squares, Bus Stop]

Fine: “Many of our habits and institutions are bolstered by the fact that we can get simple, inexpensive food on the street, on the way to shopping, work, and friends.”

Sleeping in Public [May be part of Interchange, Small Public Squares, Public Outdoor Room, Street Cafes, Pedestrian Street]

Says Alexander: “It is a mark of success in a park, public lobby or a porch, when people can come there and fall asleep.”

Indeed but we are far from being the trusting community that we need to become to enable this prescription:

“Keep the environment filled with ample benches, comfortable places, corners to sit on the ground, or lie in comfort in the sand. Make these places relatively sheltered, protected from circulation, perhaps up a step, with seats and grass to slump down upon, read the paper and doze off.”

I would call this change I could believe in.

NOTE: I am making an effort to find some visual basis for suggesting the structure of settlements I am trying to convey. So far I have found only the following:

EXAMPLE ONE

EXAMPLE TWO

Obama Pattern Language Primer — 13

I am acutely aware, as I continue this series of looks at Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, that it is presumptuous to imply that the ideas I am developing could constitute a primer for our President. And yet, that is exactly what I intend them to be.

A primer is something that primes. It is also an introduction, not a finished product. I intend, and devoutly hope, that our President will read Our Crisis Is Not Economic and agree that we need to move not merely beyond the tyranny of oil but beyond the entire design that was spawned by an automotive economy.

Then I hope he will open and bookmark this handy online summary of Alexander’s classic work, realizing that, like Robert Pirsig’s Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Alexander’s work is the special product of a rare being. Its resulting honesty — and even it’s offense to the status quo — is to be respected and even honored.

THE ONLINE PATTERN LANGUAGE SUMMARY

Then, I hope the President will at least ask someone on his staff to wade through all the posts in this series. I have been at pains to collate Alexander’s timely ideas about human settlements with my own vision of what is desperately needed as at least one element in the work that will be done over the next few years. That is:

1. To create the principles we can agree need to inform all future human settlements and

2. To actually design and develop models of human community that are car-free, eco-sufficient and integral, that place near at hand all of the elements needed to live a rounded life within walking distance, not within thirty or sixty miles.

OBAMA PATTERN LANGUAGE PRIMER POSTS — CUMULATIVE

In this post, we note that Alexander is basically pertinent to a car-free, new community and that his ideas become more relevant the more we concede the need to simply replace metrosprawl with viable new settlements.

The workgroups, including all kinds of workshops and offices and even children’s learning groups.

Self-Governing Workshops and Offices

Small Services without Red Tape

Office Connections

Master and Apprentices

Teenage Society

Shopfront Schools

Children’s Home

Self-Governing Workshops and Offices [May be part of Scattered Work, Industrial Ribbon, Work Community]

Alexander says: “No one enjoys his work if he is a cog in a machine.”

But he does not directly relate this to the automotive root of our design and its articulation in the world. We are in a great warp of history in which Alexander’s ideas are actually consider-able. From now on we are in the realm of the seismic changes that could occur if the initial premises of these notes are accepted — car-free, eco-sufficient, integral.

Instead of Alexander’s conclusion which you can read at the relevant link above I want to argue that we can maintain some version of the work reality we now have, but by doing two things. First, creating settlements where it will be natural for those who work there to live there. That is impilicit in all that I am posting. Furthermore I am assuming that those whose livelihood is connected to some other locality will have the capacity to do much if not all of the needed work via the Internet. I believe that it is a choice whether one works at home or has an office to go to. In my proposed settlements, internet cafe’s would evolve to the point of being able to rent secure office space to persons needing them.

Note that I am not eliminating cars from the mix. I am merely eliminating them from within the area where people live.. Anyone could have a vehicle outside the perimeter and this would enable transportation to work beyond one’s own settlement. But the need for this would be radically reduced.

Small Services without Red Tape [May be part of Work Community, University as a marketplace, Local Town Hall, Health Center, Teenage Society]

Says Alexander: “Departments and public services don’t work if they are too large. When they are large, their human qualities vanish; they become bureaucratic; red tape takes over.”

I can quote his solution exactly as he wrote it and subscribe to it. And anyone who can envision the sort of settlement I am proposing will see that it is precisely what I mean by having nodes all through the settlement that are offering the services and commercial options that people want and need.

Resolution

In any institution whose departments provide public service:

1. Make each service or department autonomous as far as possible.
2. Allow no one service more that 12 staff members total.
3. House each one in an identifiable piece of the building.
4. Give each one direct access to a public thoroughfare.

I would not require anything but I would give each institution a place. All would be accessable to a public thoroughfare which in this case would be a promenade, a pedestrian way.

Office Connections [May be part of Work Community, Self-Governing Workshops and Offices, Small Services without Red Tape]

Alexander: “If two parts of an office are too far apart, people will not move between them as often as they need to; and if they are more than one floor apart, there will be almost no communication between the two.”

This implies that there might be organizations with hundreds of persons. If that is the case I should mention that I do not envision floors in the settlement I propose. While I would make it possible to stack my lego blocks two to a level, this would work out to a two story max for a larger office. In my view the structure I am proposing would offer maximum flexibility to planners of work space, even to the point of having various parts of the office across from each other so that one would walk outside to reach them.

Master and Apprentices [May be part of Network of Learning, Self-Governing Workshops and Offices}

Alexander says: “The fundamental learning situation is one in which a person learns by helping someone who really knows what he is doing.” Adding: “Organise work around a tradition of masters and apprentices.”

This is an ideal and a good one. So too, I believe, is a notion of schooling as apprenticeship, fanning out from home schooling, with the passage of decent, standard examinations the basis for certification in one or another line of work. Essentially I am assuming that the downside of the collapse of the current means of doing things will create the rising up of better alternatives for the future.

Teenage Society [May be part of Life Cycle, Network of Learning, Master and Apprentices]

Alexander: :Teenage is the time of passage between childhood and adulthood. In traditional societies, this passage is accompanied by rites which suit the psychological demands of the transition. But in modern society the “high school” fails entirely to provide the passage.”

Alexander’s solution: “Replace the “high school” with an institution which is actually a model of adult society, in which the students take on most of the responsibility for learning and social life, with clearly defined roles and forms of discipline. Provide adult guidance, both for the learning, and the social structure of the society; but keep them as far as feasible, in the hands of the students.”

Again I see a mentoring environment in my human settlements so that a teen could be drawn to playing guitar and work with a good player and get credit for same. And so forth and so on. There could be satellite mentoring nodes.

I definitely do not see huge high schools in a commmunity of 5-10,000. I would break up any educational operation into nodes that would serve no more than 50.

Shopfront Schools [May be part of Children’s Home, Network of Learning]

Alexander’s premise: “Around the age of 6 or 7, children develop a great need to learn by doing, to make their mark on a community outside the home. If the setting is right, these needs lead children directly to basic skills and habits of learning.”

Here it is almost as though Alexander had envisioned the matrix needed to make the following possible — a car free, safe community, condensed enough to make walking anywhere a reasonable expectation. [Yes, the ways would also be disability-friendly.]

“Instead of building large public schools for children 7 to 12, set up tiny independent schools, one school at a time. Keep the school small, so that its overheads are low and a teacher-student ration of 1:10 can be maintained. Locate it in the public part of the community, with a shopfront and tree or four rooms.”

Children’s Home [May be part of Children in the City, Connected Play, Network of Learning]

Says Alexander: “The task of looking after little children is a much deeper and more fundamental social issue than the phrases “baby-sitting” and “child care” suggest.”

And again his solution is pertinent to the sort of settlement I am advocating:

“In every neighbourhood, build a children’s home- a second home for children- a large rambling house or workplace- a place where children can stay for an hour or two, or for a week. At least one of the people who run it must live on the premises; it must be clear, from the way that it is run, that it is a second family for the children- not just a place where baby-sitting is available.”

You will ask how this will all be supported. It should be obvious at this point that we will be transferring the money that we used to spend on extraneous and needless things and things of inflated value with huge profit margins to the creation of a people-infrastructure, an entire new class of occupations requiring skills needed to master every phase of an enhanced living experience in a viable human settlement.

NOTE: I am making an effort to find some visual basis for suggesting the structure of settlements I am trying to convey. So far I have found only the following:

EXAMPLE ONE

EXAMPLE TWO

Stephen Curtiss Rose

A universal way of life for the 2000s

Tag Archives: sustainability

Components of New Settlements — One: Parameters 1

Jane Jacobs Saw It All

How To Get The Jobs Back

Obama Pattern Language Primer — 14

Obama Pattern Language Primer — 13