Tawni Aaron is a colleague of Michael Gosney’s who will be visiting Arcosanti in the beginning of March. She is trained as an architect and has worked with him producing the Ecocity Visions Preview, which was set up as an exhibit for the Green Pavilion at Burning Man 2 years ago. She is working with Burners without Borders in Peru, on a green building/disaster relief project). She has a blog about her efforts to promote sustainability in the Bay Area.
On a related note…Libby Hubbard aka Doctress Neutopia recently sent out an email with regards to her work on promoting Arcology via her Lovolution framework. In terms of fixing the housing crisis she says, “President Obama seems to have a good heart in wanting to keep families in housing rather than having more people added to the homeless problem. But he doesn’t fully take a holistic approach to solving the crisis.”
While in a Mesa, Arizona Obama gave a speech on Feb 19. Libby notes that he talked about how the “home mortgage crisis, the financial crisis, and the broader economic crisis are interconnected…” What he failed to mention she says is, “how underlying the economy is our life-support system, the ecology, which is also in crisis.”
The dilemma is that most people don’t know how to talk about the root causes of the housing/real estate/financial crisis without undermining any political legitimacy that one has in the political mainstream. This is one reason why exceptional leadership is needed. There seems to be zero political courage among mainstream politicians to have a thoughtful discussion about the roots of American’s economic crisis which revolve around the fact that we “have exploited the natural resources of America in order to build an unsustainable lifestyle that has no long-term future.” And who can blame them – so long as we are convinced that people cannot really change or be persuaded that another way of doing things is truly possible in this world nation and indeed this world.
American’s wealth creation machine – which the mainstream media operatives were trained to marvel about incessantly – has created huge amounts of wealth for capitalist developers. They have she notes, “became rich and greedy by building urban sprawl making cities like Phoenix and its suburbs socially isolating,” so that people feel compelled to consume conspicuously to feel ok about themselves. So long as we can consume, we can tolerate things. Once the ability to consume is removed – watch out – because that is when the repressed rage that we have kept under wraps for years now begins to surface and impact American life. On a more tangible level, she notes the “transportation nightmare caused by the private automobile.” American cities led by the reductionistic thinking of mainstream thinking engineers, designers and economists (who were trained to see their role as enabling the integration of the car with the single family home, the television, the shopping mall and the freeway so that the American Dream could be most fully realized) has been misled by the idea that building more freeways would solve the problem of congestion. What has happened is that freeway growth has led to more people travelling more so that they can consume more stuff and resources. So the end result was that over the last 30 years people have been spending more time in their cars commuting and consuming and less time with their families and friends enjoying life.
Yet the business/economic development model that drove this rapid growth, just like the dotcom meltdown in 2000, was unsustainable. The problem was that the people who managed the economy convinced America that it was a sustainable model and the result was predictable: increasing numbers of Americans financed their unsustainable consumer lifestyles on their unnaturally inflated stock and real estate investments.
Libby says that Obama has the wrong idea on how to fix the multi-level problem:
We need a new paradigm in housing, economics, energy and transportation that redefines human life within cities. Such a lifestyle transforms the traditional American Dream housing model into a 21st Century model of ecocity development that creates a lifestyle based on sharing and conserving resources. To create such a profound lifestyle shift, the president needs an overarching architectural plan that inspires us to build cities in ecological ways. Architect Paolo Soleri calls such design arcology, a model that is car free, conserves water, shares resources, and encourages locally grown agricultural.
To construct an arcology requires ingenuity, innovation, and invention from science and engineering and cooperation, communalism and peace within the realm of sociology and experiments in egalitarianism. It demands that we find the social imagination and collective wisdom to build something entirely new and exciting with 21st Century technology. The arcology model could be a truly bipartisan project that creates a union of purpose for America and frees the world from a form of civilization that is doomed to war because of its ceaseless need for imperialistic markets.
With the collapse of Wall Street there is much talk about America turning towards socialism and the nationalizing of banks. But without a new vision of how socialism could transform our social and physical architecture in the way we design cities, the socialism we may experience might be of the type that caused the down fall of the Soviet state and created a hellish police state and nuclear arms race.
Now, with this new rise of socialism, it is time to visualize a new model of “People’s Palaces” or a people’s arcology by declaring sustainable housing a human right for all. In such a world, homelessness would be a tragedy of history. But to manifest such a vision requires clear thinking, social idealism, and the love for equality and justice. Call it a Lovolution, a revolution of the heart.
President Obama bails out the housing and auto industry, and advocates the concept that “economic growth” is good, he blocks out alternative possibilities. He will continue feeding money to a dying housing and transportation system rather than constructing a new architectural and social paradigm needed to save us from a hostile environment brought on by the American dream middle-class lifestyle that has caused global heating.
To read more about these ideas on how to transform American housing: see Arcology Phoenix and 12th Hour for Arcology
Her comments make me think about the recent TED conference video by Jill Bolte Taylor that my colleauge Joy Tang (founder and exec dir oneVillage Foundation) shared with me. Taylor talks about “Thinking from the Right Side of the Brain” and how her tragedy of having a stroke actually presented a tremendous opportunity to study the brain – her brain – from a bird’s eye perspective.
In this process of rethinking how the mind thinks, we also need to rethink how the collective “global brain” (first coined by Peter Russell the term “is a metaphor for the intelligent network formed by humans together with the knowledge and communication technologies that connect them.” It first came to my consciousness through my link to Howard Bloom’s network via oneVillage who in 2000 wrote the book: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century) operates within the humanity community. The social-psychology dimension of this process implies a complementarity in terms of seeing the individual/group interaction at the immediate and human scale level of our everyday lives as a fractal image of the larger human whole. So if it is true that we need to become the change that we want to see in the world, then a possible realignment of the progressive movement is needed in order to effectively promote the kind of “change vision” that led to Obama’s election.
In such a process of real and authentic transformation, we need to create a dialog between the naysayers and the technological optimists, to try to find a middle ground to prevent a complete collapse of civilization. Such a tragedy is in no ones real interests. We need to forward a dialog within the political and social mainstream of our society that puts forward the need for real and comprehensive change without becoming obsessed with assigning blame and pointing fingers. Definitely, we need to understand how we got into the situation we are now in and to understand the role of the key players responsible. The truth is however that we all share a responsibility for the mess our nation is now in.
The key of this struggle is learning how to live and proceed in an effort to create change with an open heart. There is great resistance to that even in the progressive movement. This is something that the Buddhists are aware of – to foster change by changing the very way in which we see and interact with the world around us. Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Being Peace noted that the shrill, critical tone with regards to progressives and their peace efforts, was often counterproduce to their stated intentions. The Buddhists provide important wisdom that if we adopt as part of our living consciousness and being will I believe help us to have a greater impact in creating the world we want to see.
The more we can focus on being that Loving Kindness that the Buddhists like the Dali Lama talk about, the faster we can move towards the vision of sustainability that we seem to share. If we focus on being the resentment and hatred that is reflective of the society we live in, then we will only be a mirror of that wrongness. The power to make that choice is within each of us…
Introducing ArcoPedia: an Alternative Approach to Arcology Theory
Posted by basac on March 18, 2009
I have set up a wiki that I call ArcoPedia. The idea is to consider an alternative perspective of Arcosanti in terms of how it could be contributing more effectively to current best practices in the ecological design movement as it is increasingly impacting the mainstream society.
My most recent addition to the wiki was a page on Green Roof an ecological design concept that has long intrigued me. The page/article is titled: Why Green Roofs are more than Just about Keeping Buildings Dry
This is related to the upcoming discussion on School of Thought today in terms of my thinking about the need for a comprehsive approach to rethinking existing and prevailing urban design and development practices. Actually most of the planning community has been extremely disguisted with current “best practices” that perpetuate sprawl and the commercially dominated aesthetic of urban/suburban spaces that is of course a key driver to the consumption/consumer driven economy.
Thus the idea is to consider the possibility of
Also in relation to the above is the idea of building urban spaces that balance and combine the best of urban and rural life rather than simply saying that Urban is BEST. Complementary to this is the idea of seeing the suburban as a flawed but possibly well intentioned way to do this. Also important is seeing suburbs as a way to naturally transition urban life with rural. So for example in permaculture theory we are taught to promote this idea of gradations between human habitat and pristine nature. The key consideration is to think about what is most appropriate for zonal gradation. One thing that is stressed in this school of thought is locating food as close to the human habitat as possible. Of course for permaculturalists, food production systems are most ideally integrated with the built environment/habitat itself.
Thus the core goal is to consider how to remake the suburban so that it undergoes a process of densification and at the same time offers a menu of choices for people to consider in terms of density and lifestyles. Possibly the Linear City model that Soleri puts forward can be seen as a way to combine that densification of suburbia by offering nodes of convergence at key mass transit stops within each of the concentric rings that typically define the evolution of suburbia in metropolitian areas.
Posted in philosophy and commentary | Tagged: green roofs, greenhouses, Solare Linear City | Leave a Comment »