Puppet Show in Central Taipei

Scott and I had dinner at a all you can eat pizza and pasta place for 350NTD just a few blocks from our flat. The pizza wasn’t bad and possibly this may have somethng to do with the link between Italian and Chinese culinary arts. Marco Polo supposedly brought something resembling a pizza from China that some say impacted the development of pizza in Italy. But the pesto pasta dish…well maybe they’d be better off to leave that to the Italians. We met up with some friends and saw a Chinese Puppetshow in Central Taipei.

Later on foot, we went through the capital district and saw the Presidential Palace, Central and Armed Forces HQ. After that we saw some of the shops and peddlers in the central shopping district. It was quite a site to see a whole block of peddlers vanish almost into thin air as they apparently got advance notice of a policemen on motorbike patrolling the area. There was a young woman playing the drums to rock-n-roll music and also a woman who made outwork out of straws – a classic example of Chinese innovation and ingenuity. I bought one of her peices for $150NTD. Oh and I almost forgot the street entertainer with the pet squirrel who he trained to pose with onlookers.

Saturday’s trip to the Beach North of Danshuei

Over the weekend on Saturday Scott, Michelle, Cherry and I took a late day trip to a beach north of the historic port city of Danshuei which is located at the mouth of the Danshuei River.

The transport costs are pretty reasonable. Taking the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) from TaiPower Station only a few blocks from where we “live” (well…at least for another week) to the Taipei Main Station (actually Taipei has no real downtown, but rather several clusters of tall buildings…that’s a story for another post though) and then to Danshuei was $55NTD ($1.70USD – not bad when you consider that it is really a distant suburban link to outlying Taipei Metro area). The bus ride took longer and cost more ($90NTD – $2.77USD) than the MRT ride, even though it was pretty much about the same distance. That’s because almost all along the way was built up area on the main shoreline road and it made it more like an urban bus trip than a rural or trans-urban one.

The idea of Community Development within An Arcology Movement

I found Shannon May’s work when I did a search a China and Sustainable Development (or something like that) She is really doing interesting work that relates to a lot of my thoughts and ideas.

In one post on her blog she asks: Who will live in the countryside?. Of course, what she is talking about is this really skewed and biased notion that all that matters in the world is urban.  Soleri, it does seem very echos this conventional notion of what it is to be civilized. Civilized people don’t live in the country, or at least truly embrace rural culture and lifestyles, we are subtly taught to believe as we become intellectuals. This arrogant assumption is deeply embedded in the psyche or some might psychosis of patriarchal civilization and its modern politically correct incarnation: modernity/modern civilization and technologically driven “development.” On this level, I can relate at least some what to those on the Right who question this assumption of the urban being superior to the rural. Yet I think they take the same us verse them thinking, but simply turn it on its head and make the rural look like a Utopian Christian society that has a monopoly on what it means to live the true and proper moral life.

So we are stuck in these flawed notions of what is developed and undeveloped and undeveloped, advanced and primitive, first, second, third and now forth worlds. So thus the flaw of the modernization process is exposed in the idea that we now must become sustainable. Therefore this is an opportunity for so called Emerging Societies/Economies to get smart and leapfrog over all this garbage thinking cloaked in sophisticated wording and word play that seems to be real job of many in the intellectual class. That is of course what Chomsky was referring to when he stated education and particularly the finest Ivy League educations were simply a system of imposed ignorance so as to prepare the smart people in the society for this very important role in maintaining the status quo. So it is one thing to say people are ignorant or primitive or undeveloped, but what if the people who say that are simply deluding themselves to say they are the educated ones.

Subject: Attention all Arcosanti alumni: Be part of the recorded history of Arcosanti!

Help tell the story of this unique place! There is still time to write up your stories and memories to be included in a special “Builders of Arcosanti” quaderno. Brief submissions of a paragraph or so are welcome, as well as longer ones. All alumni, old and new, are encouraged to participate. The deadline has been extended to the end of September, as the quaderno will be put together in October.

Contact soleri90@arcosanti.org with submissions.

Yilan Beach

On Saturday Michelle Lee (who we first met at that cafe on the hill at Dongshui along with Kareem a animated filmmaker) took us to one in Yilan along with some of her friends. Yilan is a popular beach destination on the south east coast of Taiwan. Its the only major southern city between the cities of the north and mountains that dominate the center of the island. Despite the fact we were on a freeway most of the time, it took 2 hours despite and yet Yilan was only about 32 miles (65km) from Taipei. My theory is the island is so small that they can’t afford to have people going too fast on the freeways, because everything would go by too quickly.

05.5-8.10 | New Orleans: CBA 20th Conf: Transforming Communities through Collective Action

I just got a press release from the Community Built Assoc. about their May 2010 2oth anniversary conference that will bring together COMMUNITY BUILDERS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY TO CONVENE IN NEW ORLEANS. The theme of the event is Transforming Communities through Collective Action.

Read more about it below…

Rethinking what it means to Build and Promote Arcology

The Food is great here and I am cooking stuff too at my flat which is located in Central Taipei. The subway system is quite good, although the main Taoyan International does not have a direct rail link. You have to take a bus to the High Speed Transit or the Central MRT Rapid Transit station. However when I came in the ride on the bus provided a nice intro to the city with its many medium sized buildings. The view of Taipei is defined by Taipei 101 which goes far higher than the rest of the city-scape.

Interesting living in a society that has compact living, great design of products, very good mass transit, lively urban environment and friendly people.

I guess I am moving away from this large scale Arcology vision like Linear City (i dont see how this would create a lively city with its austere repepitive design that goes on forever in both directions) but I still see relevance to this idea of small er scale Arcology like at the scale planned for say “Critical Mass” at Arcosanti.

I don’t think that Arcology is not about remaking the city in one mans vision. However, because Soleri has designed many large scale Arcologies that is the implication put forward. City in the Image of Man his 1971 book which helped finance Arcosanti in the early days definitely created that idea that a city could be designed as one, unitary monolithic form. Soleri continues to design such urban spaces with the implication that Arcology = City. However, I challenge the idea that an entire city can be housed in one building on that we would even want to do that even if we could. Arcology and Arcosanti to me is about rethinking the city to make it more liveable with a more integrated neighborhood and community design process that might include large scale building within buildings situations in certain applications.

Coming here to Taipei and seeing the attractive urban spaces, I really see the value to the diversity of design that comes from the evolution of the city and the proliferation of people as an ecosystem of collaboration. Because the Chinese never completely lost this idea of living in harmony with the ecology, I think they are better positioned for the challenges ahead and it really shows in the design of their cities and products and the way they interact with each other.

This is not to say that I like everything about Taiwan as I had a conversation with a Chinese woman the other day who referred to the society as conservative and repressive because she says it limits free thought. Yet its nice for someone who has really been affected by the dismal characteristics of the American built environment to go somewhere space is valued, land is valued, people appeared to be valued within urban settings and culture is valued as well, rather than seeing all these things as deemed secondary to the imperative of the marketplace to maximize short term profit at all costs.

Alot of theory but the trip has been good and it reminds that I can always figure out how to live in someplace like this if I really want to – at least for a little while and see how it goes…

Reconsidering the Idea of the Suburb within Arcology

Soleri says Suburbs are bad or at least he seems to use the word as if it is something totally negative. I understand what and why he is saying/thinking that but I think he loses sight of the idea that the suburb is a reflection of the need for human gradients in the flow of things. Indeed this is in my interpretation a Taoist idea. More practically in permaculture design one of the basic laws is all of nature operates from gradients and if you will vortexes. The patterns most obvious in the weather such as the difference between high and low pressure weather systems are a major morphological event in the cast of the reality of earthly life. Yet I would say that gradations in relation to the design and observation of systems and most specifically in relation to built environments – geography – go beyond weather.

We have urban gradients that stem from natural features but also from decisions people make as they evolve the built environment.  These urban gradients have led to a natural diversity of density within the urban space.  Suburbs descend from this reality as growth increased exponentially during industrialization and traditionally urban cores overflowed. Soleri argues that suburbanization is a violation of natural law and is explained in his Arcology CMD thesis.

I would say that partially yes he is correct. However, suburban Taipei in the form of Dongshui is very different than say suburban Phoenix in the form of Scottsdale. The question I guess is whether over the next 100 or so years, we will want to revert to a super-compact urban core and abandon the suburbs. The practical question is what would get people to do such a thing? Soleri might say if we make the urban effect of the Arcology powerful enough that will do it. Let’s say just to give him the benefit of the doubt – yes, we have this massive reverse migration to the urban core over the next 100 years. Suddenly we have miles of suburban wasteland and trillions of dollars of wasted infrastructure investments globally. What do we do with it; with all this mess of rusted infrastructure and debris? Yet I see the need for a different approach. Suburbs are here they are a reality. we must learn to live with them and possibly even embrace them. How do we make them better and more sustainable with an eye on making them more compact with cores for shopping and work that are neighborhood friendly, have many natural corridors and provide ample alternatives to the car and its ecologically burdensome support structures.

I guess I am still not completely sold on the idea that seems to the major focus of the project I now live and work at. Yet, honestly coming to Taipei I see that the beauty of the urban form cannot and has never been about the work of one person. It is about collective IQ and creating a culture in a society where people come together to play the music from a mosaic of past experiences. Taipei has inspired me in that I see it as a success in that it enables people to play their music in relation to the larger sum of the city.

Taipei has developed an urban vibrancy through the proliferation of the many different perspectives being allowed to mold and evolve the urban reality and experience. So that creates a richness in the urban space that facilitates the urban effect. Without that richness of the diversity of past human experiences that carved out the urban space there would not be for me that sense of an urban effect.

Thus, it is problematic this idea that one person (or even for that many by some urban planning committee) could design an urban architecture at a very large scale (such as a Lean Linear City) that would go on for many miles and house many thousands of people and would have a monolithic design. The idea of the monolithic form in architecture won’t facilitate the Urban Effect. Indeed monolithic forms only foster a culture or more precisely a cult of bigness and have historically been a way to promote a centralized system of command and control in a society or civilization. This is not to imply that Soleri is trying to create a cult, but rather consider this idea that the worship of large things in our society is indeed a cult in that it reflects a monoculture way of thinking. Such thinking does not have never promoted and facilitated that inherent diversity of life. Who and what we are as human beings which is seeking to coming up and from us indeed reflects the overall diversity of the universe. As progressives and visionary idealistic thinkers, we need to ask ourselves do we really want to live in a space that is monolithic form rather than something like what we see in Taipei or New York? So in considering Arcology, we might do well to ask ourselves how might an Arcology either be a smaller scale development within the city or even as a stand alone settlement in a rural area, where it can demonstrate the benefits of a more integrated approach to development in relation to sustainable development.

Dongshui – more than just a suburb of Taipei

OVF intern Scott, Cherry (OVF volunteer), Joy and I went to historic town of Dongshui, which is now part of metro Taipei. We took the recently completed Dongshui line extension of the Taipei metro (MRT) rail transit system which now makes it within easy reach of central Taipei. While there we went to the local market and a cafe that is one of Joy’s local hang-outs. While there we met her cousin Wade as well as his wife and several friends. We also met Kareem who is a animated film director from France who has been in Taiwan for 8 years now and also several of his colleagues.

Urban Life in Taipei

Paolo Soleri continues to have a lot of interest in Asia about his work. It started with the Japanese and their support of his Hyper Building project. Later Francis Frick conceived of the South China Arcology and finally there was Lean Linear City Exhibit in 2006. Recently the Chinese have expressed considerable interest in including Soleri’s work in an exhibit in China.

On Saturday did my first Unity Drum in Taiwan with Joy and her friends in Taipei. It was amazing. We drummed and danced and there was a crowd that gathered around us to listen to the African drumming. Sometimes they clapped after a song. Several little girls joined in dancing to the music and two older ones actually started drumming with us! The police also came as well to tell us to please keep it down – they were responding to a complaint, but we kept playing (apparently they can only ask us to keep the noise down up to a certain time). From my experiences so far…I feel the people in Taipei really know how to live life in the city.

Someone asked me “what do you think about the city of Taipei tonight?” I answered that I felt it was a special place to me in that I really felt like the people of Taipei use their city space well. The spaces were well lit and the overall layout of the city is very good. There were hoards of people out in the streets and particularly in the night markets where the food is good and cheap but not necessarily healthy.

Life in Taipei is such a contrast from the life of say the modern American city. The Taiwanese can’t afford to engage in ill-thought out and short-sighted development as they live on a small island with a very high population density (23 million people live on an Island about the size of New Jersey).

So I think it is no coincidence that the Asians are so interested in Arcology, the reality of the finiteness of space and resources is more obvious there. However I also think it is a design issue in that people in the East see the city as something that regardless of space is something that works best when compressed together and well organized within that compact framework. I can think of no better example of the Urban Effect then in seeing the night markets with the creativity of the people in selling their products and food and the general vibrancy of the place with all the people around interacting.