Thursday, October 23, 2014

The perfect society?

What do people need? Why do we have thousands and thousands of ideas of how to live?

The environment is close to collapse and so are we. And the qustion that we have to ask us is; can we rebuild how we live and the surroundings so it is more environmental friendly, or do we need to change the way we look upon things?

The question about a market for environmental friendly stuff, and more over the energy-efficient stuff, is one way to look at it, and the other is.. ?

A change.

A new way to look at it.

Or is it new by the way?

In this blog I use to talk about ecocities, how a more narrow way of living will make a more joyful life. Because, we dont just have to live someplace, we also have to enjoy it.

Ecocities is the idea of Richard Register and he started to talk about it back in the 70s. The first ideas of the environmental collapse was about that time. We have Rachel Carlsons book Silent Spring as early as 1962. So why does it take so long time, and will the market force it the "right way", really.

Sure, we need better technology for cheap solutions of passive houses, or wind power turbines for example. But the real thing is done, when we look at the solutions that are of a structure manner.

I mean now, how we plan.

We have examples from Freiburg, Tübingen, and the little neigbourhood in Södra Hamnen, Sweden. More and more of this is coming. Another way of how we look upon how we live.

So whats the different? For example, we have a closer living, things are built closer, buildings. But thats not just it. In between the buildings we have streets and places to be. That means restaurangs, stores, kindergarten, benches, lakes, waterlines, balconies, tunnels, bridges and you name it.

Here we find the big society in the small.

So whats the problem?

Why do we still build buildings with straight walls, with no place to interact inbetween? Dead neigbourhoods so to say. People are there to go to their homes and stay there.

In Arcosanti, the experimental "city" in Arizona, USA, they started big scale, but what came out of that? An ideal city, which noone had the interest to finance. A started project which is just a piece of the masterpiece.

What we have to do is to think bigscale in the small neigbourhood. And how do we finance that? Market? How? Please tell me how?