I think I was particularly lucky with this image, as we here have the contrast between the hopelessness of the woman collapsing on the street, and the rich, uncomfortable, stylish, blonde Norwegian woman looking away, trying to ignore her, but clearly not feeling well.

Converting the image to a low key monochrome filter really fit the image, taking away their faces, leaving a black gap of it, like a ghost face, as we have all become like ghosts in this country.

Many politicians want to prohibit begging, so I really encourage all street photographers to get out to the streets documenting the beggars in the Norwegian society this summer. Especially I hope you can shoot a lot of images like the one below, showing the poor and filthy beggars in contrast to Norwegian selfishness, mindless consumerism and indifference.

So fellow street photographers, get to the streets and start working! This might be the last summer we can document beggars of the Norwegian streetscape!

Beggar and Norwegian woman looking away on Karl Johan Street, Oslo. – Flickr.

The post Street Photographers – Get to the Streets and Document the Beggars of the Norwegian Streetscape! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The “våningshus” of the small farm Holmstadengen by Skreia.

Norwegian Layman’s Christianity peaked in this house. The man who lived here for almost 40 years, Magnus Johansen Dahl from Spydeberg, was the son of a “husmann”, which in some aspects was worse than serfdom. Serfs were many places well protected by traditions. In spite of his background, Dahl became the apostel of the Totenåsen Hills.

About 1900 the “husmannsvesen” ended, and the smallholders around and on the Totenåsen Hills were now independent, proud farmers. The forests of the Totenåsen Hills was a commons where they could grass their livestock in summertime, and cut firewood and and timber for their personal needs during wintertime. Some too worked for the sawmills during the winter, and even these were run like cooperatives, like the diaries. By Sagelven River they had a common bathhouse where they gathered to clean their bodies on Saturdays, before they went to their “bedehus” on Sundays. A “bedehus” was a kind of prayer house, but without clerks, because in Norwegian Layman’s Christianity they were all priests.

These former “husmenn”-slaves were now not just proud and independent farmers, they were even priests with their own religion and apostel. This was a religion of the commons, as they organized themselves free from the State, they had their own songbook gathered by Dahl, Pris Herren, and their own music Associations, which formed several talented musicians. Knut Anders Sørum is the last in this chain of musicians going back to M.J. Dahl, a bestselling Norwegian artist.

Almost everything was a commons in these days, their religion, the forests, their businesses, their songs and so on. And in the center of all this was the preacher, shoemaker and farmer M.J. Dahl, the apostel of the Totenåsen Hills. He came from Østfold County, the same county where Hans Nielsen Hauge, too a son of a “husmann”, wandered out from some years earlier. Hauge became the apostel of Norway, as he walked around the whole of Norway spreading his gospel. While Dahl walked around the Totenåsen Hills, connecting the congregations which grew up here in his footsteps.

A child’s shoe most likely made by the shoemaker M.J. Dahl.

These smallholders with their newly won freedom put much pride in being good farmers, with Dahl as their example. Dahl was widely recognized for how he run his small farm Holmstadengen, and even got a diploma for his farming skills from the Norwegian Agricultural Association.

Magnus Johansen Dahl was a commoner, one of Norway’s most important commoners of all times, with his farm Holmstadengen as the nave for these proud commons he represented in every aspect of his life. He was an apostel living in the midst of his followers, being one of them and their example for life, like Jesus. He toiled in the soil, walked on his feet and worked as a craftsman. And the door of his home was always open, so that everyone who needed advice or to be prayed for, could just step inside.

This is why this house represents a peak in the Norwegian commons and culture, and in my regards is Norway’s most important house, as our most valuable values were found here.

The fields where the apostel of the Totenåsen Hills toiled in the soil.

The post A House of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Klyngetun

Norway’s Land Reform of 1859 was like America’s Land Ordinance of 1785 — planning based on surveys and private property, not around the land itself and community. Its a good time to revisit! – Ross Chapin

The image, a painting by Nikolai Astrup named “Soleinatt”, is from a Norwegian “klyngetun”. In Western and Southern Norway farmers lived in “klyngetun”, these were smaller than villages, more like “pocket neighborhoods”. “Klyngetun” were to be found in those parts where farming was some difficult, and people relied more on each other. This was a common way of life until the land reform of 1859, which was a forced reform by the governments. It was inspired from the American settlers and their philosophy, which again was developed from the philosophy of John Locke. After the reform of 1859 these “klyngetun” were banned, and all farmers should have single family farms, not taking care of the land as part of a community.

Mads Langnes at the University of Bergen has written a thesis about how this reform of 1859 took place, and how it ended our proud tradition of “klyngetun”, which in fact were like small ecovillages. You can read an article about Langnes’ thesis in Norwegian here:

– Jordreform endret landskapet (Land reform changed the landscape)

The original thesis might well be written in English, and if somebody should find interest in learning more about the ancient tradition of the Norwegian “klyngetun”, you should contact Mads Langnes and the University of Bergen in Western Norway.

The journalist Eva Røyrane together with photographer Oddleiv Apneseth are currently working on a book about the Norwegian “klyngetun”. The book will be published at Skald forlag.

My hope is that Norway can regain our proud tradition of “klyngetun”, combining old traditions with new knowledge and solutions, as developed by the brilliant Ross Chapin Architects.

The ancient Norwegian “klyngetun” and the modern pocket neighborhood have a lot in common.

Episode 47 – CNU25. Seattle: Pocket Neighborhoods Tour from Active Towns Initiative on Vimeo.

Related

• John Michael Greer Loves Norwegian “klyngetun”
• Verandaen – limet i tunet
• Design-nøkler for lommenabolaget
• Grendeklynga – en modell for framtida?
• Det moderne klyngetun – buplass for fleire enn bønder
• Klyngetun hos SNL
• The Fateful Choice: The Pilgrims Assign Private Property Rights in Land
• Extractive vs. Generative Ownership

The post The Ancient Norwegian “Klyngetun” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This article by Pål Steigan was originally published here. Translated by Graham Healey.

The paintings of goatherds and farm animals amongst the ruins of infrastructure and temples from classical Rome are like pictures of people moving among the remains of a high-tech civilisation that they no longer have the ability to match. The city of Rome had at its height a population of a million people. That required a very advanced infrastructure for water and food supply, transport, goods delivery, trade and so on. The city was, at the time, the foremost example of a building materials industry, that had the capacity, and level of competency, to deliver the enormous amount of building materials that such a city required.

When the empire collapsed, the infrastructure was no longer maintained. The aqueducts broke down and towns and cities lost their water supply. Roads and bridges deteriorated and were not repaired. Goods transport and trade was reduced from a surging river to a quiet brook. 1200 years after its days of glory Rome was a ruined town with a population of less than 10.000.

The Etruscans, and later the Romans, had drained swamps to increase food production. Thereby they also removed malaria. But when the empire broke down, the drainage ditches were no longer maintained and malaria returned. It wasn’t until the 1930’s, after the fascists came to power, that the swamps were drained again and malaria disappeared from Italy again.

The ’empire’ of today is extremely vulnerable

We, who live in a a time when another empire shows many of the same tendencies towards disintegration that the Roman empire had towards the end, have all reason to give it some thought.

The Roman emperors mixed more and more lead in the silver coinage (denarius), so that eventually there was almost  no silver left. That was the hyperinflation of the time. Roman citizens no longer wished to fight in the army, so the army became based on mercenaries. The word soldier comes from this. A soldier was someone who received money to fight (solidus – gold coin). In order to pay the soldiers more money had to be minted. The empire’s wars were expensive and the empire was large, so the problem was solved by minting coins that were ever more worthless.

The world is dominated today by the American empire. It affects everything about global production, the money system, world trade, agriculture, the energy system and so on.

The empire passed it’s high watermark around 1971. That is when USA gave up the gold standard. After that the empire’s growth was built on printing more and more paper money, and now digital money. But the empire is also based on the rest of the world accepting these symbols as the real thing. US wars in the 21^st century are largely financed by selling American government securities to China, in other words on China lending money to the American state.

The globalized production and trade system is finely tuned to deliver goods and components just-in-time. Norwegian meat production for example is dependent on a boat arriving at Fredrikstad with soya from Brasil once a month. If the boat did not arrive there would be a full-blown crisis in  Norwegian meat production.

When the so-called horse-meat scandal broke in 2013 the Financial Times showed how the European trade and transport systems for meat work.

Slaughterhouses are capital intensive and energy demanding, and therefore there are fewer and fewer slaughterhouses delivering to a more and more global market. The margins are paper thin, so they cut corners wherever they can.

The big supermarket chains want to buy the cheapest food raw materials available at any one time. Their brokers are continually on the phone to make best wholesale purchases. FT quotes professor Karel Williams at the Manchester Business School, who explains how refrigerator trucks queue up in front of the slaughterhouses in the Netherlands at the end of the week, with the drivers having no idea where they are going until the last minute. Each broker has 10-20 slaughterhouses he buys from. One week he buys from one place and the next week from somewhere else. The deals are made at the last moment for the driver to get his delivery orders. “We have a continual European trade where animal parts are driven around in 40-ton trailers.”

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation – UN) says that there are something like a quarter of a million edible plants that could be cultivated. But humanity has become dependent on just 3% of them.

The worlds food supply is dependent on 150 plant species. Three quarters of all energy we get from plant food comes from just 12 of them. Competition and the need to increase production has resulted in a drastic reduction in genetic diversity. The system also demands more and more energy, minerals and rare raw materials at an exponentially increasing rate.

This makes today’s empire extremely vulnerable. Agriculture may well experience crises similar to the Potato Famine that hit Ireland in 1847, when a million people died of starvation. It is easy to imagine how devastating and dramatic it will be.

In short: when this system collapses, it will, just as in the Rome empire, experience the collapse of much of the critical infrastructure. It will simply not be possible to feed as many people as before. The result can be widespread starvation disasters to an extent that humanity has never seen before. There are 37 megacities in the world today and the largest of them have over 30 million inhabitants. If there is a breakdown in water supply, or energy or food delivery, then such cities will become uninhabitable.

Food and water are fundamental. Without food and water we cannot live. But many of our systems are also extremely dependent on oil and rare earth minerals that there are less and less of. When this system collapses, it could easily have dramatic consequences. The example of the Roman empire shows that it might well take a long time before anything else takes its place.

It is easy to show that today’s growth based capitalism is living on borrowed time. It is a long way from being robust or sustainable. On the contrary it is very vulnerable and unstable. This is one of the reasons that it is necessary to work towards replacing the system as soon as possible and learning how to run society in a healthier and more sustainable fashion.

Globalists of right and left bemoan the fact that people turning their back on the globalism they have preached for decades. They are turning instead to populist politics and are so “reactionary” that they want to preserve their nation states, local production and more. But it is the globalists who are playing Russian roulette. It is their system that has made us so extremely vulnerable. To ensure food-security and viable local communities, to restore the broken metabolism between society and nature, is what is truly progressive. That is the future, and we need to urgently get rid of the empire and it’s economy of spongers and freeloaders.

If we don’t then perhaps landscape painters in a few hundred years time will be painting goat-herders grazing their animals under the twisted remains of skyscrapers and motorway bridges.

The post It hurts when empires fall appeared first on P2P Foundation.

(Journal of Urban Culture Research – Chulalongkorn University Bangkok Thailand)

Keep the cars outside the urban core.
Image: Richard Elmore

The rapid urbanization of the world’s population over the twentieth century is described in the 2005 Revision of the UN World Urbanization Prospects report. The global proportion of urban population rose dramatically from 13% (220 million) in 1900, to 29% (732 million) in 1950, to 49% (3.2 billion) in 2005. The same report projected that the figure is likely to rise to 60% (4.9 billion) by 2030. [Wikipedia]

Urbanization, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin-America has created mega-cities out of small settlements in less than a century. The process has been, and is chaotic and the result as well. In earlier societies the city was a quite well defined entity. The city was often enclosed by a wall. The people inside the walls were the true citizens with their rights and their duties. Today a shanty town may spring up in weeks or months with thousands or even tens of thousands inhabitants and almost no formal structures. There is no certain definition of the city, and even lists of the most populous cities of the world are very ambiguous for that very reason. A city of fifteen million registered inhabitants may have twenty million during work hours because so many from surrounding areas commute into the city. These migrations very so much that any census is uncertain.

The wall sets a permanent limit – No sprawl.
Image: Richard Elmore

The city sprawl has also made it hard to define the limits of the city, where does it end and where does the countryside take over? Is New York a city or is it just a part of a super Megalopolis of fifty million people stretching from Boston to Washington DC. Greater Mexico city is a huge conurbation of more than 40 municipalities in the Valle de México. Jakarta was once before colonialism a small trading port. When the Dutch took over they founded the European style town of Batavia in 1619. Today Greater Jakarta has swallowed the neighboring cities such as Bogor into a metropolitan area, called Jabotabek, of almost 30 million people. And then you have the enormous conurbation of Tokyo-Yokohama where you can travel for hours and still be inside the city area.

In China the biggest migration in human history is taking place. Over the next few decades some 300 million people, that is approximately one USA, are moving into cities. Hundreds of new cities will be built to accommodate them.

The mega-cities are a 20th century invention made possible by the car and cheap petrol. But cheap energy is no longer an option and the city of the 21st century is challenged in a large number of ways. Let’s have a look at the greater picture.

Buildings that honors the natural environment.
Image: Richard Elmore

Peak oil

85 % of world energy consumption are fossil fuels, 37% oil, 25% coal and 23% gas. Fossil fuels have been the energy pushing and pulling the industrial revolution and so also the energy behind urbanization. Now it seems that oil has peaked. World oil production is not increasing any more, new oil fields are few and harder to exploit. In spite of a deep economic recession oil prices have been in the $ 100-120 per barrel bracket. With so high prices one would think that production would increase a lot, but instead it has leveled off. Lately prices have been falling, but that solves nothing, because it means that the marginal oil fields become even less attractive and that the push for alternatives to oil also becomes weaker.

Peak oil will have a profound and long lasting influence on world cities. Oil does not only go into commuting and transport. Electricity which is so crucial to the city is most places produced by burning oil, gas or coal. Concrete from which the cities are build in highly dependent on fossil fuels. The whole building industry is an oil guzzling industry never to be satisfied without it. And of course to feed and give water to the citizens oil is everywhere. Modern agriculture depends on oil in plowing, sowing, watering, reaping, producing, storing and distributing farm produce. The pesticides and chemical fertilizers that made the green revolution possible and by that the feeding of seven billion people, is based on fossil fuels. 17% av the world’s oil consumption is linked to food production. Fertilizers alone consume 5%. Modern man is a walking SUV. In fifty years agricultural oil consumption has tripled. Taking oil out of agriculture is like taking the central pole out of a tent.

Local food becomes increasingly important.
Image: Richard Elmore

Running a car takes oil. And if you prefer an electric car, consider how your city’s electricity is produced and how the car itself is produced. You will find oil and even coal behind the most environmental electric car. To produce one takes about 20 barrels of oil.

Heating and cooling of apartments and houses consume a lot of energy, and since most electricity id produced by burning fossil fuels, it is another carbon agenda.

What about the computers that run your city, or the one on your desk or lap top? No oil in them, to be sure. But to produce one they use at least ten times its weight in fossil fuels. To produce one 32MB microchip they use 1,7 liters of oil. And when you get rid of it it turns into so much hazardous waste. China is the fastest growing economy in the world, but it is also the fastest growing land fill of hazardous garbage.

School classrooms are on the village plazas.
Image: Richard Elmore

And what about our wonderful global internet? It helps us find information from the other side of the globe without moving from our desk or café table. Sure that must be eco-friendly. May be, but running the web consumes about 10% of all energy that is used in the US and close to 6% globally. For most of the people in the world that means oil and coal, and now and then nuclear power.

Producing cement consumes oil in quantity, 1000 kilos equals 1,13 barrels of oil. China alone consumes 1,7 billion tons of cement and counting. India is following suit. Paving of roads with asphalt takes at lot of oil, of course.

The suburbs were unthinkable without cheap energy, read oil. With the increase in Chinese growth alone, the world will not have enough energy long before 2030. Our entire city model is heading directly for a fundamental crisis.

Country towns are part of the rural economy.
Image: Richard Elmore

Synthetic fibers that are used in textile industries is nothing but oil. Plastics are oil. Toys, bottles, machine parts, sports’ equipment, building materials: oil, oil, oil.

95% of global trade is based on oil. Globalization equals oil.

With peak oil we enter into very uncertain terrain and continued urbanization becomes very dubious indeed.

But the trouble doesn’t stop there.

Climate and global warming

The modern city is a CO2-producing unit. Forests can be carbon sinks, but cities not. But the atmosphere already has too much CO2 for future good. Soon we will pass the 400 ppm limit, and that is at least 50 ppm too much. Even if we could stop immediately to emit more CO2 an increase in global temperature by 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial level is a given. But with the present speed in emissions 450 ppm is more likely, and then we might blow the 4 degree level and that is the entry into a very unpleasant planet.

Weather will be warmer, wetter and wilder. There will be more violent storms, more flooding of low-laying areas so typical for most big cities in the world and more diluvial rainfalls.

The modern city is contributing strongly to global warming and the climatic disasters, and it is also a local hot spot itself. City temperatures typically differ from the surroundings by being five centigrades higher. The city is a deposit for store solar heat and the city activity produces a lot of heat by itself.

Rooftop glasfloor harvest energy, water and food.
Image: Richard Elmore

So it is to be expected that the cities are vulnerable to climate change, and particularly the mega-cities in Asia, Africa and Latin-America.

Food and fertile top soil

The modern city is highly dependent of food production that typically tales place outside of the city itself. The city is a parasite. Without the fertile land outside of the city the inhabitants would die. But in spite of that the city destroys arable land as it grows. The level fiends of agriculture is so much more convenient building land than the barren hills, and the market price for building ground is so much higher than farm land. The end result is that that precious fertile soil that has taken numerous generations to create is destroyed to make way for the city. There is no romanticism from me underlining this, it is a fact. The city destroys the land that it feeds upon. In the long run this is of course lethal.

Water and sewage

Hanoi has seen its population swell to almost 7 million over the past few years, yet there is not a single sewage treatment plant in the entire city. Wastewater from toilets and showers ultimately ends up in the region’s rivers, from where it makes its way, dirty as dirty can be, into the ground water.

Residents in Mexico city get most of their drinking water from aquifers under the city. But because of waste and poor water treatment that water is contaminated with cadmium, chrome and other metals that are hazardous for humans. Over-exploitation of aquifers has contributed to the continued subsidence within the city (5-40cm per year), increasing the chance of catastrophic flooding.

In the port city of Karachi in southern Pakistan, around 30,000 people die due to the effects of contaminated drinking water, while in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), there are both traces of feces in drinking water and high concentrations of arsenic in ground water.

In the rivers of Buenos Aires there are high levels of dumped toxins making the Argentine river Matanza-Riachuelo “one of the world’s most polluted waterways”. And millions of people in the city lack safe access to drinking water and are not connected to sewer systems.

In Kenya, the capital city lacks capacity to manage the increasing demand for water. And 60 percent of Nairobi’s inhabitants live in informal settlements with inadequate access to quality water and are forced to buy their water at kiosks at a higher price.

The oceans

Most of the mega-cities lie on the estuaries of big rivers. Their sewage, their excessive nitrogen and phosphate over load go into the nearby sea and add to the dead zones in the worlds oceans. This in its turn destroy the feeding ground for fish and other sea organisms, and then of course threaten the food chain of the city dwellers.

Scientists have measured higher acidity in the oceans and a shocking level of plankton death over the last few decades. Most of it may be linked with CO2 being dissolved in the ocean water creating carbonic acid which is highly detrimental to all life in the oceans.

In the mid Pacific there is a sludge of plastic particles creating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. As it disintegrates, the plastic ultimately becomes small enough to be ingested by aquatic organisms that reside near the ocean’s surface. Thus, plastic waste enters the food chain. Estimates of the size of the Patch vary widely, but there is no doubt that i represents a huge problem.

Paradigm shift

These ecological problems and the problem with getting sufficient energy are some of the biggest challenges to the future of the cities. The Henry Ford paradigm, that is the car and petrol city, is outdated. But that was the paradigm that fed the city growth, and so far there is no other paradigm in sight that can turn the table and make way for the sustainable city of the future.

Buildings are attached and multi-floor.
Image: Richard Elmore

But there is a lot of research going on in this field, and this is obviously the way to go to turn the city from a parasite and a problem into a contribution to a sustainable society.

There is no energy source in the pipe line of the foreseeable future that can match the versatility and energy richness of oil. The consumption and ultimate depletion of the oil resources is a once in a life time opportunity for a planet. Alternative energies like wind, tide and solar panels contribute but a tiny bit to world energy. And their production and maintenance takes a huge amount of oil. Nuclear doesn’t seem such a bright option after Fukushima and fusion energy remains a mirage very far from the practical world.

So the big picture is that we have to use less energy, per person and in sum total.

• The walkable city. Before cheap oil cities were built for slow and local transport. Commuting over long distances was not an option. We will soon be back there again. Cities must be built or restructured so that people can reach most of their daily activities, including work and play using their own muscles, that is by walking or biking. That means that work places and services must be within a short walk from home.
• City cells. To be walkable, all basic needs must be within walking distance. That means that the city must become a multi-node, multi-cellular city. A city of towns. Some needs that are not daily necessities could be found farther away, like an over-laying grid.
• Quality of life. The city nodes must have a sufficiently rich cultural life to satisfy a wide range and needs. Cultural consumption is normally less energy an material demanding and also gives life and attractiveness to the city environment. Here I think not only of culture for the people, but also of culture by the people. The city must give ample room for the creative activities of the citizens.
• Self sufficiency. The city must become self sufficient and self sustaining to a very large degree. Buildings must produce as much energy as they consume. A certain amount of food production must take place in the city. Sewage must be treated so that phosphates and nitrogen is contained and circulated back to farming.
• Durability. The modern tendency of use-and-throw is creating waste mountains that threaten to strangle the big cities. Durability and reusability are the new modern. Energy, water and other material resources are stretched thin today. There is small room for growth. So economic use of resources will be crucial.
• Urban qualities in the countryside. To contain a too great influx of new millions into the mega-cities, it is crucial to give the countryside some urban qualities. Those qualities that go for the city cells should also be developed in smaller rural centers, when it comes to jobs, housing, culture, recreation etc.

Start now!

Village Towns – Each village has a central plaza.
Image: Richard Elmore

The economic and ecological crises in the world today mean that there is no time to wait for change. The problems are only getting bigger and more difficult to solve as we wait. There will not be any one-size-fits-all solution. What we will be looking for is a complex and multifaceted web of solution, local, regional, national and global. A huge number of people all around the globe are thinking about and working for this. They need resources and sufficient leverage to make results. Also some governments have seen some of the drama in the present situation. China, which has some of the gravest environmental problems, not least in its ever-expanding cities, has declared its new five year plan «The green leap forward». The Chinese have also made plans to develop eco-cities. So far most of these plans remain on the drawing board and the real results are few. One of the problems is that so far these ideas have been top-down technocratic ideas. To succeed I believe such projects must belong to the people, to the grass-roots. People must be deeply involved and have a realistic feeling of ownership to the project. So empowerment, mobilization, real democracy are essential. That is not to say that planners, specialist and scientists do not belong. Their expertise is crucial, but it must be matched with a conscientious popular movement for groundbreaking change. From the Tahrir plaza to Madison Wisconsin, from the streets of London to Wall Street people demand power over their own future. The mismanaging of the earth by the rich elites have gone all too far.

Am I naive, is this an utopian vision? I don’t think so. The most unrealistic plan of all today is business as usual. It is business as usual that drives us to destruction. Be bold, be realistic, change the world!

Pål Steigan

The post The sustainable city of the twentyfirst century appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Christopher Alexander

I’m not a scholarly man and I have no vision to come up with any new theories, what I hope is to get a glimpse of the understanding of the world held by many greater thinkers. But why is it so important for me to get this understanding when I’m just a simple man? It started a few years ago when I wanted to build a nest for myself and my beloved wife. Unfortunately, what should have become an expression of our lives and our unification with the universe, became like being sucked into a black hole, losing all energy and trust in society.

The developer would of course say that it was something wrong with me; as would the people of the bureaucracy. But could it be a problem somewhere else? Could it be that what happened with me was a healthy reaction against sick structures in society? After I came to know Christopher Alexander I see this as a possibility:

The mechanistic idea of order can be traced to Descartes, around 1640. His idea was: if you want to know how something works, you can find it out by pretending that it is a machine. You completely isolate the thing you are interested in – the rolling of a ball, the falling of an apple, the flowing of the blood in the human body – from everything else, and you invent a mechanical model, a mental toy, which obeys certain rules, and which will then replicate the behavior of the thing. It was because of this kind of Cartesian thought that one was able to find out how things work in a modern sense.

However, the crucial thing which Descartes understood very well, but which we most often forget, is that this process is only a method. This business of isolating things, breaking them into fragments, and of making machinelike pictures (or models) of how things work, is not how reality actually is. It is a convenient mental exercise, something we do to reality, in order to understand it.

Descartes himself clearly understood his procedure as a mental trick. He was a religious person who would have been terrified to find out that people in the 20th century began to think that reality itself is actually like this. But in the years since Descartes lived, as his idea gathered momentum, and people found out that you really could find out how the bloodstream works, or how the stars are born, by seeing them as machines – and after people had used the idea to find out almost everything mechanical about the world from the 17th century to the 20th century, people shifted into a new mental state that began treating reality as if this mechanical picture really were the nature of things, as if everything really were a machine.

For the purpose of discussion, in what follows, I shall refer to this as the 20th century mechanistic viewpoint. The appearance of this 20th century mechanistic view had tremendous consequences, both devastating for artists. The first was that the “I” went out of world picture. The picture of the world as a machine doesn’t have an “I” in it. The “I”, what it means to be a person, the inner experience of being a person, just isn’t part of this picture. Of course it is still there in our experience. But it isn’t part of the picture we have of how things are. So what happens? How can you make something which have no “I” in it, when the whole process of making anything comes from the “I”? The process of trying to be an artist in a world which has no sensible notion of “I” and no natural way that the personal inner life can be part of the picture of things – leaves the art of building as a vacuum. You just cannot make sense of it.

The second devastating thing that happened with the onset of the 20th century mechanistic world-picture was that clear understanding of value went out of the world. The picture of the world we have from physics, because it is built only out of mental machines, no longer has any definite feeling of value in it: value has become sidelined as a matter of opinion, not intrinsic to the nature of the world at all.

And with these two developments, the idea of order fell apart. The mechanistic idea tells us very little about the deep order we feel intuitively to be in the world. Yet it is this deep order which is our main concern. – The Phenomenon of Life, by Christopher Alexander, page 16

I should like to say; the whole goal is to make the world whole. The ancient Greek word hamartia is rooted in the notion of missing the mark, and is in our culture better known as the word ‘sin’. The whole goal with our existence, our time on the Earth, is to make the world whole, a living whole. I cannot imagine a greater sin than not making the world whole, because not doing so we completely miss the mark, the goal, and doing this we lose ourselves as well. To see the world as fragmented, as parts – machinelike, according to the mechanistic idea of order – we are creating the framework for the biggest sin ever committed by mankind. This is why we should now enter the post-Cartesian era!

The huge difficulties in architecture were reflected in the ugliness and soul-destroying chaos of the cities and environments we were building during the 20th century – and in the mixed feelings of dismay caused by these developments at one time or another in nearly every thinking person, indeed – I would guess – in a very large fraction of all people on Earth . – New Concepts in Complexity Theory (PDF), Christopher Alexander

But how is it possible to make something whole? Isn’t such a big task better left to God? No, this could not be more wrong! It is our mechanistic idea of order that robs us from what is natural for us to do. And worst of all, this false idea of order has now become so massively pervasive and organised in our society that even if you want to and know how to make something whole, you will be opposed and oppressed by the system. The system doesn’t allow you to become whole, by making your world whole. Our current systems are not whole, not at all.

What is then needed to make something whole? According to my still very small and limited understanding of Alexander’s work I see four key points:

1. It reflects the beauty of the universe, which means it’s bound together by the fifteen structure-preserving properties you find in nature.
2. Always create centers, which together help create stronger centers, to make a coherent and living whole.
   “At the root of these fifteen properties, there appears to be a recursive structure based on repeated appearances of a single type of entity — the primitive element of all wholeness. These entities are what I call “centers”. All wholeness is built from centers, and centers are recursively defined in terms of other centers. Centers have life, or not, in different degree, according to the degree that the centers are built from other centers using the fifteen geometric relationships which I have identified.” (source)
3. It must be generated; it means it must be made up by small steps that at every step adapt to forces or structures in its surroundings.
4. It has its origin in a pattern language. This pattern language should always seek to be in harmony with forces in and between humans and nature, by making meaningful connections between everything, animate and inanimate.

To be honest, the entrepreneurs that built my house were doing the opposite of all this in every way. The only interests they had were, in the following priority: to make money (use the simplest materials implemented in the simplest way), to follow the drawings (a drawing or design made a long time ago by a person far away, used a hundred times at very different places) and to follow the laws (doing the minimum that the building laws require). I cannot see that this entrepreneur, a huge entrepreneur, had any interests for the whole at all.

And this way there could not be any “I” in what they were making for me and my wife, because they didn’t give a damn about me or my wife. A thing, a house, a place, can only be whole if there is an “I” in it, if you feel to be one with the world and the universe when you see it, or live in it.

Another devastating introduction in the early phases of industrial society was the “the invisible hand”, by Adam Smith.

But, by contrast, in the early phases of industrial society which we have experienced recently, the pattern languages die. Instead of being widely shared, the pattern languages which determine how a town gets made become specialized and private. Roads are built by highway engineers; buildings by architects; parks by planners; hospitals by hospital consultants; schools by educational specialists; gardens by gardeners; tract housing by developers.

The people of the town themselves know hardly any of the languages which these specialists use. And if they want to find out what these languages contain, they can’t, because it is considered professional expertise. The professionals guard their language jealously to make themselves indispensable.

Even within any profession, professional jealousy keeps people from sharing their pattern languages. Architects, like chefs, jealously guard their recipes, so that they can maintain a unique style to sell.

The languages start out being specialized and hidden from the people; and then within the specialties, the languages become more private still, and hidden from another, and fragmented. – The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander, page 231 – 232

This is the work of “the invisible hand”; this is what happens when cooperation is replaced with competition, the beautiful pattern languages of our communities die.

To believe in “the invisible hand” is like believing in the emperor’s new clothes; it makes no sense. What we should do is dress up with real clothes decorated with beautiful patterns of eternal truth.

What we need now is to replace “the invisible hand” with “the visible hand”. But where is this visible hand? Actually, it could be your hand, because a true pattern language is generated by the actions made by the hands of millions.

Still, the most visible hand I see in the world today carries the name permaculture, and this hand holds a big pencil, a pencil which creates the most beautiful patterns upon the surface of our Earth – a beautiful pattern language.

How can we know that something is whole? What would it feel like if our world were whole? In a timeless world, with a timeless way of living!

When we are as ordinary as that, with nothing left in any of our actions, except what is required – then we can make towns and buildings which are as infinitely various, and peaceful, and as wild and living, as the fields of windblown grass.

Almost everybody feels at peace with nature: listening to the ocean waves against the shore, by a still lake, in a field of grass, on a windblown heath. One day, when we have learned the timeless way again, we shall feel the same about our towns, and we shall feel as much at peace in them, as we do today walking by the ocean, or stretched out in the long grass of a meadow. – The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander, page 549

Republished in celebration of the 40-years anniversary of “A Pattern Language“. Original post here.

The post Let’s Make Our World Whole! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Globalized capitalism has inflicted so many defeats upon the working class and people all over the world that it’s hard to give an account of them. Still, everything isn’t sad. In the middle of all this misery there are glimpses of light – if you know where to look for them. In fact, some of these bright spots come as a result of the misery, because they can be turned to our advantage.

Translated by Anne Merethe Erstad for the Norwegian original

The war on cash and the war on free speech

As previously shown through a number of examples, the international finance capitalism has specific plans to wind up cash as an option for payment. In India, this war on cash is led by the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, and his allies. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a leading participant in the “Better Than Cash Alliance” along with Ford Foundation, Clinton Foundation, Citi Foundation, Omidyar Network (eBay), Coca Cola, USAID and the UN – among others.

In Norway, the Norwegian bank DNB has taken the lead. And since politicians in general are trained to do as financial capitalism bids, we can say with almost total certainty that legislation banning cash will be passed. If cash payment is banned by law, we will no longer have money. Or rather: we will no longer have any control over our own money. Whether we’ll be able to use them or not, will be decided by the banks and the authorities. We can no longer withdraw money from the bank and hide them under the mattress, even if the banks should introduce a five percent negative interest rate. And if the authorities decide that a certain person should be blocked from their account, they cannot buy as much as a bus ticket or a piece of bread. The totalitarian society on steroids.

This neo-fascism, or this post-democratic society – or whatever we should name this nightmare – is matched by the draconic legislations against so-called “fake news” and the introduction of public-private censorship bodies. As noted before, a militarization of opinion formers worthy that of a dictatorship, is taking place. And it is happening without the slightest protest from those who supposedly support the freedom of the press and free speech.

Light in the darkness

And where do we find anything positive in all this, you may ask. A reasonable question, indeed. It appears dark as the night, like a dystopia by George Orwell or Albert Huxley. But watch closely, and you’ll find bright spots.

The cash ban will have extraordinary negative effects, but it will also force those of us in the resistance front to think anew. Our defensive struggle can no longer remain merely defensive. The enemy forces us to create our own currency. And they force us to organize collectively in new and interesting ways.

Alternative currencies are not as innovative as they may sound. There probably exist hundreds of them throughout the world, perhaps thousands. According to Wikipedia, Local Economy Trading Systems were particularly popular in the 20^th century and the web-based encyclopaedia also mentions a large number of community currencies in the USA.

Co-operative movements and closely knitted local communities are among those who have gained the most from community currencies. The European fiscal cliff has led to the establishment of several varieties of local currencies in a number of communities all over Europe. It’s not very hard to imagine how a co-operative movement or a network of co-operatives can benefit from this. Like money in general, these currencies will express a certain value, which makes it possible to change one value into another. As long as the co-operatives only trade amongst themselves, they have no need for dollars, Euro – or Norwegian kroners.

A few years ago I watched a news story on Italian RAI 3 from southern Italy about a small, poor village where many Albanians had settled several hundred years back. This village had established a community currency with two values; one Che (Guevara) and one Skanderbeg (the Albanian national hero). According to the news report, this worked well for the inter-trading among the village people. In the village where I am an inhabitant, in Tolfa near Rome, we could very well have had such a local currency. Barter-economy still exists and could be developed further. In addition there are many local craft businesses. I haven’t carried out any serious study of this, but I wouldn’t rule out that one Euro spent at the bakery passes five pairs of hands in Tolfa before it leaves the village. We could call the currency collinaro, as those of us living there are called collinari: the hill people.

The southern Italian che and skanderbeg were most likely paper based. But there is nothing stopping these currencies from being electronically based. In Norway, the one who has performed the most extensive work in this area is Trond Andresen at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology). He has demonstrated how this can be accomplished, all the way from the local to the national level. Andersen has argued that this system can work on a national level for countries in a time of crisis. However, with a cash ban coming up, it would be even more relevant as a tool of resistance, as means to control a part of one’s own added value without the bank interference and to keep a part of our co-operation and inter-trade outside the surveillance files.

This means that the banks’ and the states’ abuse more or less forces us to organise collectively and produce samples of a future collective society.

This applies to the censorship on social media as well. Increased censorship and harassment will make Facebook and similar systems irrelevant for publishing and discourse. This will enforce solutions on the outside, alternative social media and new platforms. This is more problematic, because the strength of the Internet is the fact that it is a global productive force. But I am absolutely sure it is possible to find a way around this as well. My personal contribution in the near future is to launch a web based medium which will bring the experiences from this blog several steps forward.

The 0.01 percent is extremely powerful, but obviously frightened

Those who benefit the most from the way global capitalism has developed, are the richest 0.01 percent. And among them, the ultra-rich “Masters of the Universe”. They are extremely powerful and some of them have personal assets exceeding entire countries’ gross national product. At the same time they are very few, and while they can buy whomever they want to defend them, the measures they are taking at the moment, above all the censorship, show that they are also very frightened. They know that if the 99 percent organise to fight them, they’re done for. When they cannot even tolerate competition from small blogs and alternative media lacking both money and power, they reveal their fear of rebellion and their fear of losing both power and capital. Their measures don’t reflect their strength, but their weakness, their panic.

These are very important lessons the ultra-rich have given us. A gift of which they are oblivious – they hardy understand what they have given away. And it is crucial to understand how this gift can be put to use.

Le Cri du peuple, Jacques Tardi (2001)
The Paris comune

The future society starts now

This points even further, to a central element in what I have called Communism 5.0. It is a collective society where the producers control the means of productions – jointly. And there’s no need to wait for a revolution fifty or hundred years ahead. In fact, it is possible to start the construction of this future society now. We can start tomorrow. Collective interaction and organizing around such projects will teach us to build a society and it will enhance people’s self confidence and trust in their own strengths. We’re not talking utopia. We’re talking about something we know can be done. And even more important: This has to be done, because the alternative is to be crushed beneath the weight of the ruling class’ power machinery. Some people dislike my calling it Communism 5.0, but that doesn’t matter. The Norwegian author Odd Eidem, once said: “Call me whatever you like. Call me the city tram!”

In this perspective, the 0.01 percent is not our worst enemy. They are few and they are frightened. We can handle them. Our worst enemy is our own feebleness, our own division and our own slave mentality. If we can liberate ourselves from this, we can save the world from the globalists and their gang.

The post Lessons from an oblivious enemy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A massive campaign to reduce freedom of speech is conducted all over Europe.  It started out under the pretext of fighting “hate speech” on the Internet. In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s election defeat in the U.S., the concept of “fake news” has come into fashion, and is now being used as the main excuse to reduce freedom of speech. This isn’t merely a political campaign. The EU has passed radical guidelines and in several countries there are now draft legislations to introduce extensive fines and even imprisonment for statements. Europe hasn’t faced such grave threats against democracy since the days of fascism – but where are the reactions?

Original article here. – Translation: Anne Merethe Erstad

EU fronting censorship

The EU commission and the IT giants Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft have agreed to a Code of Conduct, according to The Guardian, May 2016.

Under the pretext of fighting racism and xenophobia, they introduce regulations which make swift and effective censorship of social media and other Internet platforms possible. The IT companies commit to remove “illegal hate speech” within 24 hours and make such content unavailable. So, they start out saying it’s all about fighting “racism and hatred against peoples”, but further on it becomes rather hazy: “content that promotes incitement to violence and hateful conduct”. What does that mean? Promoting demonstrations or protests which the authorities deem as “incitement to violence”? And what is “hateful conduct”?

After Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the U.S. presidential election, the globalists claimed the spreading of “fake news” had caused the outcome. “Fake news” in social media, that is. However, they have not been able to present any serious research to support their claim.

Less than a month after the U.S. election, the EU and NATO agreed to start fighting “fake news”.

The Norwegian news agency NTB wrote:

“A joint analysis describing how disinformation is spread, including via social media, shall be compiled within the end of the year.

The two offices will cooperate on training and seminars, and they will make a joint effort to “improve the quality and range of a positive narrative”.

Last year the EU External Action Service (EEAS) established a work group against disinformation from Russia. This work group – East Stratcom – receives help from experts, journalists, civil servants, think tanks and organisations from more than 30 countries in order to crush myths and fact check articles.”

Here the EU and NATO state that they shall integrate journalists, civil servants and organisations in what cannot be referred to as anything but a propaganda war.

Extreme draft legislations

The coalition government in Germany has launched draft legislations which will make it possible to issue fines at the size of 500.000 Euro each time “fake news” published on Facebook aren’t removed within 24 hours. We’re talking 4.5 million Norwegian kroners – in every single case – which must qualify as extreme.

This is happening without anyone even attempting to reflect upon the concept of “fake news”. The story about the incubators in Kuwait was false, and the consequences were grave, because it justified the first war against Iraq. The story of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” was “fake news”, which laid the foundation for the second war against Iraq and lead to massive loss of lives and horrible destructions. Both these stories were published time and time again, with no critical distance, by de large media corporations. CNN, BBC, and, in Norway; “Aftenposten”, NRK (The Norwegian Broadcasting System), NTB and so on.

The legislators haven’t offered any assessment as to how large fines should be issued against these media organisations for publishing such fake news. And of course they haven’t, because the draft legislations do not aim for main stream media. They target anyone who tries to undermine the campaigns of lies, distortions and concealments in the most powerful news outlets. The Internet and social media have – at least for a little while – undermined the media monopoly of the political and economic elite. This is the monopoly the extreme draft legislations try to win back, by suggesting the most dictatorial legislations since the age of Hitler.

Denmark and Italy

Both Denmark and Italy have proposed similar bills.

A cross-party draft legislation in the Italian Senate suggests huge fines and even imprisonment of individuals or media that “undermine” democracy and publish “false, exaggerated or biased” news online and refuse to change the content within 24 hours.

Ordinary reporting of “fake news” qualifies to 5000 Euro fines, while “hate campaigns against individuals” or stories “that aim to undermine democratic process” can lead to a 10.000 Euro punishment. News that may “cause public fear” or “harm common interests” may be punished with “no less than two years in prison”.

January 12^th the Danish Department of Justice sent a proposal out for comment concerning a new law on blocking web sites.  Jesper Lund, member of EDRi IT-Pol, Denmark, writes:

“This step has been expected for a couple of months as part of the government’s action plan against extremism and radicalism on the Internet. Denmark holds opt-outs from European Union policies in relation to justice and domestic policies, so the new EU counterterrorism directive including an optional right to block web sites, does not apply to Denmark.

In spite of the focus on extremism and radicalism on the outside, the draft legislation comprises a wide range of possible criteria for blocking web sites. The bill entails that a web site may be blocked if there is reason to believe its content breaks Danish criminal law. Any breach on the criminal legislation, including a new, extensive part defined in paragraph 119a concerning harassment of public servants – which includes far more than insults and libels – may be reason to block.”

Where are the reactions?

Extreme fines, censorship, militarising of the opinion-formers (NATO), banning, blocking and imprisonment – for speech. These are extraordinary steps towards dictatorship. So, one would  expect a storm of protests from politicians on the left, or perhaps just as much from politicians on the right, protecting conservative values. One would expect PEN clubs, and in Norway; “Fritt ord” (a foundation supporting free speech), “Journalistlaget” (The Norwegion union of journalists) and newspapers like “Klassekampen” (Class struggle) to enter the barricades for free speech – against the authorities’ eagerness to censor. One would expect that at least the Norwegian political parties on the left, such as SV (The Socialist Left Party) and Rødt (The Red Party) chose the fight against censorship and “forced opinions” as main issues in their political struggle.

Perhaps I don’t pay attention well enough. Perhaps there have been some protests I didn’t discover. I would be pleased to stand corrected. On this point I really wish I was wrong. But from what I can see, there is no movement of protests against this massive attack on freedom of speech and democracy. I do have some thoughts on the issue, why it has come to this. But I will get back to that point later.

The post Freedom of speech under attack – where are the reactions? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Please, people of Hurdal in Norway, make sure you make your new urban village an all including process of architecture, filling it with spaces for the soul. The best possible start for your project would be a “Pattern Language”-conference.

– A Pattern Language Conference in the Sustainable Valley of Hurdal in 2017?

And DAMN THE MASTERS’ PLAN! (VIDEO)

The post Architecture as a Process & Spaces for the Soul – A documentary about Christopher Alexander appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Gamla stan in Stockholm is the closest you come to a VillageTown in Scandinavia

The man who invented Public Relations (PR), Edward Bernays, was hired by General Motors for their pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He was an Ashkenazi Jew from German speaking Europe, where the Bauhaus movement had significant influence, together with Le Corbusier. Just four years earlier Corbusier had made his prophecy, and now Bernays saw an opportunity to fulfill it:

The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work … enough for all. – Le Corbusier, 1935

Ever after this has been the ideal for people around the world, making the car industry the mightiest of industries, reshaping our planet in the image of the car. This ideal was what killed the beautiful Norwegian countryside, the Norwegian culture, my family’s farm, my purpose of life and the future of my daughter!

Across the rural northeast, where I live, the countryside is littered with new houses. It was good farmland until recently. On every country road, every unpaved lane, every former cowpath, stand new houses, and each one is somebody’s version of the American Dream. Most are simple raised ranches based on tried-and-true formulas – plans conceived originally in the 1950s, not rethought since then, and sold ten thousand times over.

These housing “products” represent a triumph of mass merchandising over regional building traditions, of salesmanship over civilization. You can be sure the same houses have been built along a highway strip outside Fresno, California, as at the edge of a swamp in Pahokee, Florida, and on the blizzard-blown fringes of St. Cloud, Minnesota. They might be anywhere. The places they stand are just different versions of nowhere, because these houses exist in no specific relation to anything except the road and the power cable. Electric lighting has reduced the windows to lame gestures. Tradition comes prepackaged as screw-on aluminium shutters, vinyl clapboards, perhaps a phony cupola on the roof ridge, or a plastic pediment over the door – tribute, in sad vestiges, to a lost past from which nearly all connections have been severed. There they sit on their one- or two- or half-acre parcels of land – the scruffy lawns littered with the jetsam of a consumerist religion (broken tricycles, junk cars, torn plastic wading pools) – these dwellings of a proud and sovereign people. If the ordinary house of our time seems like a joke, remember that it expresses the spirit of our age. The question, then, is: what kind of joke represents the spirit of our age? And the answer is: a joke on ourselves. – James Howard Kunstler, “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s (and Norway’s) Man-Made Landscape”, page 166

The car industry made us addicted to cars just like the tobacco industry made us addicted to nicotine. No wonder, as both these industries hired Edward Bernays to fulfil their goals. The car industry has done to the countryside what tobacco has done to our lungs, it has become a filthy place where you cannot breath. My family’s farm has become suffocated by the suburban dream, making it a wasteland where no rural life can thrive. This place was meant to be a carrier of culture and identity, a guarantor for a living landscape, now all lost to a sub-exurban nightmare!

In America, with its superabundance of cheap land, simple property laws, social mobility, mania for profit, zest for practical invention, and Bible-drunk sense of history, the yearning to escape industrialism expressed itself as a renewed search for Eden. America reinvented that paradise, described so briefly and vaguely in the book of genesis, called it Suburbia, and put it for sale. – James Howard Kunstler, “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s (and Norway’s) Man-Made Landscape”, page 37

Suburban houses are not homes, they are bunkers, and for anybody to survive in them they are depended upon a heavy infrastructure destroying the landscape.

It’s a figure that ought to send chills up the spine of a reflective person because these housing starts do not represent newly minted towns, or anything describable as real or coherent communities. Rather, they represent monoculture tract developments of cookie cut bunkers on half acre lots in far-flung suburbs, or else houses plopped down in isolation along country roads in what had been cornfields, pastures, or woods. In any case, one can rest assured that they will only add to the problems of our present economy and the American (Norwegian) civilization. They will relate poorly to other things around them, they will eat up more countryside, and they will increase the public fiscal burden. – James Howard Kunstler, “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s (and Norway’s) Man-Made Landscape”, page 147

These days the suburban burden of my family’s farm is taking on weight again, digging tons of plastic deep into the ground and putting a pump house where the barn used to be. All in service for the subexurbanites and their miserable, pointless lives!

This cannot go on anymore! The cars should be reserved for farmers, as originally was the intention of Henry Ford. Let the countryside be rural for rural people, and the towns to be urban for urban people. Suburbanites, exurbanites and subexurbanites, go home to where you belong, in town!

Of course, we cannot store these poor people in vertical suburbs, as was the idea of Le Corbusier. We must give them real urbanism, we must give them Village Towns!

Related:

Village towns

Wendell Berry And The New Urbanism: Agrarian Remedies, Urban Prospects

A Pattern Language Conference in the Sustainable Valley of Hurdal in 2017?

Nathan Lewis: People Who are Not Directly Involved in Agriculture Should Live in Urban Places

This post first appeared on my blog PermaLiv here.

The post Village Towns for Norwegian Countryside appeared first on P2P Foundation.