Thinking about new p2p forms of habitat

So that’s some of what’s occupying my mind these days.

An update from our p2p-urbanistic correspondent Eric Hunting:

“Most of my own thinking about urbanism has revolved around the development of new communities and habitats and how we adapt our civilization to the logistics of renewables and the progressively decentralized/de-massified industry and economics of the Post-Industrial Age. A lot of this has been in the context of space advocacy, both in terms of the design of new settlements in that challenging environment and the employ of intentional communities here on Earth as engines/incubators of space, technology, and cultural development. I find much inspiration in the pre-industrial cities whose very organic vernacular architecture was a reflection of coherent community and a much more social peer-oriented process of development than has been allowed in the contemporary city, with its corporate models of authority and organization, increasingly militaristic logic, socially and environmentally irresponsible speculation, very ego-centric professional architecture, and systematic destruction of the community as a political and economic entity. We have a lot of new terms for things; P2P Urbanism, adhocracy, new biology, and so on. But I find it’s really mostly about the re-discovery of modes of human activity and organization we once took for granted in a community setting we now, in our industrialized market-centric culture, have lost and now seek to re-learn. All across the Industrial Age we seemed to be engaged in a desperate denial that we were social animals in favor of identity as autonomous economic agents.

Most of my discussion lately has been centered on several prospective intentional community concepts; the Aquarian Seed, Maker incubators/ashrams, Microcities or Proto-Arcos, small scale experiments in P2P architecture like the Vivarium concept, and a home show of the future/space called Space@Home.

The Aquarian Seed is a floating eco-village that relates to the space-futurist scheme devised by Marshal Savage called The Millennial Project, which I’ve been updating in a wiki-project called TMP2. In the TMP book Savage outlines a scheme to cultivate the world’s largest space program through the development of a series of marine arcology settlements in a development phase called Aquarius. The idea is to exploit the potential of the equatorial oceans to produce renewable energy and food through the combined use of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion and Polyspecies Mariculture. With these two powerful sources of income, these planned communities would cultivate an independent high-tech industrial capability focused on space development as a cultural agenda. But settling the middle of the ocean is a very challenging proposition, not so much in terms of engineering and architecture–which is relatively straightforward today–but because of the massive economies of scales compelled by the transportation logistics of living there. Savage originally devised a scheme by which a network of numerous coastal eco-villages would cultivate the means to construct the first marine settlements and equip them with independent transportation collectively, but the scheme was flawed by its reliance on what tends to be the most expensive real estate in the world. My proposal was to cultivate marine settlements from near-shore floating eco-village settlements that employed architecture allowing them to grow and move farther out to sea incrementally, adopting progressively longer-range transportation and greater subsistence independence as their population afforded the necessary minimum operational economies of scale.

The Maker incubator community is a concept similar to Marcin Jakubowski’s Global Village but not intended to seek such a total self-sufficiency so quickly in order to avoid any compromises in conventional standard of living. I like the term ‘ashram’ rather than more monastic and academic analogies as a way of suggesting the ‘outquisition agenda’ of the community. Not a retreat from the world but a stepping back to get another perspective–getting out of the car to get at its engine and undercarriage. It’s intended to showcase an ‘unplugged’ lifestyle independent of the market economy and salary employment, but since we really don’t have the at-hand technology to achieve this without resorting to the kinds of compromises that doomed the ‘back to the land’ and commune movements of the ’60s, my approach has been to employ hybrid methods of achieving a Basic Income in a community concept deriving from both local subsistence production–what I call Integral Basic Income–and the leveraging of shared equity exploiting the external market for a Cash Basic Income. Thus residents have the means to bridge the gap in subsistence capability through external market goods without, in turn, being exploited by that market. Few people really want to return to an agrarian way of life and if we are to cultivate a viral cultural evolution we have to demonstrate a culture with a truly attractive, superior, lifestyle early on–otherwise you risk being accused of just repeating the history of the hippy era.

The Microcity is a larger scale implementation of the same ideas as in the Maker incubator, using larger population to enable both larger scale commercial activity and subsistence systems needing larger minimum economies of scale. It is an eco-village designed like an embryonic arcology–hence Proto-Arco–relying on economic/geographical situation like that of the American Edge City which emerged in the 1980s as expansion of suburbia reached the practical limits of commuter travel and many cities like New York began engaging in a kind of commercial class war driving out smaller entrepreneurial business in favor of larger corporations with more political influence. Eco-villages have generally been over-focused on residence uses and driven to the edge of wilderness in order to find the freedom to employ alternative architecture and renewable energy. But this is not where they should be. They cannot set powerful examples for existing cities and suburbs from there and risk the disconnection from infrastructure that leads, again, to compromises in standard of living. The Microcity is intended to realize the full, if miniaturized, functionality of any large scale city at the same living density while eliminating the chronic dysfunctions of the conventional city, leveraging the freedom to deploy new architecture and renewables technology the average city is politically and bureaucratically incapable of. In some ways the Microcity concept is the land-based version of the Aquarian Seed, likewise looking beyond subsistence to the cultivation of entrepreneurship in its Edge City situation. I don’t think you can change the world by pulling a John Galt or conjuring up revolution. You have to simply demonstrate and offer a competitively superior way of life. The ‘real money’ is always in empowerment because exploitation is always a zero-sum game.

Vivarium was a proposal I made some time ago for an experiment in P2P architecture based in a fun low-risk context. I proposed the creation of a kind of public pleasure lounge where people would use a simple DIY building system like Grid Beam to build their own indoor ‘furnitecture’ following a few simple rules on use of space. You can imagine it as sort of an indoor Burning Man encampment, repurposing such large-span space as old warehouses, hangers, etc. The space would provide some basic resources; power, WiFi, a workshop for the building system, bathrooms, and maybe some light food services. The rest would be up to the people freely using the space, creating a ‘lounge’ environment as they see fit. It would be a fun way for people to express their creativity while re-cultivating our lost community skills.

Space@Home is loosely related to the Vivarium idea but more closely related to the International Open Space Initiative proposed in TMP2; an open public space program intended to tap into today’s Maker and hobbyist robotics communities to cultivate the technology for deployment of telerobotic orbital, lunar, and Mars bases as pre-settlements for later human settlers. Space@Home is an attempt to cultivate public interest in space by creating an opportunity to explore ideas of living in space and the future through a design showcase akin to conventional home shows. The program would create show venues that mimic the general organization of likely space habitats then allow creative teams to make and deploy showcase homes in this little community setting. We generally see space settlement in the context of tin can habitats in a wasteland or the giant rotating structures of the classic space colonies. But in reality near-term permanent space settlement is more likely to be based on very simple but large area structures, excavated or built-up and using simple shapes. A good example and likely venue for this program would be the Kansas City Subtropolis–a commercial park repurposing a white limestone mine with a very regular geometric vault structure. Such structures need no exotic or advanced technology to inhabit. They would be outfit by retrofit using light modular building systems and would make extensive use of space for gardening both as part of their life support and for creating a comfortable environment. Exploring such things is well within the means of today’s designers and tinkerers. The chief challenge of these environments is how to live well in these likely windowless space when you’re living indoors 99.9% of the time.

So that’s some of what’s occupying my mind these days.”

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