Thanks Michel for the kind mentioning! Sorry I do not follow this list all the time. I am getting a bit puzzled if you mean "rural" or "urban" population in your last sentence. I think the 80 rural - 20 urban ratio is desireable, IF and only IF human beings in rural areas have local clusters and subcenters where they can physically access the amenities of support that the modern world provides. IT can make a village intelligent, it can make a small town superintelligent. Global Villages is a strategy of redesign, to make rural areas really agreeable. I consider it as a kind of fully fledged branch of urbanism by the way. I think Nikos gave me a great portion of encouragement ... --- Miguel, I am very interested in your work in Brazil, sounds exciting to me! my friend Arthur Spiegler developed a "conference on the small town" that led to the ASSET project. (Action to strenthen and support small European towns) a very neglected area, even Christopher Alexander does not analyze the relation between the town and its hinterland in greater detail. But of course he gives a hundred time more consideration than the mainstream. I canned a basic speech by Phil Turner / Pam Moore from the recent 4th Symposium on Small Towns here at slideshare which describes the goals of ASSET: http://www.slideshare.net/globalvillagesinfo/phil-turner-pam-moore-the-asset... I was chairman of ECOVAST Austria for some time, I hope we can link P2P Urbanism to this topic and people! Franz Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote :
A remark on ruralization. I don't think we should empty out the cities, but nevertheless, a new balance may be necessary. As I see it, people leave rural areas for two main reasons, one is they have to for reasons of economic survival, as capitalist dynamics destroy their livelyhoods; but the other one is cultural: many young people, leave rural areas for cultural reasons, they see no dynamic future in their static and isolated rural areas. Here is where the Global Villages strategy of Franz Nahrada comes in, the use digital connectivity, empowerement and peer learning to de-isolate the rural. I can take my own life as an example, I can be a throught leader from a provincial city in the forests of northern thailand, a place which two generations ago was still three days travel from the capital city, but is now connected through global satellites and broadband internet, and I feel hardly any sense of isolation anymore. Of course, I have the cultural capital to use these tools, which many still lack, but these are not insurmountable problems. Just want to say, it's not either-or, rural or urban, but a mix, and my guess is that the relocalization you call for, and a return to say organic sustainable agriculture, will require a more labour intensive rural area. I've read, again I forgot where, that a sustainable world would perhaps require a return to a rural population of about 20%.
MIGUEL ALOYSIO SATTLER <[email protected]> wrote
Actually, after working for several years with cities or large communities, we started concentrating in the small municipalities. There are, in the whole of more than 5000 Brazilian municipalities, more than 70% with less than 20.000 inhabitants. About 50% of Brazilians live in these municipalities. I believe that in the future a "reverse migration" will occur, according to all scientific documentation I have been reading in the last 15 years I have dedicated to the study of more sustainable communities. And this will happen, I believe, mainly due to lack of food. What we are trying to do, is to try do develop directives, strategies, that will help this communities to avoid the sort of chaotic growth that resulted in our megalopolies. Thus, what we are concentrating on, now, is to develop those tools to keep Green Fingers, in their rural-urban tissue; to preserve the quality of their water, air and soil; to deal with their waste waters; to optimize urban morphology (in harmony with urban climatology, solar access); to optimize energy use and efficiency; to provide mobility and accessibilty with minimum impacts; to produce food diversity and quantity localy (as far as allowed by different soil and climate limitations); to keep the population healthy (physically, mentally, psicologically and spiritually). This is what we are trying our students to do, in class, but also by working close to the communities. And Alexander gives us a lot of guindance and inspiration...