Re: [P2P-F] [P2P-URBANISM WA] Any of you use map layering for p2p urbanism open collaboration projects ?
Just a question to this crowd of urban experts. I once read that Chinese cities used to produce 60% of their food requirements within or just around their city walls. Does anyone have a reference for this. 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%. Michel On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 5:58 AM, MIGUEL ALOYSIO SATTLER <[email protected]
wrote:
Michael,
I actually share with you the idea of "*a Sim-city kind of approach*" would be very helpful in providing us with some of the necessary answers. And, yes, as you probably guessed, I am one among those in favor of a re-ruralization of our habitat. For nothing else than for our own survival. And that, in line with the Green Fingers of Alexander or the Future *Neothecnic *Cities of John Lyle. On the one hand we (not only some privileged people, even less the whole humanity) cannot afford continue having a 5000 miles Cesar Salad. On the other hand, the slavery of food production, the exploitation of those producing our food has to finish... Bringing these food producers closer to urban spaces, as put by Alexander in the patterns, would offer them the possibility of sharing the benefits of the cities (health care, education, leisure, ...) at the same time that the productive land would absorb what we consider as being our wastes (that, actually, are resources). To do that we have, already for a long time, the adequate technologies (energy generation from biodigestion, composting, ...). Different sources indicate that (at least in Europe) each person would require 40m2 as one´s roof (in Brazil, we might have 8 people living in same space), a share of 400m2 in urban space, but 4000m2 of productive space to suply the minimum required food necessities - this in a Brazilian food diet for low income people (some say 2000m2, in a diet without meat and grains). I am sure that this statement would annoy Jane Jacobs, as will certainly do with her followers... How to find a solution for all these requirements? I suggest to my students that we should start developing a sustainability version of Sim-city, that also, following the same approach adopted by Wil Wright, would also be based on Pattern Language. Certainly that would require much more effort and time (and money), than that of 10 PhD thesis...
Regards,
Miguel , 2010/12/28 Michael Mehaffy <[email protected]>
Hello Dante,
Many communities use a Geographic Information System (GIS) and these are often available to the public, either on-line, or with downloadable data, or both. They are typically layered so it's possible to add one or more layers - depending on the software you use to view it (this varies depending on the system).
In New Orleans however, we proposed to bypass the usual GIS system and use a Google Earth "mashup" (which allows you to create custom data from other programs and mesh it with the maps). That way we felt that anyone could use the resulting system and add their data. We had computer people on the team so I am not able to give you the technical details - but someone more skilled in mashups can probably give you enough to go on. As with a lot of this technology, I think once you get the basics, the most important thing is just to play with it and learn!
Another option that we need to explore, I think, is using generative procedures t create forms collaboratively. In principle this could be done with SketchUp and Google Earth, but a) creating the structures requires expertise, and b) those with expertise - architects - are generally not good enough at facilitating the collaboration of others. Too much top-down approach, usually... Hence this effort...
We might explore other models, like a Sim-city kind of approach, based on patterns (in fact the game was based on Pattern Language in the first place, according to Wil Wright). But this would take a lot of time, and very likely, money! So we need shortcuts...
Cheers, m
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 3:58 AM, Dante-Gabryell Monson < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi to all on this list,
I want to put forward and ask some technical questions which I believe are pretty practical, to facilitate collaboration for citizen participation in city (re)development.
It involves map layerings, and I wondered if some of you may be aware of certain tools I may not be aware of yet, so I could use them ?
Or if they do not exist, how difficult would it be to create them ?
My background is that of a netroots hitch hiking nomad who is interested in setting up some physical resilient living space base.
Here goes for the question / suggestion :
The starting point is a personal project which I choose to be in Leipzig, Germany. There are vacant buildings ( about one fifth of all buildings ? ), which makes some of these buildings more affordable then other cities. Hence, I'd like to use it as an experimental space to set up a local network economy, with not for loss/not for financial profit/use value and p2p cooperative principles, building up on peer property, governance and production.
The is one of the wiki pages me and some other friends use to brainstorm :
http://sharewiki.org/en/Leipzig_project
Enough friends offered to buy shares as to guarantee the purchase of a first building. Now, the challenge is to be able to *use all data and , based on needs for projects, select the ideal area and choose the ideal first building to start the project.*
Now that Google Street View is available for some cities in germany, such as Berlin or Leipzig, it also makes it easier to show to potential investors , and further increase participation online.
I wondered how difficult it would be to* enable automatic KML layering*, after doing a specific research, such as buildings in Leipzig ( according to price or size criteria for example ) from data such as
http://lwb-immobilienangebote.de/index.php/objekte/suchen
( a company that inherited from the formaly east german housing cooperative )
This would be very useful, to choose, then view directly with Google Street View, buildings of interest for me and friends to invest in, while collaboratively compiling important data about the buildings, the neighbourhood,
by eventually enabling additional connections to every points on the layer for open comments or linking to wiki pages ?
Enabling each point on a KML layering to have some kind of URI ? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole_Markup_Language ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier )
Or even enabler social networks ( people login from facebook, or enable a direct link map that can be added to identica and twitter, and serve as a tag for other interested twitter users... ? )
Hence enabling emergent collaboration for the redelopment of a city ?
Perhaps also a layer for open street map ? ( if that exists ? ) http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page
I do know about wikimapia which enables adding specific data about places http://wikimapia.org
but I am not sure such tool is ideal when it comes to specific projects / our own project layers, or for enabling the superposition of various layers extracted based on specific researches.
Perhaps also that Open Layers could be of use ( although I do not know much about it ) http://openlayers.org/ ?
I also know that one can create ones own maps on google maps, which could be one way to go.
In that case, how to enable automated access to databases directly represented on the maps ?
Then finally, how to make such databases, from private companies and from governmental organizations alike, directly available on maps. ( including access such as water grid information, public transportation data, electricity, gas, fiber optic internet grid data... ? - latest dates for construction works, or planned construction works, ... - or data regarding the condition of the houses, legal information , size of buildings, fire department information, possibly even demographics , ... )
Hence on one hand, a political aspect of making such information accessible, and on the other, technical solutions, to enable layering of information layers on maps, and finally uniform resource identifiers ( URI ) which can be used and connected to profiles, or as links on blogs and micro-blogging tools, as to further enable emergent collaboration ?
Does any of you work on this, or does any of you know of some answers going in this direction ? Does any of you use such tools ?
I do understand this may be a booming field. I remember watching this video :
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_images.jsp?cntn_id=118063&org=NSF
Perhaps I missed some mails on this list that mentioned such ideas, as I notice the title of this list is
"p2p-urbanism-world-atlas"
Thanks!
Dante http://hitchwiki.org/en/Dante
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "P2P-Urbanism World Atlas" group. to register to the group http://cityleft.blogspot.com/ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/p2p-urbanism-world-atlas?hl=en
-- Michael Mehaffy 333 S. State Street, Suite V-440 Lake Oswego, OR 97034 www.tectics.com
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "P2P-Urbanism World Atlas" group. to register to the group http://cityleft.blogspot.com/ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/p2p-urbanism-world-atlas?hl=en
-- Prof. Miguel Aloysio Sattler, PhD Depto. de Engenharia Civil/NORIE UFRGS
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "P2P-Urbanism World Atlas" group. to register to the group http://cityleft.blogspot.com/ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/p2p-urbanism-world-atlas?hl=en
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
thanks Roberto On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Roberto Verzola <[email protected]>wrote:
Hi Michel,
Patrice Riemens, who was also at the Berlin ICC 2010, called my attention (see below) to a book by FHKing on Chinese agriculture in the early 20th century, which I found very informative. King said the West had a lot to learn from China, whose agricultural practices then were quite sustainable. Unfortunately, what happened instead is that China imported the agricultural practices of the West (as Schumacher said, if you import the technology, you are bound to import its embedded ideology too).
Roberto
FH King apparently predicted 100 years ago that we were heading towards a major economic crisis and that we should concentrate on locally/ regionally based food production & consumption. http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010122king/ffc.html
(I think it's the whole book, is also on the Gutenberg project site)
on FH King: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Hiram_King
Michel Bauwens wrote:
Just a question to this crowd of urban experts.
I once read that Chinese cities used to produce 60% of their food requirements within or just around their city walls. Does anyone have a reference for this.
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%.
Michel
On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 5:58 AM, MIGUEL ALOYSIO SATTLER < [email protected]> wrote:
Michael,
I actually share with you the idea of "*a Sim-city kind of approach*" would be very helpful in providing us with some of the necessary answers. And, yes, as you probably guessed, I am one among those in favor of a re-ruralization of our habitat. For nothing else than for our own survival. And that, in line with the Green Fingers of Alexander or the Future *Neothecnic *Cities of John Lyle. On the one hand we (not only some privileged people, even less the whole humanity) cannot afford continue having a 5000 miles Cesar Salad. On the other hand, the slavery of food production, the exploitation of those producing our food has to finish... Bringing these food producers closer to urban spaces, as put by Alexander in the patterns, would offer them the possibility of sharing the benefits of the cities (health care, education, leisure, ...) at the same time that the productive land would absorb what we consider as being our wastes (that, actually, are resources). To do that we have, already for a long time, the adequate technologies (energy generation from biodigestion, composting, ...). Different sources indicate that (at least in Europe) each person would require 40m2 as one´s roof (in Brazil, we might have 8 people living in same space), a share of 400m2 in urban space, but 4000m2 of productive space to suply the minimum required food necessities - this in a Brazilian food diet for low income people (some say 2000m2, in a diet without meat and grains). I am sure that this statement would annoy Jane Jacobs, as will certainly do with her followers... How to find a solution for all these requirements? I suggest to my students that we should start developing a sustainability version of Sim-city, that also, following the same approach adopted by Wil Wright, would also be based on Pattern Language. Certainly that would require much more effort and time (and money), than that of 10 PhD thesis...
Regards,
Miguel , 2010/12/28 Michael Mehaffy <[email protected]>
Hello Dante,
Many communities use a Geographic Information System (GIS) and these are often available to the public, either on-line, or with downloadable data, or both. They are typically layered so it's possible to add one or more layers - depending on the software you use to view it (this varies depending on the system).
In New Orleans however, we proposed to bypass the usual GIS system and use a Google Earth "mashup" (which allows you to create custom data from other programs and mesh it with the maps). That way we felt that anyone could use the resulting system and add their data. We had computer people on the team so I am not able to give you the technical details - but someone more skilled in mashups can probably give you enough to go on. As with a lot of this technology, I think once you get the basics, the most important thing is just to play with it and learn!
Another option that we need to explore, I think, is using generative procedures t create forms collaboratively. In principle this could be done with SketchUp and Google Earth, but a) creating the structures requires expertise, and b) those with expertise - architects - are generally not good enough at facilitating the collaboration of others. Too much top-down approach, usually... Hence this effort...
We might explore other models, like a Sim-city kind of approach, based on patterns (in fact the game was based on Pattern Language in the first place, according to Wil Wright). But this would take a lot of time, and very likely, money! So we need shortcuts...
Cheers, m
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 3:58 AM, Dante-Gabryell Monson < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi to all on this list,
I want to put forward and ask some technical questions which I believe are pretty practical, to facilitate collaboration for citizen participation in city (re)development.
It involves map layerings, and I wondered if some of you may be aware of certain tools I may not be aware of yet, so I could use them ?
Or if they do not exist, how difficult would it be to create them ?
My background is that of a netroots hitch hiking nomad who is interested in setting up some physical resilient living space base.
Here goes for the question / suggestion :
The starting point is a personal project which I choose to be in Leipzig, Germany. There are vacant buildings ( about one fifth of all buildings ? ), which makes some of these buildings more affordable then other cities. Hence, I'd like to use it as an experimental space to set up a local network economy, with not for loss/not for financial profit/use value and p2p cooperative principles, building up on peer property, governance and production.
The is one of the wiki pages me and some other friends use to brainstorm :
http://sharewiki.org/en/Leipzig_project
Enough friends offered to buy shares as to guarantee the purchase of a first building. Now, the challenge is to be able to *use all data and , based on needs for projects, select the ideal area and choose the ideal first building to start the project.*
Now that Google Street View is available for some cities in germany, such as Berlin or Leipzig, it also makes it easier to show to potential investors , and further increase participation online.
I wondered how difficult it would be to* enable automatic KML layering *, after doing a specific research, such as buildings in Leipzig ( according to price or size criteria for example ) from data such as
http://lwb-immobilienangebote.de/index.php/objekte/suchen
( a company that inherited from the formaly east german housing cooperative )
This would be very useful, to choose, then view directly with Google Street View, buildings of interest for me and friends to invest in, while collaboratively compiling important data about the buildings, the neighbourhood,
by eventually enabling additional connections to every points on the layer for open comments or linking to wiki pages ?
Enabling each point on a KML layering to have some kind of URI ? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole_Markup_Language ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier )
Or even enabler social networks ( people login from facebook, or enable a direct link map that can be added to identica and twitter, and serve as a tag for other interested twitter users... ? )
Hence enabling emergent collaboration for the redelopment of a city ?
Perhaps also a layer for open street map ? ( if that exists ? ) http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page
I do know about wikimapia which enables adding specific data about places http://wikimapia.org
but I am not sure such tool is ideal when it comes to specific projects / our own project layers, or for enabling the superposition of various layers extracted based on specific researches.
Perhaps also that Open Layers could be of use ( although I do not know much about it ) http://openlayers.org/ ?
I also know that one can create ones own maps on google maps, which could be one way to go.
In that case, how to enable automated access to databases directly represented on the maps ?
Then finally, how to make such databases, from private companies and from governmental organizations alike, directly available on maps. ( including access such as water grid information, public transportation data, electricity, gas, fiber optic internet grid data... ? - latest dates for construction works, or planned construction works, ... - or data regarding the condition of the houses, legal information , size of buildings, fire department information, possibly even demographics , ... )
Hence on one hand, a political aspect of making such information accessible, and on the other, technical solutions, to enable layering of information layers on maps, and finally uniform resource identifiers ( URI ) which can be used and connected to profiles, or as links on blogs and micro-blogging tools, as to further enable emergent collaboration ?
Does any of you work on this, or does any of you know of some answers going in this direction ? Does any of you use such tools ?
I do understand this may be a booming field. I remember watching this video :
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_images.jsp?cntn_id=118063&org=NSF
Perhaps I missed some mails on this list that mentioned such ideas, as I notice the title of this list is
"p2p-urbanism-world-atlas"
Thanks!
Dante http://hitchwiki.org/en/Dante
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "P2P-Urbanism World Atlas" group. to register to the group http://cityleft.blogspot.com/ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/p2p-urbanism-world-atlas?hl=en
-- Michael Mehaffy 333 S. State Street, Suite V-440 Lake Oswego, OR 97034 www.tectics.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "P2P-Urbanism World Atlas" group. to register to the group http://cityleft.blogspot.com/ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/p2p-urbanism-world-atlas?hl=en
-- Prof. Miguel Aloysio Sattler, PhD Depto. de Engenharia Civil/NORIE UFRGS -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "P2P-Urbanism World Atlas" group. to register to the group http://cityleft.blogspot.com/ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/p2p-urbanism-world-atlas?hl=en
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
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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...
*Michel,* Thanks for establishing this link with Franz. *Franz,* Thank you for your interest on the work we have developing and also for sending me the link for the slideshare with the speech by Phil Turner / Pam Moore. I was not aware of this European initiative and also found it very interesting. I will try to sumarize some of the activities we are developing, that are somehow related to what is beig developed by ASSET members, as I could understand from the slideshare. I am with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, at the southmost State of Brazil (having borders with Argentina and Uruguay). I have been working with several postgraduate students in this field since 1997. I then organized the First Brazilian Conference on Sustainable Buildings and Communities (we just had, in 2009, the Fifth Brazilian and Third Latin American issue of this Conference. For the First Conference I invited Steve Curwell, from Salford University, UK, as a Guest Speaker. At that time he was leading a European project called Bequest, related do Sustainable Cities. I mention him because it was Steve who made us interested working on this scale. Lately we have been running short courses related to Sustainable Buildings and Communities in several regions in Brazil, but also in Uruguay (MSc) and Paraguay (MSc), mainly as part of MSc and PhD Programs, led by our PostGraduate Course in Civil Engineering. At the moment I am supervising 7 PhD students, all working in the area that aims at getting more sustainable cities (four of them are just starting their research at a northeastern city, in the State of Paraiba, working with a town of nearly 30.000 inhabitants; one student is working in the area of urban metabolism, in Montevideo (a large city), capital city of Uruguay; and two others are developing their studies in our State: one in a city of about 13000 and other with a city of about 7000. In the city of 13,000, we started working in 2003, with the preliminary studies for a more sustainable technical school (for about 700 students). That was demanded by several municipalities sharing the same watershed (of Rio Caí), that due to their characteristics and potential aimed at atracting students in some areas of interest of all of them (like agroindustry and ceramic clay bricks and tiles). The school was built and several MSc dissertations were developed to monitor the buildings and user´s satisfaction. Due to this starting project, we established interesting links with the communities (mostly the one were the school was built - municipality of Feliz), leading to the start of several new works. Two MSc studies were already completed: one, evaluating a simplified Ecological Footprint for the municipality; the other led to sistematization of 108 Alexander´s patterns that were found to be related to sustainable communities. Presently a PhD student is working with the urban metabolism of the municipality of Feliz; another with the preservation of water quality (very high there) and water pollution; one more MSc student is working with Strategies for Creating Greenways for small municipalities; and one more MSc student working with construction and demolition residues and strategies for managing them sustainably. In all initiatives we give a return to the municipality, that is slowly strengthening our links with their people and representatives. Other initiatives are constantly under development, either by Diploma or undergraduate students, mostly focusing in this municipality. This was a looong sumary, but as you said you had interest on our work, I tried to give you an appropriate picture of what has been going on here. Regards, Miguel Sattler 2011/1/20 Franz Nahrada <[email protected]>
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...
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Dear Franz, my reference is only to the West, where presently the percent of people in agri-production must be around 2-5%, but according to calculations, could regrow to be up to 20% under a post-Peak-OIl smart organic scenario, which needs more human intervention. I'm not sure where I got that number from, but perhaps Sam or Steve know more, as they are active in this agrifood movement, Michel On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 10:17 PM, Franz Nahrada <[email protected]> wrote:
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...
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participants (4)
-
Franz Nahrada -
Michel Bauwens -
MIGUEL ALOYSIO SATTLER -
Roberto Verzola