[P2P-F] [P2P-URBANISM WA] Any of you use map layering for p2p urbanism open collab

[MIGUEL ALOYSIO SATTLER]

*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 <f.nahrada at reflex.at>

>  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-of-the-project-ecovast
>
> I was chairman of ECOVAST Austria for some time, I hope we can link P2P
> Urbanism to this topic and people!
>
> Franz
>
>
>
> *Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> *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 <masattler at gmail.com> 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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-- 
Prof. Miguel Aloysio Sattler, PhD
Depto. de Engenharia Civil/NORIE
UFRGS
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