Nomadic Eco-Villages

[Eric Hunting]

I made this presentation with Google's slide show app to summarize a discussion I've been in lately about Neo-Nomadism. Relates to some of TMP2 by way of the potential use of Utilihab and Pod Furnitecture, which I've discussed here previously.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19g_XYezo_jHEZINUqZNZUswZaLsuNHpvbsT3vNkW3eU/edit?usp=sharing

Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com

[ken dabkowski]

Hi Eric,

I dig the presentation and will be showing it to my Mongolian friends!

Best,
Ken

Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com



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[Devin Balkind]

This is great.  I'm sharing it with the owners of Solaqua.  They might be interested in hosting such a community.  Are you all looking for space and do you think Solaqua in Chatham, NY (3 hours from NYC, 30 minutes from Albany) could be a good fit?

[Andrew Mazzotta]

Liking this project too!

@Devin, if you get things going and infuse 3d printing into anything i would love to make an interview/video of it.

Andrew

[Nathan Cravens]

Thanks for sharing this Eric. 

I've lived like an individualist primitivist within urban environments for most of my adult life, so I find your presentation of particular interest. The slides are very thought provoking. 

The increasing conditions of poverty left unfilled by Commerce and State will make nomadics more attractive, especially as robotics takeover transport (trains, buses, taxis, truck drivers) in the 2020s, there will be millions of people out of work, and hopefully seeking alternatives with less social stigma denying this development, as job markets and money itself become less able to effectively provide a decent material living standard, and that reality although already so, once that becomes socially accepted, alternatives follow as being acceptable, articulated, and lived. The great question to be negotiated in the 21st Century is: How are material rights properly attributed without money or serfdom? Nomadicism is a curious answer. 

Those displaced by the autonomous vehicle industry could be building factories to localize production during this time, (spaces are presently being 3D printed, and research labs are using robots to build spaces, so these jobs by the late 2020s may be few) but that sort of work of course is not as cosy as driving, so work in counselling will probably increase, and I suspect, at least within welfare states of European countries, will be the last form of large scale employment before post-scarcity convention is established. For the more purely capitalist states, (where the capitalist manufacture of consent of the people to fear and therefore reject government as a public service) the last majority profession will probably be (para)military service. 

There is a persistent issue with living as a community in every community I've lived in: a sort of stagnation from being in constant close proximity with people in a personal way for long amounts of time. This sets in motion the 'hierarchy of productivity' bicker: "I do all the work while homestyle smokes grass all day" says the guy who's always sitting around talking and smoking grass all day. In my experience everyone is mostly concerned with smoking and gossip while a few people in the group do anything worthwhile. Those that are nomadic, travelling from one group to the next, (from squat, to festival, to ecovillage) are the happiest, refreshing the group with stories of other places and activities, adding excitement and dynamics to the established group. So that topic surfaces the need for balancing 'transience' with 'foundation', the need to stay together as a group to form meaningful relationships and maintaining a healthy space for travellers; while not stagnating as a community. 

Your proposal of nomadics would alleviate or at least renew the bicker often attributed to most intentional communities today. 

People that visited Occupy St. Paul's made great contributions, if not physically, at least to the morale of the camps for inputting a refreshed optimistic approach. Most people, it should be noted, viewed the camps with disgust, as a fair amount of people within the The Roman Square Mile do rather well for themselves as things are. Nearly 100% of the food, clothing, books, and other materials at the camps were donated by those simply to visit for long enough to make that very contribution and perhaps have a short chat before moving on. That demographic was more often than not, women over 60. The boys mostly, curiously enough, worked in the kitchen, the late Tea Tent 'Tea and Empathy', although perhaps not so surprising, sat on computers in the Tech Tent (aka Livestream Tent) and, more often than not, a particular Canadian bloke, managed Tent City University talks while frequenting the Starbucks nearby. It was only during GA's and meetings that things became more gender balanced. The campers were considered stupid while the workgroup visitors elevated themselves with what they believe was intelligence. Most of what I heard discussed was 'plain stupid detailing stupid' and it was difficult for me to reason how a group of people could circle around talking about irrelevant things for so long other than to vent or ego maximize, but at least this activity was some semblance of activity, instilling some idea of Occupy, the greatest outcome of the movement being it has encouraged people to think  critically and speak openly about what controls. 

Because these camps were mostly populated by the homeless, and because I featured a beard and long hair, although I managed the library at St. Paul's, most people did not think I was very capable. I was always sleep deprived living in a tent with ongoing noise. Not reacting is often misattributed with stupidity. In those conditions, few could be very constructive, even if they thought they tried, the major premise of the group was based on blame, and the lack of goal construction and self responsibility became collectively internally disfunctional. 

The camp itself was the solution to the economic and other crises, but few were able to see the obviousness of the solution right in front of them. That would be too easy, surely its not that easy, was often the response. Of course, the function could be tidier within the urbanized barrackesque (everything attached and circular like a fortress) of European urban design. Such assertion was off topic to the majority bank and corporate bashing banter, so it seemed as if it were from a naive optimist. Being from Texas, I cannot possibly be an optimist. . . if but as an overlay. 

There remains a great human error with viewing something more consistent as more correct. Tech can help distinguish or exploit this error.      

Two urban ecovillages in London would be interested, Grow Heathrow and Runnymede. The nearest interested group to you in New Mexico might be Arcosanti.

Best of luck with this project Eric!  

[Robb Greathouse]

Take a look at http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/Manuals.html  lot of interesting designs.

[Eric Hunting]

Thanks for the feedback. Most of the collaborators for this have been in Europe. Dante-Gabryell Monson got things started. But I think this could be done most anywhere, and maybe more than one place at once. The key is the type of venue. The indoor eco-village needs a space like a typical open-plan commercial building with hanging wall facade, a multi-floor parking structure, warehouse or empty industrial building, or the like. My guess is an exhibition might use such space for about a month. Looking at the photos on the Solaqua web site, it looks like that would offer some possible spaces and the workshop could be a boon to the participating designers. With less window space, I think one would want to do more to demonstrate heliostat lighting use, and there seems to be plenty of roof area for that. Though not as urban in location, this seems like a very good project site. We need to see how many people in the US can be brought together to go there. Dante has noted the possibility of Brussels as a possibility because they have a particular issue with excess office building space, thanks to the recent EU austerity psychosis... 

[Eric Hunting]

I think the furnitecture concept offers a lot of interesting possibilities to explore for 'packaging' of 3D printers and similar digital machine tools as mobile/deployable workstation units. The basic idea here is that, in groups, the nomads carry the capability to build their own furnitecture with them, keeping their tools in forms as mobile as their rest of their amenities and creating a potential for a sort of light mobile industrial economy exploiting found space as both live and work space. Today it takes weeks to setup a typical hackerspace that is often in a location that may only be usable for a relatively short time. Imagine doing that setup or move in a day or two or setting up more comprehensive temporary workshops for events. We've seen some interesting things done with trailer-based mobil fab labs, but they're still pretty large individually because they are trying to put the whole workshop into one enclosed package. Imagine workstations more individually mobile and a little smaller, like something that could be packed up like musician's equipment, wheeled around inside a building space, transported in conventional cargo vehicles, or even put on a flatbed tuk-tuk to make a inner-city-mobile MOD (manufacture on demand) kiosk. 

http://9163c5d7f42148b24dc9-6fdd47c69ba2799be5f122e0a345c7ed.r5.cf2.rackcdn.com/cache/startUps/docs/14717_199939253476863_1497468623_n_image_full_width.jpg

http://www.tuktuktransport.com/product_images/uploaded_images/et-van-box.jpg

(I'm rather partial to the tuk tuk as a model urban vehicle, and to my surprise I've learned there is now at least one company actually making them in the US, not just importing them) 

[Eric Hunting]

Thanks for this great reply. I'm in general agreement with your observations. The thing that interests me most about the neo-nomadic living concept is the way it changes the perspective on property and the way we define standard of living. It changes the idea of housing/shelter from noun to verb. From a product to an application. And even if the urban nomad lifestyle proves not as mainstream a trend in the near future, I think it reflects something that is emergent in the mainstream culture. We are evolving toward something akin to a traditional Polynesian perspective on life imposed by the increasingly dynamic, unstable, nature of our contemporary situation. Ultimately, the culture will start expressing that physically, in the built habitat.

We entered the 21st century asking ourselves where the jet packs and flying cars went, yet we really are in a fundamentally different world most western people don't seem very cognizant of. Many of the things which were counted on as stable foundations in our lives have rather suddenly become unstable or broken down. Property? The banks and Wall Street have now taught us how little we actually own. The middle-class deal has been broken. Long-held, and fundamentally delusional, assumptions like life-long debt as being an 'investment' as long as we pretend real estate values grow forever have been blow away. The higher education contract has been broken. There we had another, similar , debt-as-investment delusion based on a fundamentally delusional assumption that job markets could grow forever in the midst of trends systematically destroying them. Global Warming is producing a more violent climate, destroying more property more frequently. Even if you think you're safe from the vicissitudes of a violently changing economic system, the man on his lot is in increasing peril from a changing climate and left, increasingly, with no safety net from insurance and government. If we're going to live well in this century, we are going to have to figure out how to do it in very different ways than our grandparents and parents did. 

There isn't a lot of physical record for ancient Polynesian culture because there was never a whole lot of 'stuff' to it. It didn't often produce the sort of resilient detritus of other cultures. There wasn't much of an obsession with property because the environment didn't offer a lot of resilient materials and often didn't allow you to keep it. Homes were simple not only because generally mild climates reduced the performance demands of shelter but also because destruction by storms, tsunami, earthquake, or volcanic activity was routine. In our culture we've typically tried to make property--and by extension our lives--disaster-resistant. But there's an economy of diminishing returns with that--and no degree of sturdiness is going to save your house from a lava flow. So Polynesians adopted a different approach. They developed housing vernaculars based on ease and economy of creation/replacement rather than ideal resilience and they had more peer-oriented ad-hoc approaches to property rights. In some cultures they would burn houses when someone died in them, like it was an extension of the person in the way their clothes might be. (some architects refer to housing as the 'third skin') There's an old Polynesian saying that a good roof and a good floor make for a good house. There's no mention of walls because that was not permanent structure and thus there was no word for them. For Polynesians, the valuable things were what people carried around in their own heads and communicated to each other. That was the vault to last generations. 

This sort of thinking carried over to Japan where the written word for house has 'roof' as its root and is synonymous with 'interior'. In western culture we define inside and outside in contexts of space enclosed by a perimeter, with or without a roof. A division of 2D space. In Eastern tradition 'inside' is defined by overhead covering--by the roof. Consequently, much traditional Japanese architecture has no load-bearing walls and they are often temporary, moveable. (which wasn't always the most practical in more temperate winter zones) Modular housing was largely invented in Japan as a response to coping with the impermanence of built structure in a land of typhoon, tsunami, earthquake, volcanos, frequent war, and frequent urban fires. Imperial edict established the 'ken' system of modular housing with a topology deriving from the dimensions of the tatami mat. This allowed lumber to be pre-cut to standard dimensions and stockpiled for emergencies. Homes could be built quickly and designed following simple rules of proportion and organization in a casual conversation between homeowner and carpenters. The traditional Japanese household kept a modest few easily carried and moved furnishings. Urban neighborhoods sometimes had resilient community vaults where these goods could be temporarily stored in emergencies with enough advance warning. 

Most people today still like to pretend architecture and property are permanent. We build as if we know everything about the future when, in fact, we know nothing. We treat the house--this thing increasingly expensive yet increasingly badly made of stuff more and more like papier mache--as this symbol of security and a stockpile of personal wealth. I've never quite made sense of it, myself. Take the inhabitants out of a house--as the foreclosure crisis has for many lately--and the average suburban American house turns into a pile of landfill waste in a couple of years. But I think the perspective is changing. The folly of it is getting shoved in our faces more and more as technology progressively undermines the paradigms of the Industrial Age. More and more we sense how we're being hoodwinked by the systems around us rather than empowered. It's tentative, but we're starting to seem some pushing-back and more willingness to entertain alternatives. 

I think part of the difficulty in coherence with the Occupy movement (though I think in some ways it was much more coherent than it was given credit for--that was largely a convenient characterization for the media to marginalize it with) is that it was dealing with a generation two generations removed from the last activist generation.  American culture has, to a large degree, pawned-off its protests to a kind of celebrity agitator community much as it has tended to pawn-off responsibility to many other kinds of 'professionals'. I'm talking about people like Michael Moore who, before Occupy, was the predominate media-industry-certified personification of leftward activism. He served as a 'safe' face of protest from the media's perspective. As long as it's jesters of one sort or another making the protest, that's OK. We can call it all a joke. So the contemporary youth culture really didn't have a living memory of past youth movements and, raised in a predominately suburban 'walled garden' where every novel aspect of youth culture that emerges is co-opted, repackaged, and sold back to them, not a lot of functional activist skills. It's a wonder Pepsi didn't run Occupy-theme ads or Nike come out with an 'activist' running shoe line... That Occupy happened at all in contemporary America is truly astounding to me. 

Off-the-shelf camping tents are definitely not designed for an urban environment, let alone any sort of communal activity. They are more often designed around an idea of very briefly 'experiencing the outdoors' as opposed to living and working someplace for a significant amount of time. The usual sporting goods market doesn't really offer the kind of shelters one really needs for this. I suspect there was some impact on the potential productivity of Occupy from inadequate shelter and encampment organization--but you can't really blame anyone for that. This was a very new unplanned thing for its community. I think there's an interesting field of protest architecture waiting to be explored, and that probably does strongly relate to nomadic design. I've noticed this in the work of Winfried Bauman's designs;

http://winfried-baumann.de/index.php

I suspect the future of things like Occupy may see a more deliberate attempt to manage image and situation of protest venues through smarter shelter/encampment design, social production systems, and more organized media use. Kids learn fast these days. They'd better...