Comunidades y Viviendas: "Slow Cities"

this fits in nicely with the community concept i've been discussing off and on (here, here and here, among others) for the past couple of months...


A banner for a festival in Bevagna:
The celebration is conducted at a snail's pace.

"Slow City" advocates argue that small cities should preserve their traditional structures by observing strict rules: cars should be banned from city centers; people should eat only local products and use sustainable energy. In these cities, there's not much point in looking for a supermarket chain or McDonald's.

[...]

"Our goal is to create liveable cities," says [Stefano Cimicchi, mayor of Orvieto, Italy, from 1991 to 2004], a cheerful 51-year-old with a white moustache and laugh lines around his eyes. "We are working, if you will, on the concept of the utopian city, in the same way as the writer Italo Calvino and the architect Renzo Piano have done."

The miniscule Tuscan Chianti town of Greve became the first "cittáslow" in 1999, followed by Bra, Positano and Orvieto. Over time, the slowness wave has spread. There are now 42 slow cities in Italy, and more and more cities -- in Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Poland and Norway -- conform to the movement's list of strict requirements. In Germany, a number of cities -- including Hersbruck, Lüdinghausen, Schwarzenbruck, Waldkirch and Überlingen -- have joined the select circle, which only admits cities with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.

i've visited the cinque terre region in italy, five unesco world heritage sites villages along the ligurian coast... they function much the same way as "slow cities", and i was vastly impressed... the sense i got was one of towns existing for the people who live there, as opposed to places that have been overtaken and virtually destroyed by the automobile and the relentless push for business expansion and profit...


Riomaggiore, Cinque Terre,
Ligurian coast, Italy

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Comunidades y Viviendas, Monologue 3

Bottom-Up Power
Creating a New Era through Community

Our world is facing a critical challenge. For too many years, the levers of global society have been controlled by small groups of people who are only interested in money and power and have little to no concern for the common good of the rest of humanity. People everywhere, whether or not they were consciously aware of it, were forced to surrender their power, their livelihoods and, in many cases, their lives, to satisfy the voracious and unending needs of their masters. Slowly but surely, this is changing. People are beginning to wake up to this reality and, bit by bit, are starting to re-claim their god-given right to take charge of their own lives, to live and work with dignity and to enjoy the health and prosperity they so richly deserve. As this happens, the depth of our challenge becomes ever more apparent.

When power shifts, as it must, from the few at the top to the grassroots, people need to learn how to exercise it, not only for their benefit but to achieve the common good of all. To do this means building healthy, effective, sustainable systems, structures and communities, communities which are strong enough to insure that power and resources remain where they belong – in the hands of the people.

The fundamental building block of society since the dawn of human history has been the community. One of the subtle strategies employed by those seeking money and power has been to turn our focus away from community to the family. It is much easier to isolate and control individual families than it is strong communities. Because the family is indeed an important and fundamental element of society, this strategy has been wildly successful, and, as a result, we have seen communities across the globe virtually erased as a functional element of the societal landscape. Long commutes to work and many hours per week on the job, minimal vacations and recuperative time, bedroom communities only used for sleeping, “cocooning,” an emphasis on materialism and the money it takes to continually acquire the newest goods, geographic mobility and the subsequent demise of the extended family, and a deliberate disenfranchisement accompanied by an increasing inability to effect positive change in the larger system, all have served to drive us apart and restrict any natural tendency we might have to banding together in healthy communities. Now that we are on the brink of an unprecedented shift of power back to the hands of the people, we need to learn how to build communities.

What I propose to do is to put power into people’s hands and to teach them how to use it to create the strong communities that will allow us to take charge of our own lives. Doing this requires, first and foremost, enlightened and skilled leadership, but, equally important, it requires an understanding on the part of all community members about how community must function as an integrated system. It is impossible to construct and maintain an effective, healthy, sustainable community system without a baseline set of knowledge and skills about how systems function, how to design them and how to make them work over time. More about how to go about doing that in subsequent posts.

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Comunidades y Viviendas: two visuals

i've been attempting to determine the approximate size for a workable community... obviously, there are sizes beyond which the concept of "community" would cease to apply... there also also natural boundaries for communities within which people would feel an identification with the area... here's two rough attempts...


A portion of Barrio Nuñez, Buenos Aires,
approximately 70 square blocks, and possibly
1-2,000 people


A portion of Cold Springs, Nevada,
approximately 18 square blocks, and
roughly 5-600 people

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Comunidades y Viviendas, Monologue 2

where does the family fit in to my thinking about communidades y viviendas...?

it's almost impossible to read or watch anything over tv, the tubes, in mainstream or even alternative media these days without seeing the word "family" used in some context... googling the word "family" gets you 789 MILLION hits, among the first three of which include disney family.com and james dobson and focus on the family's "family" website... there are a ton more, left and right, liberal and conservative, wingnut and moonbat, and all of them share one common assumption: that the family is the sine qua non, the absolutely essential building block of human society, and that an analysis of societal structures will inevitably and universally take you back to that irreducible unit... i think that assumption is flawed and, in fact, is the source of much of the social polarization, societal anomie and sense of personal isolation that seems to define much of today's world, and i would like to propose what, to some, may be a radical notion, that COMMUNITY is the fundamental building block of society...

stop and think about it... what are communities composed of...? well, certainly, one of the first answers that springs to mind is families... no argument here, but what else...? THIS is where is gets interesting... IF families are seen as the fundamental building block, social structures that don't fit that category are either marginalized or rejected outright, and isn't that exactly what's happening...?

we hear ad nauseam about how diversity (and, i gotta tell ya, i have come to HATE that word, not because of the concept it implies but because of how i have seen it used in the corporate world) is essential to healthy communities, and i don't think too many of us - with the exception of those who live in and swear by homogeneous gated communities - disagree with that... so, IF that's true and IF community is seen as the fundamental building block of society, then it would stand to reason that families would be just ONE part of that diversity, right...? this would not only open the door, it would also seek to include the mildly retarded adult who is just capable enough of managing her life to have her own apartment and hold down a job as a shelf stocker in the local grocery... it would legitimize the gay couple down the street, the life-long bachelor who obssesses over his flowers in the summer, and all the others that are all too often pushed to the sidelines today...

so, what's new about this, you ask...? nothing, that's just the point... community has been the fundamental building block of society for thousands of years, and it has only been recently that we have seen family pushing community aside... what does putting family into that key position do... well, we already know that it creates exclusion rather than inclusion, exclusion for anyone who does not fit into that neat category... what else...? my belief is that holding family up as the cornerstone of society drives us apart from each other... when families occupy center stage, all of the focus is on them, a la dobson, and the infinitely much richer web of community fades into the background... if family is the cornerstone, it may very well be that the family must stand alone, the final bulwark against the vagaries of the outside world... on the other hand, if community moves front and center, there is an inherent assumption that a family within that community is part of that larger support structure...

as i hinted at in earlier posts, for the purposes of what i am thinking about, i have a very specific definition of the word "community" in mind... in our current society, "communities" form around almost everything - the workplace, hobbies, volunteer work, church, children's activities, travel, you name it... part of the reason i chose the spanish term "comunidades y viviendas" to headline what i'm proposing is because it captures the specific kind of community i have in mind - the place where we LIVE...

there aren't many close-knit communities of that type kicking around any more, and those that remain are battling the same divisive forces as the rest of society... it used to be that small towns and rural areas were spared from the ills that plague higher density urban areas, but those days are long gone... thanks to satellite and cable television and the internet, kids in small-town argentina and macedonia often have more in common with kids in kansas farm country and the russian steppe than they do with their parents... five blocks from where i sit right now in my little place in buenos aires, there are ciber-cafes packed with young kids and adolescents, playing the same video games, drooling over the same new nike gear, and chatting with their friends all over latin america and around the world, just like kids in hundreds of other countries... now, don't get me wrong... i don't see anything wrong with that... many of these kids are more technologically savvy and more keenly aware of global goings-on (albeit in the popular culture vein) than any generation that's come before... but what's missing...? when they walk out of that ciber-cafe and finish hanging with their friends, they go back to that FAMILY... there's no community where they live, although i do have to say they have it somewhat better than many u.s. kids because of the focus on extended family... there's always an uncle, an aunt, a cousin, a grandma, or a grandpa in the picture somewhere, and, usually, a sister or brother-in-law and lots of nephews and nieces as well... but, in the barrio...? nah... it isn't there, any more than it exists in the suburban, bedroom community that my son, his wife, and my grandsons call home in nevada...

my belief is that the lack of the "communidades y viviendas" type of community in this world is killing us by degrees and that we desperately need to bring it back... but it can't be recreated in the mold of the past... it has to be a radically new approach, one suited to the realities of today... in subsequent posts, i'll talk about how i think that might look and how we might go about doing it...

in the meantime, comments are appreciated...

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Comunidades y Viviendas

About a week ago, Larry, a contributor at Lydia Cornell, left this quote in the comment section at the Blog of Revelation. It so touched me, that I put it up as my Saturday Quote of the Week.

After thinking about it, I realized how apropos it was for Comunidades y Viviendas. The quote is from Alice Walker, of the Color Purple fame.

"When it is all too much, when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of peace, find a human sunrise. Find those people who are committed to changing our scary reality. Human sunrises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. People gathering, people working to change the intolerable, people coming in their robes and sandals or in their rags and bare feet, and they are singing, or not, and they are chanting, or not. But they are working to bring peace, light, compassion to the infinitely frightening downhill slide of human life".
Alice Walker

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Comunidades y Viviendas, Monologue 1

Following on from last night's post, what to do? Where to start? How to explain? How to proceed? Striving for clarity to all those questions can only lead me to mental paralysis, so I will simply jump in.

As absurdly obvious as it may sound, everybody lives somewhere. It is a fundamental fact of our existence and, globally, one we all have in common. Certainly, the circumstances and the definition of that “living” may vary dramatically, but, the fact remains, we all put our heads down to sleep, and that takes place most often at the place (or places) we live. From the homeless person and the nomad, to the super-rich world citizen, our perspective on life springs from where and how we live day-to-day. My theory, therefore, is simple. If we are going to change the world, we must start from where people live.

Let me quickly introduce another perspective. Human society and the dynamics of the world in which it exists are made up of an infinite number of nested and interrelated systems. A family is a system. A community is a system. Biology is a system. An organization is a system. The environment is a system. Politics is a system. A government is a system. The economy is a system. The planets and their movement around the sun is a system. I will talk at another time about the emerging field of complex adaptive systems, but, for now, it is sufficient to point out that all of these systems are interconnected, interdependent, seek to learn and grow, and that the behavior of one affects, often in non-linear and unexpected ways, the behavior of the others. It is impossible to effectively alter the dynamics of one system without considering the influence of related systems and, subsequently, impacting the dynamics of those systems.

If we are to focus on and change a core element of human existence, where and how people live, we must undertake that work from a systemic point of view. All of the systems that interrelate with that core system must be taken into account. That was the framework behind the visual I posted in my introduction to this concept last night. All of those components, and probably more that I failed to mention, are systems inextricably interrelated to where and how we live, what I have chosen to call “Comunidades y Viviendas.” If where and how we live is to change for the better, ALL of those systems MUST be taken into account, and not only taken into account, THEY must very likely be changed as well. We must insure that the changes in the core element of how and where we live are not ground into dust by leaving the systems that support it unaffected. At a later time, I will relate several stories from my past experience that clearly illustrate how that can happen and the tragedies that ensue when it does. I am sure many of you have similar stories and hope that you will take the opportunity to share them when we get to that point.

Before moving one step further, I would be terribly remiss if I didn’t point out that what I am proposing has enormous and potentially quite threatening implications for established systems. If people become truly empowered to take charge of where and how they live, there is NOTHING else that can remain unaffected. Economic and power structures, for instance, will be altered in dramatic ways. The flow of both will be reversed, flowing from the bottom up, rather than as they do now, from the top down. This, to me at least, implies that there must be a readiness for this kind of change, and, as I said in the introductory post, I am predicating my proposal on what I believe to be unexpected and dramatic events that will pave the way for work on these changes to begin in earnest. That said, I see absolutely no reason why planning for it should not begin now.

That takes me to the principal challenge I see moving forward. I have connections with gifted and enlightened people in many parts of the world who, if they were able to pursue this effort and sustain themselves and their own lives in the process, would drop everything to become part of it. When I say “sustain themselves and their own lives,” I mean precisely that. Most of us require a certain level of resources flowing into our lives in order to maintain needs, responsibilities and obligations, and we also have connections and roots that are neither easily nor lightly abandoned. That’s good. It’s all about where and how we live and no one should be asked to sacrifice that. However, these people, if we are to join together in such a grand project, must come together from time to time to develop and evolve the concept, and, after all, developing and evolving the concept is the first and the biggest piece of the work. What this points to is a basic requirement for seed money, money for two things: to support the lives of the initial, core team so that we can devote all of our energy to the work, and two, money to support the travel necessary to bring us together as needed. To my mind, the money would ideally be provided by an “angel,” a sole philanthropist who would underwrite the development, evolution and pilot execution of the concept until it can become self-sustainable, with no expectation of return, payback, profit or future rights. An impossible fantasy? Perhaps. I’m putting it out there nevertheless, because I know from experience, you don’t get if you don’t ask.

I’ll expand on some of these initial thoughts in future posts. In the meantime, I look forward to your thoughts and comments.

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Moving in a new direction

i've been somewhat public in my recent angst over the direction of this blog (here and here)... some of my fellow bloggers have been most supportive (here, here, here, here and here)...

i had a brainstorm yesterday morning as i was drifting in and out of sleep prior to getting out of bed... i won't bore you with the details or the long story that led up to that neuro-meteorological event, but i will attempt to pique your curiosity just a bit...

if, as i believe, things are going to take an unexpected and dramatic turn for the better (no prediction on timeline here), we - and i'm speaking in global terms when i say "we" - are going to need a model for an entirely new way to live together... as a professional devoted to large system design and leadership, i think i have something to contribute to such a noble effort...

so what i intend to do is, in addition to the already-established direction of this blog, toss out some of my thinking related to community-building, people-powered governance and leadership, and how to go about designing systems to accommodate both... it goes without saying that i invite anyone who thinks they can add something to such thinking to do so...

for starters, let me introduce a visual of the macro concept which, in honor of my respect for latin american culture, i have christened "comunidades y viviendas," literally translated as "communities and dwellings..."



stay tuned...

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