 
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1992 15:16 EST
From: BLUECANARYINNAOUTLET 
Subject: more responses
To: +dist+~js9b/Public/camc.dl@ANDREW.CMU.EDU
Message-Id: 

Hello again.
 
   More stuff.
 
Bill responded to Mike Wiik, man of the neat last name: :-)
 
>From:  IN%"wce%hogbbs.scol.pa.us@CARNEGIE.BITNET"  4-APR-1992 09:19:54.59
>Subj:  miraculous resurrection....
 
>Using a more urban base for these corporate tribes is something I'm
>strongly hoping will happen-- I admit to preferring a rural approach, as
>I (a) grew up in the country, and (b) anticipate collapse, civil war,
>and a freejack style competition between the classes, and I want to
>avoid it, thus I don't really want to live near the sprawl, personally.
>I prefer to end up in the greater freedom of the country, even if this
>means I'm a bumpkin.
>
>The ideal solution, as I see it, is a network of many different types
>of communities/corptribes--- large and small, rural and urban and
>suburban, hi tech and lo tech, villages on the land, on and under the
>sea, in the cities, and villages seeking to colonize untapped niches
>everywhere on the planet.
 
   I'm glad that you can be so broad about approaches to the problem.  I
can't see a ridiculous in-house fight cropping up in here-- unless some
unheard-from county speaks up... :-)
 
>The ideal starting combination, as I see it, is an urban compound type
>of place in a type of sister-relationship with a more rural community.
>In effect this creates a micro-model of a traditional city-- a
>concentrated, centralized urban site where specialized urban functions
>are carried out, in relationship with a decentralized rural support
>base, which provides, for example, high quality food and certain types
>of manufactured goods to the urban comunity, while gaining the urban
>benefits of more intimate access to the marketplace and information
>streams.
 
   Uh... this sounds like a bad idea to me.  We need material
self-sufficiency in these communities, not chains of dependency-- and why
on earth would we want to create an anythingcosm of a traditional city??
Access to a marketplace? Get thee behind me, Satan! :-)
   Specialization, centralization, concentration-- you're practically listing
the principles that Alvin Toffler identified with the grand, dying Second
Wave (i.e. industrial) civilization.  Phooey!
 
>Have you heard of "co-housing"? There is a book with this name that
>discusses this european architecture and housing movement, in which a
>group of home-buyers form a co-operative to buy a plot of land, develop
>it at rates far cheaper than they would be forced to pay individually,
>ending up with a type of townhouse community, with an enclosed park and
>gardens, at a much lower cost, and, they claim, with a greater sense of
>neighborhood loyalty and unity.
 
   I've read about it.  I think I like the basic idea, and it might be
practical for middleclass people of various types in your basic capitalist
democracies.
 
   Again-- let us try to think *more universally* about what is applicable
and practiceable.  Who by and who for.  Who benefits and why.  Think Cat
not Corp. :-)
 
   One last note: I'm thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of
the two approaches that I see emerging-- hightech/planned vs.
lowtech/unplanned, put simply-- and one word jumped out at me in the midst
of Bill's piece:
 
>security of employment contracts
 ^^^^^^^^
 
   And it's true: a concrete benefit of the hightech/planned approach (can
I shorten it as "ht/p"?) is added security.  You take much less of a risk
of chaos, outbreaks of disease, sporadic warfare and crime, deaths from
shoddy goods, release of environmentally hazardous stuff, etc.  At the
*cost*, I think, of a limited list of beneficiaries-- namely, the people
with class access to these kinds of ht/p communities.  lt/up tools are (in
theory) available even to the lowest strata of society, and could spread
out in a horizontal, ultra-decentralized manner, taking down hierarchies
on the way.
 
   Something to think about...
 
 
    --Jesse.
 
PS-- if I'm just rattling on about the whole ht/p vs. lt/up thing, TELL ME!!
 
   --me again
 

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