The Cities Will Fade Away, People Will Have to Return to the Basic Form, the Village

The model cottages at O’Connorville seems to be a kind of mass production, maybe a sort of that idea that for everyone to be equal, everyone should live in the same kind of home?

Christopher Alexander on the contrary stresses that to make living communities, every place, every house and every room needs to be unique, shaped accordingly to every individual's deep personal feeling and character.

Equality cannot be shaped through similarity, it can only be created through shared pattern languages.

We, in our time, have a special responsibility to create new pattern languages, supporting a movement or network of global villages: http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/commoning-patterns-and-patterns-commoning-short-sketch

Today's information technology will go away:

Villager, computers don't build themselves, they don't power themselves, they don't mine the raw materials to make their own spare parts for themselves, and so on. They're simply the final hurrah of the age of cheap abundant energy, and will go away as the immensely complex and energy-hungry infrastructure needed to support them becomes too costly to keep running. Thus I don't think that the invention of computers is anything like a game-changer. - John Michael Greer

The same way as computers will be gone, we will see a return of the village as the basic form of community:

Ashley, I'd suggest a slight variation. Through most of history, the urban-civilization form of society supported itself on a foundation of decentralized villages; the latter is the basic form, the former an occasional blossoming, which runs its course and ends. Our current civilization, as I've argued in a couple of my books, is as brittle as it is precisely because it tried to replace the village system with factory farming powered by fossil fuels; as those run out, it's not going to last -- and then, as you suggest, we'll be reverting to a stabler form. - John Michael Greer

This is why I see GIVE, the Global Villages Movement, as the most important movement of the world today: http://www.globalvillages.info/wiki?GlobalVillages/GIVE

The cities will fade away, people will have to return to the basic form, the village. To create a network of villages, to be managed as commons, ruled by internationally but locally adapted pattern languages, is the future of humanity!

The "klyngetun" of Havråtunet, Western Norway.