Mariaberget at Södermalm, Stockholm

Wikimedia

The Beautiful Courtyard of Stockholm City Hall

Wikimedia

Breakfast in Gamla stan, Stockholm

Virkeligheten er "subjektivt føleri"!

Fantastisk viktig essay av David Bollier om økofilosofen og biologen Andreas Weber, som viser at det suburbane er en ukultur, at vårt konkurransesamfunn er en løgn, at teknokratiet dreper livet, at modernismen er falsk. Det er det dyptfølte som er ekte, og vi høysensitive er de som bør lede an i arbeidet for en levende verden.

Essayet vil bli publisert i sin helhet på PermaLiv, og jeg håper å kunne skrive en lengre kommentar til Bolliers tekst ved anledning.

Takk Weber!

Andreas Weber’s “Biology of Wonder”: Aliveness as a Force of Evolution and the Commons

"Future historians will look back on this book as a landmark that consolidates and explains paradigm-shifting theories and research in the biological sciences. Biology of Wonder explains how political thinkers like Locke, Hobbes and Adam Smith have provided a cultural framework that has affected biological inquiry, and how the standard Darwinian biological narrative, for its part, has projected its ideas about natural selection and organisms-as-machines on to our understanding of human societies.  Darwinism and "free markets" have grown up together." - David Bollier

"Biology, which has made so many efforts to chase emotions from nature since the 19th century, is rediscovering feeling as the foundation of life. Until now researchers, eager to discover the structure and behavior of organisms, had glossed over the problem of an organism’s interior reality. Today, however, biologists are learning innumerable new details about how an organism brings forth itself and its experiences, and are trying not only to dissect but to reimagine developmental pathways. They realize that the more technology allows us to study life on a micro-level, the stronger the evidence of life’s complexity and intelligence becomes.  Organisms are not clocks assembled from discrete, mechanical pieces; rather, they are unities held together by a mighty force: feeling what is good or bad for them." - Andreas Weber

"We have understood human beings as biological machines that somehow and rather inexplicably entail some subjective “x factor” variously known as mind, spirit or soul. But now biology is discovering subjectivity as a fundamental principle throughout nature. It finds that even the most simple living things — bacterial cells, fertilized eggs, nematodes in tidal flats — act according to values. Organisms value everything they encounter according to its meaning for the further coherence of their embodied self. Even the cell’s self-production, the continuous maintenance of a highly structured order, can only be understood if we perceive the cell as an actor that persistently follows a goal. I call this new viewpoint a “poetic ecology.” It is “poetic” because it regards feeling  and expression as necessary dimensions of the existential reality of organisms — not as epiphenomena, or as bias of the human observer, or as the ghost in the machine, but as aspects of the reality of living beings we cannot do without." - Andreas Weber

"In the ecological commons a multitude of different individuals and diverse species stand in various relations with one another — competition and cooperation, partnership and predation, productivity and destruction. All these relations, however, follow one higher law: over the long run only behavior that allows for productivity of the whole ecosystem and that does not interrupt its self-production is amplified. The individual can realize itself only if the whole can realize itself. Ecological freedom obeys this form of necessity. The deeper the connections in the system become, the more creative niches it will afford for its individual members." - Andreas Weber

The Suburban Culture

How the Norwegian wealth is wasted!

"But this new wealth was spent on suburban houses, and on cars to get to them and appliances to put in them. It transformed American (and Norwegian) culture. The private world of home and family was everything; the public realm was out. When middle-class families took a vacation, it meant a trip by car to a national park, or perhaps to a second home by a mountain lake or beach. Most of all, it meant getting away from other people. Americans (and Norwegians) no longer wished to congregate in "playgrounds" like Atlantic City where most of the action took place in public places with crowds of strangers pressing in. Those still in the habit went to new playgrounds like Miami Beach, where the decor was not threadbare and the weather nicer. If you wanted the public realm in postwar America (and Norway), there was TV." — James Howard Kunstler, "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape", page 229

"When middle-class families took a vacation, it meant a trip by car to a national park, or perhaps to a second home by a mountain lake or beach. Most of all, it meant getting away from other people."

The suburbs spreads across the Norwegian mountain landscape like an invasive species nobody knows how to get rid off!

The Norwegian culture is gone. All we have left is a suburban culture of individualism and consumerism.

Er ornament kriminelt i Hurdal økolandsby?

In his famous essay of 1908, “Ornament and Crime,” the Austrian writer/architect Adolf Loos presented an argument for the minimalist industrial aesthetic that has shaped modernism and neo-modernism ever since. Surprisingly, he built this argument upon a foundation that is accepted today by almost no one; the cultural superiority of “modern man”, by which he meant Northern European males. Loos proclaimed that, in this new era of streamlined modern production, we had apparently become unable to produce “authentic ornamental detail.” But are we alone, he asked, unable to have our own style do what “any Negro”, or any other race and period before us, could do? Of course not, he argued. We are more advanced, more “modern.” Our style must be the very aesthetic paucity that comes with the streamlined goods of industrial production — a hallmark of advancement and superiority. In effect, our “ornament” would be the simple minimalist buildings and other artifacts themselves, celebrating the spirit of a great new age. Indeed, the continued use of ornament was, for Loos, a “crime.” The “Papuan,” he argued, had not evolved to the moral and civilized circumstances of modern man. As part of his primitive practices, the Papuan tattooed himself. Likewise, Loos went on, “the modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate.” Therefore, he reasoned, those who still used ornament were on the same low level as criminals, and Papuans. - Salingaros & Mehaffy

I Hurdals økolandsby er man definitivt ikke papuanere eller kriminelle! Nei, vi er en moderne økolandsby full av moderne mennesker. Alle med tatoveringer er uvelkomne her, kom heller i slips og dress.

Her er heller ingen vekslende repetisjon, ingen brede vindusomramminger, ingen skalering. De 15 transformasjonene for helhet er nøysomt stylet vekk!

Legg merke til hvordan balkongene bryter med det 167ende alexandrinske mønster: Six-Foot Balcony. Balkongene her har intet overbygg, dvs. ingen gradvis overgang, hvor ei rett linje bryter mellom inne- og uteverdenen.

"And recesses seem to have a similar effect. On a cantilevered balcony people must sit outside the mass of the building; the balcony lacks privacy and tends to feel unsafe. In an English study ("Private Balconies in Flats and Maisonettes," Architect's Journal, March 1957, pp. 372-76), two-thirds of the people that never used their balconies gave lack of privacy as their reason, and said that they preferred recessed balconies, because, in contrast to cantilevered balconies, the recesses seemed more secure."

I dette bauhauset er man i det minste ærlige om at ornament er kriminelt, reaksjonært og noe degenererte personer holder på med

Adolf Loos, det store idolet for Hurdals økolandsby?

How Modern Architecture Got Square!

Er Hurdal økolandsby ikke annet enn et uttrykk for liberal fascisme?

Ornament is a necessary component of any architecture that aims to connect to human beings. The suppression of ornament, on the other hand, results in alien forms that generate physiological and psychological distress. Early twentieth-century architects proposed major stylistic changes -- now universally adopted -- without having any idea of how the human eye/brain system works. - Nikos A. Salingaros

Det smerter mitt hjerte at Norges første økolandsby står så milelangt unna verdens første ekte økolandsby, David Holmgrens Crystal Waters Ecovillage i Australia, i sitt ideologiske fundament. Mens denne bygger på Alexanders "A Pattern Language", er det klart at Le Corbusier, Adolf Loos og Bauhaus-skolen til Walter Gropius er forbildene til Hurdal økolandsby. Dessverre er ikke dette bærekraftig arkitektur!

I am convinced that humanity's salvation lies in the correct application of scientific theory to architecture. Furthermore, I argue that the so-called "theory" used up until now is just cult doctrine and ideology, which is what has destroyed our culture. - Nikos A. Salingaros

Les mer om bærekraftig arkitektur:

- Frodig i Gamla stan (Biophilia and Healing Environments)

Derfor må en økolandsby være alexandrinsk!

Relatert:

• Ornament and Function are Part of One Greater Whole
• Selective Anti-Modernism and the Shape of Society
• Episode 84: Creating buildings and environments that support life
• Hurdal økolandsby tar form
• Design-nøkler for lommenabolaget
• Münchensöndag II

The Only EROEI that Matters is Energy Return on Human Labor Invested

Published at Peak Oil News on February 24, 2016.

There still needs to be consumers who can afford the output. Even if there is massive consolidation, the basic problem of workers who could not afford the output would not be fixed, because it is related to the fact that the cheap energy sources have already been taken. Even if direct extraction costs are low, governments are still very dependent on high tax revenue.

What would happen in normal circumstances is collapse. Collapse happens when wages of non-elite workers fall too low, so that they cannot afford the output of the system. This happens when (goods and services produced)/population stops rising. More and more of the goods and services produced needs to go into overhead for the system (government, manager higher pay, debt service, cost of dividends and higher stock prices). There is too little output for the non-elite worker to get an adequate share.

There is a lot of talk about EROEI. In my view, the only EROEI that matters is Energy Return on Human Labor invested. When it falls too low, there is a big problem. It falls too low, when there is too little fossil fuels and other energy leveraging human labor, and too much of the system’s output pulled off the top for overhead. This is similar to a fish being forced to migrate for food, but not getting enough food energy from the process to cover its own energy costs. The result has to be die-off of the population. – Gail Tverberg

Very low energy return on human labor invested

MAN

Human Beings are “Agents of Disturbance”

What MEDOSS was Meant to Complement

Read about MEDOSS here.

First time poster, Hello everyone! This is a bit of a tangental rant and scrolling past is excused :)

I’ve been cogitating over Fast Eddy’s claims that collapse hasn’t come sooner because there are people in control who have done their darndest to prevent it. Players who determine central bank and economic policies, some kind of unelected inner sanctum banking clique, are seen as the saviours of our time (so far at least). It may seem a moot point to consider whether the course of our recent history is determined by design more than chance. It is a point worth considering though because but it does speak to sense of hope that often finds its way into the discourse here. If there are people who have been capable of stemming the effects of energy constraints is there a chance that they can do it for a longer term? Can collapse be avoided, or ameliorated if it does occur ? In this regard the benevolent communism that ArtLeads yearns for, the disappointed nihilism of Fast Eddy, and the microbial revolution of D.S. have something in common. All put the course of history in the hands of human agency.

Some would argue that we are capable of determining our lot through a reasoned modelling of the consequences arising from our actions. However our choices often are just a muddle through. We just do what seems right at the time. Our actions are usually determined by a narrow range of learned responses in answer to perceptions and models of the world that seldom escape ‘cultural velocity’ (to coin a term). If we are to expect any one in control to keep this sinking ship afloat we can’t expect them to act too much differently than what has come before. Where we go next is determined by past choices more than present ones. Believers in the power of human agency to achieve human goals also forget this; there is really no such thing as a true revolution, only a reconfiguring of the rankings of existing relationships and networks.

Humanity’s existence within the habitat of earth can be seen as a participation in a system that allows no agency and no revolution. We cannot change the constants needed for energy transfer within this system as it relates to maintaining human complexity. Such needs as a comfortable temperature range, regular food and water are baked in. The network of rules, technologies and habits we use to achieve the energy flows we need to achieve these needs we can label ‘the human economy’ (It is misleading to call this network of energy use ‘culture’ when money became our principle tool for control over the harnessing of energy. Take for example the difference between the agricultural revolution – enabled by a cultural shift to adapt to new methods of food production – and the industrial revolution – enabled by a change in money use which allowed the creation of capital intensive projects). Any change within the human economy subsystem must always bow to the demands of the larger system. This is why a set of economic rules only succeeds when it succeeds in feeding its society, or in other words, successfully achieves the required energy flows for maintaining entropy-defying higher order systems. It is this conclusion that reinforces Gail’s premise that it is the interplay of energy and economics that determines the fate of human society. Furthermore, it posits that we are members of a subsystem locked within the demands of a larger system thereby limiting our agency. - Contributor

What an excellent contribution from Contributor! He very well outlines why it's so difficult to come up with a new system replacing the old one. Of course a big challenge even for Terje Bongard, Norway's first and best human behavioural ecologist. But I'm sure he would have outlined the necessary solutions if he just was given the 42 millions N.Kr. he needed for MEDOSS!

The Culture of Architecture was Lost to Modernism and its Dogmas

A further consequence is that two generations have grown up and matured in Norway without experiencing what it is to live in a human habitat of quality. We have lost so much culture in the sense of how to build things well. Bodies of knowledge and sets of skills that took centuries to develop were tossed into the garbage, and we will not get them back easily. The culture of architecture was lost to Modernism and its dogmas. The culture of town planning was handed over to lawyers and bureaucrats, with pockets of resistance mopped up by the automobile, highway, and real estate interests. — James Howard Kunstler, "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape", page 245

Österlånggatan.

"What's the Secret of Making a Happy City?"

Morgon på Brantingtorget

Skulpturen heter Morgon, og jeg var på stedet om morgonen 9. okt. 2015 kl. 08:12.

Egentlig er ikke dette en så aller verst erstatning for ødeleggelsen av det gamle Gamla stan, som fant sted her, selv om det blir litt sterilt.

Svenske wikipedia.

English Wikipedia.

Wikimedia.

The only "high tech trap" exists in the minds of those who can't see outside of the very narrow tunnel of progress

Øyvind, how come it's impossible to go from cars back to horses when it was perfectly possible to go from horses to cars, and there was a very elaborate and expensive infrastructure around horses and horse transport that somehow got replaced? The answer, of course, is that you're letting the myth of progress do your thinking for you. You don't make the transition all at once, any more than cars replaced horses all at once, and so the ordinary depreciation of the infrastructure that has to be replaced does much of the work for you. The only "high tech trap" exists in the minds of those who can't see outside of the very narrow tunnel of progress. - John Michael Greer

Follow the discussion between me and Eivind Berge to his post "Can industrial civilization be saved?". Is Gail Tverberg caught in "the very narrow tunnel of progress", in spite of that she foresees the rapid end of industrial civilization? Or is the "high tech trap" real? Can we go back as Greer proclaims? How far back will we fall? Is the InGroup-Democracy of Terje Bongard possible, or will it claim way too much resources? What with an anti-collapse army? These and many more subjects are put on the table. Please feel free to participate. Any perspective to illuminate these very relevant and important issues are welcome!

Can we go back?

«Affordability»-veggen

Kommentar her.

Nettopp! Dette er et hovedpoeng hos Tverberg, at lavstatusarbeidere må få et skikkelig lønnshopp for å berge prisene på forbruksvarer. Luksusvarer som yatcher og privatfly og champagne kan på ingen måte holde det økonomiske hjulet i gang innenfor kapitalismen. Husk den første store energirelaterte trusselen vi står overfor, lave priser på råvarer og forbruksvarer.

Illustrasjonen viser at kapitalismen nå braser rett inn i den første verdensveggen, «Affordability»-veggen. Hadde vi hatt vettet i behold ville vi stanset nå og funnet oss et nytt kjøretøy. Terje Bongard har tegningene klare!

Stemning fra Kaffekoppen

Kaffekoppen er en kafè ved Stortorget i Gamla stan i Stockholm. En hyggelig, slitt liten sak. Se også min stemningsrapport fra Stortorget:

- Kaffekoppen & Chocladkoppen ved Stortorget i Gamla stan

(Images from Kaffekoppen Cafè at Gamla stan in Stockholm.)

Sedler fra hele verden er nyttet som tapet.

(Notes from all over the world used as wallpaper)

Wikimedia.

Herlig kaffebord.

(Wonderful coffe table.)

Wikimedia.

Det fineste er egentlig å sitte ute og ta inn atmosfæren fra torget.

(The nicest is to sit outside taking in the atmosphere of the wonderful plaza.)

Wikimedia.

Men mye å se på innendørs også.

(But much to look at inside as well.)

Wikimedia.

De serverer deilig bringebærpai.

(They serve a wonderful raspberry pie.)

Wikimedia.

Affordability is the First Big Chock to Hit Humanity

Comment by Gail Tverberg:

One point that many people have missed is that there are really two different thermodynamic limits that we are approaching:

1. The limit of a depleting battery, if a person thinks of fossil fuels and uranium as being temporary resources that decline as we use them. This is what EROEI has been concerned about.

2. The continuous rise in energy consumption, required to keep the economy from collapsing. The economy is a dissipative structure. It is like plants and animals, and hurricanes, ecosystems, and stars. All of these temporarily grow in systems that are thermodynamically open. They cannot continue forever, however, because their energy supply is not infinite. They come to ends of different types, depending on how they are structured. We know that economies have collapsed in the past–I won’t go into the details, but it is not too different from what we are seeing today.

EROEI researchers grabbed on to the first limit described above, and have assumed it is the only one. If a person can assume it is the only limit, then a person can spin a story about how decline will be slow. All we need is to manage the transition to a lower-energy economy. A person can assume that we can move to a lower energy economy. Falling EROEI is sort of OK–we just gradually move to lower EROEI.

Our problem is indeed greater and greater overhead. But the greater and greater overhead is not simply the greater energy use in making energy (in other words, what EROEI measures). The story isn’t right. We cannot slide down to lower EROEIs. We really need an EROEI of over 50:1, or we need to keep adding more debt to temporarily cover up the problem.

By the way, I am using BP’s inflation adjustment. My point was that oil prices were less than $20, not that they were actually $20 per barrel.

We really have to solve the thermodynamic problem of not enough energy to keep the economy going. No amount of money printing will fix this.

Human Beings are “Agents of Disturbance”

- Turns out ancient humans were bad for nature, too!

To understand what it means to change how species coexist, think of interspecies relationships as falling into three broad categories: aggregated, segregated, and random. Aggregated species are those that tend to live in the same habitat, indicating some kind of mutually beneficial interaction. Segregated species are those that actively don’t live in the same habitat, indicating maybe a competitive relationship or just a difference in habitat preference. And random species coexistence is exactly that — random. Now, for millions of years, life on Earth exhibited a strong tradition of species aggregation — a kind of love-filled hippie era, if you will (that’s a gross oversimplification, but you get the point). Then we came along, and suddenly, the world started to get a lot more segregated.

It's time to listen to the wisdom of Masanobu Fukuoka. And actually you can do so in a podcast at Levevei.no:

- Episode 122: Natural farming and the life and work of Masanobu Fukuoka

I point out that this way of thinking and seeing the world [natural farming] is probably highly provocative to a Western mindset. Larry agrees and explains how our values and thinking has been molded by modern society. Talking of modern, Larry is actually referring to the last 10 000 years, from the point in history when people for some reason decided that we were more important than other species. It was as if human beings no longer had any limits in regards to what they could do towards nature. Fukuoka’s thinking was very different and more in line with the mindset of the indigenous people of the world. - Larry Korn from Oregon, USA

"I guess “agents of disturbance” is a pretty apt nickname, then. It’s certainly not the most flattering, but then again, neither was Suzy Spit-up, and I’m willing to admit that I totally deserved it when I was a baby. So maybe we should just own it. Anyone wanna make t-shirts?"

My Image of Mythical Princess Libuše Used in a New Book on Czech Legend and Folklore

I was happy to find my image of Libuše on page 64 in a new book!

The Esoteric Codex: Czech Legend and Folklore

October 5, 2015 by Nicolas Kraushaar (Author)

Buy the book on Amazon here.

It's really inspiring that they used my image to cover a whole page in the new book!

Wikimedia.

About Libuše in Wikipedia.

Spikern på hodet!

Les artikkelen kommentaren er knyttet til her.

Vidunderlig "spade for spade"-retorikk fra en MDGs representant. Endelig en artikkel i jungelen av luftslott og grunn økologi og tro på mennesket og markedets sameksistens i forbindelse med Paris-sammenkomsten, som treffer spikeren på hodet. Krydret med allegorier og historiske linjer. Den største nedturen for meg ble et intervju med Terje Bongard hos P2s Ytring 6. desember: https://radio.nrk.no/serie/ytring#t=45m7s

At de fikk med Bongard er utrolig, og man hører på stemmen hans hvor lei han er. I tillegg klarer programlederen å vippe ham av pinnen ved stadige avbrytelser, uten å la ham fullføre et eneste argument! På toppen av det hele får man inn grunnøkologen Frederic Hauge etter Bongard, som stempler Bongard som en "menneskepessimist"!

En stor ugjerning av programlederen å invitere Bongard for så å gjøre alt hun kan for å legge hindringer i veien for at han skal få fram sitt budskap. Programmet kalles Ytring, men Bongard fikk ikke mulighet til å ytre noe som helst, med en programleder som var en mester til å få ham til å falle i staver. Også utilgivelig arrogant og overfladisk av Hauge å stemple Bongard som en irrelevant pessimist, uten å låne ham et øre. Hallo! Vi har her å gjøre med Norges fremste menneskeekspert!

En jeg ikke kan få takket nok i denne situasjonen er James Alexander Arnfinsen hos Levevei! Takk for den dyptloddende og fantastiske samtalen du gjorde med Bongard mens han ennå var full av optimisme, og trodde på at folk ville lytte til hans budskap!

- Episode 66: Inngruppa som styrende prinsipp i et bærekraftig demokrati: http://www.levevei.no/2013/02/episode-66-inngruppa-som-styrende-prinsipp-i-et-baerekraftig-samfunn/

Kjære MDGs representant, jeg håper du kan arbeide for å innlede et samarbeid med Bongard hos MDG. Du har sett overfladiskheten i hele systemet, og at det hele er intet annet enn løgner. Det nytter ikke med flikking på noe som ikke fungerer, vi må ta et dypdykk i menneskenaturen og få til noe helt nytt som vi kan takle som MENNESKER.

Down a Stairway from Norra Benickebrinken

A man walking down a stairway from Norra Benickebrinken to Österlånggatan.

The Organic Wholeness of the Small Town Street

The organic wholeness of the small town street was a result of common, everyday attention to details, of intimate care for things intimately used. The discipline of its physical order was based not on uniformity for its own sake, but on a consciousness of, and respect for, what was going on next door. Such awareness and respect were not viewed as a threat to individual identity but as necessary for the production of amenity, charm, and beauty. These concepts are now absent from our civilization. We have become accustomed to living in places where nothing relate to anything else, where disorder, unconsciousness, and the absence of respect reign unchecked. - James Howard Kunstler, "The Geography of Nowhere", page 185

Västerlånggatan Street seen from Järntorget Square in Gamla stan, Stockholm

Mystisk skikkelse i Baggensgatan

‘The Follies of Free Love’

Thanks for sharing Oyvind. Sorry to hear about the loss of the fish, but sounds like the small river still passes by which is a nice sound. I ghost wrote a book via an alias name, ‘The Follies of Free Love’. A woman that was born in Sweden in about 1880 hand wrote a book about her life and I just fixed the grammar and sentence structure so it could be easily read in English. She immigrates to Denmark, then later takes a steamer via a couple of stops in Norway. There she sees the Fram (a wooden ship that went up into the arctic) in a Norwegian fjord. The steamer then goes to NY, then she takes a train to Chicago, then is in SF just a couple months before the 1906 Earthquake, on to the Philippines, then back to SF to live in the SF bay area and her descendants are still here and friends of mine. The Fram is now on display in Oslo. Some day I want to go on a tour of the locations in the book in Sweden, Denmark and Oslo, Norway. It’s a fascinating life story in which she is most of the time single and very sought after. The book is cheap and available as an E-book from Amazon.com – not in paperback yet. - Stilgar Wilcox

The Values of the Coming American Elites

- YALE STUDENTS EAGERLY SIGN PETITION TO REPEAL THE FIRST AMENDMENT

Pål Steigan som Norges James Kalb

- Sverige og Fahrenheit 451

Norge er et underlig land. I USA er en av de argeste polemikerne mot den liberale fascismen den konservative katolske advokaten James Kalb, som har skrevet den glimrende boka «The Tyranny of Liberalism».

Her i nisseland er derimot den konservative kommunisten Pål Steigan den uovertruffent beste kritikeren av det liberalistiske tyranniet!

På samme vis som det innen litteraturen foregår en utrenskning av reaksjonære ideer, renskes alt av tradisjonell/menneskevennlig arkitektur vekk i byggingen av Norge.

Hele Bjørvika-prosjektet er en manifestasjon av den liberalistiske fascismens seier, og møter alle med sin glisende, seierssikre tanngard når de ankommer Norge sjøveien. Norge er en sjøfartsnasjon, og ved å kle sjøsiden av vår hovedstad med modernisme viser de for all verden at her er den liberale ideologien enerådende. Nazistene kunne ikke ha gjort det bedre!

Bjørvika-prosjektet er en manifestasjon av den liberalistiske fascismens seier.

Wikimedia.

Utgruppekultur er ukultur

Grunnleggende finnes det kun to typer kultur: Utgruppekultur og inngruppekultur. To opplagte eksempler er den suburbane eneboligen kontra lommenabolaget. Terje Bongard foreslår at vi beveger oss vekk fra utgruppe-kulturene og inn mot inngruppe-kulturene. Ja, faktisk presenterer han en inngruppe-kultur som eneste løsning for at den menneskelige sivilisasjon skal overleve! Lytt til samtalen med Bongard hos J.A. Arnfinsen på Levevei:

- Episode 66: Inngruppa som styrende prinsipp i et bærekraftig demokrati

Se også hvordan boligstørrelsen jevnt og trutt har økt i USA som en følge av de negative suburbane utgruppe-handikappkreftene (Bongard bruker atlaskgartneren som eksempel i sin bok, en jålefugl fra Australia):

- Sick Suburban "Homes" are Increasing while Income is Decreasing.

Syke suburbane "hjem"

Det snakkes så mye om å bygge et klimanøytralt samfunn. For en som har lest "Det biologiske mennesket – individer og samfunn i lys av evolusjon" og samtidig studert vossingen Gail Tverberg hos OurFinite.World.com, framstår det som åpenbart at dette er umulig innenfor en utgruppe-kultur som den vi har.

Uten en inngruppe-kultur i bunn vil alle våre forsøk på å skape bærekraft være som å kave i kvikksand, dess mer vi forsøker, dess verre blir vår situasjon. En inngruppekultur, hvor økonomien, demokratiet og boligen underlegges inngruppa, vil kunne gi oss fast grunn under føttene igjen.

Bongards bok burde være ei hovedbok for arkitekter, ikke kun for legestudenter. Slik det er i dag ser det ikke ut til at arkitekter kan noe som helst om human atferdsøkologi, som burde vært arkitektenes hovedfokus. Det ligger et stort ansvar hos arkitektstanden for at det gikk som det gikk med Hurdal økolandsby. Tross alt er det arkitekter som har hatt hovedansvaret for designet. Bongard er hard i sin dom:

MØNSTERET BYGGER PÅ AKKURAT DET SAMME, OG VILLE VÆRT ET GLIMRENDE CASE-STUDY HVIS DISSE “SAMFUNNSFORSKERNE” HADDE VÅKNET, MEN SOM DU PÅPEKER: VI MÅ FÅ KONTROLL OVER DET GIGANTISKE PRODUKSJONSAPPARATET. DET ER DET SOM TRUER EKSISTENSEN VÅR.

Mønsteret det dreier seg om er det alexandrinske mønster 37; House Cluster.

Et hederlig unntak er selvsagt Ross Chapin, som har utført en fenomenal case-study over dette mønsteret, som han har popularisert i sin bok "Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small Scale Community in a Large Scale World".

Bongard og Chapin, de to store ledestjerner for vår veg mot inngruppekulturen! La oss dyrke inngruppekulturen! La oss underkaste oss denne i pur livsglede!

Verdens første egentlige økolandsby, dvs. som ikke har et spirituelt fundament men et reint permakulturellt utgangspunkt, er David Holmgrens "Crystal Waters Ecovillage" i Australia.

Denne ble etablert samtidig som "A Pattern Language" ble lansert, og gjorde et sterkt inntrykk på Holmgren, som er en av permakulturens grunnleggere. Det var forresten på en av hans nettsider jeg kom over Christopher Alexanders arbeider første gang, og som vekket min nysgjerrighet.

I Crystal Waters Ecovillage spilte mønster 37 en sentral rolle, og husene ble gruppert etter dette mønsteret. At Norges første økolandsby ikke har tatt lærdom av verdens første økolandsby, er for meg ei stor gåte? Har de ikke fått med seg "A Pattern Language" sin rolle for mønstertenkningen som står så sentralt i permakulturen, og at nettopp denne boka var inspirasjonskilde for verdens første økolandsby?

Med utgivelsen av Ross Chapins bok framstår det hele som enda mer uforståelig. Vil gjenta hva Sarah Susanka, som skrev bestselgeren "The Not So Big House" og hvor Chapins lommenabolag illustrerer flere kapitler, skriver om hans bok:

Every few years a book comes along that profoundly shifts the way we think about a subject, and when we look back a decade or so after its publication, we see a dramatic shift brought about by the thoughts that book contains. I believe that the book you have in your hands right now is such a game changer. The model of community it describes provides a missing link in our longing for home, and a better place to live. My fervent hope is that it will provide people around the country with the vision and the inspiration to shape thriving pocket neighborhoods of their own. In my opinion this is the way to a vastly more livable and more sustainable future for our cities, for our towns, and most important, for ourselves. - Sarah Susanka, Raleigh, North Carolina, January, 2011.

Måtte utgruppe-kultur bli ut og inngruppe-kultur inn!

Den store lommenabolagsboka! Kjøp den her.

Dette innlegget bygger på en kommentar hos Kulturverk.

Les mine KV-artikler:

- Design-nøkler for lommenabolaget

- Lommedemokratiet

5 kjennetegn ved meningsfylt arbeid

Meningsfylt arbeid er en aktivitet som oppfyller fem kjennetegn:

1. Den framstår med klar nødvendighet som materielt livsgrunnlag.
2. Utfordringene er mangfoldige og har sammenheng, slik at menneskets eget, alltid medfødte mangfold av evner lokkes fram og fører til personlighetens utfoldelse og modning; - blant annet utfordrer kroppen ved en så variert omgang med landskap og en så direkte kontakt med natur, materialer og emner at den bygger ferdigheter i å skjelne mellom kvaliteter, blant annet god og dårlig form.
3. Utfordringene er slike at menneskets evne til solidaritet, lojalitet og dets samarbeidsferdigheter utvikles.
4. Produktene (varer og tjenester) fremmer liv - i natur og samfunn - og bryter ikke ned, skader, forurenser.
5. Arbeidet frambyr samfunnsmessig viktige områder hvor barn kan delta i det - ikke bare som lek, men på en måte som både voksne og barn oppfatter som nyttig; det samme gjelder for gamle, og i prinsippet for alle grupper innen et samfunn.

- Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng, "Identitet og meningsfylt arbeid", Elvetid, side 127

Tidens gudinne

Interviewed: David Bollier on Patterns of Commoning

Shareable’s Cat Johnson interviews our colleague David Bollier about the Commons Strategies Group new book anthology Patterns of Commoning.

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David Bollier is a policy strategist, activist, and a leading voice in the commons movement. In a new book, Bollier and commons activist Silke Helfrich, both members of the Commons Strategies Group, collaborated to underscore the fact that commons are not things, resources or goods; they are social structures, processes and patterns.

The second book in a planned trilogy, Patterns of Commoning is a collection of more than 50 essays written by activists, academics, and commons project leaders from 20 countries. Topics include alternative currencies, open source farm equipment, community forests, co-learning commons, theater commons, mapping projects, urban commons, digital commons, and more. As Bollier points out, “the primary goal of Patterns of Commoning is to show the great scope and vitality of commons initiatives around the world.”

Shareable spoke with Bollier about the book, the future of the commons, and how we can transform ourselves into commoners. Here are the highlights of our conversation.

Shareable: In the book, you and Silke focus on what is described as the consciousness of thinking, learning, and acting as a commoner as the heart of the commons movement. What does this mean to you?

David Bollier: It means breaking down some of the dichotomies that we take for granted, such as between public and private, between collective and individual, between rational and nonrational. In the commons, they start to blur

You have to start talking about the commons as this organic whole, and not as this machine you can break down into parts or dissect. It’s a living organism and that’s precisely what needs to be studied: its aliveness.

Conventional, modern science refuses to explore aliveness, and instead has a lot of reductionist categories that don’t really get to the essence of, not only what it is to be a living human being, but a living human being on a living earth. I think the commons wants to speak to those kinds of concerns and, not surprisingly, it won’t fit into a lot of the conventional, intellectual boxes that academics, in particular, like to use.

A point in the book that I find very interesting is that policymakers and experts can’t design and build commons in a top-down fashion and expect them to thrive. Commoners must do this work themselves. What distinguishes an organic commons from a manufactured one?

The institutionally sponsored commons cannot have the same bottom-up sense of commitment, ownership, co-creation. To that extent, they will be subjects in somebody else’s drama with outside directors, as opposed to expressions of a creative upswell from people themselves, that serves their interests, their needs, their inner lives.

Institution are notoriously unable to speak to or express people’s inner needs and yearnings, but I think commons can and do. That’s really the essence of the aliveness I was talking about. Commons have their own self-replicating energy and enthusiasm and, sometimes, flashes of grace. That’s quite special. It’s all wrapped up in the fact that a commons is a unique social, historical, cultural phenomenon that lives in that moment, that expresses people’s real needs.

This is a far cry from the resource-allocation type of analysis that some people try to understand commons through. Which is not to say that some of those resource analysis issues don’t matter, I’m just saying that they’re not the whole story.

There’s an interesting notion in the book that there are few parts of life, or production, that could not be structured to work as a commons. Over the last two books, you’ve presented an amazing spectrum of commons projects. What would a commons-based economy or world look like to you?

In some ways, that’s like asking what a three-year-old child will look like when he’s 50 or 80.

There’s a whole lot of life experiences that are, frankly, contingencies, that we can’t predict. There’s a whole developmental process that I think has to unfold and emerge to make those kinds of predictions.

That said, I do think that this is not a matter of some central authority designing it, and then getting the appropriation, and then building it. I think this is more of a biological, or evolutionary, developmental process. A lot of smaller scale principles and dynamics will be animating it.

That’s the great unfolding and drama we have. Some people say we have to scale the commons, but it’s been pointed out that the word scale is truly a term of hierarchy. I think it’s going to be more a matter of replicating and federating. That’s a different structure because it retains the integrity of local embeddedness and commitment, but it nonetheless asserts a broader solidarity and support.

We see this on the Internet, where you have all sorts of different digital tribes. There’s no central authority. Although sometimes you do need those infrastructures to help move to the next level.

What will hold a lot of it together will be a certain ethic and culture which is emerging and starting to find each other. If you attend any gathering of a lot of practitioners, activists, and commoners, there’s usually this buoyancy and pleasure in finding each other and learning about each other… Despite being in different domains, they share a lot of ethical principles and cultural concerns.

The pattern approach to the commons acknowledges that the commons are complex, living systems and honors the fact that they emerge and grow. It also embraces the fact that these patterns are our cultural heritage. What’s the benefit of studying the commons in this light?

It allows you to capture the real human complexity of it instead of collapsing it into reductionist categories, or models that don’t really get at the animating forces. I don’t want to be either/or about it. There’s of course a need for a lot of academic scholarship about the commons. At the same time, there is a richer reality than some model-building can capture.

There is a sweet spot between raw anecdote and excessively abstract models. Patterning is a way to capture some of these recurrent forms, but it’s from the bottom up as opposed to an intellectual imposition on the reality.

The book is framed as a first step to delineate patterns of commoning, in the hopes of initiating the development of a richer pattern language of commoning and the commons. Why is this important and what would a pattern language of the commons look like?

Silke, in her chapter in the book, tried to suggest what it would look like in the sense that you would get certain themes that could jump out and then recur, that emerge from experience. For example, there are certain themes: How does one protect the commons? How does one create certain legal or social systems to protect it?

Another pattern might be, how do you become self-aware of the commons itself? How do you make those invisible dimensions of commoning more visible? Silke was just trying to identify some of these thematic patterns that are like the golden threads that go through a lot of the stories in our book, that pop up recurrently.

We need to start training ourselves to see some of these patterns and start to understand the inner function of the commons in more sophisticated ways, and more realistic ways than simply rivalrous and exclusivity and so forth, which is part of the economic framework of analysis.

This is the second book in a planned trilogy. What’s the third going to be?

The next book, which we’re still in the very, very early stages of, is, What does this mean in the larger macro dimensions, for policy, for economics, for the state?

This book focused on the inner dimension of commoning and the lived reality at a smaller scale. Now we want to look at some of the macro implications and see, how might law have to change to accommodate the commons? How might the role of the state need to be changed to allow for a commons-centric society? What does this mean in terms of international relations? That’s what the third book will be.

Svar til Lys og Kulturverks Webredaktør

Svar til en kommentar til min artikkel:

- Herr Fossemøllens øyensten

Dette er et svar jeg har lagt vesentlig arbeid i, grunnet at kommentaren jeg svarer på støttes av Kulturverks Webredaktør. Hva er det han støtter? Mener han at hver eneste bakketopp i det totscanske landskapet skal krones med en suburban enebolig, utgått av industrisamfunnet, dyrket fram av den amerikanske bilindustrien? (Slik vi ser det i Diseny-videoen Kristian Hoff-Andersen har kommentert til, lenket til i artikkelen.) Mener han at de ideelle bevegelsene som så dagens lys på 1970-tallet, som permakulturen, var utopiske drømmerier, som med rette bør forkastes? Deler han Zero og Frederic Hauges oppfatning om at alle problemene knyttet til bilen og "suburban sprawl" kan løses med batteri/hydrogen-elektriske biler? Ser han ikke verdien av Mike Reynolds forsøk på å frigjøre nåværende og framtidige økosamfunn fra sentralisert infrastruktur? Mener han at ubegrenset mobilitet er et mål i seg selv, og at hele Mjøsregionen bør utviklet til ett arbeidsmarked, hvor man bor på Gjøvik, arbeider på Hamar, og tilbringer helgene på hytta på Hafjell? Altså det steds-frigjorte mennesket, som en forlengelse av det kropps-frigjorte mennesket. Deler han det platonsk-greske idealet om det kroppsfrigjorte mennesket, hvor enhver form for slit opphører? Er han uenig med Sigmund K. Setrengs filosofi om arbeidet som livets dypeste mening? Er han enig i at det å leve "off-grid" er amerikansk propaganda? Dette i et land hvor man kastes ut av sitt hjem hvis man nekter å koble seg opp mot elektrisitetsnettet!

Mitt svar

Selv elsker jeg Reynolds jordskip, i alle fall innvendig, hvor de er svært koselige. Utvendig minner de dessverre mest om utdaterte romskip på billigsalg fra en Star Wars - episode. Men det finnes også vakre jordskip, og med alexandrinsk designteknologi er det her et stort forbedringspotensial.

Å bo i et jordskip i et natursamfunn ville for meg vært oppfyllelsen av en drøm. Det å være frikoblet fra sentralisert infrastruktur bør være av godene ved å bo på landsbygda, og en opplevelsesrikedom i seg selv. For egen del frykter jeg heller ikke slitet, vel og merke det gode slitet i samklang med stedet og naturen, slik dette er beskrevet av Setreng.

Vi bør ikke forakte 1970-tallet, hvor mye bra skjedde i kjølvannet av hippietida. Som dypøkologien, vi hadde jo en dypøkologisk bølge som ble tatt av oljebølgen, videre ble permakulturen utviklet på 70-tallet, samt bioregionen, som vi burde ta fram igjen, bygningsbiologien så dagens lys, og ikke minst utgivelsen av Christopher Alexanders mesterverk "A Pattern Language", som fyller 40 år neste år!

Besøk gjerne Earthship Brighton før du feller din endelige dom: http://www.theecologist.org/green_green_living/2986550/saving_earthship_brighton_to_inspire_and_educate_for_decades_to_come.html

Earthship Brighton, an award-winning off-grid community centre set in an organic farm within the South Downs National Park, has hosted hundreds of events and inspired tens of thousands of visitors over the last decade, writes Phil Moore, demonstrating green technologies and energy-efficient living.

Men er en urban livsstil mer i din gate håper jeg du vil støtte landsby-by-bevegelsen, eller Village Towns på engelsk: http://villagetowns.com/

Man ville selvsagt ikke oppnå en god urban kultur i en by bygd opp av Reynolds jordskip. Primus motor for Village Towns - bevegelsen, Claude Lewenz, er i likhet med Nathan Lewis krystallklar på at de som ikke er direkte involvert i landbruket skal bo i en urban setting. Den suburbane eneboligen er hverken fugl eller fisk, og degraderer sine omgivelser samme om den er plassert i byen, på landet eller oppe på fjellet.

Her er forresten en interessant respons jeg fikk fra the Village Towns Stewards for noen tid tilbake: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-04-10/village-towns

A response from VillageTowns: We were delighted to read the review of our VillageTown work and would like to add some comments, but your comments section is closed. Øyvind Holmstad wrote "Unfortunately they don’t seem have the same enthusiasm for the compost toilet, but hopefully they’ll take this advice from Lester Brown." We did read the links provided, but note that Lester Brown writes: "Collected urine can be trucked to nearby farms". That means we need trucks which means the VillageTown need to buy trucks, fuel them and use roads to transport the urine in those trucks. And where do we store the urine until it is collected? Do we need to include urine storage tanks in each house? That adds a few hundred dollars and then means we need to send trucks around to empty them. How long do we leave the urine in the tank before collecting it? And how do we vent the tanks if people have roof gardens up where the vent pipes need to go? The same problem holds for the faeces. A composting toilet makes sense in a low-density community such as an eco-village especially where the compost is dumped outside in the veggie garden by the home occupant. But it becomes a numbers problem in a common locality large enough to support a complex local economy (4,000 homes) that is intended as a complete community, which includes people with phobias about handling their own effluent, no matter how nice it smells. As the other link provided by Holmstad notes, it remains a taboo subject. Presuming each home has 2 composting toilets and each one must be emptied every six months (as manufacturers recommend), that means 16,000 clean-outs each year. With 250 working days a year, that means 64 toilets cleaned out every day, vehicles to pick up the compost and haul it away for the farms. And, while it is clean compost, it still will contain the heavy metals and the non-biodegradable medications that humans consume and expel. The important thing to understand here, that there is no inherent opposition to composting toilets. Rather it is a question of engineering. We are not advocating the 19th century solution that the referenced Lester R. Brown criticises. We agree with his points. When dealing with 4,000 homes however, all paid for and built at the same time, there probably are smarter engineering solutions. The first point of agreement is that urine and faeces are not waste but surplus material. They have chemical and nutrient value, and it is an absurd waste to contaminate drinking water to shift them or to co-mingle them. Get them to the production centre in as pure a form as possible - as pure as they came out of the human body. To do this, first look at the Swedish separator toilets. Install two pipes, one for urine and the other for faeces. Use water or an equivalent medium to transport these surplus materials to the processing plant. At the plant, use appropriate technology to deal both with the medication issue (antibiotics, birth control and other medications expelled by the body) and the heavy metal issue that otherwise could concentrate these harmful or toxic chemicals in the food systems. Determine what nutrients are used for farm fertiliser (for example, feeding tilapia fish that are then ground up for fertiliser and mixed with food compost) and what may be used to brew alcohol that powers the farm tractors. Using biological systems, purify the transport water to a quality deemed safe to then return to the toilet so that it functions in a closed loop system much like the radiator in a modern car. Once charged, the system uses no new water, it just uses water as the transport system. Beyond the two toilet pipes, we imagine more water pipes coming out of each home. Pipes are a lot cheaper than trucks, and once installed can last for centuries and require no personnel or vehicles. Install a pipe that goes to the kitchen sink, and install something akin to the old-fashioned garbage disposal for food scraps. Pipe those ground-up scraps to the food compost processing plant where they are higher quality surplus materials for compost, fertiliser or brewing stock for fuel. Don't use drinking water to run the disposal unit, but have an automatic feeder pipe below the sink that uses grey water. Have another pipe that comes from the roof to collect clean storm water, direct this to a reservoir. Instead of washing machines in every home, provide local laundries for villagers that uses closed loop water systems. This is especially important in places like Australia which just came off a ten-year drought. In all of these ideas, do note that the decisions are not made in an ivory tower, or by the VillageTown Stewards as know-it-alls. Rather they are made when the funds have been raised and the project begins. They are made by scientists and engineers who are given a set of principles instructing them to find the best, smartest, most sustainable methods for solving age-old problems. The sad fact is that some of the best ideas out there get no funding because the system is too closed minded. The VillageTown approaches the industry with an open-mind, seeking the best solutions the market has to offer, and it does so with funds. On another subject, thanks for the heads-up on "Alexander’s latest achievement, Generative Codes." We'll make sure it gets in there. Actually, we hope that when we get funding that Christopher Alexander and some of his co-authors may consider becoming consultants to the first project. There are some outstanding experts and many are happy to help, if we have the funds to pay them. - VillageTown Stewards

Således kan man si at en Village Town framstår som et stort romskip!

Det er helt klart at den norske familiegården er en videreføring av den amerikanske settlertradisjonen og deres fortolkning av loceansk filosofi for å rettferdiggjøre sin landgrabbing av de opprinnelige amerikanernes land. Var det ikke for jordreformen av 1859 kunne Norge i dag vært fullt av økosamfunn, som en videreføring av en eldgammel tradisjon av klyngetun: http://forskning.no/jord-og-skog-kulturlandskap-samfunn/2015/03/da-gardstunene-forsvant

Da hadde vi hatt en tradisjon og masse kunnskap å bygge på, og vi hadde sluppet å se hvordan man i Hurdal økolandsby famler nærmest i blinde for å finne tilbake til våre røtter.

As Bradford wrote: ‘‘And no man now thought he could live except he had catle and a great deale of ground to keep them all, all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scattered all over the bay quickly and the towne in which they lived compactly till now was left very thinne.’’ You might say that private property rights in land were the beginning of suburban sprawl.

http://bollier.org/blog/fateful-choice-pilgrims-assign-private-property-rights-land

Hadde vi valgt allmenningenes veg i 1859 ville neppe eneboligen hatt den samme posisjonen i den norske folkesjela!

http://permaculturenews.org/2014/06/27/commons-way-life-vs-market-way-life/

Det er allikevel vesentlige forskjeller på et våningshus og en suburban enebolig, da våningshuset er (var, da den rurale kulturen jo gikk tapt med industrijordbruket, som de frekt nok benevner "den grønne revolusjon". Den moderne bonden er således ikke lenger en kulturarbeider, men har blitt redusert til en industriarbeider!) tilknyttet en jordbrukskultur, mens eneboligen er et uttrykk for hatet til den urbane (u)kulturen dets eier avhenger av for sitt livsopphold, som gjerne er berettiget. Det tjuende århundres urbanisme er jo ikke noe videre å ettertrakte!

Våningshuset oppstod ut av en jordbrukskultur, mens den suburbane eneboligen er et produkt av den industrikulturen som den ikke vil vedkjenne seg, men som den springer ut av og er en del av.

The Dream, more specifically, was a detached home on a sacred plot of earth in a rural setting, unbesmirched by the industry that made the home possible; a place where one could play at cultivating the soil without having to rely on husbandry for a livelihood; a place that was, most of all, not the city. – James Howard Kunstler, «The Geography of Nowhere», page 101

Den suburbane eneboligen er derfor en sjablong hvor man lever et rotløst liksom-liv, hvor den rurale kulturen og den urbane kulturen er døde, og alt som står tilbake er den suburbane kulturen. Dessverre er jeg redd for at Norge snart ikke har annen kultur enn den suburbane, ispedd hva A. Viken kaller døde gravsteinstradisjoner.

Dess lenger jeg kommer i kunstlers bok "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape", dess klarere blir det for meg at dette også er Norges historie. Det bør skrives et essay om dette temaet, kanskje med tittelen "Norge, en suburban nasjon?".

The Geography of Nowhere traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots.

In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness. The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good. "The future will require us to build better places," Kunstler says, "or the future will belong to other people in other societies.

Slik sett har du rett i at lettvint mobilitet er en velsignelse, slik at vi kan komme oss vekk fra denne suburbane ukulturen vi har skapt. Du verden hvilken lettelse det er når man sitter på toget på veg til Gamla stan, Skandinavias eneste Village Town, for å oppleve ekte urbanisme: http://permaliv.blogspot.no/2015/12/skoleveg-pa-brostein.html

Eller å vandre rundt i Prahas gater, hvor man står opp i gryningen for å spasere over Karlsbrua i morgenlyset uten folketrengselen, og man avslutter dagen med en klassisk konsert i Smetanahallen i Obecni Dum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_House

(Jeg er litt stolt av at de fleste fotografiene som illustrerer denne Wikipedia-artikkelen er mine, og det er ikke jeg som har satt dem inn, kors på halsen.)

Tenk at vi har skapt oss en kultur og en arkitektur som vi bare lengter etter å flykte vekk fra! Hvor vi ikke har noen røtter, ikke føler noen integritet, hvor vi er uten identitet.

I sannhet, vi trenger en ny slags verden, slik Alexander formulerer det: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/a-new-kind-of-world/2014/08/04

Jeg vil ta med hele sitatet om Wendel Berry:

Her ser vi den radikale natur i Berrys visjon. Hele vår økonomi, vår kultur og vårt arbeid, fritid og hjem, er bygget rundt ideen om enkel mobilitet og oppløsningen av ulike aspekter av våre liv. Vi bor ett sted, arbeider en annen plass, handler et annet sted, tilber på et nytt sted igjen, og i fritiden reiser vi vekk. Ifølge Berry er et integrert liv, et liv med integritet, preget av medlemskap i et samfunn der man bor, arbeider, tilber, og gjennomfører de aller fleste andre menneskelige aktiviteter. Valget er klart: "Hvis vi ikke bor der vi arbeider forspiller vi livene våre, og vårt arbeid også. – Wendell Berry and the New Urbanism: Agrarian Remedies, Urban Prospects

I originaltekst: http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2011/03/wendell-berrys-new-urbanism-agrarian-remedies-urban-prospects/

Here we can see the radical nature of Berry’s vision. Our entire economy, our very culture of work, leisure, and home is constructed around the idea of easy mobility and the disintegration of various aspects of our lives. We live in one place, work in another, shop in another, worship in another, and take our leisure somewhere else. According to Berry, an integrated life, a life of integrity, is one characterized by membership in a community in which one lives, works, worships, and conducts the vast majority of other human activities. The choice is stark: “If we do not live where we work, and when we work, we are wasting our lives, and our work too.”

Dette er også poenget til Setreng, uten at vårt arbeid er del av en stedegen kultur blir vårt arbeid meningsløst, og således også våre liv. Derfor er ikke meningen med livet å arbeide mindre, men å integrere arbeidet i det lokale, slik at det finner sin mening. Slik Setreng definerer arbeidet ut fra sine studier av buddhistisk filosofi, er arbeidet selve livet. Derfor, hvis man forteller en tradisjonell buddhist at du har mistet ditt arbeid, vil denne forferdes, fordi for ham vil dette da være ensbetydende med at du har tapt ditt liv.

I denne sammenheng vil jeg oppfordre Kulturverks redaksjon til å sette opp Setrengs essay "Identitet og meningsfylt arbeid", som er å finne fra side 124 i "Elvetid".

Derfor har du rett i at at dette fokuset på arbeidsplasser er et sykdomstegn ved vår kultur, vi bør heller fokusere på arbeidets innhold og sammenheng, med utgangspunkt i økofilosofiens fem kjennetegn for meningsfylt arbeid.

I denne settingen jobber forskning, private og offentlige institusjoner i alle land kortsiktig og enøyd med «verdiskaping, innovasjon og utvikling av nye markeder», med formål å produsere flere dingser, reiser, forbruk eller tjenester som skal konkurrere ut andre. Arbeidsplasser brukes som skalkeskjul. Bærekraftig industri blir aldri satset på om det ikke er profittgivende; målet for hele økonomien er å generere penger. Til dette forbrukes natur, de ekte verdiene som er framtidas mat, hus og klær. Det jaktes på mer energi, ressurser, mineraler, fiber, arealer og mat som omdannes i «markedet» til symboler. Pengesymboler som i børsene bare kan ses på dataskjermer og utskrifter. TM kaller symbolene «eierskap i verdens produksjonskapasitet». Hva skjer når verdens vegger av begrensede ressurser nås, og produksjonen stopper? Vil verden ha datasymbolene våre, i bytte mot at «vi» tar mat og klær ut av munnen på de som jobber? I en verden av knapphet er børsservere verdiløst spesialavfall. I dagens politiske virkelighet er de redningen for barn og barnebarn. - Terje Bongard

Ressursene som trengs til framtidas mat, hus og klær må lagres, resirkuleres og forvaltes slik at de vil være tilgjengelig i framtida. Satsingene på «grønn teknologi» er minimale og overfokuserte. En arbeidsplass i dag innebærer i praksis en fare for etterkommerne, i stedet for å bygge trygghet for framtida. - Terje Bongard

En arbeidsplass i dag er ikke annet enn et skalkeskjul for å utplyndre våre barns framtid, på samme vis som de amerikanske settlerne utviklet sin eiendomsrettsfilosofi for å kunne stjele landet fra de nordamerikanske indianersamfunn. Din og min arbeidsplass innebærer i praksis en fare for våre etterkommere!

En annen tenker som er veldig kritisk til vår omfavnelse av enkel mobilitet, er den store "allmenningeren" Ivan Illich.

- Ivan Illich on Cars - excerpts from Energy and Equity also collected in Toward a History of Needs: http://ranprieur.com/readings/illichcars.html

Jeg gjengir et lite utdrag, anbefaler å lese hele:

People move well on their feet. This primitive means of getting around will, on closer analysis, appear quite effective when compared with the lot of people in modern cities or on industrialized farms. It will appear particularly attractive once it has been understood that modern Americans walk, on the average, as many miles as their ancestors -- most of them through tunnels, corridors, parking lots, and stores.

People on their feet are more or less equal. People solely dependent on their feet move on the spur of the moment, at three to four miles per hour, in any direction and to any place from which they are not legally or physically barred. An improvement on this native degree of mobility by new transport technology should be expected to safeguard these values and to add some new ones, such as greater range, time economies, comfort, or more opportunities for the disabled. So far this is not what has happened. Instead, the growth of the transportation industry has everywhere had the reverse effect. From the moment its machines could put more than a certain horsepower behind any one passenger, this industry has reduced equality, restricted mobility to a system of industrially defined routes, and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity. As the speed of their vehicles crosses a threshold, citizens become transportation consumers...

More energy fed into the transportation system means that more people move faster over a greater range in the course of every day. Everybody's daily radius expands at the expense of being able to drop in on an acquaintance or walk through the park on the way to work. Extremes of privilege are created at the cost of universal enslavement. The few mount their magic carpets to travel between distant points that their ephemeral presence renders both scarce and seductive, while the many are compelled to trip farther and faster and to spend more time preparing for and recovering from their trips.

The captive tripper and the reckless traveler become equally dependent on transport. Neither can do without it. Occasional spurts to Acapulco or to a party congress dupe the ordinary passenger into believing that he has made it into the shrunk world of the powerfully rushed. The occasional chance to spend a few hours strapped into a high-powered seat makes him an accomplice in the distortion of human space, and prompts him to consent to the design of his country's geography around vehicles rather than around people.

The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

Vi kunne altså like gjerne benyttet apostlenes hester som bilen, da de arbeidstimene vi benytter til bilhold tilsvarer at vi kunne gått samme distanse på samme tid.

David Bollier, som er omtalt i en artikkel her på KV, har Ivan Illich som en av sine store forbilder, og har skrevet mye om hans filosofi som et utgangspunkt for allmenningene: http://bollier.org/search/node/Ivan%20Illich

Today, we have achieved the goal of total separation of uses in the man-made landscape. The houses are all in their respective income pods, the shopping is miles away from the houses, and the schools are are separate from both the shopping and the dwellings. Work takes place in the office park - the word park being a semantic gimmick to persuade zoning boards that a bunch of concrete and glass boxes set among parking lots amounts to a rewarding environment - and manufacturing takes place in the industrial park-ditto. This has some interesting, and rather grave, ramifications. - James Howard Kunstler, "The Geography of Nowhere", page 118

Du skriver:

"Bil og veier og annet som hjelper både produksjon og forflytning er jo bra. ( Selv om batteri-elektrisk eller Hydrogen-elektrisk ville redusert/fjernet bilens negative sider)"

Hvordan i all verden mener du at batteri/hydrogen-elektriske biler vil fjerne bilens negative sider? Man fjerner da ikke denne totale separasjonen av funksjoner i vårt daglige liv ved å introdusere batteri/hydrogen-elektriske biler. Tvert imot bidrar disse til å opprettholde denne perversiteten og kvelningen av sunne menneskesamfunn, i en grønn innpakning.

Personlig synes jeg et slikt syn vitner om en mangel på forståelse om hvordan den amerikanske suburbane kulturen gjennomsyrer våre samfunn. At den batteri/hydrogen-elektriske bilen kan løse disse enorme problemene vi har satt oss i ved vårt bilsentrerte samfunn, er en grunn økologiforståelse ala Zero. Jeg håper virkelig ikke dette er KVs redaksjonelle syn, da jeg ser KV har gitt sin støtte til denne kommentaren?

"Bil og veier og annet som hjelper både produksjon og forflytning er jo bra."

"Og annet..." Ja, dette annet hadde ikke General Motors særlig sansen for. Dessverre har jeg ikke fått sett dokumentaren "How General Motors Destroyed a Nation", men prosessen er ganske bra beskrevet i Kunstlers bok. Det naturlige ville jo vært en overgang fra "horsecars" to "streetcars", og dette skjedde jo også den første tiden. Men ettersom GMs finansielle muskler vokste kjøpte GM opp trikkeselskaper og jernbaneselskaper og reiv opp skinnene, for å erstatte disse med biler og busser. Ja, Robert Moses, som påbegynte USAs Inter City Highway-System, var ikke særlig glad i busser heller, da han designet vekk bussen:

...to design overpasses only eleven feet above grade, knowing full well that this would prevent buses from using the roads. - Kunstler, s. 99

General Motors' ultimate goal was to replace public transportation with private transportation, meaning the car, and in this they triumphed. The bus was only an excuse to rip up the trolley tracks... - Kunstler, s. 92

Nei, vi løser ikke problemene bilen har gitt oss med batteri/hydrogen-elektriske biler, men ved å designe for apostlenes hester, dvs. tradisjonell før-automobil urbanisme!

At the international Walk21 conference this week in Vancouver, British Columbia, an eminent authority on streets boiled the walkability of cities down to the number of street intersections per square mile.

Venice has 1,725 intersections per square mile. "It's very complex, it's very messy, and people walk," said Allan Jacobs, urban design consultant, former San Francisco planning director, and author of Great Streets.

Brasilia, near the opposite end of the spectrum, "has 92 intersections, and you don't walk there," The Vancouver Sun reported Jacobs as saying. "Irvine, California is the classic automobile city. It has just 15 intersections, the lowest I've ever counted."

Other places that are good for pedestrians, Jacobs said, include the Market Street area of San Francisco (300 intersections per square mile), Tokyo (988), Savannah, Georgia (538), Portland, Oregon (341), and Paris (281).

The most complex and messy stret patterns provide the most walkable and enjoyable experiences for both visitors and residents, according to Jacobs.

- 'Messy' street patterns boost walking: http://bettercities.net/news-opinion/links/15408/messy-street-patterns-boost-walking

De første suburbene var ikke et produkt av bilen, men av romantikken. Henry Ford var kun tre år gammel da jernbanesuburben Riverside ble bygget. Kunstler anser dette som et paradis:

In the meantime, a suburb like Riverside offered a fair approximation of country living in a convenient reach of the city, while it dispensed with the worst aspects of both. In Riverside, you could wake up to the crowing of your own rooster, but you could also enjoy a hot morning bath while someone else-say, an Irish servant girl-gathered your eggs and cooked breakfast. Then it was an easy twenty-minute train to the business in the city. For children, it must have been paradise. Real countryside, with its wondrous allures, lay close at hand. There were no dangerous highways to hem the movements of little pedestrians, only farm-to-market roads and country lines to facilitate them. Teenagers' access to the city was as easy as an adults', and a driver's license was not required to get there. - James Howard Kunstler, "The Geography of Nowhere", page 51

Llewellyn Park utenfor New York var amerikas første suburb, Kunstler beskriver den slik:

The layouts of the homes was about as far removed from a grid scheme as might be imagined. Everything was formalized: the streets were crooked and winding, gardens rambled, asymmetrical houses sprouted towers like fairy-tale castles to create a fanciful sense of timeless historicity - where, in reality, there would dwell just as many widget manufacturers who depended on their fortunes on the implacable routines of business conducted in the gridded streets of Manhattan. - James Howard Kunstler, "The Geography of Nowhere", page 47

Seinere ble trestrukturen det suburbane idealet og er det enda, selv om Christopher Alexander allerede i 1969 viste at dette er en gatestruktur som dreper alt av urbant liv, i sitt berømte essay "A City is Not a Tree". Nå viser ny forskning at trestrukturen virkelig også gjør oss syke og feite: http://permaliv.blogspot.no/2016/01/the-suburban-tree-structure-is-anti.html

Llewellyn Park was the English manor democratized: instead of one mansion in a park, here were a lot of mansions in a park. - James Howard Kunstler, "The Geography of Nowhere", page 48

Le Corbusier demokratiserte dette konseptet ytterligere ved å sette suburbia på høykant, gjennom ideen om "the tower in the park".

De som bor i corbu-tårn og innbiller seg at de er urbane bør tenke om igjen. "Tårnet i parken" er ingenting annet enn et vertikalt suburbia, og de som bor der er vertikale suburbanitter. Leon Krier forklarer det hele i denne videoen: http://www.countercurrents.org/holmstad251113.htm

Industrimagnatene som okkuperte de første suburbene kjøpte også opp jernbaneselskaper, men dette for å forsyne dem med luksuriøse tog for seg selv og massene med så elendige tog at det ikke var noen fare for at de tok turen ut på landet for å forstyrre deres suburbane paradis.

De første suburbanittene, romantikere som de var, hatet bilen, eller "maskinen i parken". Derfor bestakk de byadministrasjonen i New York for å neglisjere vegene ut av byen, slik at folk ikke skulle begynne å reise ut til deres uplettede drømmelandskap.

When the automobile entered the scene it became, in Leo Marx's apt phrase, "the machine in the garden," and made a mockery of the suburban ideal. - James Howard Kunstler, "The Geography of Nowhere", page 57

Henry Ford var en landsens gutt og han begynte med produsere blier for bøndene, slik at de kunne ta lørdagsturen inn til byen for å ordne med innkjøp og nyte smaken av de urbane goder.

Med Fords samlebåndsteknologi ble dette segmentet raskt mettet, og ideen ble derfor å få bybeboerne til å bosette seg på landet, for slik å gjøre dem bilavhengige.

In America, with its superabundance of cheap land, simple property laws, social mobility, mania for profit, zest for practical invention, and Bible-drunk sense of history, the yearning to escape industrialism expressed itself as a renewed search for Eden. America reinvented that paradise, described so briefly and vaguely in the book of genesis, called it Suburbia, and put it for sale. - James Howard Kunstler, "The Geography of Nowhere", page 37

Slik ble det moderne suburbane idealet skapt av bilindustrien og for bilindustrien. Få massene ut på landsbygda og selg dem en bil!

Ved verdensutstillingen i New York i 1939, hvor General Motors innledet sitt samarbeide med PR-industriens far Edvard Bernays, tok dette helt av: http://permaculturenews.org/2013/11/22/vision-architecture-sum-parts/

But how did the modern system of development and consumption — our “technological-consumerist” system — come about? Was it not an inevitable part of the evolution of science and technology, and an inevitable response to the desires of consumers — in short, our destiny?

No it was not. In fact this system was invented — planned by industrialists and political leaders in the early years of the 20th Century, primarily in the USA. The story was documented well in the 2002 film by BBC documentarian Adam Curtis, “The Century of the Self”, and in particular the first episode titled Happiness Machines. Leaders of Wall Street joined with political leaders to solve a twin problem: how to keep the masses engaged in productive and wealth-generating activities, which would also quell potential political unrest.

Their answer was to create a new kind of consumer society — the one we take for granted today, and the one that is still used to sell consumer products (including modern architecture in Dwell magazine, for example). This new idea was perhaps explained best in 1924 by Banker Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers — the same company whose notorious collapse in 2008 helped trigger the global financial crisis and great recession. “We must shift America from a needs-culture to a desires-culture”, said Mazur. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. […] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

Central to this fascinating and poorly-understood story was Edward Bernays, a remarkably important and yet almost unknown figure in modern history. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and his brilliant idea was to use Freud’s own ideas on subconscious desires to create powerful new strategies for advertising, public relations, and propaganda. Among Bernays’ “accomplishments” was getting millions of women to smoke for the first time and essentially inventing the modern political campaign, with all its emotional manipulations. (Freud, to his credit, strongly protested this manipulative, exploitative, and fundamentally antidemocratic use of his ideas.)

Even less well known, Bernays played a key role in selling modernist urban and suburban planning to the public. As Curtis’ film demonstrates, Bernays helped to orchestrate the seminal “Futurama” exhibit by General Motors at the 1939 World’s Fair. It was this event, perhaps more than any other, that sold a radiant vision of the suburbia to come to a desperate public, traumatized by the Depression and coming war, and seeking a positive vision of the future. To this vulnerable audience, the marketers offered a gleaming new age of modern buildings and suburbs and consumer gadgets of every conceivable type. It was all so wonderful! We had certainly been “trained to desire, to want new things …” And we got them.

And it was architects, working with industrialists like the leaders of General Motors, who led the charge. Here is the pioneering modernist architect Le Corbusier’s prescription for drive-through utopia, described in his pamphlet Radiant City (1935, translated into English in 1967):

The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work … enough for all.

Å sette Mike Reynolds opp mot dette her blir bare søkt!

Den suburbane drømmen passet naturligvis som hånd i hanske med Roosevelts "New Deal", med enorme infrastrukturprosjekter, gjennomført av tidligere nevnte Robert Moses.

Du skriver: "Og noen vil altså bo litt tettere, og drive matproduksjon mer effektivt på større samlet område."

Dette blir etter mitt syn å sny det hele på hodet! Vil man drive mer effektivt bor man tynnere, ikke tettere. Dette er hele poenget med å slå sammen gårdsbruk til store gårder, da vår tankegang måler effektivitet som avkastningen per tidsenhet (¤), ikke per dekar. Charles Eisenstein sier følgende om dette: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-10-02/permaculture-and-the-myth-of-scarcity

Konvensjonelt jordbruk søker ikke å maksimere avkastningen per dekar; det søker å maksimere avkastningen per tidsenhet. Hvis vi hadde 10 prosent av befolkningen sysselsatt i landbruket istedenfor dagens 1 prosent, kunne vi lett brødfø befolkningen uten petro-kjemikalier eller giftsprøyting.

Man bor derfor tettere for å kunne bedrive mindre effektivt landbruk på et mindre areale! Dette er nettopp filosofien bak permakulturen og natursamfunnsbevegelsen. Et mindre effektivt landbruk hvor målet er størst mulig resiliens!

Du skriver: "Målet bør jo være å redusere arbeidet /slitet for alle i samfunnet. Slik at mest mulig av livets frie timer kunne fylles etter eget ønske av den enkelte.

Dette er vel hovedgrunnen til at vi organiserer oss i (homogene) samfunn."

Det med slitet er allerede kommentert, og ellers har som sagt Setreng skrevet mye om dette temaet.

Ja, samfunnet har nok som mål det platonsk-greske idealet om det kroppsfrigjorte menneske. Selv deler jeg ikke dette idealet! Da KV kuttet litt i sitatet fra Setreng gjengir jeg det i sin helhet her:

‘Servoglobus’ betegner en global datamaskin-styring, hvor ’servo’ både står for ’automatisk forsterket’ og for ’servise’ eller ’servering’; ’globus’ angir et kuleformet kart istedenfor en levende prosess. Det er altså snakk om en styring av jordens menneske- og natursystem ut fra en mekanistisk modell, hvor små impulser gir sterke effekter, hvor de viktigste prosessene skjer via sammenhengende robot-operasjoner slik at de produktene menneskene trenger serveres uten menneskelig slit, verken kroppslig eller åndelig, og hvor det platonsk-greske idealet om det kroppsfrigjorte menneske er endelig realisert. Med andre ord en tilstand hvor en ingeniørskapt global serveringsdame har erstattet Gaia, biosfæreorganismen som i 3 ½ milliarder år har improvisert myriader av veier og løsninger uten hensyntagen til den spesielle etterspørselen etter varer og tjenester som kjennetegner det 20. århundres euro-amerikanske menneske. – Sigmund K. Setreng, Elvetid, s. 52

Ja, vi har i dag organisert oss i et gjennomført homogent suburbant samfunn! Men hovedformålet med dette er ikke å redusere slitet, men å øke konsumet! Den suburbane livsstilen er konsumentbasert, og det er hele poenget med den. Alt er statussentrert og fokusert rundt individualisme og stadig større eneboliger til å fylle med stadig flere ting, gjerne også hyttepalasser på fjellet vi fyller med enda flere ting, alt for å drive den økonomiske veksten slik at vi kan få olja opp av bakken. Den suburbane eneboligen er intet annet enn en økonomisk veksthusmaskin!

- Sick Suburban "Homes" are Increasing while Income is Decreasing: http://permaliv.blogspot.no/search/label/Suburbia

Etter å ha gått gjennom din kommentar punkt for punkt er min konklusjon at mitt syn avviker fra denne på alle punkter!

Vil avslutte med et utdrag fra intervjuet med Douglas Rushkoff, som det er lenket til i artikkelen, hvor jeg har oversatt dette til norsk. Rushkoffs budskap er akkurat det samme som i "A Pattern Language", nemlig at tilhørighet, hva man kan kalle hjemme, er et nettverk av forbindelser, hvilket er det stikk motsatte av den suburbane drømmen. Derfor tok myndighetene den suburbane drømmen til sitt hjerte og videreutviklet den, med formål å bryte disse forbindelsene, med den hensikt å passivisere massene.

http://hilobrow.com/2011/11/04/douglas-rushkoff/

DR: Fra 1920-tallet til 1970-tallet ble en ikonografi utviklet som viste korporasjonene som våre helter. I stedet for å kjøpe noe fra folk jeg kjenner, stoler jeg mer på "Quaker Oat Man" enn deg. Dette er et resultat av PR-kampanjer, og utviklingen av PR som et yrke.

PN: Har økningen av PR bare skjedd, eller gjorde de dette for å hindre ting fra å komme ut av kontroll?

DR: De måtte gjøre det for å hindre ting fra å komme ut av kontroll. De viktigste stegene i utviklingen av PR var alle i krisetider. For eksempel arbeiderbevegelsen; det var ikke bare det at arbeiderne gjorde opprør, men at folk så at de organiserte seg i motstandskamp. Det var et behov for å omskrive det som skjedde slik at folk ville tro at arbeideraktivister var dårlige og skumle mennesker, slik at vanlige folk foretrakk å flytte til forstedene og isolere seg fra dette mylderet av arbeidere, fra "massene". Eller for å gå tilbake til "Quaker Oats"-eksemplet, hvor man var vant til å se på produkter fra fjerntliggende fabrikker med mistro. Her er en vanlig brun boks langt bortefra, hvorfor skal jeg kjøpe dette i stedet for noe fra en person jeg har kjent hele livet? Massemedier er nødvendige for å gjøre deg mistroisk til naboen din, for så å overføre denne tilliten til en abstrakt entitet, et aksjeselskap, og tro at dette vil medføre en bedre morgendag og alt det der.

Det ble som mest utspekulert etter andre verdenskrig, da alle soldatene skulle hjem. Franklin D. Roosevelt rådførte seg med PR-folk. Traumatiserte veteraner var kommet tilbake fra andre verdenskrig, og alle visste at disse gutta var "freaked out and fucked up". Vi hadde tilstrekkelig med psykologi og psykiatri til å forstå at disse gutta var ute å kjøre, de visste hvordan å behandle våpen, og - dette var ille! Hvis veteranene vendte tilbake til den samme arbeiderbevegelsen som før andre verdenskrig, ville det ha vært over og ut. Så ideen var å skaffe et hus for disse gutta, å sørge for at de kjente seg bra, og vi fikk etableringen av Levittown og andre nøye planlagte boområder utformet med hjelp fra psykologer og samfunnsvitere. La oss plassere disse veteranene i et hus, la oss feire kjernefamilien!

PN: Så hjemmet blir en ting, i stedet for en rekke relasjoner?

DR: Definisjonen av hjemme slik folk bruker ordet nå betyr "mitt hus", snarere enn hva det hadde vært tidligere, som var "hvor jeg er fra". "Mitt hjem er New York, hva er ditt hjem?"

PN: Akkurat, min by.

DR: Hvor er du fra? Ikke den "strukturen". Men de måtte redefinere hva hjemme betyr, og de brukte en masse av det offentliges penger for å få til dette. De konstruerte hus i nabolag spesieldesignet for å isolere mennesker fra hverandre, og i særdeleshet for å hindre menn fra å kunne samles og organisere seg - det er ingen felles saler, ingen ølhaller i disse boligfeltene. De foretrakk menn som var opptatt med sine plener og med sine tre frukttrær i hver sin hage, med stadige oppussingsprosjekter; for kvinne vil kjøkkenet være bakerst i huset, der de kan se barna leke i bakgården.

PN: Slik at de ikke ser naboen gå forbi. Ingen verandarom.

DR: Alt måtte være individuelt, dette ble planlagt! En mann med et boliglån å betale kommer ikke til å bli revolusjonær. Med et slikt beløp å tilbakebetale har han en eierandel i systemet. Sant nok, han er på feil side av gjeldsøkonomien, men i 30 år kunne han eie sitt eget hjem.

¤) Egentlig feil definisjon av effektivitet: "On a simplistic level, efficiency is maximum (or optimal) output with minimum waste." Les artikkelen "Efficiency Is Not the Enemy of Resiliency".