Can intentional communities balance connection and individuality to counter solitude? Is there a way to foster meaningful living without falling into the extremes of isolation or groupthink?
A friend and reader/watcher, an accomplished yet quite young Texan creative entrepreneur, is considering starting a relatively remote residential community from scratch.
He recently sent me an email with a million-dollar question regarding housing:
“Are there any good examples of small, intentional communities or neighborhoods in modern life? I know the answer is probably yes, but if there are any that rise to the top of your mind, I want to start researching.
“Very loose idea, but my wife and I like the idea of buying land (say, 40 acres) and trying to convince friends to build and live simple lives, most likely near a small town that feels right. Common farm/garden, modest living structures, and shared chores/responsibilities.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about subdivisions (a word I had a disdain for most of my life) and going through the exercise of what a subdivision would look/feel like if I were to try and create one. Of course, it can get very complicated, but something inside of me thinks that it could work. There would be many goals, but a main goal being to create a community where each family could lower their cost of living and thus live in a meaningful, simple way.”
Individuals, communities, communes, and groupthink
I set out to answer my friend here —imperfectly, provisionally, in spirit more than in already transubstantiated matter. I have been reading about intentional communities and communes from the late sixties onwards lately, and many accounts explain the difficulties such projects face.
Among the impediments, one appears in each failed experiment of alternative living: I’ll call it the human aspect. Many intentional communities can fall into personality-worshipping, moving from a hopeful, idealistic early energy to self-isolation and inward-thinking.
In short, the desire for harmony suppresses dissent and critical thinking, giving way to gurus and cults. American Psychologist Irving Janis explains this process in his 1972 essay on groupthink:
“The main principle of groupthink, which I offer in the spirit of Parkinson’s Law, is this: ‘The more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policymaking ingroup, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against outgroups.'”
However, hard individualism isn’t the answer either. An intentional community based on preventing any consensus from happening will deter the free flow of ideas and initiatives, and thus, many suburban places end up with immaculate, picturesque environments where there’s no “village” but detached houses with carports where people do errands exclusively by car and rarely establish fruitful bonds as they would if they were living in a thriving middle town.
Constant buzz syndrome and screens: people afraid to be alone
Within the comment section of the recent video we posted about a young architect living on his own in a 12th-century Masia (farmhouse in the Catalan world), somebody mentioned living on his own until he was 50, then deciding to live with someone.
Inside the thread, somebody rightfully pointed out that he had actually been alone for quite a while and was trying to find somebody to share his life with. I replied that nobody should be forced to be alone. I also replied to others within the same thread, explaining that I think that most people have become so accustomed to using stimuli to avoid being on their own that when that happens, they barely bear the feelings of confronting their inner voice —or lack thereof.
I tried to express that it seems to me that, in modern life, many people surrounded by relatives, relations, and co-workers feel very alone and ultimately resort to their screens to find solace, disconnecting from their surroundings.
Many have described the phenomenon of alienation in contemporary culture. People feel very alone and isolated despite being surrounded by people, and the opposite also occurs: many people who choose to be alone once in a while and enjoy doing so return to people and routines reenergized and enjoy the company of friends and relatives, and also that of people in books.
Some people in the second category like to live on their own (sporadically, just once in a while, permanently) and do so by choice; I know many people (including myself, Kirsten, and many others) that like to be sometimes on their own, and this activity seems to reenergize the things we appreciate in others.
Alone, lonely: two separate things
Many urbanists might argue that lousy urbanism can make people who are physically together feel lonely and at odds with each other, whereas the opposite can be true: properly designed, less dense environments can create a stronger sense of community, so people who are “alone” for a part of their day (especially today, with telework and computing) have only to go to the street to get into activities or face serendipity as they venture into a walkable neighborhood, a gentle little square, or a mixed-use street with plenty of little stores and people going about their day.
Being alone without feeling lonely is a skill. Enjoying nature, deep reading, and other activities (including the art of wandering or just doing nothing away from work, screens, and people once in a while) can feel refreshing once in a while. There’s one huge caveat, however: being alone isn’t for everyone, and choice matters. Urbanism and housing arrangements could also help tackle some challenges regarding the feeling of disconnection in contemporary life.
For people in their formative years and the elderly, coliving and cohousing arrangements allow them to establish bonds with their community by addressing affordability, unwanted isolation, and the power of spending quality time with others, whether the encounters are planned or serendipitous. In coliving, people live inside a house and share common spaces, amenities, and sometimes resources while maintaining privacy and one’s own private quarters. In cohousing, residents reside in private homes while sharing common facilities like a communal kitchen, gardens, or workshops.
Many urbanists facing the challenge of understanding the potential and limitations of American low-density urbanism, fundamentally tilted towards single-family housing zoning, argue that there are ways to achieve many of the community-building advantages of coliving while young, or cohousing when people want to downshift after children leave the house.
To them, successful places work like medium-density villages that are walkable, blend commercial and residential use without the one overwhelming the other, and feel safe. Are such mostly high-trust, self-contained environments people like to visit on vacation replicable anywhere, or can attitude foster isolation anywhere in the name of misunderstood privacy?
Building communities that avoid alienation
Architect and urbanist Daniel Parolek, principal of Opticos Design, came up with the concept of “missing middle housing” to explain that, by allowing flexibility in low-density areas, places of detached and mostly isolated houses can be turned into gentle villages with opportunities to walk and meet, shop or work locally, and find living quarters for any income level or need.
We met Dan Parolek a few months ago over a coffee in Strawberry Creek Park, a thriving elongated park in Berkeley that turned a derelict industrial rail yard with contaminated land and broken culverts into a vibrant natural retreat with a small waterway that was uncovered and restored that now supports native plants and wildlife next to a public meadow and a children’s play area.
Recently, as I was thinking about this article, I asked him why, when reading the local press like the East Bay Times, I find real estate advertising that always offers suburban homes detached from any context other than their direct utility.
“I think this is because many American home buyers just do know that there is or should be a different choice where the context or amenities the neighborhood delivers should be just as important as the square footage and amenities of the home. The National Association of Realtors Annual preference survey now shows that more than half of American households want this walkability and are willing to compromise on home size or type to get it.”
When we need the solace and support of others, perhaps it isn’t a good idea to go live on one’s own or experience withdrawal and isolation (a phenomenon that also happens in urban environments and within families living together, as self-isolated family members like the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan, now pervasive around the world, exposes).
Urban environments often display cases of extreme alienation, which reminds us there are many factors that make us feel fulfilled or miserable when we are alone.
Identity and community in interchangeable suburbia and exurbia
Some suburbs, especially those conformed exclusively by single-family houses and detached from any nearby social fabric to provide context and amenities, have struggled to create a sense of belonging, community, and identity for their residents. More compact neighborhoods behave like villages, creating casual interactions among neighbors and the emergence of shared spaces and paths to walk and bike, whereas many suburbs establish a hard barrier between houses with fenced-in backyards and the outside.
With the social reality and current issues spreading through suburbia and exurbia, including the rise of so-called deaths of despair, I asked Dan Parolek whether he sees it possible to turn already developed suburbs into urban systems capable of working more like an organic village:
“In our planning work, we identify different types of contexts that need different solutions to deliver walkability. The three contexts we identify are Walkable Urban, Transitional, and Suburban. There is still a lot of need and opportunity for what we call urban repair to make the historically Walkable Urban neighborhoods more vibrant, but they will happen first. Secondarily, the Transitional context is where it is where the patterns started evolving from the walkable urban to purely suburban. I think these will be the most likely to transform before the Suburban because they can be ‘fixed’ more easily, and they are closer in proximity to downtowns and walkable neighborhoods. In Suburban contexts, the primary opportunities are dead malls or other greyfield sites. At 10+ acres, these sites can deliver a fairly complex ‘walkable village,’ but there will be an island of walkability within an otherwise car-dependent context. I would not live in a place like this, but I think many Americans probably would.”
If we know that walkability, greenery, serendipitous elements like paths or little squares, or mixed-use proximity streets improve the quality of life in any neighborhood, including them, why are they still forgotten in new developments? It may be too much of a stretch to introduce them in mass across mainstream suburban areas anywhere in the US. However, Parolek explains there are many “good exceptions” to the car-dependent norm across the United States: he highlights that New Urbanist communities have been doing this for 35+ years and have created amazing neighborhoods, “but they do not help or improve the broader regional context.”
Suburbs, rural areas, and counterculture outposts
Like rural towns and villages with a strong identity and mixed-use amenities, suburbs are often built in the countryside. Yet, they aren’t rural in the traditional sense, isolating individuals in single-family homes. In contrast, rural areas used to integrate people into natural rhythms and shared responsibilities, and they often still do so successfully.
Perhaps this difference between rural areas and suburbs built in the countryside also explains the difference between rural remoteness among people who don’t feel isolated and socialize with their neighbors despite being far away and the relative closeness of suburban neighbors who, however, feel lonely.
Being unable to remain at peace with one’s own musings for a while is a contemporary occurrence, and those unable to cope when being on their own don’t seem to be the best adjusted to personal bliss and contentment. There’s a reason that ancient philosophies of life, as well as religion, saw in tranquility a desirable outcome of a fruitful retreat into one’s own musings occasionally.
That said, there’s another phenomenon that plays with the perception of both the idealization of going back to the land, living full-time in an off-grid cabin surrounded by a permaculture garden, and the difficulties of carrying such a life —especially if one aims at the chimera of self-sufficiency.
Only a lucky few capable of working remotely and ready to give up the many things that make urban living so convenient and potentially fulfilling, succeed in living permanently in isolated, often off-grid setups. Many, however, prefer to fantasize about them by keeping ties with a rural past or getting someplace as a sporadic getaway to visit during the weekends or vacations.
Skeptical of the detachment of suburbs from any identity or reference, the counterculture flew to blurry areas of cities where creative cross-pollination is much higher, from the beats’ itinerancy to the experimental communes from the late sixties, many set to explore new ways of building a local society. According to their participants, such experiments fell short and degenerated into cults of personality once it became clear that personal freedom, self-sufficiency, and higher enlightenment were difficult to achieve from scratch in isolated areas.
Making things that work and adapt: systems vs. systems in time
Whole Earth Catalog‘s founder and writer Stewart Brand, defined as “the intellectual Johnny Appleseed of the counterculture,” experienced many of the hopes and shortcomings of experimental lifestyles from his years of college onwards: his trips across the US and early visits to Native American reservations, his many visits to friends creating communes in California, Oregon, New York, New Mexico, or Colorado, and his decades-long life aboard several houseboats attached to Sausalito’s pier outside San Francisco…
Reading John Markoff’s biography of Stewart Brand, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, one can’t help but acknowledge the ability of Brand to spot tidal trends in American culture (and hence the world’s pop culture after World War II).
He set out to change the public perspective on American natives in his early multimedia itinerant exposition America Needs Indians; he later gravitated around Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters but refused to join what he felt was a personality cult, and when he was told that he either ought to be “inside or outside the bus,” he chose to remain outside the bus and keep evolving.
At that moment, his intent was to push for NASA to show the public a picture of Earth from space, which—he correctly assumed—would change our perspective of life on Earth, right when British biologist James Lovelock was about to publish his hypothesis on the planet’s biosphere as a whole integrated living entity. Brand was also present at the onset of cybernetics, brainstorming with the likes of Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, and Bill English while he launched his quirky toolbox for the counterculture, the Whole Earth Catalog.
When computing was getting ready for personal computing, Brand was already following the evolution of systems thinking, thanks to authors like Gregory Bateson and his ecological systems thinking. Adding evolutionary principles to the equation of the biosphere, he stated in his later publication CoEvolution Quarterly:
“Ecology is a whole system, alright, but coevolution is a whole system in time. The health of it is forward. Systemic self-education which feeds on certain imperfections. Ecology maintains. Coevolution learns.”
Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (2022), John Markoff, p. 222
Offering access to tools to start communes from the back of a truck
In parallel, Stewart Brand cultivated an avid interest in urbanism, which led to his later project book “How Buildings Learn.” Decades before, when he visited his friends’ communes across the US, he noted that none of such places could live up to the early hype and hopes of their founders. His early suspicion had to do with the isolated aspect of communes and their almost dogmatic quest to be self-sufficient and detach themselves from the creative aspects of the bohemian edges of cities, where creativity and entrepreneurship seemed to thrive.
Decades later, popular science author Steven Johnson would publish a plausible theory of such an explosion of creativity around the edges where two biomes meet, extracting his hypothesis from biology just as Stewart Brand had speculated early on. In Where Good Ideas Come From (2010), Johnson talked about the concept in biology of the “adjacent possible,” or a set of possibilities for innovations available at any given time in history, which often arise in edges between biomes, especially rich for cross-pollination. Not surprisingly for people like Brand, the book argued that the “adjacent possible” worked for organisms, but also for human creativity.
Communes, Brand thought since the beginning, didn’t seem to attract the same type of creative innovation to propel society forward with new solutions for the problems that arise locally and at bigger scales:
“Ironically, though in a few years the Whole Earth Catalog would play a key role in the commune movement, Brand never embraced the idea of rural life. He and Jennings stayed at Lama for only a couple of weeks and then moved on. Durkee was committed to building a new world, and Brand was fascinated by the project but not committed in a personal way. Jennings had even less interest in the communal hierarchy imposed by Steve Durkee, which she thought was overly regimented and verging on being a cult. They quickly decided to go back to California and settle on the Midpeninsula.”
Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (2022), John Markoff, p. 139
The Whole Earth Catalog had an early physical expression: Brand noticed that many of his friends who were trying to go back to the land and start alternative lifestyles— including communes and many kinds of intentional communities—were short of tools and knowledge to use them, so he tried to alleviate this need with the Whole Earth Truck Store, a set of interesting tools to offer to people that Brand initially set on a 1963 Dodge Truck that would need to drive to their potential customers’ places to start. Later on, the Truck Store opened a permanent office in Menlo Park, which would kickstart the Whole Earth Catalog (it was easier to send a magazine to remote areas than drive a truck to them).
Inner workings of an intentional community, young Steward Brand’s edition
Brand’s skepticism about communes didn’t mean that Brand had given up trying to come up with a lean and interesting way of living, while he and his first wife lived in a camper parked on a friend’s Menlo Park driveway (a pioneering way of getting by for creatives and ski bums of all sorts, it turns out):
“This didn’t, however, prevent Brand from continuing to dream about creating an ideal community. He fantasized about the features his utopian collectives might have. (In one case, he fixated on the idea of separating the community in halves, divided by a volleyball court—a level of detail that was both meticulous and decidedly utopian.)
“In August at Libre, an artists’ commune in the Huerfano Valley in southern Colorado, Brand came up with the idea of creating a mountain community with access only by foot. It would be governed by an executive council and regular town meetings, with a voting age of sixteen. Revenue would be generated by taxing cultural events. Population would be controlled by ‘disadvantaging’ families with more than two children. Innovation in community activities such as games would be expected, but how things might be set up to encourage entrepreneurship was a question left hanging in his journal.”
“Perhaps better than going back to the land completely, he decided, would be a backcountry retreat to get away from the urban world occasionally. He proposed the idea of having a ‘back forty’ to Lou Gottlieb, who had been the bassist for a folk-music group called the Limeliters. Gottlieb happened to have some land he had purchased in Sonoma County. The following year, 1967, Sender, who had co-organized the Trips Festival with Brand and whose first wife was a descendant of one of the members of the original Oneida community, a nineteenth-century religious commune, suggested that the land be used to create a new communitarian experiment, which led to the creation of the Morningstar commune. It would be precisely the opposite of what Brand had suggested.
“All of this left Brand feeling out of sorts as the summer wound down. He had a sense that he might be in the wrong country. The commune world was no utopia, to say the least, yet he was finding that he grew easily bored ‘in the woods.’ His perception of the growing commune movement was further complicated by the fact that they were often created around charismatic leaders, leading to the cult behavior he was anxious to avoid. What could he do that was ‘wholly of use’? he wondered.”
Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (2022), John Markoff, p. 139-140
The “edge effect”: the place where two biomes meet
Arguably, most of the limitations regarding applied knowledge and tools that Brand observed, propelling them to develop his compendium, wouldn’t be faced today by those trying to start an alternative community in the middle of nowhere: high-speed satellite Internet and pervasive delivery of online orders, as well as the knowledge available for free across the Internet (say, YouTube), would allow anybody to start from scratch with potential universal access to stuff.
Could off-grid communes that develop a way to keep in check cults of personality and extemporaneous evolutions thrive today on little resources by, say, restarting already-existing rural quasi-ghost towns or even by building from scratch?
Back to Brand’s decision to end the Whole Earth Catalog while the publication had earned national success: he saw it as a testimony of his intention to explore new projects and ideas. As Silicon Valley was taking shape, he left the Midpeninsula and, after traveling for a while, he ended up settling in the shabby and bohemian Sausalito boat community before it became a refuge for upper-class hipsters.
What Brand found in Sausalito during the 1970s and 1980s was a testimony to his ideas on urbanism, which became close to those of Christopher Alexander (A Pattern Language) and San Francisco-based architect and urbanist Peter Calthorpe.
Brand’s brainstorming sessions with Calthorpe must have interested the likes of current urbanists like Daniel Parolek or Portland expert in community-based architecture Mark Lakeman, whom we extensively interviewed some time ago. Brand and Calthorpe observed that some apparently precarious edges managed to evolve into creative “art zones” of cheap, alternative living where everything was handy from a walk’s distance and ideas flew with the ease of Renaissance Italian city-states:
“And that was Brand found on the Sausalito waterfront, a tidal basin both physically and metaphorically, with a habitat that sustained artists and quasi-outlaws. He had stumbled into this world, first in 1960 as a young Stanford graduate, and again after he returned from the army in 1962, when it had been home to artists and poets and professors. It was still a rich mix of people with a villagelike closeness, everyone from welfare recipients to wealthy architects and TV people. It also provided a bit of longed-for continuity. Steinbeck’s Cannery Row had remained his touchstone, and the Sausalito waterfront was similar to the world inhabited by its protagonist, Ed Ricketts.
“When Brand left San Francisco and began to both live and work on Richardson Bay in 1977, he was still attracted by the romance of what Buckminster Fuller described as ‘outlaw areas.’ Fuller had noted that human habitation on Earth was concentrated on a tiny portion of the Earth’s surface and that for most of human history the oceans had been outlaw areas beyond the reach of the law. He had pointed out that most technology developments had occurred in the outlaw areas because of the toughness of nature, citing space as an obvious future arena for invention. Fuller’s idea was that technology innovation happened first and most effectively in the areas that were the most challenging for human life, forcing creativity.”
(…)
“Fuller had convinced him [Stewart Brand] that there would always be outlaw areas, indeed that a society of laws required them. The question was whether you preferred a highly ‘coevolved’ outlaw area like the Waldo Point scene ‘with the benefit of 20 years of mutual accommodations between the transients, permanent residents and surrounding town and county,’ or would take your chances on whatever might spring up elsewhere.”
Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (2022), John Markoff, p. 243-244
How to build thriving pirate-flag neighborhoods
This is what architect and urbanist Peter Calthorpe saw in the pre-gentrification Sausalito boathouse “art zone”:
“The South 40 Dock became the best example of what Brand’s friend and neighbor Peter Calthorpe would describe as the “new urbanism.’ Calthorpe was inspired in part by living in the houseboat community to realize that ‘walkability’—the notion that all resources a resident might need, from shopping to work and entertainment, were within easy walking distance—was the key to creating a livable community. That insight would be at the heart of Brand’s break with the back-to-the-land movement. He had realized early on that he was an urban person at heart—thus his flight from commune life in favor of the Bay Area. Now he came to agree with Calthorpe, who in 1985 wrote that in terms of impact on the environment, dense urban cities were the most benign forms of human settlement.”
Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (2022), John Markoff, p. 246
But not all cities are created equal, and the TED Conference crew (Brand and Calthorpe are among them) have acknowledged this, as do millions of people who can experiment by themselves with the difference between gentle and vibrant villagelike environments where creativity and high trust foster ideas, and urban areas that lack a sense of identity and pack people instead of housing them in livable patterns like the ones found in historic middle-sized European cities.
Stewart Brand’s ideal place would turn out to be adaptable, affordable, always in the works, and in perpetual evolution:
“Although it would be mentioned only in passing in his book, his own Gate 5 Road community was his touchstone. When he traveled to his friends’ ‘nicer’ homes, he would find them walled in like sterile deserts by zoning restrictions, ‘stuck in a place where nothing ever changes.’ The neighborhood immediately around his office included lots of recycled buildings, and because it sat between county and city jurisdictions, planning codes were fuzzy. Certainly, it fit Calthorpe’s New Urbanist worldview: from Brand’s boat, it was a short walk not only to his office but to everything he needed to live, from a supermarket to a gym to every kind of supply imaginable, all ‘scruffy’ and neighborly and walkable.”
Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (2022), John Markoff, p. 307
It’s no coincidence that among the experiences that caused a life-changing impression on Stewart Brand were his visits to Tokyo (he was mesmerized by the livability and contrast between streets and the network of alleyways) and Venice, the ancient and picturesque, Renaissance-era version of Sausalito’s “art zone.”
So, to finally try to answer my friend’s question opening this article, are there any communities trying to push the envelope in at least the main areas where suburbia needs to improve to build villagelike environments for anyone living nearby to benefit from?
According to Daniel Parolek, innovation will happen first in areas adjacent to cities or within cities, where there’s already a predisposition to make livability much higher with little investment needed. Areas defined before World War II are most fortunate, for their layout prioritizes human encounters, and the addition of walkability, bike paths, and low-impact public transit (say, light rails) can create corridors with an ideal blend of ages and economic levels.
If small-to-medium-sized college towns feel like good candidates, they are, in many ways, the poster child of Parolek’s argument. Consider, for example, green and bike-friendly Davis in Central Valley, California.
A medium town in Europe, a village in Europe, and today’s America
As for developments that started from scratch, there’s one market-oriented initiative, Culdesac, that intends to build walkable communities across the US and already has one of them open in Tempe, Arizona, which we visited about one year ago (video of our visit).
Parolek consulted with Culdesac, so he knows the project very well. I asked him the fact that Tempe, Arizona, doesn’t sound like the ideal place to have a vibrant life outdoors during the hottest season, for it can get really hot in the desert, so, if it can happen in Tempe, is it possible to create walkable communities anywhere in the US?
“If you remove the light rail from the Culdesac site, it would be far less appealing to car-free households. It is also super proximate to downtown Tempe and Downtown Mesa. At 15 acres, it is just big enough to fill a complete community.”
So there you go, living on a corridor that is growing and has a big hospital and a State college in its footsteps can help attract the type of talent and creativity that walkable communities like Culdesac may need to recreate from scratch the best of urban living minus the constraints of, say, being in NY’s Greenwich Village: that is, the need to pay over 5,000 dollars a month on rent for any tiny studio, not to mention any livable apartment for a couple or a family.
Dense and artist-friendly, creativity-fostering new developments could follow a template similar to that used by Culdesac, or that of any gentle small town in Southern France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Southern Germany, etc.
How about recreating walkable, picturesque small villages atop hills from Mediterranean Europe? I asked Daniel Parolek whether he’s heard about Esmeralda, the project of building a “European-style” village to be built in Cloverdale, Sonoma, two hours north of San Francisco amid wine country. I asked him, “How about the American vernacular vs. importing elements from Europe?”
“Yes, I am in conversations with them about this project. My sense, based on conversations with them, is that what they really want to promote is great urbanism like that of a European village. Building types and public spaces would adapt based on climate, similar to the way that we would not place Culdesac as designed in any other part of the country. Unlike many architects, I am not afraid of a project design that is a bit nostalgic because I think people like a hint of nostalgia. But there is a fine line where it starts to feel a little too forced/fake. Once again, I think our approach at Culdesac represents that. Hopefully, we will get a chance to demonstrate this on the design of this project :)”
So there’s that, and:
“Big picture: Americans love to visit the historic towns of Italy, France, Spain, etc., so why not give them a place in the US to live that has similar characteristics and delivers that lifestyle.”
Intentional communities of tomorrow
I agree with Parolek, and our family is an in-between: we own a house atop a rocky hamlet overseeing a water reservoir in Catalonia, Spain, a place with only one street that leads to a castle next to a church, where kids can play in the street undeterred that celebrates a medieval market in Spring and a small multi-day town festival in Summer. I can see people in California or anywhere else in the US liking that, but is it feasible to recreate such ambiance in a short period and with economic constraints? We’ll soon find out.
Today, the Internet and off-grid technology provide the equivalent of universal, affordable “access to tools” like the one pioneered by Whole Earth Catalog and the likes of Stewart Brand and Lloyd Kahn.
Perhaps the Alchemy for the desired housing and intentional communities in the next decades will also need to consider sustainability and extreme-weather-proof developments in the equation. At *faircompanies, we’re humbly participating in a project adjacent to this conversation that we called Biokabin. More on it next Summer.
Those willing to attract to their communities the non-tangible aspects that make places great—conviviality, creativity, health, diversity of opinion and walks of life, and positive impact—will also need to think about how to make such places affordable enough so everyone living on them isn’t on top of the increasing wealth gap. Otherwise, we’d be thinking about dreamy retirement communities for big 401k recipients and gated communities.
Any ideas from the community regarding my friend’s question with which I started this article? Ideas and notes are welcome, either in the comments section here or via *faircompanies’ contact section.
Finally, to those interested, we have an ever-improving playlist of documentaries on car-free communities.
“When you don’t know where to go next, go back and start over. Drop out of specialization. Develop rudimentary skills good for any situation.
“Stay Loose,” Earth, December 1971