“That’s easy for you to say.” “Yes, that’s why I’m saying it.” More inspiration. More ways to hear the same messages over and over. Stop thinking. Start doing. Don’t accept the old rules. Step outside the language of commerce.
How to begin?
How can the change I want to see emerge from the moment I’m living through?
Christopher Alexander proposed something like an ‘emergent architecture’ in his book The Timeless Way of Building. It’s basically the prescriptive application of the descriptive apparatus he presents in A Pattern Language, and relies very much on the cyclic application of simple operations, combined with reflection and evaluation throughout the building process. In effect, it’s a process that starts from no fixed blueprint but uses a vocabulary of building techniques and elements which is iteratively modulated by idiosyncrasies of the building’s site, its intended users, and its purpose(s). It’s like a generative syntax for architecture. A very cool idea.
Permaculture design owes something to this way of thinking: from supposedly universal descriptions or prescriptions, overlaid onto end-use and site-specific requirements, emerges one of a set of possible optimal designs (optimal given that choices were made as to tradeoffs, and other choices might have been made along the way). Also in common with Alexander’s work is an acknowledgment that everything is provisional and transitional, nothing is fixed or final. Very much like natural process, where succession and competition are always at play, converting the current perfect system into the next perfect system.
What about the emergent design of a cooperative? What are the starting conditions? How will these co-evolve with the self-organization of a community? What are the opportunities for recalibration along the way? What are the patterns in emergent social organization that correspond to Alexander’s patterns or permaculture’s design principles? I suppose these are something like values or goals or ethical guidelines; are they hierarchically ranked? Free to be reordered as the situation requires? How can we prevent calcification and specialization within the system?
My goal is a biomimetic community, autopoietic and robust.
How?
Yes.
