If you look carefully, you can get a sense of what I mean.
What I have been thinking about is how we have lost the sense of the community center. Here in Canada, villages grew around the church, the town hall, or most often, the railway station. There was always a geographical center to any town. Modern communities don't have that anymore. Now we have subdivisions with sprinklings of malls and convenience stores.
Sometimes, I think it would be wonderful to have the opportunity to have the chance to build a town from scratch. I would build with a combination of traditional building designs, with all of the techniques and materials we have today. It would be as if I took an old village and just moved it to a site that had convenient, hidden services.
My model for the services is, of all places, Disney World in Florida. Everything comes in underground, via tunnels. Electric vehicles transport everything. All of the critical systems can be checked visually and worked on with ease. The trash is even emptied from the bins into carts in the tunnels. All of those necessary, but not really attractive things can be taken care of without spoiling the scenery.
As I have said before, I don't think the house of the future will differ that much from the homes of the past. There have been modern fads, but it is the tried and true that remains. Given all of the space that we have in this country, I don't see why we need to pile up on each other in huge cities that take up valuable land that could be used for food and energy production. City life has its' place, but I think that we can get by with smaller cities, say two hundred thousand people or so. In an age when I can write this opinion and have it criticized by hundreds from my own living room, why should we have to be all in the same square kilometre?
I eagerly await the remarks of those who are dazzled by cities that never sleep. And therein lies another blog.
1 comment:
Hm, you raise an interesting point. We don't center around the community anymore. It's something that's hard to do in this day and age. Look at everything that surrounds us, the pressures that society gives us. Slowly but surely people have begun to look out for "number one": themselves. I'm not saying that this is the right thing to do, it's just something I've noticed. I know not everyone thinks that way, but it is the general trend of the world, as sad as that fact is. Devin and I have discussed it many times, and it is one of the many things we agree on. Though the subject led to a mild disagreement on another subject. As to your solution, a good idea, but whose really going to do it? If anything, people are just going to keep expanding those "great cities". Again, the general trend is that people don't really care for the environment, and those that do don't have a big enough margin to change anything. Too many people just sit back, wait, and watch. Yet again only looking out for "number one". I know, I have a rather jaded point of view on humanity. Lol.
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