INTERCOMMUNITY: the emerging “internet” of smart, safe, green places
Beyond pandemics, super-powered 21st-century towns, business campuses, and cities may all be sustainably interconnected
[This plan was originally published in 2001. It is now being updated.]
If we respond creatively to COVID-19 and the climate crisis, exciting possibilities lie within our grasp. For one thing, we may create 21st-century communities that are —
Efficient, sustainable ecosystems with nearly everything needed for living, learning, and earning within walking distance … through architecture blended with the environment and increasingly intelligent broadband networking.
Existing complexes
There are many experimental projects that exemplify the intercommunity trend. None does so completely, but they’re moving in the right direction.
Visit them by clicking their names:
Chautauqua Institution
Guides to additional complexes
The movement toward local control
THE INTERCOMMUNITY IMPERATIVE
The automobile and industrial development, which shaped 20th-century communities, have brought us suburban sprawl, urban problems, segregated agriculture, and environmental challenges including new diseases. Intelligent broadband networking, ecological wisdom, and social equality — the emerging sources of community formation — offer fresh new prospects for living and working.
In time, linked intercommunity nodes may cover the planet
and extend into space, supporting and unifying people everywhere.
Definition
A 21st-century intercommunity is a broadband-enabled arcology, as exemplified by Paolo Soleri’s experimental city, Arcosanti. It may also be thought of as a broadband-enabled ecovillage or co-housing complex; or as a green smart city or cyber-ecology.
The non-cyber portion consists of efficiently blended architecture and ecology that offer enhanced modes of living and working while conserving natural resources.
The cyber portion consists of integrated broadband infrastructure and network-based community services. The typical intercommunity, such as a broadband-enabled Arcosanti or Chautauqua, will be an integrated system built by modern methods and incorporating local food production and associated climate control, with pervasive communications.
Why it’s needed
Today’s cities, suburbs, industrial parks, shopping malls, and megafarms use too much energy; pollute too much; and tax people’s bodies, minds, and spirits much too much. Life is too chaotic, work and innovation too unproductive, and success too elusive. Furthermore, the planet cannot long sustain the current burn rate of its resources.
The 21st-century intercommunity promises economies and simplifications that spell greater happiness, productivity, and health for more people with less effort — all within Earth’s resource budget.
Intercommunity promises a return to simpler, more idylic ways of living. But the “good old days” were often fraught with back-breaking work, poverty, disease, conflict, and struggle. Intercommunity development is, rather, a move forward to a better time that never was. The 21st-century intercommunity is needed because progress and self-betterment are what people are all about. There are mundane, practical benefits as well.
For families, companies, and non-profit organizations, the intercommunity system offers many benefits inherent in arcology principles, including lower costs per square foot for real estate; lower heating, cooling, and maintenance costs; much reduced need for commutation or auto maintenance; and heightened mental output thanks to closer human contact and ready broadband resources.
General benefits include reduced pollution; sustainable use of Earth’s energy and physical resources; increased health thanks to local food production and reduced stress of close-knit living; and reduced reliance on foreign oil thanks to moderated need for surface transport.
In addition, intercommunities created in third-world countries can help lessen the poverty that divides people and inflames resentment.
Intercommunity network
In time, globally-linked intercommunity complexes will be like today’s internet except physical.
Intercommunity “nodes” will supply everything people need locally to live and earn a living, while connecting them to the world via high-speed networks, energy grids, and people-friendly transportation conduits.
These unicultures will be analogous to neurons; and the planetary intercommunity network, a brain. Each neuronal “cell” will be a mostly self-sufficient world, but traffic between these worlds will create a vastly richer world beyond today’s imagining.
Potential intercommunity project
Objective
It is now possible to create the world’s first true intercommunity or “unicuture,” which might also by called a “cyber-arcology” or “broadband ecovillage.” Once completed, this community, mini-city, or business/residential/cultural center may serve as a prototype, leading the way to a global system of unicultures linked by emerging new arteries of transportation, energy, and high-bandwidth communication.
Supporting others, our strategy is twofold: (a) to help complete a prototype intercommunity; and (b) to develop and disseminate the principles and technology to those wishing to build other cyber-arcologies, or to retrofit existing communities or cities.
The longer-term objective is to facilitate a trend toward broadband communication and ecological balance versus 20th-century transportation as the key driver of city and community development. We believe it’s time to move beyond the auto’s creation of wasteful suburban sprawl with its bedroom communities and far-flung business parks, shopping malls, and agriculture.
The global system of cyber-arcology nodes, if evolved properly, will re-introduce and redefine earlier values: close-knit community living characterized by a rich integration of family life with work life, culture, education, religion, and food production — all the elements, close at hand, that make life meaningful and productive.
Possible sites
Although the first true intercommunity might be built from scratch on a virgin tract of land, a more likely option is to add missing features to an existing community, complex, or city. Possible sites for the retrofitting option include those mentioned elsewhere in this plan. Candidates include —
- Arcosanti. Paolo Soleri’s prototype city near Phoenix, Arizona, already incorporates the principles of architectural compactness, shared spaces, and integrated ecology (principles pioneered by Soleri). Adding broadband networking would be relatively straightforward. Introducing real estate ownership and mainstream businesses to Arcosanti might be more of a challenge, but could accelerate the Arcosanti’s completion.
- Chautauqua Institution. This venerable facility in upstate New York is perhaps the most advanced intercommunity in the human and cultural dimentions. Rich resources in education, religion, the arts, and recreation abound. Chautauqua’s layout offers ample green space through sharing, yet a compact residential layout allows people to get almost anywhere by foot. However, to be true to uniculture principles, the buildings — many of them old — would need to be retrofitted with Soleri’s greenhouse features for food production and climate control. And broadband infrastructure would need to be added.
- A large corporate headquarters. A few years ago, AT&T’s announcement that it was putting its Basking Ridge, NJ, headquarters up for sale may be a bellewether. Large, centralized corporate facilities may become more and more anacronistic as information-age economics, terrorist fears, and lethal pandemics nudge us toward decentralization and distributed work. These complexes may be suitable for retrofitting into intercommunities, however. A business-oriented intercommunity would accomodate hundreds to thousands of businesses, the shops that service them, cultural and educational venues, and pedestrial access to nearby residences. Though sold as a new corporate HQ for a single company, Basking Ridge exemplifies provocative multi-use possitilities. Even in it’s original one-company form, the complex sported two restaurants, a barber shop, a bank, a library, a learning center with hotel facilities, an auditorium that could host a symphony orchestra, and underground parking for 3,900 autos.
Intercommunity retrofitting projects are possible almost anywhere. With the right leadership, almost any small town, urban area, or city could be converted into a uniculture or intercommunity over time. For example, the neighborhoods of New York City’s boroughs could be retrofitted into dozens of unicultures, all linked by fiber and people-friendly transit into a mega-uniculture. For starters, imagine cars banished to the periphery, and the streets converted into vegetable and flower gardens; playgrounds and walkways; outdoor shops, art galleries, and performance spaces. New York’s High Line project, now in progress, is a step in that direction.
Prime locations for cyber-arcology development include third-world countries as well as the United States, Europe, and Asia — especially areas in need of economical, productivity-boosting reconstruction.
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This plan will grow into a book-size document with action guide.
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