Ecumenopolis
See Governance — Medium http://buff.ly/19JZu1L
Not long ago I launched an idea called Triadic Philosophy. It is summarized in Triadic Philosophy 100 Aphorisms available at the Kindle Store. I seek to lay out a community concept based on the values of tolerance, helpfulness, democracy and non-idolatry — integral and car-free.
Ecumenopolis was the word the late Greek city planner Constantinos Doxiadis used to suggest a fusion of all metropolitan areas into a global city. He is said to have invented the term in 1967. I met and briefly studied with Doxiadis in Athens in 1966 and remember the term from that encounter. Regardless, I believe that the cybercommunity concept suggests a radically different form than that. But we should still call the global city that results Ecumenopolis.
Our world community, if it follows the cybercommunity suggestion, will be made up of compact communities of 6–12,000 living in myriad configurations throughout the world. What will happen is that when the density has been established, the sprawl nature of the present planet will decrease and eventually vanish. The population density of today’s world is under 50 per square mile, 35 to be more exact. Cybercities can be built almost anywhere. They can resist most climactic vagaries. They can exist wherever you can sink the feet of matrices deep into the ground.
The free land between cybercommunities will be essentially either uninhabited or the locus of specialized communities or rural areas — most likely a combination of these. Of course there will still be cars and people who prefer the wide open spaces. Basic income will accommodate all.
There will probably be remnants of past dominant places. I cannot see Rome or New York or Cairo or Shanghai vanishing. But if this vision prevails, we will have a world that is de-sprawled. It will have the densities needed for community and for commerce.
It will be a world of varied and architecturally wonderful cybercommunities.
If I have any say, cybercommunities will adhere to the close-to-the-ground suggestion of three or four levels, stair free. The world’s basic industry will be the creation and replacement of the components of the cybercities and cybercommunities.
We will not suffer depressions and violent economic cycles. We will sustain ourselves because we have imbibed the values I have been at pains to suggest are a scientifically valid statement of how the universe can and should operate.
Insofar as we can guess in a world where mystery is still at large, we do best when we elevate love and freedom as our ideals and truth and beauty as our objectives and when we live by the active values of tolerance, helpfulness and democracy.
I cannot close without an appeal for ecumenism among what is left of our world religions. We need not see secularism as liberation, nor religion as a barbarian relic. We should see ourselves as fallible beings living as best we can in a cosmos that bears in its activities the very slightest suggestion that we are capable of a measure of freedom and love and are able to grasp truth and beauty as a result.
Nothing more need be said. Our die is cast. The future is ours.
