VISIONARY Speculative Memoir Fiction
The conclusion of VISIONARY
How will this idea take root? Let’s put it this way. It has taken fifty years to create from the edges of awareness the notions of car-free and walkability. It has taken the advent of wide computer use to awaken the growing alienation from sprawl and the move to greater urban population density. It has taken decades to anchor the thought that the good life is the creative life. It has taken decades of poisonous politics to reduce that enterprise to some sense of its own absurdity and enable the beginning of a recovery of sense. It will take root because it is logical at bottom. We cannot overcome the ecological challenge if we deny who we are, from our slobhood to our seraphic nature. We need a technostructure that can clean up after us. The cybercity sees that. We need our privacy but we do not need ten rooms of it that saddle us with debt and fix us in one spot. Better everyone have a room of their own they can replicate anywhere in the world. Bucky Fuller knew things move from small to large. Things will move inevitably in the direction I have surmised. The only question is whether it will be tasteful, grass roots and democratic, or whether the corporate folk will once again find ways to leech from their creations all attention to what actually works for real human beings. The spirit that should animate cybercities should build on the ideas in Christopher Alexander’s “Pattern Language”, modified by the ideas here of attaining a less car-centric world. The key ideas are that we should build with attention to weather, that we should give up our infatuation with height and achieve our miracles less by reaching for the sky than by reaching amicable means of extending the spirit we ordinarily associate with vacations.
It is possible that the first cybercity will be built by some hedge-fund billionaire. Why not? It may be time for the new Thomas Edison to be not an inventor but the gatherer of the elements needed to achieve what no single mind can accomplish. This person will be the new Henry Ford. It may be that someone like Mayor de Blasio will take a mile square lot in New York City and tell folk to apply the very ideas in this book. Note that the actual area is a square mile more or less. Note also that the density I am advocating would solve the global population problem because the evening of things economically would reduce the birth rate to stability and economies would no longer require growth to be prosperous. Prosperity would be synonymous with well-being. How this takes root, take root it will. Its time has come.
