we have the fewest number of community
gathering places of all first world
nations in the neighborhoods of the
United States where we don't live in
villages we live in a development
mechanism propelled by the interests of
developers and bankers to make money off
of creating housing it's very different
than a village that is created by
villagers as a way of helping people to
help themselves to meet their own needs
thank you so the primary lesson of this
model is to juxtapose where we live and
the patterns that we're living in with a
new understanding of how people live in
villages with very high rates of
participation and very high indicators
of Public Health
when places are designed by other people
then then the people who live there and
then the people who are who live there
are told that they are powerless that
that is a broken design so what we're
doing today is engaging a typical
circumstance a model that has been
designed within a great imposed graded
landscape that is so familiar to people
who live in North America we're engaging
it with a villager sensibility and we're
asking ourselves how can we unlock the
creativity which is resident here all
the time and yet people don't tend to
even speak to each other
it looks completely normal and yet at
the same time
we don't quite tend to understand what
we're seeing let's look at the facts
all of the houses tend to address the
street across the space where all across
the country people are told that they
have no power they have no ability to to
take the street and make it into a space
that actually brings people together
that's a big issue also though they
might have back doors back porches back
decks and maybe even Gardens their
separation is enforced by lines that say
this is yours and this is mine I'm
actually not decrying the idea that
people have separate interests it's just
that all across the country quite unlike
thousands upon thousands of years of
Village design there's been no effort
made to create something that they would
Steward in common
retrofitting a neighborhood block like
this to make it work like a village
again consists of several different
design patterns that characterize the
most lovely and robust villages in the
world the first one being whether or not
there's a great Village Commons where
everyone knows that they belong
such a space tends to exist in a central
location between where everyone lives so
they all have an equal access to it in
fact this would tend to straddle
property lines and be something that
brought people together across those
lines but this is the first piece this
is the most important piece of the
village because it tells everyone that
they're all part of a greater whole
another one of the really significant
design patterns that has to characterize
a village is that when you come to the
perimeter of the village that there are
portals you might call them gateways or
entrances that celebrate your arrival
and also your passage out of the village
they can be a lovely you know arch with
some grapes or kiwis arching overhead
something that celebrates the fact that
you're entering the perimeter and it
says welcome to you and it also invites
you to return as you leave
when people live in the colonial grid
like we do the pathways tend to be long
and straight and flat
Americans
have this challenge around obesity
largely because their environments don't
engage them to want to get out and move
around if your environment is
repetitious
and monotonous it's not inviting to us
to want to come outside and move around
but particularly because the environment
the experience of moving around is kind
of almost all the same and you're
relying on the differences of
architecture
to make it more interesting but when you
don't even have places where people are
outside interacting and Gathering like
you would in a good Spanish or Italian
Village then why get off the couch
why why even go outside you're not going
to have a place a destination so what
we're seeing now are Pathways that link
people from the gateways where they
arrive in their block to the Common
Center so everyone is linked notice that
these lines are not flat and straight
but they actually curve and they adjust
as people are moving between things and
the pathway can be established through
something as simple as wood chips
there's many different ways to to create
a sense of a path another thing to think
about is connecting to people across
public space typically in the USA we're
told that we don't have any power in the
public right-of-way I can assure you in
Portland Oregon that is no longer the
case we now have the ability to
transform Street intersections into
public squares for free Beginning by
painting the streets we can install
benches and kiosks for free on our own
30 in a collaborative set of agreements
that we've created
before 1920
when the federal government decided that
streets were only for cars for all the
Millennia of human existence streets had
multiple different kinds of uses that
were enacted in that space every single
day and maybe the biggest and more most
important of all were the combined
birthday parties of all the children
that would live in an area of what we
call a neighborhood they would come out
into the streets and that was the space
where children would play and they would
be safe there is a lot that's missing
trees should have tree houses in them do
you live in a neighborhood without a
swing within a block of where every
child lives in my world I would have a
sitting bench at least within 50 feet of
where everyone lives so we have some
examples of the kinds of things that
would bring people together as a village
like a community market a tool sharing
Library sacred spaces greenhouses things
like that benches everywhere all around
the block why isn't there an art studio
why isn't there a cafe why isn't there a
place for a music venue why do you have
to go to a music festival or a place
like burning man in order to find that
kind of integration and then you come
home save your money to want to go away
again why don't we engage in this place
and bring this Rich program of the
village back into our lives
so just put down orange circles
designating water catchment cisterns on
the back corner of everyone's house
because we want to catch water so the
reason we're having these cisterns
happen is because we're going to put in
a common water course that is yet
another form of Commons that will bring
people's lives together and all of their
rooftops will be like Hills and Valleys
where rain comes down from the high
places and flows down to the Low Places
except with these cisterns we're going
to intercept that water so that we can
collect it and use it and then release
it again letting it eventually get back
into the landscape so that it recharges
the water table I hope everyone
is actually thrilled when you consider
as you lay down these water courses
that every time a pathway intersects
with a Watercourse it becomes an
opportunity for a bridge imagine walking
curving pathways through an abundant
landscape punctuated by bridges over
water as you simply walk from your house
to your friends as opposed to having to
go out your front door walk a straight
line turn a 90 degree angle in order to
come in through another front door just
to visit someone on your block
okay so now I'm going to lay down some
ponds what if there were pawns on your
block that were fed by the runoff from
your rooftops so that at the top of your
water course
there was actually a place with a
fountain where ducks would sometimes
land and frogs and dragonflies loved to
dwell and as the water was flowing from
that pond down toward the center your
Gathering Place would also have bodies
of water along the edge and perhaps
those could reflect light at the end of
the day as the sun was setting and these
are the kinds of things that villagers
actually create for their own aesthetic
Legacy to leave to the Future
Generations like this is what Americans
are missing out on when we just think of
our homes as Commodities that we
liquidate cash out and move on from to
somewhere that we hope will be better
[Music]
when you're considering an urban
agriculture strategy some of the most
important pieces are going to be
perennial systems oftentimes in the form
or form of food forests you're also
going to be at the same time as you're
thinking about that layer you're
probably going to be thinking about
supporting native species and then also
annual agriculture that tends to require
more sunlight tomatoes and basil and you
know artichokes eggplant corn the
abundance that is possible in places
where we've just thought that we're
going to grow Lawns that we scarcely use
becomes impossibly exciting
if we treat this side of the model as
South then I'm going to be placing these
representations of annual Gardens in
light green on the south facing
available Open Spaces I'm also going to
be thinking of where the light is coming
down both in the summertime and in the
winter time
because in the wintertime we're going to
have much less available light where
would those spots still be available
where we could actually grow anything in
the form of say a winter garden so I'm
going to locate these in Open Spaces in
a neighborhood where people work no one
typically across the country has ever
looked at the Sun the direction of the
Sun as it rises
and as it sweeps across the landscape
and as it goes down over the horizon at
the end of the day to consider how
sunlight actually falls upon
the space and I'm not just talking about
passive solar gain or photovoltaic solar
panels or solar hot water I'm talking
about the whole sensibility around
spaces and places that you'll find in
villages across the world made by
indigenous people so say some friends
here don't necessarily like to see each
other all that often one of the things
you can consider is rather than having a
fence you could actually have a living
edge with something like what we like to
call a fedge or a food hedge these can
go kind of all over the place depending
on the species that you're planting so
these food forests can freaking go
everywhere
another layer in the urban environment
is animal husbandry people love animals
kids really Thrive around animals and
learning how to take responsibility
taking care of animals is a great way to
grow up a kid just to mention some of
the potential animal species that can
easily coexist with people even in the
confines of a block like this piglets
goats rabbits chickens Ducks other kinds
of foul and that's just to get started
you can actually have bees as well in an
urban environment
foreign
to talking about energy what we like to
say is that before you start calculating
how to create an Alternative Energy
System first you've engaged strategies
that reduce your load that reduce your
need
and so one of the most popular things
that we've been doing on our block is
actually to paint rooftops with
reflective colors so that we immediately
reduce our energy load for cooling by
creating reflective surfaces so you
might have a south facing Greenhouse
where you concentrate heat and then you
might have a reflective roof you could
do this all over the block
another strategy related to energy is
the idea of installing a green roof
so on a slope and on a structural system
that can handle an installation of an
Eco roof you could actually decide to
create
a living respirating surface
like a green roof
imagine that every single house could be
generating its own power and then tied
together in a resilient localized kind
of network so that you always had enough
so imagine that every one of these homes
could have a solar hot water system as
well as solar electric
when we start
to reconsider
our lives at this scale
the greatest
consequence of this is that our voice
and our sense of capacity and Power
actually becomes Limitless and for an
American that is a big deal to go from
thinking that we are just a consumer or
we are just a job description or we are
just what we have in our bank account to
feeling like you can do anything then
you start to do stuff like this
why not
curve
the pathways of Our Lives
into something more aesthetic and
beautiful that still enables us to have
driveways and to come home
but that starts to fill in the surfaces
of the grid so that that arable land
becomes available to us to grow and
create
it becomes more beautiful and
interesting for our gathering needs and
at the same time
we no longer just travel long straight
flat lines for the rest of our lives
and even more than that considering the
fact that where intersections happen the
pathways of Our Lives come together
that's the most essential pattern
of the public gathering place in the
history of villages in all the world so
every one of these nodes should be
places of community convergence
so the village expands outward
to connect all of the other scales of
the village
as we transform
the whole world really so whether the
pathways become curving or they have
stations for people to charge their
vehicles or their Community bike parking
stations or they're just gathering
places or sacred spaces or or what have
you
what if you're able to walk through your
entire neighborhood and have food just
growing along the edge of the primary
Pathways you travel and your children
travel would we have a few food
insecurity issue
so I'll just close by saying that
the point of this game again is about
people coming into their agency and
realizing that anything is possible and
what we thought was boring and mundane
is actually potentially a context or a
palette for rediscovering the ancient
Village that still lives inside of all
of us