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Global Villages, COTW, Attachab and Dadamac Goes Glocal November 7, 2010

Hi All

Chris and Franz

I guess that you two probably know each other, but I'm just making sure.

Franz - I know you and Michael Maranda are in contact now so I am guessing you are getting drawn towards Movement Camp and Coalition of the Willing (I hope so)  After Movement Camp - from Michael Maranda and Tim Rayner October 24, 2010 

Franz and Chris to me what Franz writes in The origins of Franz Nahrada's Global Village initiative GIVE http://p2pfoundation.net/GIVE is very relevant to how I hope that COTW will go in some, if not all, of its work. Franz writes about meeting Doug Engelbart in Stanford - "Technology is dull" I heard him say.. "Society takes it for granted and mostly does nor really know how to apply it in the best possible way. We cannot solve this by engineering. There must be a completely different approach, putting technology in social laboratories to find out what is really empowering and augmenting human mind and action". -

I am very excited by the potential of COTW - because of the way it brings together a unifying purpose, people who have initiatives and need to communicate, people who have relevant information, and people who are good at the technology - so for me it ticks all the boxes for a successful Internet enabled collaboration .

Wael is already active here - it has been a pleasure to meet up with him again. Perhaps COTW can help us to make that "Community of Communities" that we talked about back at your workshop http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/GrundtvigWorkshop.

Chris - I am wondering again how close we are to having the COTW "Catalyst System" to drop all these things into. Who would know most about that? My understanding is that when the Catalyst System is up and running it will be a focal point for us all, where we can bring what we have and get energy and collaboration from each other ( find "win-wins"). Do you think I have understood that right?

Franz - is that the kind of thing you are looking for with Global Villages - more energy and collaboration? The COTW has a climate change focus - but as far as I am concerned there is enormous overlap between all the issues that are looking at more eco-aware futures. Anyhow, once a good information-sharing and collaborative system is set up - even if originally it is "only" for climate change - it can serve wider needs.

John I have copied Franz' email for you, below, highlighted where relevant, because it is about global villages, which ties in with eco-villages and therefore with Attachab.

At some point you may like to share  some of it with others at the KRC to let them see how Attachab fits into the picture of Dadamac Goes Glocal through things like Global Villages and Chris's Appropedia work and many other initiatives.

Posted to  Dadamac's Posterous - http://dadamac.posterous.com/ 
by Pamela McLean - http://www.dadamac.net/about/pam
Email -  pamela.mclean@dadamac.net
Twitter -  @Pamela_McLean and #dadamac
Website  http://www.dadamac.net

Dadamac - "We introduce people to each other (mostly UK-Nigeria) and help them do useful stuff. How can we help you?"

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Franz Nahrada <f.nahrada@reflex.at>
Date: Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 3:24 PM
Subject: [P2P-URBANISM WA] Global Villages
To: p2p-urbanism-world-atlas@googlegroups.com

Dear all,

thanks to Stefano for the Biourbanism link! Thats really the right direction to take and I am happy about this positive explosion in mind, although reality seems to lag behind a lot.

I do not know if I already introduced myself on this list, I am basically lurking here - because there is too much to be followed and active contribution can only be very focused. My Name is Franz Nahrada, I am neither architect nor city planner, but have been convinced as a sociologist that "the ultimate expression of the social is in space". (S.Kracauer).

I missed my academic career basically because I felt in the presence of the wrong people there. So I am making my life as a hotel manager and waiting for a good opportunity to go back fully into research. But not the type of research that produces mere paper.

My topic since more than 20 years has been the interconnection of new information and communication technologies with human habitat - especially the way they give new freedom to design smaller. leaner, greener community spaces. I went to the extremity of things and went for the best ideas to have those who want and desire it find a viable alternative in new and regenerated village life, whilst connecting those villages to urban centers that me and my friends chose to call the Mothercities. (the name says it all: becone a bub rather than a vacuum cleaner). I find much confirmation in Alexanders introductory notes about the distribution of settlements in the pattern language, although Alexander totally focussed on urban developments and neither cared much about the very center nor the very periphery.

The hypothesis is: with the advent of new communication technologies, specialised knowledge can be permanently present, active and effective within a small scale human settlement without a drastical surge of the population. We can live in a distributed manner, yet cluster in urban ways in small human settlements. There possibilities in an age of global communication have not been explored - neither have they even been realized!

So I am working to fill that gap, and as you can guess not in a descriptive manner, but in a constructive. Villages as we know them today are autdated and threatened by totalitarian urbanisation, so one conclusion - and thats the one I follow - is that they have to be radically reinvented and exploration and realisation go hand-in-hand. The village of the futuire is deeply influenced by the urban experience and its explosion in human possibilities and it "brings the mind home", as my friend Tony S. Gwilliam (member of Archigram and now also fellow hospitality manager in Bloo Lagoon Village in Bali) used to title his groundbreaking essay on Global Villages.

In fact, there is a certain optimism built in that new media allow us to retrieve what is forgotten and combine it with new and exciting possibilities. The new patterns that emerge are clearly visible, like local education centers, theme based co-working, village as an intentional cooperative endavour and so on.

I would very much like to point your attention to those possibilities. Recently I started to work with a foundation based in London based on similar principles, the Clear Village Foundation. They focus on village rejuvenation by participatory planning - and invited me to participate in their first "Lab" in the center for advanced architecture in Barcelona, Spain, last November. For the first time I see the real possibility of a global community of researcher-activists who are collectively determined to bring a wave of change to the world and shatter the "2050 75% will live in cities" assumption.

I started an attempt to build such a community back in 1997, the Global Villages Network, but it is still stagnant and needs to be brought to life, There is enormous demand for such a network, but without some funding and permanent staff things will not move.

I definitely consider myself uf P2P Urbanism and Nikos has friendly welcomed this strange and determined strain, I am glad we could meet several times in person. So I would like to tie in the Global Villages network activities, although the should unfold and be visible in a stand-alone manner, also as a working group within p2p urbanism and thus within/with ties to the p2p foundation.  (As the P2P Foundation ties to the larger Commons Movement .... that just has met in Berlin).

There are some descriptive pages here:



Who would be interested in a working group on Global Villages?

all the best

Franz

Franz Nahrada
Globally Integrated Village Environment