Global Villages: Attempts towards a Concrete Utopia in a Time of Perplexity

by Franz Nahrada ˧

The “ruthless critique of the existing conditions”..... if not at the same time it carries a positive counter-vision that accompanies the critique, the danger is real of ending in indefinite to destructivistic negation. Conversely, a utopian future fantasy can quickly seem implausible and unworldly without critical analysis of the present. ˧

If a pragmatic intelligence is joined to the critical and visionary intelligence as a third pole, then the changes can survive and thrive. ˧

In this respect, I am happy to present the Vision of the Global Villages here, as a serious counter-proposal to an increasingly catastrophic development and as a distinct negation of the talk about “turning of times” ("Zeitenwende") to “cybernetic capitalism” and its excursion in biopolitics and geopolitics, information-flowing propaganda and control digitalisation – things that are currently clared by many theorists, yet they lack ... a clear practical alternative perspective. ˧

To stand against this tidal wave does not mean just to deliver a random narrative of a possible future, but it is nothing less than the search for the sustainable combination of our best possibilities, which is to be expressed in the vision. (By the way: what I am writing here has been presented in detail in 56 hours of radio broadcasts and will become a book soon.) ˧

It is about anything but a prescriptive technocratic vision. If, after all the experiences of the last hundred years, if a possible future is worthy of thinking and living, then it is just an urgently needed framework for cultural difference and real freedom, wealth of forms and creativity, sense and autonomy, which is in harmony with a cooperative basic structure. ˧

Therefore, no “need-oriented supply economy” should be speaked about, as with Austrian alternative economist Alfred Fresin in his book of the same name. The principle of the so much praised "divion of labor" as foundation of economic relations always carries the Mark of Cain of mutual instrumentalization, dependence and subtle blackmail behind the facade of productive rationality. Indeed it creates and maintains inequality and power gaps. ˧

Why not, in the contrary, consider a renaissance of self-work, combined with the new potentials of technology and an orientation towards the cycles of nature as guiding principle? Of course this includes that such a framework must be subjected to normative examination and "cultural form determination" by autonomous subjects constantly. ˧

Especially at a time when the fatal content of seemingly neutral and consented concepts such as “progress”, “sustainability”, “solidarity” and many other "language monuments" reveals itself as the machinery of conformity blackmailing, we need an idea or the design of a world in which there is maximum space for dissent. ˧

The ideology suspicion against the ontological primacy of “society” which was voiced by conservatives and neoliberals, again and again, has an inherent truth that we need to recognize – we probably suffer from too much of it. Of course, this recognition could lead to a totally different reading if it is underpinned by a structural analysis. In principle, cooperation must be cancellable, as Christoph Spehr has to be revealed in “More equal than others than others. A foundation of Free Cooperation" ( https://www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/2989/gleicher-als-andere-eine-grundlegung-der-freien-kooperation) has shown. But this alone cannot be the whole solution, because reliability of relationships is also essential. That this squaring of the circle is possible and that it finds its base in the structuring of space will be shown here. ˧

Enough of the preface, let us go to the subject or perhaps better to the idea of the global villages itself or themselves. There is a leitmotif in this visionary narrative about a peaceful and living world of cooperating communities. This is the idea of the “great implosion” that, according to Eric and Marshall McLuhan (“Laws of Media”), characterizes our era in spite of everything else. ˧

Worldwide electronic communication with its logical consequences of decentralised automation and accessibility of any information entails that all possible skills and feasibility arise everywhere at the same time. The McLuhans? dressed it in the visual image of a planet that enlarges itself a hundredfold, a thousandfold. While all previous technological and media advances and the subsequent upswings involuntarily ended up in an expansion trend, with wars and shocks in the wake and a violent compulsion of accumulation, the whole thing is now fundamentally different, in this “first global renaissance”. ˧

The globalization of knowledge and information means that it must turn into an unprecedented renaissance of the local. The reversal of our efforts in the direction of shared knowledge to make the local flourish everywhere – which was called “Auskooperieren” (keimform.de, 17.3.2008), not outcompeting but out-cooperating of the competition world – is at the center of the vision. ˧

The architectural visionary Paolo Soleri has described a similar thought in “Technology and Cosmogenesis” as the evolutionary double step of increasing complexity and miniaturization. “Small is beautiful” is also a central theme at Kohr and Schumacher, but this “small” is basically an enriched, condensed thing. This is exactly what the term “global villages” expresses. A world full of self-sufficient living environments, each of which resorts in its own way to the jointly maintained pool of global design patterns - the repository as they call it in Open Source.. ˧

It is important to identify a coherence of patterns that reinforce and carry each other (cf. Christopher Alexander, A pattern Language). System contexts and social formations have always grown out of such coherence, which combined materially with technical and socio-cultural patterns. The vision of global villages consists of many types of such patterns from different basic perspectives, which together generate strength and vitality. ˧

First perspective: Space

The paradigmatic work for the explication of such transdisciplinary coherence is Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” (APL), which at the core addresses problems and solutions in the field of architecture, but at the same time does not shy away from addressing social, political and cultural questions and problems that have shown themselves in various forms in the course of history and confront them with proven design patterns. ˧

Especially with regard to the spatial perspective, there are fundamental arguments here, all of which stem from Alexander's commitment to real participation in the planning process. So he is not even afraid to propose a substitute for nation states with “independent regions” at the beginning of his work, because this is the only way to provide the framework conditions for holistic action, co-determination and self-organization. ˧

“If the population focus of a region is too much with the small villages, modern civilization can never prevail; but the focus is too much on the large cities, the earth will perish, because the population is not where they have to be in order to maintain it.” (APL, Pattern 2, paragraph 1) ˧

City and countryside should interlock like fingers, and the cultural landscape should be designed as a holistic habitat: "There is no parks, no farms, no unexplored wilderness. Every piece of land has custodians who have the right to use it if it is arable, or the obligation to care for it if it is wild. And every piece of land is generally open to people as long as they respect the organic processes that go on there..” (APL, Pattern 7, paragraph 4) ˧

The Global Villages vision can build on this: indeed, the second essential of the Global Villages vision is the conscious reversal of urban growth and the active engagement of communities equipped with knowledge, skills and tools within the larger network of life. Urban achievements such as density and cultural diversity should not be played off against this relationship with nature, but rather reconciled in a new spatial synthesis ˧

In a report by the UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs, the term “In Situ Urbanisation” is used – “a model of rural development, which includes the essential rural characteristics, while living standards rise to the urban level”. (UN DESA 2021) In contrast to neo-Malthusian “depopulism” – the crazy idea that too many people populate the world – the potential and carrying - capacity of our planet is actually far greater than currently needed, if we change our way of life without losing quality of life. ˧

Design patterns that have their place here are: new small towns, rural towns, multifunctional, synergetic centres of vitality, themed villages, urban hills. But it is about much more: Instead of continuing to cluster and bunker down exclusively in the high-bred economic war machines of modern cities, people are spreading out in smaller units over the entire surface of the planet, units that are stationary, highly developed, quasi-organic entities by design, that are more like plants in their logic, urban plants, village plants that are connected to soil and sun, with techniques that resemble roots and foliage, and that, like plants - and in community with them - synthesise the material foundations of our lives. ˧

Second perspective: Materia Nova

The more we learn about the principles of nature, the more our technology converges with the developments that evolution has produced for billions of years. The future therefore belongs to a “biomimetic” technology, which not only uses and develops the proven construction plans of nature, but also knows how to use the enormous potential that lies in the materials of the living world itself. Be it textile fibres, be they various building materials, resistant surfaces, new forms of biomimetic energy production from the sun and so on – a “green chemistry” gradually replaces the fossil fuel one. ˧

All kinds of products are produced in a resource-saving way using 3D printing from biogenic materials. There is no waste, everything is recycled or regenerated. Architecture expresses this symbiosis of high-tech and closeness to nature in many ways. The series “Wonderstuff” (ARTE TV channel) gave a foretaste of this diversity – investigated materials that have the potential to revolutionize the way we build and live – from “thinking concrete” to “transparent wood” to the immense potential of hemp, mushrooms, living bridges and much more. ( https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000177068/mit-wun) ˧

The result is a symbiosis between man and nature, a new, unprecedented form of cultural landscape. The old separation from pure wilderness is dissolving. We are one with the living world that sustains and nourishes us. And this new understanding also characterises our interaction with it. We shape our environment mindfully, as part of a larger, living network. In this way, we can transform the entire planet into this unique human-natural cultural landscape, which creates a much more comprehensive relationship between human and natural infrastructures - and therefore always expresses the uniqueness of the place, the genius loci. ˧

Third perspective: Technology

It cannot be stressed enough that the “Cybernetic society”, i.e. the digital technologies that are currently in the hands of an unholy alliance of state domination and private power of money, must be freed from it and developed in a completely different form in order to make the vision a reality. Digitization (and digitalisation) is essential for this in three respects: ˧

First it connects people around the world for knowledge sharing, innovation and collaboration. Digital platforms and developer networks allow ideas and designs to be shared globally. They are the repository of possibilities and designs that are constantly expanding. They include ideally the general result of all human work, including work, processes and procedures. They are therefore also the foundation of learning and education. Just as every village used to have a church at its center, digital technology will create a building of access to the knowledge of the world, to all cultural possibilities and perspectives. The “global village” is also characterized by this place of access and learning. ˧

Second. Digitization enables decentralised production through digital fabrication and 3D printing. Complex objects can thus be manufactured on site, embedded in material-regenerative processes, completely emancipated from the constant acceleration of industry, but embedded in a time structure that needs and fosters qualities. Myriads of biomimetic “seed capsules” replace the assembly lines metaphorically, and in fact biological and digital technologies will grow together. The decentralizing tendency of solar energy production and related technologies is an indispensable prerequisite for these developments. ˧

However, and that is our third point, digital simulation also makes it possible to map a complex cycle of all material and energy processes on site, which not simply serves the overview and control, but also and above all the coordination of existing possibilities with human needs and all possible structural requirements. Money as a medium of (un)social relations and economic value as the demiurge of mutual ignorance can only disappear when complex cycles can be depicted and negotiated ex ante and comprehensive communication replaces the market. This also applies if this communication is determined crucially by the size and flexibility of the social units, in and between which it takes place. Life as a constant process of ever-new adaptation and the production of reliability. However the thing with artificial intelligences goes on, here would probably be the most meaningful place for them. ˧

Fourth perspective: The Social

It has already been hinted at: Our current societies are not the result of free association, but of the explosive proliferation of sedentary lifestyles towards the global mega-machine, in which social constraints have historically developed and perfected themselves in a competition of power apparatuses. The history of mankind has so far been characterised by the growth of huge agglomerations, regardless of the consequences. ˧

Now for the first time, technology opens up the opportunity to consciously choose more small-scale and nature-oriented lifestyles – and thus correct the undesirable developments of the past. But small-scale does not necessarily mean continuing the traditional limitation of societies to lineage and origin. Quite the opposite. The social principle of global villages is elective affinity. The network, which encompasses the whole world, creates the basis for like-minded people to come together, as David de Ugarte beautifully describes: ˧

"Socialisation via the Internet takes the form of a great sea of community flowers. The blogosphere itself is an ocean of identities and conversations in constant intersection and change, from which, at regular intervals, the great social digestion distils stable groups with their own contexts and specific knowledge. ... These conversational communities, which crystallise at a certain point in their development, ... begin to become real, to generate mutual knowledge among their members, which makes them more and more identitarian than the traditional of the imaginary communities to which they belong (nation, class, community, etc.), just like a real community (group of friends, family, guild, etc.)." (PHYLES,p.103f) ˧

There are a growing number of attempts to understand the functioning of such a "holarchic world" (-> https://bewusstseinswerkstatt.de/holarchie/) based on manageable groups. Even if we can go small with our societies on the basis of the "great implosion", even if we question the violent parenthesis of nation states, a plethora of not just regional but global arrangements is still required. A highly networked world of interconnected infrastructures has confronted us for the first time with completely new possibilities of co-operation, just as we saw images of our planet from space for the first time. The preservation and expansion of these infrastructures of global communication and co-operation, excluding any cultural or political dominance masked as technology, should therefore be the first vital interest of every single community, no matter how high its degree of autonomy may be. We are a planetary organism - whether we like it or not. ˧

The example of Switzerland, which did not need a common culture or language to fight for its independence from the great powers in its time, could serve as a reference example for such a voluntary union of small units. And as far as the structure of decision-making is concerned, the indigenous medicine wheel of many tribes in North America, for example, teaches us to make opposites and polarities the starting point for integration rather than the game of majority and minority. ˧

Increasing the skills of all while maximising the independence of all would indeed be the guiding principle of our vision. ˧

Fifth perspective: Culture and meaning

At the beginning, Christoph Spehr was criticised for calling for a resolution of the contradiction between the "freedom to leave" and the necessity of the existence of reliable cooperation. In the vision of global villages, this unresolved paradox is the starting point for demanding the co-existence of the greatest possible number of lived and liveable cultures, between which individuals can "vote with their feet". No one belongs to one culture, and yet leaving one culture only makes sense by entering another. Realising and manifesting this in diverse spaces will probably be our greatest planetary wealth. And the solution to the old philosophical riddle of freedom and equality. ˧

Sixth perspective: Evolution

Many questions remain unanswered. One of them: Is this now a call for stagnation? What about expansion into space, Kardashov's phases of civilisation and the like? My dry answer: we should do the homework of humanisation on our beautiful planet instead of taking the absurd contradictions of our social system into uncomfortable space. Nevertheless, this planet is too fragile for us as a human race to completely dispense with protecting it from cosmic whirlwinds (asteroids etc) by making a concerted effort in the direction of space mainly to protect the integrity of the web of life, our true and only home. It's a good thing that there will certainly be enough special interest groups and cultures for this! ˧