permaculture

["John Schinnerer" <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

Similar situation in the USA when Disney Corp. tried something similar. 
Celebration was the name of the 'community' they built, I believe.

They thought that simply putting front porches back on the houses, on nice
old-town-type streets, would do the trick, get people out communing with their
neighbors.

Thing was, most everyone who moved into Celebration was from the
"stay-inside-watch-tv" cultures/generations.  So that's what they did.

These examples all show that design - and community - happens when people
engage with what is important to them - to get what they want.  There is no
"technology" that can make that happen, even if someone calls it "design." 
And especially if the actual users of the "design" are not even involved in
the designing (in which case it's *not* designing - or at least not whole
systems designing - IMO).

The folks in the one example finally got fed up with the corruption of their
commons (even though they had not initially embraced it as such) and started
to take it back and clean it up.  IMO this is starting to happen on larger
scales too (as well as smaller ones) - with the large group of "small nations"
effectively saying "NO" to the WTO farce again, EU citizens taking a clear
stand against GMOs, and so on.



John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net