An alternative idea is to buy one of the many abandoned malls in the US and turn that into housing, common space, and shops. Is anyone doing this?
If we're honest with ourselves, isn't this roughly what much of the U.S. has going on now? "New towns" are started as suburbs with economical segregation. Complete with gated communities. Or gentrifying urban areas. Low level work is performed by those from poorer, neighboring communities.
Well, you could always select interesting, smart people who enjoy what you call "low level work" and mix them with interesting, smart people who do not perceive such work as low level/low prestige even if they do something more "high level" for a living.
Now that would be an interesting, smart community.
Yes... also in Spain there's this place named Ca La Fou: https://calafou.org/en
Ca La Fou is an ambitious ‘eco-industrial postcapitalist colony’, a day’s cycle outside barcelona. The group first visited this site in october 2010, and only moved here in july 2011. The enormous space was bought as a housing cooperative by the group with a loan from an ecological bank and support from a wider network.
The thirty permanent collective members work at a slow pace but have achieved a great deal by making the space livible and have already built a number of functioning workshops. These include:
- An impressive hacklab where broken computers are recycled into new ones
- A collaborative car workshop where engines are fixed to run with vegetable oil
- A Ukelele workshop
- A chemistry lab where soap is made from recycled vegetable oil mixed with caustic soda, (and sometimes recycled animal fat)
- A chicken-run and chick creche.
https://www.ecotopiabiketour.net/2012/an-introduction-to-ca-...
When I was visiting Europe this past year, I saw plenty of gorgeous little hillside villages (pop. ~100) that relied on a larger town below. Some were within sight of major cities, while some were more remote. Even stayed in one for a few days, hiking down and back up whenever I needed groceries. It was really interesting and quite relaxing.
My main issue is that it feels like a rather, um, "colonialist" idea. It would be very important to integrate with the local community and culture.
Too idealistic to plan just for creatives when so many in that category have less-than-creative partners who need regular jobs to get by.
Maybe better to own one of these smaller villages and have friends and colleagues drop in and out as they wished.
There'd be reasons the locals have abandoned them. Poor services, poor land, poor connectivity, etc. Do you snatch up cheap-but-remote housing in your own country? I know I don't. These just seem exotic and enticing but I imagine they're an expensive pain to fix up in reality.
Perhaps, except I don't meet many people who'd be willing to permanently relocate to some remote village in my everyday life. (As opposed to the travel-back-and-forth-to-a-swanky-coworking-space-in-Thailand type people. Nothing wrong with that, but different breed, I think.) There's a higher chance I'd get along with them than with most people around me.
> Too idealistic to plan just for creatives when so many in that category have less-than-creative partners who need regular jobs to get by.
I agree, and I didn't mean creatives exclusively. More like, "mostly people who want to work on their own projects" as opposed to, like, radical isolationists or farmers or something.
> Do you snatch up cheap-but-remote housing in your own country? I know I don't.
Yeah, because by myself, I don't really have the funds to do so. :)
> These just seem exotic and enticing but I imagine they're an expensive pain to fix up in reality.
I agree, and I'm not talking about the villages in the article exclusively. Communes and ecovillages[1] have been successful in the past.
I would love to be able go to a place where like-minded people come and live for a while (weeks, months), working on their projects, while surrounded by neighbours they can engage with and discuss interesting ideas, but also with cool events going on around the village.
A kind of a permanent 'boot camp' which you can visit at any time.
Some old forgotten village in the mountains, inhabited by programmers, sysadmins and designers (with family/ kids of course) , with fast Internet, night time parties with visiting DJs, cooking experiments, group sports, hiking in the mountins, fishing, camp fires; tech conferences in the village center with invited speakers, meetups and hacklabs.
:)
In the last 2 years the idea became more tempting I investigated which kind of villages were in Spain and what kind of work was needed to make this work.
As you might expect as prices goes down utilities, accessibility and general connection to the world decreases. But it is also true that even if not with those outrageously low prices there are several villages with just a few thousand inhabitants, all the utilities you might need, low prices and just at 20 minutes from well connected airports and the capital.
From this September we are moving to one of those in the Southern coast of Spain and try to implement a really simple model in which part of the community bring in economic resources and the rest brings in quality of life, all in an environmentally friendly and socially responsible way.
The ones bringing in the economic resources at the beginning would be mostly developers like myself or designers. The reason for that is they can move and work remotely quite easily and they are quite frequently looking for some more colleagues to work with in their projects or Startups (again, like myself).
The quality of life is something abstract depending on the members of the community, it could be anything from organizing bootcamps or accelerators to yoga, paragliding or having a good chef cooking for everyone.
We haven't yet started to make all the work to promote this but if anyone is interested or would like to participate I'm here to answer any questions.
I've just updated my about data with some social networks links. Once we begin with the social media campaign I will be posting there too.
Advantage is that there are both jobs and fiber available. However prices are much higher than a few years ago and skyscrapers downtown are scarce due to Chinese investors.
Also, there are definitely people whose ideal living circumstances would be on a farm without restaurants or other city amenities. My paternal grandfather retired from the city to a farm. But he did it after my grandmother died. And his kids were grown - no need for schooling.
Articles here have talked about Japan having the same type of problem. And so do American farming communities in the midwest. For every farmer (or wannabe) there seems to be thousands or tens of thousands who don't want to leave the city. And that's accelerating.
And that's just one of the benefits!
I know this isn't really your point, but video is actually one of the better use-cases for satellite internet. The problem with Satellite isn't bandwidth (I mean, it is, but that's only because most of them are old and there aren't enough of them.)
The fundamental problem with satellite internet is latency; the speed of light to get up to where we usually put 'em and back down is... significant.
The only realistic way to overcome that is to put the satellite in a much lower (and thus much less stable) orbit, which means replacing them frequently; there have been a bunch of cool-sounding proposals to do this, but it hasn't happened.
But... the point is that satellite is great for non-interactive stuff. If you can buffer, say, half a second without causing problems, there's no reason why you would be unhappy with Satellite, so streaming video would work beautifully.
Games and skype would be unusable. Web pages would load noticeably slower. But your streaming video and large downloads, potentially, would be competitive with the shitty broadband we're used to here in the US.
If you were to fill a full village with well-off people, I think you could get some ISP to connect you.
Nothing is too far from anything else. These "distant villages" are probably bathed in an easy to pick up 3g signal that you would share with precisely no-one. Your own 4 or 5 megabit connection.
A fun experiment in segregation?
I am not entirely sure you would want smart people only in the village. I think you should have a great mix of people, who share similar values and ethics.
At any rate if the exercise of setting up a small town interests you, the Republic of Plato as well as The Social Contract give you some good starting point. At least philosophically.