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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

It's not a walkable community. No grocery store. No restaraunts. No doctors offices or dentists.

If you look at the map and don't have the public relations material in front of you, the urban form is ordinary exurban sprawl.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ecovillage+At+Ithaca+Inc/@...

Sure there's a bus stop at the end of it's long driveway. Route 20 has six buses per weekday. Three buses a day on the weekends. https://tcatbus.com/bus-schedules

If you're going anywhere in the long cold Ithaca winter, a car is the most practical option because it's still sprawl. Maybe better sprawl. But still sprawl even though there's a garden instead of a golf course.

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In a first semester graduate school class, as students did their usual round of finding flaws in the paper under discussion, the professor said something that changed my thinking forever: (paraphrasing)

'The point is to see what value we can find in the paper, not what flaws. Our purpose is to learn and to grow knowledge. Papers are written by humans; every one has flaws. If flaws disqualify, every paper is disqualified. They are experimental, pushing the frontier of knowledge. Your work, your hard work, is to see what you can get out of them.'

Well, ideally the communal kitchen and eating area would essentially substitute for both restaurants and grocery stores. The potential for socializing seems a lot like that of a small college - most people socialize during meal times and people who feel more like socializing can hang out in the communal areas between meal times. Which is to say, it's a space that has a lot more social potential than the grocery store/restaurant combo. Restaurants are for celebrating and meeting people you know. I don't think anyone socializes at all in grocery stores (though simple contact has its benefits).

The "village" is divided into three neighborhood, all of which appear walkable (from a brief glance at the video). What I personally wouldn't like would be the small scale and having to buy-in and put all your eggs in the eco-village basket, so to speak.

I've been to Ecovillage on a few occasions and it's a very walkable community. And not only that, it's about a 20 minute bike ride to downtown Ithaca. The town is quite walkable and bike friendly, if you don't mind the hills of course.

The video doesn't take you through the entire community, but I'm not sure why people are left with the impression Ecovillage is in the middle of nowhere.

Just thought of the same, thanks to Andres Duhany who pointed at this long time ago. (I think this is a good summary lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jftwNC3k65o)

A lot of sprawl or plastic goods are branded as "eco" because they promise less exposure to exhausts, but hide the fact that their users emit a lot more.

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