Communitas: Means of Livelihood
is what might be called a seminal book, critiquing our way of life with a historian background. Update 25 September 2021 by
Paul and Percival Goodman.
(Use hi-power loupe to read the comments on the Figure-Illustration) and check who they were on the Internet.
Paul Goodman (1911-1972) was an American culture critic, a psychotherapist who helped invent Gestalt therapy and also a very good writer. In 1960, he wrote Growing Up Absurd, a friendly critique of the then Beat counter culture and the book was so popular that he enjoyed the rest of his life on the money from the book and didn't do much afterwards.
Percival Goodman (1904-1989) was an American architect who specialized in religious buildings and he was also, like his brother, a strong culture critic of his scene. In the 1970s he wanted to write a sequel to Communitas but couldn't get his brother Paul to cooperate so he published on his own The Double E.
(The double E stand for Ecology and Economics).
I make this section about the Goodmans' writings, mainly Communitas because a person who considers himself cultured in 21st century ought to be thinking about the questions the Goodmans raised as early as the 1940s.
This aim of Communitas is to bring to mind the ideas of community planning. The book is best read by intellectuals and architects and community planners or students. All 3 editions are on Amazon.com and the prices are so low that all are worth buying even considering the small differences between them.
Many things in Communitas in 2021 one may disagree with and consider obsolete; for example, the Goodmans' idea of making the river banks of Manhattan into tiered beaches and entertainment parks has been obsoleted by Global Warming. The money is better spent on dikes against flooding. And the Goodmans' economic class consciousness (separating housing for "the rich") is outdated. But if the ideas do not cohere into a plan, the parts are immensely stimulating and provoke in an educated reader, his or her own creative vision of community and city planning.
And reading Percival Goodman in his 1977 Afterword without brother Paul's input reveals striking differences in the brothers' outlook and writing style; Percival clearly is a cockeyed optimist; while Paul is the cold-eyed writer as true artist.
Communitas stimulated in me a thirst for answering questions about How is the best way for living?
I want to advise good community living. And gradually I am hoping to develop principles we have learned since modern community planning began.
For example, Live Near Where You Work and Play ought to be knitted into society's and the individual's plan for happy, successful life. Naturally, individuals may themselves choose to find a living place within 15 minutes stroll from one's work; but more challenging is to design a community where the amenities of leisure are accessible to the farm worker, the factory worker, the office worker or anyone as part of the work, without having to struggle, or even to decide on, a nearby place to live. Think of all the savings in commuting, parking, driving; and just the saving of everyone's time and energy. I have personally experienced this since my company got me a flat near my work. Of course, there are many individual situations where it might be more convenient not to live close to your work but as a generalization it's still good advice.
Every community plan is based on
Technology
Standard of Living
Politics
Geography and History
What questions we shall be asking and what our attitudes towards each?
Kind of technology? (Assumes friendliness towards the most modern computer, renewable energy technology of the 21st century.)
Attitude toward the technology? (Assumes a critical approach, e.g., a contra attitude towards private automobiles as sources of pollution and congestion; it does not mean we give up motor vehicles; rather, we minimize, simplify and improve the safety and ecology-harming of their use.)
Relation of work and leisure? (Assumes the present separation of work and leisure is not the best; there are many variations on that theme from "workaholics" to partial stages of the separation as in persons whose life is centered about their work; Also, as mentioned, what I consider a principle of happy life: Living close to your work and your leisure should be an ideal.)
Domestic life? (Now in 2021 in a period of flux, e.g., marriage, sexuality; but that does not mean you and your companion or family cannot have a sensible, moral, intellectual and functional idea about your domestic life which does not just echo a current trend or mindlessly adhere to tradition.)
Education of children and adults? (Now in a period of flux; same as above.)
Esthetics? (Assumes an attitude of appreciation of beauty and goodness in everything we do starting with the concept of functionalism, i.e., a structure ought to be related to its function in appearance, location, human scale and in use and emphasizing. Human scale, a normal size and working relationship between the means and ends of life and work and society, e.g., the Japanese tatami flooring improves seating, sleeping and safety functions of a floor and also looks like a floor, and the tatami rectangles are the right size for a human.
The problem today is one of both reducing the quantity and improving the quality and in the erasure of today's huge inequality, especially an inequality where the worst people in our society, e.g., the celebrities, are making the most money. In future, the differences will be reasonable; enough to stimulate good competition but not so much to make some feel and act superior to others.
Economic institutions? (The less the better; e.g., no personal taxes, but state funding by consumption taxes and volunteer or youth draft labor. Subsistence guaranteed by social planning and separating & socializing the subsistence economy from the rest of the economy.)
Practical realization? (Should not stand in the way of applying good ideas to our practical lives, i.e., the word Utopian should not be used for unworkable or impractical.)
In the idea of means and ends, we note 4 classes of goods, which, after all, are the ends produced by our means and consumed by us to make our happy lives. It is useful to be aware of the differences between the goods. The following classes apply:
a) Goods that are produced and rapidly consumed for our pleasureful life. Here, look at the products on sale in a department store; e.g., typically foods that you make, eat, and disappear.
b) Goods that get produced by humans and are semi-permanent in that they do not get quickly used up in our enjoyment of them. High art, for example, the Mona Lisa.
c) Goods that were produced by nature and exist and pleasure us but do not get consumed by our pleasure, e.g., a beautiful sunset.
d) Goods that are neither produced or consumed but simply exist in our world, like the stream of life, our loves, youth, the joy of creating, etc.
A major problem today is lack of human scale. We have an economy of overabundance, a standard of living too high - goods and money that is being literally thrown away and that used more intelligently could underwrite sweeping reforms and pilot experiments and civilization goals like space exploration and learning the structure of our universe. Our cultural climate and state of ideas are such that our surplus of means and wealth leads only to extravagant repetition of a pattern of life that used to be unsatisfactory and now, by extravagance, has become absurd. Even in this present economy of super abundance and high technology most of the population including even upper middle class feel they are in a struggle for means of subsistence, meaning the feeling that one is a salary slave, i.e., completely dependent on an immediate source of income like a salary or a parent. (And see 1.15 Money! Money! Money! How to Make/To Spend/To ... ) One of the more brilliant discussions of the Goodmans in Communitas is their analysis of our current economy centered in the USA but controlling most of the world today. We live under an economy that seems geared to going full blast; everything is geared on being or nearing 100% (employment, goods production, consumption - Growth! Growth! Growth!). If it's not going full blast and growing, our economic leaders get scared because the economic life we live under by its nature goes through cycles of economic depression and of over-activity that strongly affect the price of subsistence goods like food, medical care, etc. And also expected is constant growth of population and everything that goes with that. For example, look at the price of housing in major countries; today, absurdly high. On a lesser degree of importance, the price of high art - ridiculously inflated (Cf. the British Banksy!). Four hundred and fifty million dollars (The latest bought-price for a possibly fake Da Vinci) spent for a painting that means nothing to 99.9% of its viewers, not only makes no sense relative to current markets in worldly goods; it suggests that money, above subsistence limit, has become virtually worthless. In the past, this had led large parts of our population to become anti-capitalist, looking towards socialism as the answer to a maiden's prayer for love. But the problem with socialism has been the loss of freedom that goes with it. If one wants to socialize the economy, one needs to give up one's own freedom to be an entrepreneur, to have adventures, in other words, give up hope of living a productive, interesting life. What the Goodmans' Communitas has come up with is the idea that the economy should separate subsistence from the general budget. It means that in such a society the prices of food, the rents, medical care and other subsistence goods should be kept low at the expense of their producers, who eventually turn out to be the government because subsistence production under this system becomes non-profitable. But the rest of the economy may be allowed to be purely capitalist with minimal regulation. This would guarantee that the expenses of basic life like food, living place, medical care would remain a constant for the average citizen. This kind of compromise seems good, and also quite flexible because then the various nations could each have the amount of capitalism they wish and the only principle everyone would adhere to in the system would be that the subsistence economy should be guaranteed so no one from the poorest on up is forced to experience the worst of being poor -- forced into not enough or not good quality food, into not enough security of a living place under a reasonable rent, not enough good medical care, etc. And the underlying political system should always, everywhere be democracy based on popular, free elections by a classically, scientifically educated populace deciding on their own, how much of their economy would be capitalist.
The problem is how to teach the population to get involved; it starts with education.
(Here we shall speculate about the various approaches to city life and back-to-the-farm movements.)
An idea we inherited from the Roman Empire is the idealization of rural farm life over city life. This has led to plans and experiments with various back-to-the-farm movements. For example Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous architect (d. 1959), a hero of functionalist planning whose houses were meant to blend in with the dweller's living environment, e.g., House on the Prairie, adapts to life on the prairie. (But where are prairies in 2021?) Functionalism also means the form assists the function. (cf. the mobile home for happy movable country living.) This concept, called Broadacres was meant to bring the amenities of city life with very advanced separated home structures to the countryside. But FLWr`s very elitist believing that a man should believe he is born with the right and duty to farm his patch of land and that one who does not carry out that duty should not eat is ridiculous! A more humane back-to-the-farm planner was Ralph Borsodi with his concept of Homestead. Essentially he wanted to make a rural, small town America as the norm. His ideas are worth studying. Then there is the Soviet collective farm and the Israeli Kibbutz. Suffice to say that, now in the 21st century, the failure of these experiments have shown that the best way to live is an intelligently modified city life.
Now, I want to use the Goodmans' 3 paradigms: analyses of communities—-1) a community that maximizes efficiency of consumption as we have today in USA; 2) a community that strongly narrows the difference between production and consumption as means and ends to the good life which the Goodmans prefer; or, 3) a community where there is minimal regulation of capitalism, in return for no worries about subsistence which I prefer as a basic system for the world. I want to combine them into what I think should be the ideal community (as a city) of the future. In doing this I have to recognize that it appears our society is about to crash in a catastrophic collapse over this 21st century because of the human induced climate change caused and fueled by overpopulation. This is a utopian plan for a future (if there will be one for humans) that should build on the ashes (cf. 1936 H. G. Wells' movie Things to Come).
The Green Belt Concept; Garden Cities (Self-contained town-sized communities surrounded by Green Belts; cf. Radburn NJ, which still in 2021 can be observed just across the GW Bridge from NYC), and the Ville Radieuse, both started from a revulsion against the Industrial Revolution's effect in cities and countryside. On the one hand, the factory poured forth its smoke, blighted the countryside with its refuse, and sucked in labo(u)r at a too early age. The homes were crowded among the factory chimneys, and the people were dysfunctional parts of the machine (Cf. Charlie Chaplin's factory worker caught in the revolving gears of the machine in his 1936 movie, Modern Times.
With the automobile, a 2nd impulse to Garden City planning arose: get away from the factories faster and farther. So the suburban living places (cf. Radburn NJ or suburban sections of same-construction private homes (cf. the little boxes of Levittown LI, NY.) were created accessible to the working place by car and highway.
Most recently city planners have entered a phase at least in planning of not to flee from the center of the city but to open it out, relieve its congestion, and bring the green belt into the city itself. This, on a grand, Utopian scale, is the proposal of the Ville Radieuse of Le Corbusier. (See architectural plan below.) It employs the principle of esthetic enclosures, traffic-free blocks, roof gardens as we see today in 2021 in Manhattan, and the revival of neighborhoods as a social unit with strategic piazzas adorned with works of art taken out of museum and put into street. (Cf. Camillo Sitte’s piazzas!) Then neighborly gathering and discussions take place in the piazza and at night, a light. Nowhere has the idea been fully put into place but it remains a stimulus to modern city plans and Florence Italy is a historical role model because of its historic, classical piazzas.
What about what we have now? Tokyo? Manhattan?
Living in Tokyo these last 30 years on and off, I find it is nicely spaced with interesting, self-sufficient but characteristic neighborhoods (Shinjuku, Shibuya, Roppongi, and even smaller areas within these larger neighborhoods) and excellent transportation. It is in fact my ideal city and I would not change it. New York City is a whole other kettle of fish. It needs a Ville Radieuse do-over.
The Ville Radiuse plan which has nowhere been effected because it requires huge demolition of existing metropolises. On your left, the cruciate-topped high-rises are residential flats surrounded by no-automobile areas that make up independent self-sustaining neighborhood squares in which lifts, and escalated & level mechanical walkways suffice to get the inhabitants around. Works of art taken out of the museums and private owner's homes are placed at esthetic enclosures where pedestrians can loll about in interesting conversing and thought. No autos. Workplaces are walking distance or simple pneumatic tramway reached nearby locations. People live and play near their work. Nearby surroundings are green belts of park and forest with lakes and rivers.
The basic idea today in 2021 is to try to integrate rural and urban environment in city living centers. Today we see its traces in the city trees, greenery, and in NYC, the roof-gardens; and the parks. The problem now, majorly, is a lack of human scale, a want of esthetic appreciation and the need for more functionalism in our constructions. And the problem starts with an overall over-population: the towns, cities and the earth populations are too large and crowded!
In our ideal future, Apres, le Deluge, in the new science-civilization, the Earth should divide into civilized inhabited areas that today are in temperate, more livable zones. In less habitable areas, aboriginals should be allowed to live undisturbed. In the civilized areas, centers of population would still be cities that depend on the environmental advantages of river and port transport, on access to raw material and manufacturing and on environmental advantages. City life is, after all, as the 50-year kibbutz experience failure in Israel has proven in a negative way, most culturally satisfying to civilized humans. But it has to be re-organized, which is what attempts at change like the Green Belt and Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse are all about.
Intentionally Experimental Communities At start of planning we get into ways of living where we have little or no experience and much is theoretical. These experiences should be looked toward for experiments in community planning, and from it we should learn better means of achieving better ends on a human scale using democratic political and Judeo-Christian moral means to get our desired ends, which ought to be a happier, more productive scientific society.
Two experiences I have seen that stand out positively are the Victory Gardens in USA during World War 2, and Block Parties in my Bronx neighborhoods just after World War 2.
Victory Gardens first entered my experience as a child at the start of America's entry into World War 2. The apartment building where I lived was next door to an open lot that consisted of a slope with sod and weeds and rocks, at the bottom of which we kids played.
In the spring of 1942, I recall being assembled on the lot with other tenants and told that this will be the place for Victory Gardens (In Communitas, the Goodmans called them Kitchen Gardens.) to be plots that individual tenant families should grow vegetables or fruits on to give the home-front its independently grown food. Right away that spring, tenants started growing radishes, carrots, pumpkins, tomatoes on allotted plots. And that went on each year through 1945 the last year of Victory Gardens and I recall an Indian Summer when we kids rampaged through the Victory Garden throwing rotten tomatoes at each other. At the time, I thought about Victory Gardens as one of those wartime experiences like collecting scrap metal, buying defense stamps, and using ration cards. But today, I recognize a radical attempt at uniting the rural countryside with the urban city and erasing the social and economic distinction between farm and city; erasing the present gap between production and consumption of food. Think of our present cities zoned for Victory Gardens. First, it would relieve the streets-crowding effect of buildings; second, it would teach our urban population how to support their basic vital needs. Much of the work could be done, and happily, by youth supervised by experienced oldsters. It is something not to be forgotten when the day comes to rebuild our society.
Relating to potentially experimental social units within the city proper, during and after World War 2 and at time of the Korean War, in early 1950s, the neighborhood Block Parties come to mind. I recall happily the Block Parties I experienced then. They could be an example of big city neighborhood cooperation that if carried forward into the principle of Communitas could become a model for the community to involve in political and social re-organization
Kibbutz Movement was an idea of early Zionism that came from the Russian Jews and was influenced by Russian peasant philosophy of agrarian life. So the early Jewish settlers in then Palestine started such type of cooperative living that they called Kibbutz. The Kibbutz movement extends from the 1920s until the 1970s when Kibbutzim themselves enacted changes which ended their experiment in agrarian communism. It was an experiment, i.e., a try at something new; and a noting of its failure should serve to teach us not to revisit the kind of back to the soil, rural communism that has been a dream of Utopian planners in reaction against the negatives of 19th and 20th century industrial life. The kibbutzim voted with their feet and choice that modern persons prefer city life.
Rather than the separation of production and consumption of city and farm that these agrarian communist experiments were about, we should have the opposite movement in the Victory Gardens which unifies production and consumption and city and farm for subsistence products (food, basic needs).
It is worthwhile reading the Wikipedia entry on the Kibbutz experience in Israel because experiments in specifics like communal child-raising, gender equality, personal vs collective ownership are fleshed out usefully. In all these cases, the Kibbutz eventually failed as demonstrated by the Kibbutzim themselves voting to end the radical experiments of group communism. This does not mean we ignore the potential good points of collective living; but it does emphasize that it should not be made into one's overarching ideology. The best is to let 100 flowers bloom and 100 ideas contend peacefully and intelligently. Then allow democratic choice bolstered by good cultural education.
Allow me to point out that our society has an immense unused surplus productivity that has grown much with the computer revolution. Yet our planners are fragmented and operating out of an idea of scarcity and helplessness.
Percival Goodman (1904-1989) was an American architect who specialized in religious buildings and he was also, like his brother, a strong culture critic of his scene. In the 1970s he wanted to write a sequel to Communitas but couldn't get his brother Paul to cooperate so he published on his own The Double E.
(The double E stand for Ecology and Economics).
I make this section about the Goodmans' writings, mainly Communitas because a person who considers himself cultured in 21st century ought to be thinking about the questions the Goodmans raised as early as the 1940s.
Communitas
Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life
was published in large-size (22cm by 28cm), hard-cover edition in 1947, then republished in softcover with some editing changes and rearrangements in 1960. (An important preface in the 1947 by the brothers is deleted in the 1960.) Finally, it was republished by Columbia University Press in 1990. The 1990 edition has a new 5-page preface by Paul Goldberger (b. Dec. 1950), an American architectural critic and educator. Also at the end in the 1990 edition is the 31-page Afterword: Communitas Revisited by Percival Goodman, written for his book The Double E in 1977.This aim of Communitas is to bring to mind the ideas of community planning. The book is best read by intellectuals and architects and community planners or students. All 3 editions are on Amazon.com and the prices are so low that all are worth buying even considering the small differences between them.
Many things in Communitas in 2021 one may disagree with and consider obsolete; for example, the Goodmans' idea of making the river banks of Manhattan into tiered beaches and entertainment parks has been obsoleted by Global Warming. The money is better spent on dikes against flooding. And the Goodmans' economic class consciousness (separating housing for "the rich") is outdated. But if the ideas do not cohere into a plan, the parts are immensely stimulating and provoke in an educated reader, his or her own creative vision of community and city planning.
And reading Percival Goodman in his 1977 Afterword without brother Paul's input reveals striking differences in the brothers' outlook and writing style; Percival clearly is a cockeyed optimist; while Paul is the cold-eyed writer as true artist.
Communitas stimulated in me a thirst for answering questions about How is the best way for living?
I want to advise good community living. And gradually I am hoping to develop principles we have learned since modern community planning began.
For example, Live Near Where You Work and Play ought to be knitted into society's and the individual's plan for happy, successful life. Naturally, individuals may themselves choose to find a living place within 15 minutes stroll from one's work; but more challenging is to design a community where the amenities of leisure are accessible to the farm worker, the factory worker, the office worker or anyone as part of the work, without having to struggle, or even to decide on, a nearby place to live. Think of all the savings in commuting, parking, driving; and just the saving of everyone's time and energy. I have personally experienced this since my company got me a flat near my work. Of course, there are many individual situations where it might be more convenient not to live close to your work but as a generalization it's still good advice.
Every community plan is based on
Technology
Standard of Living
Politics
Geography and History
What questions we shall be asking and what our attitudes towards each?
Kind of technology? (Assumes friendliness towards the most modern computer, renewable energy technology of the 21st century.)
Attitude toward the technology? (Assumes a critical approach, e.g., a contra attitude towards private automobiles as sources of pollution and congestion; it does not mean we give up motor vehicles; rather, we minimize, simplify and improve the safety and ecology-harming of their use.)
Relation of work and leisure? (Assumes the present separation of work and leisure is not the best; there are many variations on that theme from "workaholics" to partial stages of the separation as in persons whose life is centered about their work; Also, as mentioned, what I consider a principle of happy life: Living close to your work and your leisure should be an ideal.)
Domestic life? (Now in 2021 in a period of flux, e.g., marriage, sexuality; but that does not mean you and your companion or family cannot have a sensible, moral, intellectual and functional idea about your domestic life which does not just echo a current trend or mindlessly adhere to tradition.)
Education of children and adults? (Now in a period of flux; same as above.)
Esthetics? (Assumes an attitude of appreciation of beauty and goodness in everything we do starting with the concept of functionalism, i.e., a structure ought to be related to its function in appearance, location, human scale and in use and emphasizing. Human scale, a normal size and working relationship between the means and ends of life and work and society, e.g., the Japanese tatami flooring improves seating, sleeping and safety functions of a floor and also looks like a floor, and the tatami rectangles are the right size for a human.
The problem today is one of both reducing the quantity and improving the quality and in the erasure of today's huge inequality, especially an inequality where the worst people in our society, e.g., the celebrities, are making the most money. In future, the differences will be reasonable; enough to stimulate good competition but not so much to make some feel and act superior to others.
Economic institutions? (The less the better; e.g., no personal taxes, but state funding by consumption taxes and volunteer or youth draft labor. Subsistence guaranteed by social planning and separating & socializing the subsistence economy from the rest of the economy.)
Practical realization? (Should not stand in the way of applying good ideas to our practical lives, i.e., the word Utopian should not be used for unworkable or impractical.)
In the idea of means and ends, we note 4 classes of goods, which, after all, are the ends produced by our means and consumed by us to make our happy lives. It is useful to be aware of the differences between the goods. The following classes apply:
a) Goods that are produced and rapidly consumed for our pleasureful life. Here, look at the products on sale in a department store; e.g., typically foods that you make, eat, and disappear.
b) Goods that get produced by humans and are semi-permanent in that they do not get quickly used up in our enjoyment of them. High art, for example, the Mona Lisa.
c) Goods that were produced by nature and exist and pleasure us but do not get consumed by our pleasure, e.g., a beautiful sunset.
d) Goods that are neither produced or consumed but simply exist in our world, like the stream of life, our loves, youth, the joy of creating, etc.
A major problem today is lack of human scale. We have an economy of overabundance, a standard of living too high - goods and money that is being literally thrown away and that used more intelligently could underwrite sweeping reforms and pilot experiments and civilization goals like space exploration and learning the structure of our universe. Our cultural climate and state of ideas are such that our surplus of means and wealth leads only to extravagant repetition of a pattern of life that used to be unsatisfactory and now, by extravagance, has become absurd. Even in this present economy of super abundance and high technology most of the population including even upper middle class feel they are in a struggle for means of subsistence, meaning the feeling that one is a salary slave, i.e., completely dependent on an immediate source of income like a salary or a parent. (And see 1.15 Money! Money! Money! How to Make/To Spend/To ... ) One of the more brilliant discussions of the Goodmans in Communitas is their analysis of our current economy centered in the USA but controlling most of the world today. We live under an economy that seems geared to going full blast; everything is geared on being or nearing 100% (employment, goods production, consumption - Growth! Growth! Growth!). If it's not going full blast and growing, our economic leaders get scared because the economic life we live under by its nature goes through cycles of economic depression and of over-activity that strongly affect the price of subsistence goods like food, medical care, etc. And also expected is constant growth of population and everything that goes with that. For example, look at the price of housing in major countries; today, absurdly high. On a lesser degree of importance, the price of high art - ridiculously inflated (Cf. the British Banksy!). Four hundred and fifty million dollars (The latest bought-price for a possibly fake Da Vinci) spent for a painting that means nothing to 99.9% of its viewers, not only makes no sense relative to current markets in worldly goods; it suggests that money, above subsistence limit, has become virtually worthless. In the past, this had led large parts of our population to become anti-capitalist, looking towards socialism as the answer to a maiden's prayer for love. But the problem with socialism has been the loss of freedom that goes with it. If one wants to socialize the economy, one needs to give up one's own freedom to be an entrepreneur, to have adventures, in other words, give up hope of living a productive, interesting life. What the Goodmans' Communitas has come up with is the idea that the economy should separate subsistence from the general budget. It means that in such a society the prices of food, the rents, medical care and other subsistence goods should be kept low at the expense of their producers, who eventually turn out to be the government because subsistence production under this system becomes non-profitable. But the rest of the economy may be allowed to be purely capitalist with minimal regulation. This would guarantee that the expenses of basic life like food, living place, medical care would remain a constant for the average citizen. This kind of compromise seems good, and also quite flexible because then the various nations could each have the amount of capitalism they wish and the only principle everyone would adhere to in the system would be that the subsistence economy should be guaranteed so no one from the poorest on up is forced to experience the worst of being poor -- forced into not enough or not good quality food, into not enough security of a living place under a reasonable rent, not enough good medical care, etc. And the underlying political system should always, everywhere be democracy based on popular, free elections by a classically, scientifically educated populace deciding on their own, how much of their economy would be capitalist.
The problem is how to teach the population to get involved; it starts with education.
(Here we shall speculate about the various approaches to city life and back-to-the-farm movements.)
An idea we inherited from the Roman Empire is the idealization of rural farm life over city life. This has led to plans and experiments with various back-to-the-farm movements. For example Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous architect (d. 1959), a hero of functionalist planning whose houses were meant to blend in with the dweller's living environment, e.g., House on the Prairie, adapts to life on the prairie. (But where are prairies in 2021?) Functionalism also means the form assists the function. (cf. the mobile home for happy movable country living.) This concept, called Broadacres was meant to bring the amenities of city life with very advanced separated home structures to the countryside. But FLWr`s very elitist believing that a man should believe he is born with the right and duty to farm his patch of land and that one who does not carry out that duty should not eat is ridiculous! A more humane back-to-the-farm planner was Ralph Borsodi with his concept of Homestead. Essentially he wanted to make a rural, small town America as the norm. His ideas are worth studying. Then there is the Soviet collective farm and the Israeli Kibbutz. Suffice to say that, now in the 21st century, the failure of these experiments have shown that the best way to live is an intelligently modified city life.
Now, I want to use the Goodmans' 3 paradigms: analyses of communities—-1) a community that maximizes efficiency of consumption as we have today in USA; 2) a community that strongly narrows the difference between production and consumption as means and ends to the good life which the Goodmans prefer; or, 3) a community where there is minimal regulation of capitalism, in return for no worries about subsistence which I prefer as a basic system for the world. I want to combine them into what I think should be the ideal community (as a city) of the future. In doing this I have to recognize that it appears our society is about to crash in a catastrophic collapse over this 21st century because of the human induced climate change caused and fueled by overpopulation. This is a utopian plan for a future (if there will be one for humans) that should build on the ashes (cf. 1936 H. G. Wells' movie Things to Come).
The Green Belt Concept; Garden Cities (Self-contained town-sized communities surrounded by Green Belts; cf. Radburn NJ, which still in 2021 can be observed just across the GW Bridge from NYC), and the Ville Radieuse, both started from a revulsion against the Industrial Revolution's effect in cities and countryside. On the one hand, the factory poured forth its smoke, blighted the countryside with its refuse, and sucked in labo(u)r at a too early age. The homes were crowded among the factory chimneys, and the people were dysfunctional parts of the machine (Cf. Charlie Chaplin's factory worker caught in the revolving gears of the machine in his 1936 movie, Modern Times.
With the automobile, a 2nd impulse to Garden City planning arose: get away from the factories faster and farther. So the suburban living places (cf. Radburn NJ or suburban sections of same-construction private homes (cf. the little boxes of Levittown LI, NY.) were created accessible to the working place by car and highway.
Most recently city planners have entered a phase at least in planning of not to flee from the center of the city but to open it out, relieve its congestion, and bring the green belt into the city itself. This, on a grand, Utopian scale, is the proposal of the Ville Radieuse of Le Corbusier. (See architectural plan below.) It employs the principle of esthetic enclosures, traffic-free blocks, roof gardens as we see today in 2021 in Manhattan, and the revival of neighborhoods as a social unit with strategic piazzas adorned with works of art taken out of museum and put into street. (Cf. Camillo Sitte’s piazzas!) Then neighborly gathering and discussions take place in the piazza and at night, a light. Nowhere has the idea been fully put into place but it remains a stimulus to modern city plans and Florence Italy is a historical role model because of its historic, classical piazzas.
What about what we have now? Tokyo? Manhattan?
Living in Tokyo these last 30 years on and off, I find it is nicely spaced with interesting, self-sufficient but characteristic neighborhoods (Shinjuku, Shibuya, Roppongi, and even smaller areas within these larger neighborhoods) and excellent transportation. It is in fact my ideal city and I would not change it. New York City is a whole other kettle of fish. It needs a Ville Radieuse do-over.
The basic idea today in 2021 is to try to integrate rural and urban environment in city living centers. Today we see its traces in the city trees, greenery, and in NYC, the roof-gardens; and the parks. The problem now, majorly, is a lack of human scale, a want of esthetic appreciation and the need for more functionalism in our constructions. And the problem starts with an overall over-population: the towns, cities and the earth populations are too large and crowded!
In our ideal future, Apres, le Deluge, in the new science-civilization, the Earth should divide into civilized inhabited areas that today are in temperate, more livable zones. In less habitable areas, aboriginals should be allowed to live undisturbed. In the civilized areas, centers of population would still be cities that depend on the environmental advantages of river and port transport, on access to raw material and manufacturing and on environmental advantages. City life is, after all, as the 50-year kibbutz experience failure in Israel has proven in a negative way, most culturally satisfying to civilized humans. But it has to be re-organized, which is what attempts at change like the Green Belt and Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse are all about.
Intentionally Experimental Communities At start of planning we get into ways of living where we have little or no experience and much is theoretical. These experiences should be looked toward for experiments in community planning, and from it we should learn better means of achieving better ends on a human scale using democratic political and Judeo-Christian moral means to get our desired ends, which ought to be a happier, more productive scientific society.
Two experiences I have seen that stand out positively are the Victory Gardens in USA during World War 2, and Block Parties in my Bronx neighborhoods just after World War 2.
Victory Gardens first entered my experience as a child at the start of America's entry into World War 2. The apartment building where I lived was next door to an open lot that consisted of a slope with sod and weeds and rocks, at the bottom of which we kids played.
In the spring of 1942, I recall being assembled on the lot with other tenants and told that this will be the place for Victory Gardens (In Communitas, the Goodmans called them Kitchen Gardens.) to be plots that individual tenant families should grow vegetables or fruits on to give the home-front its independently grown food. Right away that spring, tenants started growing radishes, carrots, pumpkins, tomatoes on allotted plots. And that went on each year through 1945 the last year of Victory Gardens and I recall an Indian Summer when we kids rampaged through the Victory Garden throwing rotten tomatoes at each other. At the time, I thought about Victory Gardens as one of those wartime experiences like collecting scrap metal, buying defense stamps, and using ration cards. But today, I recognize a radical attempt at uniting the rural countryside with the urban city and erasing the social and economic distinction between farm and city; erasing the present gap between production and consumption of food. Think of our present cities zoned for Victory Gardens. First, it would relieve the streets-crowding effect of buildings; second, it would teach our urban population how to support their basic vital needs. Much of the work could be done, and happily, by youth supervised by experienced oldsters. It is something not to be forgotten when the day comes to rebuild our society.
Relating to potentially experimental social units within the city proper, during and after World War 2 and at time of the Korean War, in early 1950s, the neighborhood Block Parties come to mind. I recall happily the Block Parties I experienced then. They could be an example of big city neighborhood cooperation that if carried forward into the principle of Communitas could become a model for the community to involve in political and social re-organization
Kibbutz Movement was an idea of early Zionism that came from the Russian Jews and was influenced by Russian peasant philosophy of agrarian life. So the early Jewish settlers in then Palestine started such type of cooperative living that they called Kibbutz. The Kibbutz movement extends from the 1920s until the 1970s when Kibbutzim themselves enacted changes which ended their experiment in agrarian communism. It was an experiment, i.e., a try at something new; and a noting of its failure should serve to teach us not to revisit the kind of back to the soil, rural communism that has been a dream of Utopian planners in reaction against the negatives of 19th and 20th century industrial life. The kibbutzim voted with their feet and choice that modern persons prefer city life.
Rather than the separation of production and consumption of city and farm that these agrarian communist experiments were about, we should have the opposite movement in the Victory Gardens which unifies production and consumption and city and farm for subsistence products (food, basic needs).
Cotton fields of kibbutz Shamir, ca. 1958
Communal life
Group dining room at Gan Shmuel, 1953
Allow me to point out that our society has an immense unused surplus productivity that has grown much with the computer revolution. Yet our planners are fragmented and operating out of an idea of scarcity and helplessness.
No matter what you take from it, make it a point in your young life to read and learn about Cummunitas and actually express it and think about your unique in put.
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