interlude

I think I have completed the proposal for a Tempe pedestrian connector and now I want to let it sit at the top of studentsofurbanism, or in some other manner point readers to it, for a while, but it needs some context, or readers won't completely know what's going on. An interlude, posted here, at essaysatanurbanistsblogs. Now I can also go through some of the material in my dozen and a half other blogs, from times past, and link the relevant parts into the story as it's evolving today.

In order to understand the studentsofurbanism blog, the best thing is to use the April link in the blog archive section. Or link from here. This will display all the April posts in one window. Then you can scroll down to the bottom and read the blog from there in the order it was written. The April blog does divide into two parts, however. The earlier two or three posts meander around in a bit of an arbitrary way - and a similar post is suspended in the second section, too, early on - and then the second part describes my program for urbanistic development, beginning with a setting out of principles in the post titled "life of an urbanist", followed by a restatement of those principles in the form of a list of business projects, followed by a detailed proposal, in the form of a series of maps and then drawings, for the Tempe pedestrian connector.

The pedestrian connector project, to explain a little of the substance of "life of an urbanist", is a kind of demonstration project for an approach to urban planning, that could be called new with regard to some of its ambitions, which I am making in order to attempt to integrate Fantastic urbanism into Cities. (Fantastic refers to speculative urbanism generally, stuff of fantasy, and especially the speculative research of Paolo Soleri, and the architecture/infrastructure of the past and of all great places. Fantastic architecture spans the smaller Habitat scale of urban structure, studying and developing neighborhood, cityscape, and landscape scale environments. To some extent it is the architecture of imagination, of storytelling, and of activity, and to some extent it is the mega-scale architecture of the future, or of the present.) Even though these proposals come from no place but my own imagination, I think the document is vallid in several regards. At the most basic level, it is an academic exercise which I hope to use to support something like an application for graduate studies. But the illustrated project is designed to demonstrate a principle, if possible, that Fantastic architecture can be built in the real urban context, or at least that it can be made to look feasable, especially by addressing four major concerns: cost, convenience, aesthetics, and safety. Cost and convenience are planning issues, while aesthetics and safety are design issues, and, especially, programming issues.

My plan is to work on these projects - this and similar ones - by involving myself in a sense as little as possible in day to day operations. I want to monitor things, not run them, or not run them unmonitored, I want them to be self-monitoring, I'm emphasizing a program of worker originated operational documentation that amounts to, essentially, professional practice.

The kind of documentation I'm describing is illustrated in the adjacent post on this essaysatanurbanistsblogs blog you are presently reading, titled "equipping the kitchen". When I say it's the kind of documetation I'm describing, I mean that employees of these ventures, worker operators, worker managers, worker entrepreneurs, are charged with creating this kind of documentation of essentially all that they do in the conduct of company business. In a sense my job is to colate and publish that material. In a larger sense that's the urbanismweb concept, where all the world's urbanistic efforts can be toured on line. This is from "life of an urbanist": "in order to communicate, i'm innovating web technology and exploring socioeconomic modeling".

All of this is an outgrowth of my work at Arcosanti and on Paolo Soleri's Arcology, where "on Arcology" means a study of sorts of his ideas and methods. A sense of personal involvement drove me in considering possibilities for development at Arcosanti and of arcological environments. The documents described thus far represent an effort to move away from work on Arcosanti, and into the larger world. A major effort to create an effective document about ideas for Arcosanti preceded them, and now can be appended, in the context of a broader set of ideas.

The question to be addressed in a course of studies is how to publish these ideas, not in the narrow sense, or not only in the narrow sense, that is, publishing, but in the larger sense, how to activate them in the world, matters of business practice, protocol, and so forth which I could learn about. Or, just publishing, for that matter. A process of publishing in an academic environment for feedback, for information, as a means towards publishing more at large.