VIII. Earth Earns: An Open CoCreative Earthropocene to Astropocene PediaVerse

3. Sustainable Ecovillages: Social Protocell Communities

Oppenheim, Claire. Nelson Mandela and the Power of Ubuntu. Religions. 3/2, 2012. In this online journal, a Massachusetts General Hospital scholar offers a graceful essay upon this traditional African wisdom of mutual, symbiotic community of benefit to both individual and group that served the sub-Sahara until it was destroyed by military colonialism. Today a global systems science is, in fact, verifying this viable way of habitation as nature’s evolutionary archetype from microbes to meerkats, bonobos, and the future promise of intentional communities. Could devasted, struggling Haiti actually be rebuilt and revived this way - “it takes an Ubuntu ecovillage.” A companion paper is “The African Ethic of Ubuntu/Botho” by Thaddeus Metz and Joseph Gaie in the Journal of Moral Education (39/3, 2009).

Nelson Mandela dedicated his life to fighting for the freedom of his South African kin of all colors against the institution of apartheid. He spent twenty-seven years fighting from within prison, only gaining his freedom when his fellow South Africans could claim it as well. This article demonstrates how his faith, his spiritual development and his noble purpose can be conceptualized through the lens of Ubuntu: the African ethic of community, unity, humanity and harmony. (Abstract)

Ubuntu is a spiritual ideal, a way of life that is conceptually represented in a wide range of sub-Saharan African societies. While Ubuntu exists in many variations within different African cultures and languages, each conceptualization retains the same core of meaning that is both a goal and a guide for humanity. The representation across widespread African cultures, unified by a common message represents a duality that is in itself the foundation of Ubuntu. (2)

Pearson, David. New Organic Architecture: The Breaking Wave. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. A history of human habitation based on nature from Celtic times to Frank Lloyd Wright along with thirty case studies of current projects to employ organic design principles and environmental sensibilities.

Register, Richard. Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance with Nature. Berkeley, CA: Beverly Hills Books, 2002. Drawing insights from Pierre Teilhard, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme and Paolo Soleri, and with a Foreword by Hazel Henderson, an architect and activist lays out compelling reasons for the recreation and reinhabitation of communities guided by natural wisdom and ecological principles, together with practical examples.

The evolutionary leap 65 million years ago was the bursting forth of the mammals. The next could be humanity collectively learning how to build a healthy future. Inescapably, that means building ecologically-healthy cities - ecocities….Cars are preventing the next step in our now-cultural evolution, the step in which we build as if we knew we were evolving. (17)

Robinson, Sarah and Juhani Pallasmaa, eds. Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. These edited proceedings from a Minding Design symposium at Taliesin West in November 2012 cite a vital awareness for more humane, organic, ecological communities. Typical papers are The Embodied Meaning of Architecture by Mark Johnson, Toward a Neuroscience of the Design Process by Michael Arbib, and Architecture and Neuroscience: A Double Helix by John Eberhard. See also herein Vibrant Architecture by Rachel Armstrong for a companion take. But the chapter that most intrigued is Tending to the World by Iain McGilchrist as a capsule of his bicameral brain explanation, reviewed in A Complementary Brain.

Schenk, Jim. Creating an Urban Ecovillage: A Model for Revitalizing Our Cities. Meister Editorial Services, 2024. A wise man and woman recount and share their lifelong endeavors to conceive, design and abide in sustainable, humane, creative communities. See also Ecovillages and Ecocities: Bioclimatic Applications from Tirana, Albania by Xhexhi, Klodjan (Springer, 2023) for a similar missal.

Creating an Urban Ecovillage, a Model for Revitalizing Our Cities is a "how-to" book that presents ideas of ways others can develop an ecovillage in their existing urban neighborhood. Each chapter presents a particular aspect of Enright Ridge Urban Ecovillage and is concluded with a story that exemplifies how it is being carried out by an individual or family in the ecovillage. The urban ecovillage combines community and ecological sustainability in our cities. While it may not be the only way, the urban "retrofit" ecovillage is one very plausible way of achieving this.

Jim Schenk has a master's degree in theology from the University of Dayton and in social work from Case Western Reserve University. In 1978, he and his late wife Eileen founded Imago (www.imagoearth.org), an ecological education organization oriented to discovering how we would live if we held the Earth and Its people as sacred.

Scott, Andrew and Eran Ben-Joseph. ReNew Town: Adaptive Urbanism and the Low Carbon Community. London: Routledge, 2011. As the book description describes, MIT architects provide through conceptual overview and by practical detail a program for the intentional retrofit of existing neighborhoods, apartment buildings, and so on, to achieve minimal impact, ecologically viable, future communities.

ReNew Town puts forth an innovative vision of performative design and planning for low-carbon sustainable development, and illustrates practicable strategies for balancing environmental systems with urban infrastructure and new housing prototypes. To date, much of the discourse on the design of sustainable communities and ‘eco-cities’ has been premised on using previously undeveloped land. In contrast, this book and the project it showcases focus on the retrofitting and adaptation of an existing environment – a more common problem, given the extent of the world’s already-built infrastructure. Employing a ‘research through design’ model of inquiry, the book focuses on large-scale housing developments – especially those built around the world between the 1960s and the early 1980s – with the aim of understanding how best to reinvent them. At the center of the book is Tama New Town, a planned community outside Tokyo that faces a range of challenges, such as an aging population, the deterioration of homes and buildings, and economic stagnation.

The book begins by outlining a series of principles that structure the ecological and energy goals for the community. It then develops prototypical solutions for designing, building and retrofitting neighborhoods. The intent is that these prototypes could be applied to similar urban conditions around the world. ReNew Town is the product of a collaborative design research project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) School of Architecture and Planning, and Japan’s Sekisui House LTD.

Shulevitz, Judith. Does Co-Housing Provide a Path to Happiness for Modern Parents? New York Times. October 22, 2021. Some 20 months into a brutal, disruptive pandemic and all else it seems, a cultural commentator describes a latest, wide-ranging array of benefits of living altogether this way. As this section documents, this viable reciprocity between me members and we groupings began in Scandinavia in the 2000s and has now spread across continents with many, locally suitable forms. This entry focuses on urban (NYC) occasions as an answer to the deep loneliness that the viral scourge has forced upon us. Multi-generational friendships within an extended family-like milieu are a notable feature.

In regard, a practical intent of this Natural Genesis site as an emergent EarthKinder comes to her/his own revolutionary knowledge, is to provide a phenomenal scientific basis by which such “social protocells” (see Andersson) can be realized as life’s next super-organic stage. This organic mode of symbiotic synthesis has variously been cited as creative union, ubuntu villages, competitive coherence, and more,

Studdert, David. Conceptualizing Community. New York: Palgrave, 2005. An example of an academic exercise which to replace the Cartesian machine and its emphasis on individual or state in favor of cooperative human community. But I wonder by what philosophical stroke could this resolve be appreciated as a phenomenal microcosm of a greater creation.

Tanabe, Makoto, ed. Digital Cities II. Berlin: Springer, 2002. Technical papers explore the transition of urban areas into viable self-organized, autopoietic, semiotic systems by means of electronic communication.

Testa, P., et al. Emergent Design. Environment and Planning B. 28/4, 2001. From MIT, an example of the intentional employ of self-organizing “complex adaptive systems” wherein autonomous individuals are allowed to dialogue and interact so as to create emergent, viable architectures.

Tomlin, Sarah. Harvest of Hope. Nature. 442/22, 2006. A report on progress made in the Millennium Villages project of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Jeffery Sachs, Director. A dozen villages across Africa, in this case one in Rwanda, where chosen to demonstrate how a judicious blend of local initiative coupled with better health, appropriate, sustainable land use, minimum investment, basic education, and so on, could overcome extreme poverty, hunger, and disease. A critical factor is to empower African professionals such as physician Angelina Kanyange and agronomist Donald Ndahiro so they can lend their skills to the valiant effort.

Weisman, Alan. Gaviotas. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 1998. On a high plateau in eastern Columbia, a remarkable self-sufficient village has arisen with a medical clinic, indigenous enterprises, renewable energy sources, reforestation, that could serve as a model for emerging peoples.

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