thu 13 mar 2008 23:25:34 — tram 14
on my way to big urbanism discussion
18.02 u tram 14
volgens mij moet je gekken gewoon negeren. da' s het beste aanpak. dat geldt voor allerlei gekken, zowel religieuze geovertuigden als nationalistische. going to meet dvr at nachtwacht for dinner.
23.12 witte de with
returned from nachtwacht, long intense discussion about civilization design with dvr. salient points? huh? if i'm lucky i will remember some of this on monday. it was like attending a really intense academic lecture, only with steak and beer. the discussion would have gone longer but we both have to "work" tomorrow.
how to design the built environment: try building a set of rules of thumb, throwing it into a snowglobe of resources, and let the resources float to their ideal niches to form the pattern. because i'm not smart enough to visualize the correct pattern. i just know how some of the different layers need to touch / not touch, and the layers are not necessarily flat. the whole thing is topologically agnostic, test with snowglobe!
then "if there's a problem in the city / society, it was engineered wrong" ...
better engineering leads to low administrative costs. reduce government to the purely administrative role it was meant for. (eliminate the egotistical kind) ...
"conflict" between wave versus corpuscular natures of humanity, different sets of rules, no absolutes ... civilization is also the history of not understanding how these two rule systems can both have simultaneous meaning. hence the basic miraculous inexplicability of the town.
the "block" design rules, another rule set governing how the blocks link together ...
longer term ... if we live past the big "tipping point" dvr expects (to do with population pressures or climate or whatever) ... somehow globalizing awareness (no hiding) is connected to waning parochialness and increasing individuality ... and yet the mirror image of this trend, which we see already, is the people who scream for nationalism and the maintenance of cultural norms and values. that backlash for traditional us-ness, which i couldn't explain before, may actually be the equal and opposite reaction to the rising individuality.
now we just need to make better humans and we'll be all set.
it's nice that i have a friend who also thinks in terms of 500 / 5000 year "plans" for humanity, although neither he nor i can think more than two years ahead for ourselves.