mightychurch.com

Wow, fascinating.
 
This is what caught my eye though:

But his design also reflects the gated-community mentality that has been spreading like a cancer around the globe for decades. Its utopian purity, and its isolation from the life of the real city next door, are grounded in the belief — accepted by most people today, it seems — that the only way to create a truly harmonious community, green or otherwise, is to cut it off from the world at large.

and

What Masdar really represents, in fact, is the crystallization of another global phenomenon: the growing division of the world into refined, high-end enclaves and vast formless ghettos where issues like sustainability have little immediate relevance.
           
.... Ever since the notion that thoughtful planning could improve the lot of humankind died out, sometime in the 1970s, both the megarich and the educated middle classes have increasingly found solace by walling themselves off inside a variety of mini-utopias.

 
This isolationism can’t be the way to go.  The highly-planned model city or community needs to have lessons that can be usefully and efficiently applied, and adapted widely in many contexts.
 
I really liked the way he had a good look at ancient building methods in the area, to see what worked about them, then combined and integrated with modern technologies.

He began with a meticulous study of old Arab settlements, including the ancient citadel of Aleppo in Syria and the mud-brick apartment towers of Shibam in Yemen, which date from the 16th century. “The point,” he said in an interview in New York, “was to go back and understand the fundamentals,” how these communities had been made livable in a region where the air can feel as hot as 150 degrees.

Agreed Ros! I’m not excited about Masdar as a model for us all, no way. It reminds me too much of ‘Snow Crash’ with their gated communities run by Corporate States.

The thing I do find exciting about Masdar is that ‘cutting edge’ uber-rich lifestyles do not have to involve the ‘romance’ of a big car. They can be about car-free beautiful communities. We can wind back the dominance of 70 years of suburban thinking where we have basically built our own little ‘walled communities’ at the single family, 2.5 car garage scale.

If you have 4 minutes, this is my favourite video about where society should head ASAP over the next 10 to 20 years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGJt_YXIoJI

I offer many more links and thoughts on this subject at
http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/rezone/

I just watched Kevin McLoud’s documentary ‘Slumming it’ on Dharavi
If you missed it last week, please watch it on iView.

They live together in squalid unhygienic conditions, but genuinely seem more happy than many westerners I know.  I think it is because they have, through sheer necessity, rediscovered what the individualistic west has lost… community. We have completely forgotten what community is and means. No one in Dharavi is lonely. No one. Everyone lives in the most intense levels of community. 3 generations of men will sit in the street after work and chat. The elderly, the workers, and the children and youth will all respect each other and chat away after the day’s work.

We’ve totally lost that. A ‘chat’ with our parents or in-laws is something we have to plan, involving a thing we call a ‘visit’. Here, it happens naturally in the street because of the sheer human contact forced on them by 1 million people living in 1 square mile. I wouldn’t want to recommend those ratios, but the New Urbanist’s can fit 1 million people into 40 square miles, unlike today’s suburbia which requires an OBSCENE 400 square miles!

Also surprising is something even Kevin Goddard would love, their are ‘free market’. 85% of people in Dharavi have work!
http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/program/659866