In this video, New Zealander Shar Henderson talks about why she loves the whole idea of the village, and why she will make her village happen.
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The experience
Multiple plazas in enriched villages, a local economy, everything within a 10-minute walk, no cars... these are the facts, but they are rather dry... they don't tell the life story. What is life about in the VillageTown? How does it feel? What is the experience?
It's private. It's about shaping your own home, with thick walls to provide warmth, quiet and privacy. Your own place with plenty of light and the space you need. Some homes will be small, others grand. Some with small gardens, others with large internal courtyards. Some will have flat, liveable roofs. All will be fireproof. Some will be apartments & flats, others will be especially built for young adults, for artists, for elders. In some villages, extended families may chose to build compounds. It will be your home, you decide what works best with what you love and what you can afford.
It's public. It's about walking out your front door onto a pedestrian street, no cars roaring by and walking to your nearby plaza to a café with indoor and outdoor seating. You don't have to buy a coffee; the seating is public, if you just want to visit and read a book in the sunshine, pull up a chair. Some tables may have built in chess & checkers boards.
It's big. Big enough so not everyone has their nose in everyone else's business, with enough visitors to keep the place forever refreshed and invigorating. The plaza is the public stage, and there are 21 of them, each different, with its own look, feel and things happening. Certain buildings on each plaza contribute to those multiple experiences. As mentioned, there are buildings to foster conviviality - cafés, inns, restaurants and pubs - hopefully serving locally brewed beer that tastes so much better... and other locally brewed non-alcoholic drinks since conviviality is such a strong theme in the village. For variety, instead of always visiting your plaza, you may take a walk to others. While all are within a 10-minute walk, that's the direct way. The streets and walkways are designed like a labyrinth, so you can walk for hours and as you pass through each gateway to the next plaza, the look, feel and even the smells and sounds change. It can be like travelling from one country to another. In 4-season climates one plaza may have an arboretum, that tropical greenhouse that is warm and moist in the winter... only it will have places to picnic and an alfresco café or bistro as well. 20 of the plazas will be neighbourhood places, the hub for about 200 homes in surrounding streets and backstreets. The 21st will be the village centre... taller buildings, the village hall, a large travellers inn, higher education, perhaps a non-sectarian cathedral for the important rites of passage and for worship, and a large meeting hall and village theatre.
By funding and placing an Artist Guild Hall on each plaza, the village becomes culturally enriched. Each plaza is different, as the definition of artist includes scientists, inventors, film makers, actors, musicians, painters & sculptors - in short, the full range of what author Richard Florida calls the Creative Class. The artists work in the Guild Hall and live in homes nearby. By having no mortgage on the Hall and some rooms that generate rent to cover operating costs, as well as providing purchased homes at an affordable price (it's cheaper to save a dollar than earn one), the artists can focus more of their time on their art. They can be seen at work in open parts of their Guild Hall, and on the plaza in public life, they bring a very different view of reality than the rest of us.
By building the school classrooms on the plaza, the children become part of community life, not isolated on a school campus where their picture of reality is in books, videos and from the sole adult in the room, the teacher. By providing a place for elders, that essential part of culture: the transmission of knowledge and understanding from one generation to another, is not severed, as it is in much of modern society. Later when those students become young adults, they can buy a home in the youth zone, a plaza at the louder end of the noise overlay, perhaps with dancing in the streets, and affordable homes for the young people starting out on their own. They will find jobs in the thousand work places, and hiring will be easier, as the employer will have watched them growing up on the plazas and in the streets.
By providing for workplaces around the plaza and on the primary pedestrian streets, each village is active and alive during the day. People don't leave in the morning to commute in a car or by bus to work somewhere distant - it's not a bedroom community. Even the industrial zone is within a 10-minute walk and workers will come to the nearby plazas for breaks. The public places remain alive. The places that serve the public have more customers... not the lunch bar that closes when the commuters go home, but the all-day, all evening bistro that sees its customers come in waves.. the workers for their morning coffee and pastry, the parents of babies and toddlers, the later rising elders, then the lunch crowd and so on late into the night.
There is more. Private life in a beautiful home and public life within the village offer the vibrant experience, but in the country-town villages (in rural areas where more land can be procured), the paved and walled village is surrounded by a greenbelt, preferably three times the land size as the village itself. The greenbelt will have multiple activities ranging from Nature's domains of peace, quiet and plant life, to active places... the sports fields, equestrian park, festival fields, food and flower gardens, production forests and native timber. When you need to clear your head, walk beyond the village walls, to a field of flowers, or a stand of native trees where Nature is paramount and you the visitor there to be refreshed and grounded. And, as the village is for all generations, beyond the field of flowers, it will have a cemetery to mark the passing of those who loved and were loved on this earth. The greenbelt will even have a place to convert village sewage into alcohol the farmers use for their tractors to grow the village food.
Ah, yes. Food. Think glorious, flavourful, healthy local foods. Think those heritage fruits and vegetables the supermarkets no longer sell because they do not transport well. Think foods grown not with chemicals to squeeze the extra dollar out of each acre, but foods grown for taste, health and character. If the farmers contract directly with the village, the costs that usually stand between the producer and the consumer drop out. The farmer can be paid more to grow better, the villager still pays less for better food. It's called Slow Food, an international movement that designates member communities as "Convivium" because food is about conviviality. With excellent grown foods, the village will attract food-makers: the bakers, cheese makers, brewers, canners and processors of meats and fish using time honoured methods to produce those wonderful foods found in places that still preserve their traditions. Build a new village to host those sorts of food traditions and they will come. Over time they will become new traditions with a distinctly local flavour that comes from the local water, the makeup of the local soil, the local climate and new knowledge and understanding.
There is more, but that "more" exists in your future... the future you and your fellow villagers will create as you form your unique village. While we can paint a picture to read here, in fact each village will paint its own.
Perhaps the book should have been titled "How a Village Builds Itself".
