West side of the Rockies, checking in

[Vespasian]

Hey team.

Early 20's, M, just beginning to think long-term and waiting for ERE to be delivered to my door.

I've always been attracted to doomsday scenarios, and my family had its fair share of prepper doomerism in the Y2K confusion, so I'm naturally a fellow traveler of the ERE mindset. Ideally, my life will be increasingly independent as I get land and self-sustaining systems in place, and I'm trying to pursue a white collar career to finance that ultimate and more important goal.

I first ran into this forum a few days ago while doing some reading on Ted K, whose manifesto first came across my radar a few years ago. He yanked me out of a sort of Libertarian-ish, "growth is always good," futuristic, optimistic mindset, and into pretty serious pessimism. His intellectual hobby horse was technology's power over our lives, which he saw as only developing as time goes on, ultimately reducing humans to "cogs in a machine." Setting aside his 70's revolutionary streak, I think there's good reason to think he was right. AI is gaining more Turing plausibility as we speak. Things are getting spookier on that front. Data systems will/are metastasizing into really horrible systems of leverage and control. Food is poisonous. People are increasingly antisocial and atomized (just look at suicide rates).

I want out. I'd like to get to a level where I'm bringing home some solid change doing remote work and living in a rural setting. That could be Montana or Belize. But somewhere where I have real autonomy over my life and environment, and ideally with friends and family who see things similarly. My pipe dream is to develop villages/small towns based on traditional building styles that are good for making and maintaining actual community.

Looking forward to hearing others' thoughts who have considered this stuff a lot more than I have.

[Anesau]

Welcome to ERE!

I'm a fellow beginner so I don't have any answers, but I have found the ERE website/book and a lot of entries on the Recommended Reading list valuable as you dig more into ERE.

I'm with you on a lot of your concerns, but I'm approaching it from the opposite perspective -- I'm a big fan of more-sustainable urbanism based on human-powered transport and middle-density housing. However, I still look forward to hearing about your small-town approach. Hopefully having all of us approaching from different angles will only make us more effective.

One other book I've been enjoying lately is Lean Logic (subtitle: "A dictionary for the future and how to survive it"), which it sounds like you might also be interested in.

Looking forward to reading more from you as you dig further into ERE! I'd recommend setting up an ongoing journal -- I'm not the best with mine, but it's still super helpful for keeping me on track, and the ERE community has been very helpful so far.

[mathiverse]

I'm with you on a lot of your concerns, but I'm approaching it from the opposite perspective -- I'm a big fan of more-sustainable urbanism based on human-powered transport and middle-density housing. However, I still look forward to hearing about your small-town approach. Hopefully having all of us approaching from different angles will only make us more effective.

Quick note, small towns aren't mutually exclusive with middle-density housing and walkability and bikeability. Though in the United States, you might not find small towns in this style, you can imagine a small town with a core residential area built for human powered transportation and then farmland, forests, etc surrounding the town. If you're willing to walk into town, then you can live outside the core, walkable part while still living car free. If the town is small enough, then the core will be small enough that you don't really need public transportation because you can walk or bike everywhere you want to go easily enough.

My understanding is that in some European countries this exists. I wish I could find a picture of it. I read an article a long way back that contained a picture of a town with this design somewhere.

I once visited Hallowell, ME in the United States and that place is easily walkable in the core part near the river and there are some tracts of land closer by that you could conceivably walk to the core from. The biggest problems would be: 1) going to the big grocery store which is in a big strip mall that has uncomfortable access points if you're on foot/bike. But if you don't go frequently, get rides with neighbors, grow a lot of your food, order online, pay more for the smaller grocers in the core part of town, or some other alternative, then it may not be a huge deal anyway. And 2) if you're walking to the core from outside the core, I'm not sure how gnarly the road crossings will be. That might be bad/dangerous.

[zbigi]

Though in the United States, you might not find small towns in this style, you can imagine a small town with a core residential area built for human powered transportation and then farmland, forests, etc surrounding the town. If you're willing to walk into town, then you can live outside the core, walkable part while still living car free. If the town is small enough, then the core will be small enough that you don't really need public transportation because you can walk or bike everywhere you want to go easily enough.

There's plenty of places like that in Poland. I can't imagine there aren't any in the US either - if the town is small enough, it will end quite closely from the center, and should be surrounded by farmland, pastures, forests, deserts etc (what else would small towns be surrounded with)? The problem with these towns, at least in Poland, is that most roads leading to them don't have sidewalks, so walking or biking to them will never be really safe or psychically comfortable (due to being in constant danger). This can be somewhat alleviated by the town being in complete middle of nowhere, with hardly any traffic. We don't have many places like that in Poland, but US, with its physical sparsity, should have them. Of course, living in middle of nowhere town comes with its own challenges.

[jacob]

I'll take a leap and declare that most European cities and towns are laid out using the medieval style (a radial arrangement with a center and maybe concentric "ring" roads for bigger cities, e.g. 1 for population 5000+, 2 for population 25,000+, 3 for 125,000+ after which cities tend to absorb into each other and form greater metro areas) Subdivisions are a relatively modern phenomena in Europe, maybe 1970 and later, and only built on former farm-land to make room for increasing populations.

Whereas in the US, layouts are typically on a numbered/name grid and extremely car centric. Usually, there is a "main street" surrounded by sub-divisions. The best chances for a concentric layout in the US would be New England. Look for pre-industrial areas that were well-established before 1850 and farmed with draft animals. (This is the main reason for those layouts. This way each farm had a slice of a connected pie w/o having to get around the city or traverse the land of other people.)

[zbigi]

Whereas in the US, layouts are typically on a numbered/name grid and extremely car centric. Usually, there is a "main street" surrounded by sub-divisions.

If the shape is not concentric, but rather elongated, it's even better? Check out for example Bishop, CA - there's a freaking Starbucks within couple hundred meters of end of city and farm/pasture land. The city is just very narrow along the shortest direction, which means that the Main Street can be a couple minutes of walk from the undeveloped area. Not something that's possible in a concentric layout.

[jacob]

@zbigi - Right, but people won't be able to shop w/o a car since two random stores could easily be a mile apart whereas in the concentric style, it's a short walk across the town square or plaza between any two city services.

[Anesau]

Quick note, small towns aren't mutually exclusive with middle-density housing and walkability and bikeability. Though in the United States, you might not find small towns in this style...

My bad, didn't mean to imply there were no walkable / middle-density towns. I can't comment on European design, but in the U.S. & Canada one great resource for middle-density towns is Strong Towns.

Most of the excellent walkable areas I've been to were centrally designed, so naturally-evolved walkable areas are probably even more of a rare breed around here.

[chenda]

I spent some time in Belfast Maine and it would fit the bill I think. A small compact centre where you could walk to all your amenities. There are quite a few towns in New England like that which developed before long before cars and have preserved the natural street pattern. Even the houses at the periphery were walkable into the town centre.

I totally agree with your thinking though, living in or near a small to medium size town is by far the most resilient strategy for the future. Just been near emergency medical care and law enforcement mitigates a lot of risks. Building a fortress up in the mountains, as some preppers advocate, is highly misguided imo.

[Vespasian]

Sorry, just now seeing this for some reason...

I'm with you on a lot of your concerns, but I'm approaching it from the opposite perspective -- I'm a big fan of more-sustainable urbanism based on human-powered transport and middle-density housing. However, I still look forward to hearing about your small-town approach. Hopefully having all of us approaching from different angles will only make us more effective.

I don't think that's the opposite approach so much as it is a parallel approach -- I have a lot of sympathy with what you're saying.

For me, the literal, physical environment of a place is one of if not the most important features of human organization and political telos. Nearly everything else to me is downstream. The current physical environment of the United States is suburbia. There are a lot of good things about suburbia and I don't wish to fall into the cheap shot trick of posting aerial photos of unending houses, but it is undeniably true that those labyrinthine neighborhoods fundamentally lack the sort of soul of e.g. Amsterdam, or Edinburgh, or Hobbiton, or whatever whimsical place.

I think when we focus too much on admittedly good metrics like "walkability," for example, we're losing the forest for the trees. Walkability is part and parcel of the Ideal City, yes, but what makes such a city transcendent? For the Greeks, architecture was a central expression of beauty and human greatness. Athens was more than a city -- it was a spiritual and intellectual project. It was a reification of the Elysian Fields -- heaven on earth. There, the mind and eyes were drawn upwards to Athena herself as she stood high above the city on the Acropolis. Athens was saturated with a sense of being.Utterly surreal to our way of thinking, and something that would be impossible to gather support for today.

We're leaving the realm of ERE here I think, but for me, that's what its ultimate purpose is: getting some stability and capital together to begin coordinating. I want to build. I want a place where daily life is elevated and full of meaning. I'm tired of lackluster, mediocre surroundings. I want orange groves along walking paths that wind through forests and fields to hilltop towns and marble cities. Streams running through plazas. Horses. Outdoor markets and a tight/local economy. I wouldn't be surprised if this all involved a downright Amish prohibition on a lot of tech that seems to be zapping social energy, as well as some sort of self-selecting population of like-minded people. (I acknowledge this is all thoroughly in pipe dream land, but we gotta find things to live for!)