[p2p-research] Fwd: draft 2 of Salingaros paper, last chance for debate contributions (P2P themes and urban priorities)

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear friends,

one more chance to intervene on the now adapted version of the Salingaros
essay,

please copy Nikos in your reply: salingar at gmail.com

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nikos Salingaros <salingar at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 6:33 AM
Subject: Re: draft 2 of paper
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>, Shahed Khan <
S.Khan at curtin.edu.au>, "\"Agatino Rizzo\" cityleft" <cityleft at gmail.com>,
Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com>, George Papanikolaou <
georgepapani at gmail.com>


Esteemed colleagues,

I'm extremely grateful for everyone's comments on the first draft of
my essay. I have made corrections inspired by your suggestions -- I'm
sorry that I'm not ready to answer everything. I would appreciate
further comments and criticisms before I put it on the air.

Please see the deleted sections at the end -- if there was something
you liked let me know so that I can save it, otherwise it's out
because I added much new material.

Best wishes to all,
Nikos



*P2P themes and urban priorities: Creating the thinking society.*

*Version 2.0*

*Nikos A. Salingaros.*





*Introduction.*

I would like to respond to Michel Bauwens’ article published on 3 April
2010, which examines the nature of a broad alliance that could be expected
to adopt a new P2P worldview. Bauwens correctly questions whether the old
Left/Right divide is still valid. It probably is, but it is certainly
neither the only nor the predominant divisor of society into groups with
opposing worldviews. I have been exploring contrasting viewpoints from the
perspective of art, architecture, and urbanism for some time, and would like
to suggest a view of contemporary problems. This approach may hopefully
yield insights that could be exploited in moving towards a more
humanly-adaptive P2P society.

What I have learned from Bauwens is that the political/economic spectrum
consists of a myriad of contrasting approaches, and that any simplistic
interpretation is not only wrong but also dangerous. While a transparently
simple interpretation and model is logically attractive, especially to the
scientifically-minded reader, such approaches have led to drastic errors in
the past. Examples are numerous. Peer-to-peer orientations are being debated
on both sides of the political spectrum, and any important advance has to
emerge out of finding a commonality in a set of common P2P priorities. A P2P
infrastructure is a potentially emancipatory technology that allows the free
aggregation of individuals, yet such cooperative and collective organization
is distinct from the groupthink pathology.

A central theme of the present essay is the distinction between
individuality and groupthink orientations. Peer-to-peer emerges as an
essentially networked form of individuality. In the best cases, the
socially-embedded human being is empowered by the P2P framework to create
free communities based upon diversity. Nevertheless, the danger of falling
into the groupthink mentality is also present very much in P2P practices and
society. We have to focus on the warning signs so as to be able to avoid
groupthink when it happens, or catch it as it is about to happen. Groupthink
oriented effects have occurred in collective practices of decision-making,
and mainstreaming trends now appear on the Web.

Bauwens summarizes the difference that I discuss here in other terms. In his
words, both Left and Right are divided by a centralist/decentralist dynamic,
whereas P2P re-introduces this dynamic of localization in human history.
This approach and movement runs contrary to previous decades of gigantism
and centralization. By abandoning the visible hand of centralized planning,
we move towards mutual coordination on a global scale, involving individual
and collective endeavors. While we are wary of the invisible hand of greedy
market forces that treat the individual only as something to be exploited,
localization alone would be regressive and unable to survive centralist
onslaughts that are already firmly in place. Mutual coordination through
commonality and universality, however, assumes a large enough mass that can
effectively counterbalance groupthink.



*Partitioning society between individual and groupthink populations: the
role of the expert. *

Let me divide worldviews between personal validation, versus the blind
following of groupthink. On the one side, the individual decides that he/she
possesses enough biological capability to judge complex events and
structures in the world; on the other side, an individual relegates the
ability to judge to some expert. This second alternative is influenced by
the method introduced by science, where people do not usually possess the
scientific training that would enable them to make scientific judgments.
Science requires specialization, and its applications in fields such as
engineering, medicine, etc. also define domains of specialization. The
ordinary citizen simply does not have the training to match experts in those
fields. Even in economics, something as necessary as tax-return preparation
divides individuals who can accomplish it on their own from those for whom
the task is too complex, and requires paying a tax expert to do it for them.


The authority of the expert is, however, commandeered by those intent on
building a power structure. With religion in its most oppressive forms, an
individual is told what to think. In the field of art, architecture, and
urbanism, with which I am involved, an expert class of enormous extent and
power has grown and now dictates group opinion about what is right and
wrong. Here we have a problem in that much of contemporary artistic endeavor
is felt (i.e. perceived biologically, psychologically, and viscerally) to be
noxious and damaging to our psyche. This direct impression contradicts what
the experts are saying, as it contradicts what a vast economic
infrastructure — consisting of contemporary art museums, heavy and expensive
picture books, courses in our universities, publications by world-famous
critics, international shows and competitions, prestigious awards and prizes
— uniformly supports.

The other, equally negative face of this phenomenon involves condemnation of
what the present artistic/architectural elite does not like (because it
reminds us of the past). What naturally appeals to a person on the basis of
evolved human physiology is very frequently dismissed as “kitsch” and is
harshly condemned as a sign of moral degeneracy and backwardness. I’m sorry
to say that much of the world’s traditional art, architecture, and urbanism
falls into this category of forms condemned by an immensely powerful
establishment. We therefore face a global phenomenon of cognitive
dissonance: what we feel is right is supposed to be wrong according to
authority, and what we feel is wrong is supposed to be right.

So who is justified, the expert supported by a trillion-dollar industry
centered in the world’s Art Capitals, or the folks who buy gaudy souvenirs
and paint their house interiors and exteriors with bright colors? Who can we
safely believe? I claim that it is the latter, and that we should trust our
own biological instincts above all else, not simply for any political reason
that should automatically side with the common person out of egalitarianism,
but as evidenced by our own biology. Much of the research supporting my
claims is very recent and is contained, but is not limited to, the new
discipline of Biophilia. Science is coming to bear, not on the side of the
expert established through hegemony, but on the side of the ordinary human
being. The problem is that this clarification comes several decades too
late, only after a monolithic power structure has built itself up. The power
the establishment wields is enough to silence scientific results.

As is clear from medicine and technology, experts are absolutely necessary
in our society, yet to be useful they must be guides and helpers. Experts
have to be oriented towards the interests of the citizens and civil society
to help make sure that society makes the right decisions. The problem is how
to recognize an expert with society’s interest in mind, and to distinguish
him/her from someone who offers either faulty advice or a deliberately
biased point of view that promotes a special interest or ideology. This is
an unanswered question, and has been so throughout our history.



*Patterns check the validity of expert opinion.*

I suggest a method of checking the credentials of any expert who offers
advice on architecture and urbanism. For other disciplines I cannot venture
to say. Since the built environment touches human life in an immediate and
visceral sense, we can apply the Pattern method. A Pattern as derived by
Christopher Alexander is a discovered solution that works, repeated
throughout human society and in different ages and cultures, and is often
found in totally distinct cultural contexts. For example, the Pattern “Light
on two sides of every room” is found in the most pleasant rooms all over the
world independently of any other factor. Alexander and his colleagues
catalogued 253 such discovered patterns in 1977, and provided scientific
explanations for about half of them. For the rest, they simply stated them
based upon their phenomenological recurrence.

An architectural and urban pattern combines geometry with biological and
social function: i.e. it combines human behavior, movement, health,
subconscious physiological response, and life with a fairly general
geometrical condition that encompasses an infinite number of specific
situations. The patterns apply to create new configurations that share an
essential basis but which can all be distinct in their details. In this way,
a pattern is not a rigid template to copy every time, but rather an
applicable template that generates new solutions every time. (The Appendix
to this essay reprints a review of Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” that I
wrote for Amazon.com).

While Alexander’s patterns are extremely useful in empowering groups of
people to design and build their own living environment, the idea of pattern
languages is more powerful still. It is possible to undertake a program of
“pattern mining”, whereby a society works to discover socio-geometric
patterns in architecture and urbanism, which it then documents for
posterity. The patterns can be used whenever needed to partially guarantee a
more human environment. We have already seen the patterns movement in
software, where Alexander’s ideas have been applied to derive catalogues of
software patterns; patterns of software development; patterns of information
technology; etc. Just as in architecture and urbanism, software patterns are
solutions that can be re-used over and over again.

The value of what an expert is offering can be checked against evolved
patterns documented by a society. If the expert’s proposals differ too
radically from the patterns, then people should be extremely cautious in
adopting guidelines that might totally change their societal structure.
There is an inherent conservatism in the patterns, which can save a society
from disastrous re-orientations that erase what was good in their past and
present. Change for the good could come fairly quickly, but within a pattern
language change has to be evolved, and it very rarely offers a complete
break with the past. I know that people are extremely eager to jettison old
practices and embrace the promise of the new, with its utopian visions of
solving all problems with one radical stroke. We know, however, that this
never works as promised.

In implementing a complete break with architectural and urban patterns, our
society (ever since the 1920s) has not succeeded in generating living
environments and a human-scale urban fabric. We are now seeing a return to
past typologies such as pedestrian city centers, a move away from gigantism,
restricting exclusively high-speed traffic, abandoning monofunctional zoning
in cities, encouraging mixed-use urbanism, implementing urban densification
on the human scale, etc.  All of these are very hopeful signs of a progress
towards a new type of living city that re-uses older traditional solutions
in a contemporary context. We should encourage the many trends and
initiatives that go in a positive direction of enhancing quality of life in
a biological context. Within this urban movement there are also anti-urban
solutions that the ordinary citizen confuses with genuine solutions. Again,
the method we can use to distinguish between a good and a harmful solution
is by how far it connects to known patterns.

One last word on anti-patterns. Just because a typology has been used for
some time does not make it a pattern. Some errors are seductive. We have
examples of anti-patterns that were wrong to begin with, and remain wrong in
every subsequent application. Anti-patterns are more often studied in
software: they have been catalogued for the benefit of software engineers
who can thus identify and avoid adopting an anti-pattern (and thus
compromise their project). The same holds true in architecture and urbanism,
where certain typologies on widely different scales have persisted since the
1920s even though they generate malaise in human users. One of these is the
isolated glass-and-steel skyscraper sitting in a parking lot, lawn, or hard
plaza. Any society that drives itself to extinction or self-destruction is
following some form of tradition that has tragically incorporated
anti-patterns. This shift is marked by the transition into a groupthink
society.



* *

*P2P and pattern thinking.*

P2P principles play a key role in two distinct stages of the pattern
approach to society and architecture. First, a pattern is evolved through
collective action by many individuals and over many generations. Especially
as building a useful ad pleasant environment was the central aim of
architecture for all generations previous to our own, typologies and
innovations tended to evolve into the most life-enhancing solutions, limited
only by the constraints of available technology and materials. A pattern is
therefore the result of collective action, with many people contributing to
its development. Patterns were copied and adapted to different
circumstances: those universally applicable were used unaltered, whereas
patterns dependent upon specific situations were adapted to fit.

Second, using pattern languages to design and build our environment depends
upon the P2P ethic. Design information is open to all, and patterns
encourage collaborative design and building. Ever since Alexander’s book in
1977, architectural patterns have spread informally, primarily through
peer-to-peer networks outside formal architecture practice and academia.
Those who have gone through architecture school in the past several decades
know that Pattern Language is not taught as a standard part of the
curriculum. The reason is that the empowering aspect of pattern languages
contradicts the central message of contemporary fashionable architecture:
that the architect is a lone genius who possesses secret (i.e. proprietary)
knowledge about design, which can never be shared with ordinary people. Even
the architect’s clients are supposed to be ignorant, and have to pay
exorbitant sums of money for an “original” architectural creation they
themselves can never understand.

By contrast, people working with patterns begin with the assumption that
anyone can understand how to design and build rooms, houses, urban spaces,
and cities. All they need is some technical information, a few rules of what
not to do, and those rules are derived from past practice (and learning from
past mistakes). Design patterns are meant to be freely shared. The larger
the project, the more we need technical assistance, but this has to do with
technology and implementation, not with the design itself. Alexander has
always emphasized that societies used their collective intelligence to build
during every period of human history in the past, and only stopped doing so
in the mid-20C.

Therefore, even as pattern thinking should be correctly interpreted as a
continuation with older traditional design methods, it does not continue the
system now in place in the wealthy countries. There exists a sharp
distinction between the old (20C industrialized and globalized top-down
urbanism) and the new (P2P design by empowered individuals helping each
other). Informal settlements comprising a large percentage of what is built
today will experience a smooth transition as P2P and pattern methods can
drastically improve their quality. Unsustainable fantasies of high
technology imposed upon a country by a global financial elite have found
their natural and physical limits, however. There can be no continuation
because those represent such a radical negation of human biology and
sensibility that they are impervious to adaptation.

Business implementations of the model I am describing all define a commons
with market-value added on top of the free resource. Assuming that a pattern
language for design is available (people use Alexander’s patterns plus a
repertoire of patterns that they have themselves developed), an individual
or community can hire someone with experience in implementing the patterns
to help save time and costly mistakes. The design information is mostly
free, and the client pays for expert advice. The New Urbanist Smart Code,
which grew out of patterns, is available free online. Many New Urbanists
offer their services to calibrate (i.e. adjust the code to local
circumstances) and to help in its implementation. That is how they make
their money. Again, the design resource is free and the profit comes from
the added market-value. I should mention that the architectural
establishment slanders New Urbanism by labeling it as only for the wealthy;
however, my new urbanist friends and I have already applied those ideas to
help in building and upgrading informal settlements and social housing.

* *

*Distinction between individual/groupthink and Left/Right partitions. *

The individual/groupthink partition defines a distinct political divide from
the old Left/Right partition. I will look for overlaps and contradictions.
Justifying the feelings of common people against an elitist society that
manipulates the media is a classic responsibility of the political Left. But
this same idea is just another side of the insistence of the political Right
that the individual should have the ability to decide for him/herself, and
not be bullied into accepting a generic world imposed by the majority
society which could represent the lowest common denominator. In this crucial
point of individualism, the Left and Right partially intersect.

It is also important to point out that both Right and Left have historically
encouraged the partition as I have just defined it. The Right is often
enamored with expensive things and the latest fashions, and this consumerist
urge is precisely what drives inhuman art, architecture, and urbanism.
Experts arise within, and are promoted by the unstoppable engine of global
consumerism, initially very much a phenomenon of the Right. There is a lot
of money to be made from promoting useless and even noxious products,
whether they be art objects, fashionable-looking buildings, or entire new
cities designed by a fashionable architect (who may in fact have absolutely
no grasp of the principles of urbanism). The media are controlled by the
market, which itself exists in a self-feeding cycle within the global
consumerist engine.

The Left is not blameless, however. For much of its history, it has fallen
prey to an ideology that falsely couples liberation and progress to abstract
images of a future modernity, even long after such images turn out to be
inhuman and dysfunctional in application. Well-meaning progressives bought
into the promise of mass-production, especially its more noxious (and
unnecessary) aspect of the machine aesthetic. We are therefore still wedded
to utopian architectural and urban typologies of the 1920s, promised at that
time to be liberating for the oppressed working class, and implemented by
both democratic and totalitarian governments of both Left and Right. Every
application has been a dismal failure, yet our universities continue to
teach the “socially liberating” ideal of the Bauhaus aesthetic as it applies
to lamps, windows, buildings, and entire cities.

The Left was initially complicit in the sins of modernity, with which it
shared the same presuppositions. It blindly believed in abstract social
progress and social engineering from above. Individuals on the Left,
however, soon responded with strong critiques of this narrow image-based or
ideology-based modernity as it led to a centralist dynamic that undid
individual freedoms and made individual input redundant. As Bauwens cogently
proposes, the healthy solution sees the state as a mere vehicle for
coexistence: a partner and servant of civil society, rather than the master
of the strategy of social change. The problem is to influence the state
itself to assume this role. Bauwens warns against the extreme anti-statist
reaction of libertarians and instead encourages collaboration among the
disparate threads that create a civil society.

Traditional architecture and urbanism tend to be condemned by some of the
creators of the groupthink society, and this is often done in the harshest
possible terms. Applying negative meme encapsulation, the
globally-controlled media terrorize society with the warning that any
traditional-looking major building such as a public building, theater,
school, museum, or organization headquarters, and historical-looking urban
fabric, are an immediate threat to liberty and even to technological
progress. The majority of people buy that lie because of media conditioning.
The Left has been unfortunately complicit in condemning traditional
architecture and urbanism because of a tragic misinterpretation that
conflates social forces with abstract images.

At the same time, however, unsustainable suburban sprawl that drove the
recent (2009) financial collapse is based upon building great numbers of
isolated houses that look very traditional. Here, the most superficial
images of tradition are abused to sell a defective and shoddily-built
product to the gullible masses who deep down yearn for some more traditional
connection to their world. Urbanism that isolates people, destroys
agricultural land, and wastes resources has become a corollary of the junk
food industry, driven as it is by images and advertizing. Therefore, despite
what seems to be a traditional movement in mass-produced residences, this is
really an image covering an unsustainable and energy-wasting despoliation of
the natural environment.



*P2P principles reinforce the individual society. *

Before continuing with my analysis of the individual/unthinking partition of
society, I would just like to mention in what way P2P practices and ideas
help to balance out the tension between the two parts. Readers will
immediately offer that improved education would prevent ordinary,
intelligent people from following obviously restrictive and oppressive
ideologies. People reason for themselves. And yet, we see the same
phenomenon repeating throughout history, where pseudo-religious cults and
extremist political movements drag entire nations along in a nihilistic
frenzy. Many classic cases involved societies with a highly-educated
citizenry. Clearly, education is not enough to combat the phenomenon of
brainwashing, especially as today, a major sector of Western economy
(advertising and political campaigns) is devoted to it.

P2P practices, on the other hand, have both the correct appeal and the right
message to accomplish the job. Since its inception in the slightly
subversive world of open software, P2P has caught on with those who wish to
sidestep a monolithic power establishment. Education in the P2P arena offers
the perception that its content lies outside, and is thus potentially far
more valuable, than information pumped through the regular channels by an
establishment interested primarily in controlling the minds of citizens.
While this may be an extreme view, it nevertheless concords with the
open-source movement that liberates the tools of Information and
Communications Technologies so that the rest of the world outside the global
elite can profit from them.

The basis for P2P philosophy requires INDIVIDUALS helping each other, and
its idealization is achieved when this multiple connectivity finally creates
a “collective intelligence”. I hold the view that this type of collective
thinking process is very different from the psychology of crowds that occurs
when masses of people are driven by an ideology and groupthink. As
previously mentioned, the fierce individualism of conservative thought
combines to generate a higher level of group intelligence that is
participatory rather than simply blindly reinforcing a single message. This
collective intelligence among peers hopefully possesses a vastly improved
analytical skill, which permits it to analyze social manipulation such as
that practiced by the mass media. P2P society keeps its components as
individuals, whereas consumerist society converts them into one unthinking
mass.

Patterns represent the workings of collective intelligence over several
generations to evolve socio-geometrical solutions. Assuming that a pattern
has been accurately documented (discovered and not invented), it stands for
a far greater authority than current architectural fashion. A style that is
the idea of a single architect, although it may be copied by others, is in
fact popular usually because it is supported by a powerful establishment.
When there is conflict between architectural patterns and an individual
architect, paradoxically, the pattern is the one corresponding to free
aggregate individual thought because it is validated in P2P terms. By
contrast, the ideas of a famous architect lack collective validation, and
are supported instead by groupthink abetted by the controlled global media.



*Urbanism among the groupthink society. *

Beginning in the 1920s, the sleek, mechanical images of a new future defined
a built environment made of glass curtain walls, steel frames, reinforced
concrete, and the isolated free-standing high-rise building. Neither the
Left nor the Right questioned these typologies, as massive construction put
up apartment blocks and office towers from Magnitogorsk, to Detroit, to
Teheran. These stubbornly neat geometrical visions contrasted with
owner-built housing that is more tailored to human sensibilities, though
most often constructed with very poor materials. Self-built settlements are
uniformly condemned as not conforming to the accepted image of progress (in
truth that of reformist 1920’s Europe). Governments of every political
orientation make it their determined objective to bulldoze informal cities
and replace them with neat-looking but inhuman tower blocks. This is one of
the most serious actions against P2P urbanism, since participatory building
occurs only when it is supported by local help and connectivity, and never
by implementation from above.

The philosophical Right offers a bulwark against this propaganda, because it
continues to value older, traditional forms. Perhaps valid for a subset of
the right reasons, conservatives maintain an appreciation of traditional
things, and do not rush to dispose of everything old just because a
political ideology declares that such a sacrifice is necessary for progress.
Conservatives are more immune to this urge to jettison all that has evolved
in our past; they maintain the belief that the past is connected to the
living present and cannot simply be thrown away. Here, however, we run into
the collusion of the economic Right with power (with identical results to
the collusion of the Left with power): nothing is sacred if it poses an
obstacle to making a vast profit.

It is not necessary to convince those on the Right of the sacred value of
preserving the great human achievements of the past, but less easy to
underscore the value of folk art and architecture and irregular urbanism.
Those are too closely tied to the poor, and so do not often gain adequate
support from the Right. And yet, the salvation of the built environment
requires for the Right to accept and embrace the needs of human beings from
all classes. “High” and “folk” art and architecture meet, interact, and
reinforce each other, driven by bottom-up forces playing out in the
framework of patterns, while all of this is driven by the upswell of human
sentiment. When art is rooted in humanity rather than intellect, it can
better resist the development of sick and sadistic expressions that have
become fashionable in recent decades.

World production of vernacular art, architecture, and urbanism tends to come
from those on the Left, simply because they are less well off. But the
problem here is that these same people aspire to values instilled in their
minds by the globally-controlled media, and thus refuse to value what they
themselves produce. They are easily manipulated in a global game of
unsustainable consumerism that profits only the multinationals. The goal of
consumerism is to undervalue what can be produced easily in a P2P society,
and to create a dependence upon a proprietary product. Therefore, the world
today has almost entirely been taken over by an elite that is converting it
into the groupthink society, driving global consumerism and the economic
engine that supplies it. Most people have no qualms about the massive
indoctrination that is necessary to maintain the global consumerist society.
At the same time, however, we are wasting the earth’s resources.



*The P2P cityscape utilizes our latest technology.*

Lest the reader get the wrong impression that I am promoting a return to the
18C city and the abandonment of all technological progress, let me clear
things up. World cities before the 20C were unhealthy places, and most
remain so still. We might delude ourselves by limiting our attention to
small portions of wealthy cities in the Western World, but a large portion
of humanity lives under terrible sanitary conditions. Fortunately, we now
possess technological resources to make a tremendous advancement that would
enhance the quality of life for a major part of the world’s urban
population. For example, the Grameen Bank has lifted millions out of poverty
by giving out a very large number of very small loans. Technological
advances such as portable telephones and low-cost local power generation
have solved problems that plagued humanity for millennia. The latest
technological advances can be applied in a bottom-up fashion to benefit
individuals. This small-scale approach helps much more than does
technological gigantism, which normally ignores the individual.

What I am proposing is that we follow architectural and urban patterns, that
we respect the geometry of the living city (i.e. the traditional
human-scaled urban geometry), and not try to replace living human fabric
with utopian images of a shiny future. Instead, use a P2P approach to
upgrade our cities, driven by crowdsourcing and freely-shared information on
how human beings can live better. Useful expert advice does not come from
the architecture critic who proposes replacing owner-built urban fabric by
giant skyscrapers built out of imported glass and steel, but we should
instead accept advice on how to apply patterns and small-scale technology to
fix what we have. “Official” information sources tend to be mouthpieces of
very powerful political and economic interests, and those have the most to
gain from the large-scale approach that ignores human scale.

The key aspect of P2P society is diffuse non-expert public involvement. P2P
can play a crucial role to open people’s eyes, heretofore constrained
(either by custom or by circumstance) to follow expert advice that may be
destructive. Now as never before so many people have access to essential
information, including patterns, that they can use to change their world
into something better for all. While Alexander’s patterns are not available
free online, all it takes is one person familiar with the Pattern Language
to bring one copy of the book into a community and to help plan their
future. A few volunteers can educate people around the globe on the value of
thinking about patterns, using the internet as the distribution medium. The
same is true for bottom-up help when an honest NGO comes to install local
power sources and infrastructure using available labor and materials.



*Protecting the natural resources of the world. Love and ownership of the
commons. *

I would like to explore the foundations of a P2P approach connecting to and
eventually protecting our world. First and foremost, the basic concept of
the commons needs to be established by physicality, not ideology. In my
experience with urban forms and spaces, people do not identify with a
particular place unless they feel they own it in some way. For that to
occur, they must take emotional ownership. I believe that this is possible
only if there is a shared feeling of love for the physical object, and even
then only when this feeling is quite intense. If we love something, we care
to preserve it. We can love something that is not exclusively ours, and then
it becomes a common good. Much of the time, we love something that we have
participated personally in creating.

Consider the urban square of a village built by its inhabitants, the small
church or temple in a village also built by its inhabitants, the great
cathedral that was nevertheless the common endeavor of the people in a city
for over a century. In all these cases, the users “own” the structure
because they helped to create it, and they love it for the same reason. They
will protect it against damage and destruction because they connect to it
emotionally, psychologically, and viscerally.

We don’t love the modern church designed by a “name” architect because it is
not part of us; it is alien. Its geometry and surfaces contradict its claim
of being sacred through an unmistakable visceral message that triggers a
negative physiological response in our bodies. It has been sold to us by a
corrupt media through indoctrination, in a political power game where a
servile group is proud to execute the wishes of the dominant elite. In the
same way, we don’t love the hard alien plaza designed by another “name”
architect, nor the giant and absurd abstract sculpture that occupies and
spoils what could have been a very nice urban space. None of these objects
can ever become part of the “commons”, despite the enormous media expense
trying to convince us of their worth in ideological terms based upon an
ephemeral fashion.

Shahed Khan poses the disturbing question of whether the society that
collaborates to collectively build a Mosque or Cathedral is driven by
ideology and groupthink. The people are definitely motivated by a shared
belief, and the resulting structure is a common good to be enjoyed by
members of the majority society. I believe that the end result is one of
love: a worshipper loves his/her temple, and even more so if he/she has
helped to build it. The glorious religious structures throughout our history
give an incredibly intense biophilic feedback that nourishes the user.
Someone from another religion experiences this positive biophilic effect
(Christians visiting a 15C Mosque or Hindu temple are moved emotionally;
Muslims and Hindus visiting a Medieval Cathedral are similarly moved;
everyone visiting the Parthenon, etc.). Groupthink, by contrast, is most
often associated with hate, not love. It polarizes one group of people
against another, it denigrates and condemns the other’s work by denying the
love that went into producing it, and by denying the commonality all human
beings have for the things they love even as those things may differ.
Groupthink channels human forces towards destruction.

As Bauwens reminds us, the commons can also be virtual, such as an online
community that shares a commonly-created commons of software or design
depository. A prime candidate for such a commons would be an online Pattern
Language. The incredible growth of social networks testifies to the human
need to connect, and to the feeling of belonging to each other and to a
“meeting place” that is easy to get to (and which enables the interpersonal
meetings to take place). An online website/forum is an example of a
successful and concrete collective infrastructure.

Another dimension of love and ownership develops over time, after several
generations have experienced connection to a particular place or building.
Our ancestors could have built it, so ownership and love of that place or
building runs in our family. Traditional societies value the continuity of
connection that establishes an indirect link with our ancestors, and the
same link continues into the future to include our descendants.
Conservatives place a high value on this continuity that links generations
of people across time through the intermediary of particular shared places.
Unfortunately, here the Left is less helpful because of its urge to undo
past society so as to move forward towards real or imagined progress. When
the past is seen as a barrier to emancipation and advancement, there is
little to do to convince a society of the value of preserving at least some
continuity.

The Left/Right divide dissolves in a dangerous manner when the groupthink
society is brainwashed into a fanatical hatred of its own past. In a
phenomenon that is now referred to as Ecophobia, both Left and Right have
turned against their built heritage and unthinkingly embrace images of
buildings that are totally inhuman. The simple necessity of demolition in
historic city centers in order to erect these new structures has spawned a
propaganda war against historical and traditional built form, with the aim
of replacing them. All the techniques developed in the advertising industry
are applied in a clever manner to promote alien images of new buildings,
while at the same time the complementary techniques of negative meme
encapsulation, developed in the military rather than in Madison Avenue, are
applied to condemn historical and vernacular architecture and urbanism. The
“outdated” geometry is marked for elimination, and the people are convinced
by the media of the necessity of introducing as rapidly as possible the new
“signs of progress” that are the products of the global architectural elite.




*Scales that transcend the nation state.*

Some questions go far beyond the topic of this essay, yet they will have to
be addressed elsewhere. P2P society transcends the nation state, freely
crossing national boundaries, since its members share more with like-minded
citizens of another country than with the power establishment of their own
country. P2P does not have a national border. The original dream of the Left
in uniting the working classes of the world here takes on a different
meaning, but one that could be equally threatening to notions of national
sovereignty. Conservatives need not be alarmed, however, because P2P
empowers individuals towards a better quality of life inside their own
country and within their own society harmoniously, and is not directed
towards world revolution. The only revolution concerns itself with
liberating access to useful information.

The basic idea of P2P and people helping themselves and each other
encourages co-existence among different groups that would otherwise be
competing for ideological reasons, and for resources made artificially
scarce by central mismanagement. I believe therefore that the P2P worldview
helps the situation of minorities within a majority society. At the same
time, if people choose to follow the conservative/progressive alliance that
I’m proposing here, national identity becomes a positive factor. Getting
away from the groupthink nationalism that drives countries to aggression
against each other, recognizing national cultural achievements — the
opposite of the homogenization promoted by the global media — is a
sustaining source of national pride. Much of the fabric of national pride
has been erased by globalization that replaces local achievements with
nondescript and generic commercial products.

Shahed Khan and Agatino Rizzo raise the point that the individual/groupthink
dichotomy fails to bring minority groups into the debate. It is true that a
dominant group exercises hegemony over other groups in a society, and that
dominance is exacerbated in a groupthink mentality. Nevertheless, I believe
that a P2P approach, by trying to improve the quality of life through
cooperation, offers much better prospects for a positive form of society
that is inclusive and which can celebrate diversity. We see the successful
comingling in multicultural societies all around the world whenever a
society values all factors leading to improving the quality of life through
biological feedback.



*Conclusion: towards a new alliance. *

I hope to have helped make clear part of what is required for a P2P society.
Doubtless, we are only at the beginning of thinking about this effort,
making plans for the first implementations, and there is much more that will
need to evolve and develop. But we can summarize the first steps to take
towards this goal. My discussion has been ranging between urbanism and
politics, and certainly does not include the other significant components
that are crucial for a P2P restructuring of institutions into a thinking
society.

The conclusion is obvious: a consumerist frenzy driven by a massively global
economic-political establishment is eating up the earth’s resources. In
order to function, it had to create a groupthink society, and it continues
to do so through its absolute control of the global media. This much is
immediately grasped by part of the Left, which eagerly embraces P2P ideas
because it sees in them an alignment with its own anti-establishment ideals.
Nevertheless, while these points are necessary they are not sufficient to
develop a new P2P society.

The other component of P2P is the re-utilization of patterns of geometry, of
socio-economic actions, of tradition, which have worked in the past. Most
(though certainly not all) of these traditional patterns are intrinsically
sustainable because they arose out of necessity, and apply on the human
scale. Here we are in the traditional domain of the Right. The Right
preserves the essential respect of traditions by making them sacred. The
cultural baggage of conservatives includes not only an essential
understanding of what is worth saving, but also the worldview that gives an
individual the strength of character to oppose the massive brainwashing that
is converting the world into a groupthink population. The Left might be
surprised to realize that it needs essential tools from the Right in order
to complete the basic requirements for a P2P society.

We can profitably argue the viewpoint that the world has been divided
according to a new partitioning, which is non-political. The old Left/Right
partitioning is not very useful in implementing a new P2P society. Any
component of either side of the old political divide that supports P2P can
and should be incorporated into a new worldview. As soon as the world
realizes this, it will become easier to cross over the old political divide
in order to implement new ideas towards a sustainable society.



*Acknowledgments*: Let me mention that my principal influences are
Christopher Alexander, Michel Bauwens, and Roger Scruton. I am most grateful
to constructive criticism on earlier drafts of this essay by Michel Bauwens,
Shahed Khan, Ryan Lanham, and Agatino Rizzo. I have endeavored to utilize
all of their comments.



*BIBLIOGRAPHY*:

Christopher Alexander, S. Ishikawa, M. Silverstein, M. Jacobson, I.
Fiksdahl-King & S. Angel (1977) *A Pattern Language*, Oxford University
Press, New York.

Michel Bauwens (2010) “With whom can we work together: is it possible to
ally progressives and conservatives around P2P themes and priorities?”, *P2P
Foundation*, 3 April 2010 <
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/with-whom-can-we-work-together-is-it-possible-to-ally-progressives-and-conservatives-around-p2p-themes-and-priorities/2010/04/03>.


Andrés Duany, William Wright & Sandy Sorlien (2009) Smart Code, Version 9.2,
*Duany-Plater-Zyberk* <http://smartcodecentral.com/smartfilesv9_2.html>.

Stephen R. Kellert, Judith Heerwagen & Martin Mador, Editors (2008) *Biophilic
Design: the Theory, Science and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life*,
John Wiley, New York, 2008. My contribution is Chapter 5 co-authored with
Kenneth Masden: “Neuroscience, the Natural Environment, and Building
Design”, pages 59-83.

Nikos A. Salingaros (2000) “The Structure of Pattern Languages”, *Architectural
Research Quarterly*, 4, pages 149-161. Reprinted as Chapter 8 of *Principles
of Urban Structure*, Techne Press, Amsterdam, Holland, 2005.





*APPENDIX*: Review of Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” for
Amazon.com. Originally published online in 1998, it then mysteriously
disappeared from the Amazon site (something I have never seen with other
book reviews). I had to re-load it in 2007.

“*One of the great books of the century*. Alexander tried to show that
architecture connects people to their surroundings in an infinite number of
ways, most of which are subconscious. For this reason, it was important to
discover what works; what feels pleasant; what is psychologically
nourishing; what attracts rather than repels. These solutions, found in much
of vernacular architecture, were abstracted and synthesized into the *Pattern
Language* about 20 years ago. Unfortunately, although he did not say it
then, it was obvious that contemporary architecture was pursuing design
goals that are almost the opposite of what was discovered in the pattern
language. For this reason, anyone could immediately see that Alexander’s
findings invalidated most of what practicing architects were doing at that
time. The *Pattern Language* was identified as a serious threat to the
architectural community. It was consequently suppressed. Attacking it in
public would only give it more publicity, so it was carefully and
off-handedly dismissed as irrelevant in architecture schools, professional
conferences and publications.

Now, 20 years later, computer scientists have discovered that the
connections underlying the Pattern Language are indeed universal, as
Alexander had originally claimed. His work has achieved the highest esteem
in computer science. Alexander himself has spent the last twenty years in
providing scientific support for his findings, in a way that silences all
criticism. He published this in the four-volume work entitled *The Nature of
Order*. His new results draw support from complexity theory, fractals,
neural networks, and many other disciplines on the cutting edge of science.
After the publication of this new work, our civilization has to seriously
question why it has ignored the *Pattern Language* for so long, and to face
the blame for the damage that it has done to our cities, neighborhoods,
buildings, and psyche by doing so.”



*DELETED SECTIONS: PLEASE TELL ME IF SOMEONE WANTS ME TO USE ANY MATERIAL
FROM HERE.*



*Problems with political and moral corruption. *

*Today, most world governments support the dominant cultural elite without
any reservations; indeed, the most powerful governments (the US, Western
Europe, Japan, etc.) put their own considerable economic might behind the
indoctrination machine. Other nations in the world fall roughly into three
groups. 1) Nations that receive financial and military assistance from the
West go along so as not to jeopardize those sources. 2) Nations that are
openly hostile to the West react to its world domination by rejecting its
commercial arm. 3) More independent countries which try to play both sides.
The second group correctly perceives the danger that Western brainwashing
poses for their own tradition and culture. There is hope that P2P solutions
can be developed in those countries that do not wish to lose their heritage
to Western consumerism. In some cases, however, a P2P solution for them is
no closer, because their society has a top-down power structure that is not
very different in essence from the Western model. *

*This scenario turns into a tragedy that transcends the P2P society, for the
following reason. The West has some enormously useful lessons to teach the
rest of the world in terms of democratic systems of government with built-in
checks and balances. When the lessons of democracy are accompanied by the
selling of consumerist images and products, however, those willing to
embrace the first are turned off by the second. How can you ever trust a
world power that is trying to sell you glass-and-steel skyscrapers, which
you know are extremely expensive to run and maintain in most climates, and
which will destroy the traditional urban and social fabrics of your society?
In many cases, the situation is even worse: corrupt and totalitarian states
eagerly make deals with the global consumerist sector while carefully
keeping democratic messages out of their country. They import the worst that
the West has to offer. *

*Political affiliation of individuals has nothing to do with professional
politicians. Having followed closely top-down inhumanly-scaled projects that
continued through changing administrations, I can vouch for the fact that
politicians are concerned primarily about power. They will therefore
initiate an inhuman project in order to satisfy a large local building firm
or an international consortium, and this leads to disaster. The motivation
behind monstrously-scaled projects follows because the larger the project,
the more power there is to concentrate. This is the opposite of the P2P
philosophy. As long as this practice of gigantism continues — and I see no
indication that it can stop — P2P will remain an elusive dream. In more than
one instance, I have witnessed a government fall in part because it
sponsored a monstrous building project against popular opinion, and the
opposition was elected on the promise of stopping it. Once in power,
however, the new administration pursues the old project with the same zeal,
simply replacing the previous government in a cozy deal with the
builders/contractors. *

*The proposals we (architects and urbanists who work with P2P principles)
make for human-scaled social housing, preserving the historic city centers
from alien intrusions, micro-surgery in the sprawling European, Asian, and
Latin American suburbs to create living urban fabric on the human scale, are
so far ignored. Participatory design is simply not on the agenda of the
powerful local construction companies and hence it is uninteresting to the
vast majority of politicians that are beholden to them. To truly implement a
P2P urbanism, we will have to change the unhealthy concentration of brute
economic and political power that now controls all such projects. *

*I do not see at this time how the political system could be re-aligned so
as to support P2P urbanism. The disappointing examples I refer to above
occurred in separate European democracies, so evidently having an elected
system of government is not enough to apply P2P principles. Of course, in a
totalitarian system, the situation is far worse, yet we don’t normally
expect any progress under those conditions. Paradoxically, where we see some
hope for the present is in nations or specific regions that have very little
central government control, so that P2P principles can be freely
implemented. This is already being realized in the developing world. Many
regions in the world where this one condition is met, however, suffer from
lawlessness and instability as well, which preclude any stable society from
functioning. *

* *

*The threat from the deception of high-tech sustainability. *

*The global power system has learned ever more clever and deceptive
techniques with which to continue its world hegemony. Perhaps the greatest
threat faced by P2P urbanism today lies in the nightmarish “sustainable”
cities and urban projects proposed and built by the power elite. The global
system has picked up our own sustainable vocabulary and has used it to
re-package their extraordinarily expensive and fundamentally unsustainable
products (glass and steel towers, monstrous buildings, industrial-style
cities in the middle of nowhere) as “sustainable”. The trick consists of
using some technological gimmicks, and coming up with numbers for energy
saved through having some solar panels and double glazing on the buildings’
glass façades. But this is a fundamental deception, since the city or
country that buys one of these eco-monsters becomes totally dependent on the
consumerist energy system. *

*As the companies selling these industrial products are the major
multinationals tied into the power of Western states, it is extremely
difficult to counter the stream of propaganda that is devoted to their
promotion. Also, the selling occurs at the highest government levels, far
above any decision-making that can be influenced by ordinary citizens. Even
in the few cases where no obvious corruption takes place, the client nation
blindly trusts the giant Western-based multinationals to deliver a
sustainable product. At the same time, the controlled media acting as a
mouthpiece for the multinationals is directed to praise the client nation
for its “great foresight” and its adoption of “progressive urbanism”. Since
national pride is involved here, even the most blatant urban disaster will
not be discussed openly. Maybe we will read of a new city that proved to be
totally dysfunctional, or too expensive to run, after several decades have
passed, but certainly not sooner. *

*The Left was (and is) enamored of large-scale industrial solutions,
industrial cities, massive five-year building plans, etc. Despite all good
intentions, these proved to be totally dehumanizing because of their
ignoring human psychological needs and the human scale. Those are now
re-appearing as neo-imperialist urban applications, with a newly-polished
high-tech glamour. I’m sure that many persons continue to support these
projects as a continuation of the false promises of technology solving every
social problem (a dangerous proposition but not fatal in itself) made toxic,
however, by skewing everything towards the very largest scale. Old-style
centralized industrialization is the antithesis of P2P. *

*By contrast, P2P sustainability uses small-scale technology linked in an
essential manner to traditional socio-geometric patterns that connect a
society to itself and to its place. This approach enjoys the natural kinship
of bottom-up entrepreneurial initiatives such as the Grameen Bank. We begin
from the smallest scale and move up through increasing scales. P2P empowers
the individual to work and act within a society in a way that benefits that
society. Just as in any stable complex system, different layers of
functionality are added on increasingly larger scales, yet the working whole
requires a balance of mechanisms acting on all scales, interacting
horizontally as well as vertically. The new techno-cities, tragically, are
designed to work on only one scale — the largest scale, designed as an
abstract sculpture on the drawing table by a fashionable architect — in
which case they may not work at all. *




-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
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