[p2p-research] Fwd: [P2P-URBANISM WA] brief history

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *Nikos Salingaros* <salingar at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 12:26 AM
Subject: [P2P-URBANISM WA] brief history
To: p2p-urbanism-world-atlas at googlegroups.com


Hello everyone,

Livia Piccinini has asked me to write a brief history of p2p-urbanism
as a companion piece to our definition. Since I make some polemic
statements (that I don't wish to retract!) I prefer to remain the sole
author, but welcome everyone's input, suggestions, and corrections.
I'm sure I have left out some important things.

Best wishes,
Nikos
**
**
*A BRIEF HISTORY OF P2P-URBANISM.*

*Nikos A. Salingaros (September 2010).*

* *

*P2P (peer-to-peer) Urbanism* joins ideas coming from the open-source
software movement together with new thinking by urbanists oriented towards
satisfying human needs. The primary organizer of the wide variety of
developing P2P concepts is the *P2P Foundation* headed by Michel Bauwens.
Urbanists who joined this movement represent a heterogeneous group
consisting of individuals championing collaborative design and user
participation in planning; New Urbanists tied to the commercial US movement
of that name; followers of Christopher Alexander; and others. Alexander has
always taught that the user is the best judge of the adaptability of a
design, which supports P2P but runs counter to top-down formal planning.
There has always been a small and underutilized intersection of these two
groups (P2P thinkers and urbanists/planners) that has promoted participatory
events outside the official planning system. Those urban interventions have
tended to be temporary rather than permanent because of the difficulty of
implementing changes in the built fabric. New Urbanists do construct pieces
of city, however. The New Urbanist movement began as a human-scaled
alternative to Modernist city planning, which is based upon distances,
spaces, and speeds that accommodate machines and the needs of industry
rather than the very different needs of human beings. New Urbanism later
turned into an open-source platform, after the Duany-Plater-Zyberk “Smart
Code” was published free on the internet.

The P2P-Urbanism movement is quite recent, and it is drawing in urban
designers and planners who have been working independently for years, mostly
unaware of similar efforts being made in other regions of the world or even
close by. One reason for this isolation and marginalization has been the
total and deliberate neglect in academia for the topics that make up
P2P-Urbanism, and the same neglect holds true for the “official” means of
disseminating information as represented (and controlled) by the glossy
architecture magazines. Nevertheless, since P2P itself is founded upon
sharing and a common effort on the internet, the severe existing
informational roadblock is finally bypassed thanks to the techniques
developed for information and software sharing. More than being just a set
of ideas, P2P-Urbanism depends critically upon a universal means of free
dissemination and transmission, and ties into educational and informational
channels that bypass those controlled by the elitist champions of the global
consumerist society.

The present group behind P2P-Urbanism was formed only in 2010, but of course
participatory planning and design go back decades, particularly the work of
J. F. C. Turner on self-built housing in South America (Turner’s book
“Housing by People” dates from 1976). Christopher Alexander’s most relevant
work is the book “A Pattern Language” from 1977, followed by “The Nature of
Order” from 2001-2005. More recent P2P collaborative projects based upon the
idea of the commons were developed and applied by Agatino Rizzo and many
others. These rely explicitly upon defining common ownership of a physical
or virtual region of urban space. After several decades of physical and
legal assault on the concept of the commons, people have forgotten the
principal geometrical patterns that generated our most human-scaled urban
spaces throughout history. Re-aligning urbanism to involve the users has
profound socio-political implications that are further developed by P2P
thinkers beyond urban questions. These need to be investigated because it
may very well occur that fundamental societal changes eventually drive a
revision in thinking about world urbanism and vice-versa.

The New Urbanists officially began their movement in 1993 with the founding
of the *Congress for the New Urbanism*, and the Smart Code was first
released in 2003. These practitioners are tied into the market system, which
tends to avoid common land and which is instead based upon private
development and ownership. Perhaps the failure in Alexander’s early project
in Mexicali, Mexico turned New Urbanists away from the commons (Alexander’s
owner-built housing was very successful but had a common area that did not
succeed for several reasons, as described in the book “The Production of
Houses” from 1985). Nevertheless, the phenomenal success of the New
Urbanists in building Neo-Traditional developments in the US was a direct
result of following Alexander’s advice of “plugging into the existing
system”. We (i.e. members of the group defining P2P-Urbanism today) feel
that the tensions between the private and business focus of the New
Urbanists, and the commons-oriented alternative approach of the P2P
activists, will sort itself out into a practical scheme that is useful for
humanity as a whole. Each faction can learn from the other. The important
point is the commonality of design methods: in both approaches, the rules
for human-centered architecture and urban design are open-source and are
freely accessible to all.

Many of us working in the discipline felt that it was time to change in a
drastic manner the way we design and build our environment. This resolution
comes after a century of Modernist top-down and energy-wasteful planning. We
wish to give everyone the tools to design and construct their own physical
space. Despite superficial appearances (and a lot of self-serving
propaganda), the threat from non-adaptive and energy-wasting urban forms and
typologies is just as strong today as it was immediately after the Second
World War. That was when historic city centers were gutted and people forced
into prison-like high-rises, following a psychotic planning vision of
“geometrical fundamentalism”. This event more than anything else defined
urban alienation. The most fashionable architectural and urban projects
(i.e. those that win commissions and prizes) completely avoid or destroy
existing human-scale urbanism to impose giant forms built in an extremely
expensive high-tech style. Such outrageously costly projects are routinely
awarded by centralized power without any genuine citizen participation. The
addition of beautiful “green” unfortunately only serves to mask the
fundamentally anti-human qualities of those high-tech buildings as betrayed
by their geometry. Their attractiveness is again only a superficial image
and corresponds neither to user participation nor to adaptation to the human
scale. We see P2P-Urbanism applied around the world as the only antidote to
the continuing hegemony of anti-urban building schemes now camouflaged by
“green”.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nikos Salingaros <salingar at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 12:26 AM
Subject: [P2P-URBANISM WA] brief history
To: p2p-urbanism-world-atlas at googlegroups.com


Hello everyone,

Livia Piccinini has asked me to write a brief history of p2p-urbanism
as a companion piece to our definition. Since I make some polemic
statements (that I don't wish to retract!) I prefer to remain the sole
author, but welcome everyone's input, suggestions, and corrections.
I'm sure I have left out some important things.

Best wishes,
Nikos

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