Open P.I.S.M. Summer School

Neuroergonomics and Urban Design

Biourbanism for a Human-Centered Sustainability and Effectiveness

Artena (Rome, Italy) - 15–23 July 2012

An authentic sustainable design must deal with energy- and environment-saving technical solutions, and also with functional and restorative connections to the human neurophysiological system. Psychology and medicine show how space design can nurture or damage our well-being. A scientific knowledge, both theoretical and practical, of how human neurophysiology reacts to the organization and the shapes of space, is the first step for producing a really sustainable new design for the 21st century. This residential course is aimed at giving participants (architects, designers, engineers, psychologists, social scientists, and policy makers) a unique competence in a new field of practice and research, with relevant professional opportunities. This year we’ll welcome a group of 25 participants of different ages and backgrounds, including international students, scholars, policy makers, and professionals who are keen to specialize in Neuroergonomics.

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY OF BIOURBANISM  DESIGN SCHOOL

Unique, dynamic, independent and international, ISB Design School is much more than a school of architecture and urbanism. Born as a global biourbanism research network, it aims at producing a real and effective human oriented design. Its high-profile events programme includes public lectures, symposia, seminars, workshops, research clusters and study trips. Tutors, lecturers and researchers are recognized specialists from several disciplines. School takes place at the ISB’s newly consolidated campus home in historical sites such as Artena  and Norma, near Rome, Italy.

MAIN ISSUES

• I. Mimesis and Environment
• Students will be introduced by practical experiments and scientific literature review to the acknowledgment of how forms and space affect cognitive abilities and psycho-biological conditions in order to perform friendly and comfortable design.
• II. Design patterns and neurological patterns
• Brain and space. Mirror neurons and Neuroesthetics. Design, stress, and comfort: from the Sick Building Syndrome to the Evidence-Based Design. From Kaplan’s Savanna theory (Darwinism) to Isomorphism (Evolution by self-organization). Abstraction and image: towards an ontology of design.
• III. Algorithmic Sustainable Design
• Cutting-edge mathematical techniques for a biophilic architectural and urban design.
• IV. Body Consciousness and Neuroergonomics Space Analysis
• Breath, Grounding, Equilibrium, Posture, Movement in Space, Active Listening, Refinement of the Senses. Centers, Wholeness and Visioning according to Christopher Alexander.
• V. Practice drawing
• According to the level of each student an introductory/middle/advanced practice of freehand drawing will be offered focusing on urban volumes, personal perception of space and colors, and emotional nuances, along with how space perception influences our drawings and how design can influence space perception.

TEACHING  METHODOLOGY

Daily lectures will be accompanied by practical experiences, including drawing sessions, guided visits to important examples of architecture, urbanism and built landscapes of different ages, perception and psychometric exercises. Time will be devoted to enhancing participants’ innate abilities; to study how the environment affects human beings; to analyze the relationship between mimesis and creativity, and employ it for producing wellness-eliciting forms. Fundamentals of neurology, environmental psychology, anatomy, architecture and art related to the topics will be provided. In particular, classes will focus on specific design patterns related to different neurophysiological conditions. Different social and cultural implications of specific design choices will be actively discussed.

For further details, email Dr. S. Serafini - stefano.serafini@biourbanism.org

TEACHING  STAFF

A. Caperna – Sapienza University, C. Fioravanti – Y.A.N.I., Y. Kryazheva – Yulia Ink., E. M. Mazzola – Notre Dame University, E. Mortola – Roma Tre University, F. Orsucci – University College London, A. Pierattini – University of Miami, N. A. Salingaros – Texas University, G. Scaramuzzo – Roma Tre University, S. Serafini – I.S.B., E. Tracada – University of Derby

LANGUAGE: English

Fee € 500,00 - Registration deadline: 15.06. 2012 - Payment deadline: 30.06.2012

Payment online: http://asi.uniroma3.it/moduli/npr/

Admission request and your CV should be emailed to Dr. S. Serafini stefano.serafini@biourbanism.org

Please note: Cheap and comfy accommodation facilities on request - Grants available - Great deal for visiting central Italy

LOCATION: The workshop will be held in
(Rome), Italy, a beautiful and picturesque little town dating back to the 13th century and placed on a hill in the Lepini Mountains, 420 m above the sea level, and 40 km South of Rome. This is a perfect place to visit the fascinating surrounding area, with historical towns such as Palestrina, Segni, Anagni, Sermoneta and Norma, and many gorgeous natural beauties. It is located just 40 minutes from Rome (both by train or car). The climate is mild and this makes summer very pleasant.

ACCOMMODATION: Living and working together in a special biophilic and historical environment, it’s a relevant part of the ISB school experience. Students can be hosted in the historical village center enjoying the typical local architecture, with all comforts such as Wi-Fi internet access, buffet breakfast, air conditioning, and shuttle bus (or shuttle-mule, as this nice animal is still used in Artena today). ISB also has special agreements with restaurants in the area to provide a great Italian traditional cuisine experience at budget prices.

SOCIAL ACTIVITY: We will enjoy some excursions with stages of drawing/photography in order to live study sharp and amazing  biourban issues: the medieval city of Sermoneta and the Caetani Castle; the fabulous Garden of Ninfa designed by Lelia Caetani; the fascist “city of foundation” Sabaudia. The gorgeous beach of Sabaudia, next to the Mount Circeo, will give us a few hours of crystalline sea, sun, and relaxation.

Journal of Biourbanism (JBU) – NEW ISSUE ON LINE !!! 

www.journalofbiourbanism.org

Journal of Biourbanism (JBU) is a peer-reviewed international online journal of architecture, planning, and built environment studies. The journal aims at establishing a bridge between theory and practice in the fields of architectural, design research, and urban planning and built environment and social studies. It reports on the latest research findings innovative approaches for creating responsive environments, with special emphasis on human aspects as a central issue of urban study and architecture.

www.journalofbiourbanism.org

CALL FOR IMAGES

www.journalofbiourbanism.org

photoeditor@biourbanism.org

Comments on Ashraf Salama’s paper: “The New Vitruvius?”

Nikos A. Salingaros

While immensely flattered (and also not a little embarrassed) by this attention given to my work, I feel I must try to set the record straight on one matter. I am very grateful for Dr. Salama’s efforts to acquaint readers with my books, which they might hopefully find useful for design. But if anyone ought to be named the New Vitruvius, it is surely Christopher Alexander, not myself. I came into the architectural arena relatively late. Christopher was already making ground-breaking contributions with his first book “Notes on the Synthesis of Form” (1964). He followed that with the classic “A Pattern Language” (1977), and the monumental “The Nature of Order” (2002-2005), which proved such a turning point for my own career. My earliest paper on architecture dates from 1995, and is directly inspired by “The Nature of Order”, on which I was working with Christopher at the time, helping him with editing.

Moreover, perhaps instead of singling out an individual to give credit for a new awakening of architecture — and I do believe there is indeed such a new awakening — it is more accurate to describe this as a group effort. Actually, we are seeing the convergence of several group efforts, up until now isolated from each other. Christopher Alexander without any doubt represents a major branch of that effort, and his own work has been widely influential in many fields besides architecture, notably computer software. Another branch of the architectural movement I am talking about includes the growing efforts supporting vernacular architecture as it is found around the world. Yet another branch is the group of prominent Classical Architects as well as those designing in a traditional style, in the West and elsewhere. There is a very good reason these forms of building have endured for thousands of years: they are highly adaptive!

Each one of these branches has numerous names associated with it, and together all these people support a new, more humane architecture. Their unifying characteristic is a primary concern for the human being: as user, or as observer. Joining this already substantial group of persons is the Biophilic design movement, whose practitioners argue for an innate, genetic basis for human response to architectural forms. Coming from science, those arguments tie things together in a powerful way.

It is important to understand that this is not a single-minded “school” of architects and writers, since their immediate focus is very different in each case. A contemporary architect working in the Islamic world who wishes to use some elements of tradition in new buildings is not likely to be very interested in Classical Architecture. A Neoclassical architect working in Europe will not be interested in the mathematics of fractals. A biophilic architect may not be too interested in local socio-cultural traditions. And yet, there is a common goal, generating sharable lessons: the primacy of the user’s experience. Whatever the focus, and whatever style one uses, we wish above all to create a healthy environment for human beings from the physiological, psychological, and spiritual aspects. The artistic expressiveness must take its place within this discipline.

Unfortunately, this is not the norm today. All of these diverse groups comprising a new, human architecture stand apart from the architectural mainstream. Western architectural institutions continue to concentrate on outdated images of modernity, even as they move into ever more inhuman expressions of artistic egotism. Ordinary people become confused, because they see a small but monolithic group of established power players praised by the magazines and media, awarding each other prizes and commissions. The very broad movement to which I belong is marginalized away from the central sources of architectural influence, and that is why it is difficult for the ordinary person to get a good picture of where architecture is moving.

But it is clear that there is a wider convergence going on. In the field of urbanism, we have other distinct groups that are now designing cities for human use rather than purely for occupation by machines. More thoughtful investigators are moving away from the disastrous modernist planning that erased tightly-knit urban fabric in order to build monstrous high-rises set in vast parking lots.

Again, by all accounts, Christopher Alexander played a seminal role in this process (together with the great urban scholar Jane Jacobs) with his seminal paper “A City is Not a Tree” (1965). By virtue of incredible serendipity, I happened to get interested in urban structure just as remarkable investigators like Michael Batty, Paul Drewe, Pierre Frankhauser, and Bill Hillier were already working out models of a city that try to understand (instead of stubbornly ignoring) its complexity. New Urbanists Léon Krier and Andrés Duany made impressive advances (sometimes criticized for uneven results, but remarkably effective nonetheless) in implementing the ideas of human-scale neighborhoods, in a world that had all but forgotten urbanism. At the same time, we saw a convergence of scientific results such as small-world networks, inverse power-law scaling, and fractal structure coming out in the literature. These could be used to explain how cities can be alive in a mathematical sense.

Most recently, a broad group of these investigators has come together to conduct research and exchange ideas. The “Environmental Structure Research Group” includes urban scholars, leading practitioners, scientists such as myself, and others from a wide range of disciplines: biology, computer science, ecology, economics, medicine, and sociology. Even this group, diverse as it is, is but a smaller representation of an even broader shift beginning to take place.

I am proud to belong to this broad group of innovative thinkers, and also excited to live in this time when the foundations of our conception of architecture and the built environment are shifting in a more positive direction. I agree with Christopher Alexander that this represents a drastic and revolutionary reversal of our view of the world. My own recent efforts have been directed towards educating the public to the possibility of such a change: and actually arguing forcefully for its implementation in our lifetimes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Alexander, C. (1964). Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Alexander, C. (1965). “A City is Not a Tree”, available online from <http://www.patternlanguage.com/archives/alexander1.htm>
• Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M., Jacobson, M., Fiksdahl-King I. & Angel S. (1977). A Pattern Language, Oxford University Press, New York.
• Alexander, C. (2002-2005). The Nature of Order, Books 1-4, Center for Environmental Structure, Berkeley, California.
• Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Vintage Books, New York.

Please consider becoming a Participating Member of the INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY OF BIOURBANISM for 2012.

The membership fees for 2012:

• student member:  40,00 euro / year
• ordinary member: 60,00 euro / year
• supporting member: 200,00 euro / year
• corporate and institutional member: 500,00 euro  / year.

Participating Members support the work of the International Society of Biourbanism.

You will also receive discounts on International Society of Biourbanism Study Tours and on registration for International Society of Biourbanism symposia and conferences.

Click HERE to become a Participating Member for 2012.

Thank you for your ongoing interest in the International Society of Biourbanism.

• International Society of Biourbanism
•  www.biourbanism.org
• info@biourbanism.org

By Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros

The words “living” and “technology” do not often occur in the same sentence. We think of technology as something mechanical, inert, dead — very different from life, and even dangerous to living systems. And yet the word “technology” simply means “the knowledge of making” — that is, how to create structures in the world that help us do the things that we want and need to do to thrive as human beings.

Living organisms do very similar kinds of things: a Nautilus makes its shell, a colony of termites makes its mound, a cell makes its twin — and ultimately, through a compounding process, this kind of duplication, combined with gradual differentiation, makes complex organisms. (We will come back to the bit about differentiation.) In a real sense, we call this the “technology of life.”

Essential qualities generated by a technology of life are best discovered in small human creations: not decorative, not superficial, not fashionable, but so honest as to touch the core of living geometry.  Photo: Alexia Salingaros

The insights we are gaining about these processes are opening the door to a new chapter in design — an era of “bio-design”, “biophilia”, and “biomimicry”. It’s an exciting promise, particularly in an era when our old technologies seem to be failing us. The crude industrial processes that powered our world for a century or more leave us with depletion, fragmentation, and decay. Living systems can show us the way to recover and sustain the damaged systems upon which life depends.

The design theorist Christopher Alexander has argued that similar processes have gone on throughout our own human history, and throughout the history of life itself. Life is a kind of “making” process of unfolding and differentiating production. The “technology of life” is governed by knowable steps. And we had better learn how to apply it, if we are not to be destroyed by the unsustainable technologies that surround us today: what we might call, on strictly scientific grounds, the “technologies of death”.

Let’s start with the insight, Alexander says, that living systems are able to make extraordinarily coherent structures, like dragonflies, or roses, or humans. These coherent structures are remarkably well organized, and remarkably beautiful. (As we will see, that’s not a coincidence.) Biologists call this process “morphogenesis” — the generation of structures, in this case living ones.

Alexander proposes (on the basis of many others’ work in physics, biology, and cosmology) that these morphogenetic processes generating coherent structure are going on all the time — in fact, are at the heart of living processes, which are themselves more elaborate forms of the same kind of structure generation. So the capacity for morphogenesis is deeply ingrained in the structure of matter (both animate and inanimate) and nature, even if living organisms seem to be relatively rare phenomena.

Design produced by a technology of life should embody the same qualities found in unselfconscious traditional creations, providing the same quality of emotional feedback. Cold industrial impositions in the built environment are instead products of a technology of death.  Photo: Alexia Salingaros

Morphogenesis is closely related to ecological sustainability — the ability of organisms to maintain stability in the face of very dynamic and even hostile environments — because it is nothing other than the process by which living systems adapt to the changes that would otherwise destroy them. So it’s very important that we understand this kind of process, and understand how we do and don’t incorporate it into our own actions. Can our technologies and our way of making things reflect living processes? This includes our making of buildings, cities, and landscapes — Alexander’s primary focus as an architect.

If we don’t do this, then we risk creating fragmentations, rifts, disordering mechanisms. Up to a point, this may not matter — our environment has sufficient resilience to absorb minor disruptions. But at some uncertain boundary — perhaps a sharp threshold — we risk the collapse of critical systems on which our human well-being depends. That’s because fragmentation destroys the morphogenetic ability itself. There is ample reason to be alarmed that we are approaching just such a state today.

How did we get into this predicament? We humans are very good at assembling large complex structures from lots of standardized parts. We started doing it with rifles, where one rifle design was broken down into parts, and we could make thousands or millions of identical rifles from sets of identical parts. Following essentially this technique, we have built our world today.

Nature occasionally does something like this too, when it makes, say, billions of individual blood cells that are largely interchangeable — so much so that we can even swap them between certain people, and they will continue to carry out their complex processes and functions. In a similar way, a soldier can swap out his bolt assembly with another rifle, and it will still function.

Yet nature seldom works this way: every creation of structure is embedded in a context, with its unique circumstance, adaptation, and evolutionary history. Even in the rigid realm of crystals, there is mind-boggling variety among snowflakes, for example. If we could somehow swap out the arms of one snowflake with another, we would find that they never fit symmetrically. The context, not the thing, is the key. We might say: nature is complex — and all complexity is local!

When we create the parts of rifles or buildings, we treat the whole as being “composed” of its parts. But this is an abstraction: a whole is not simply the sum of its parts. Leaves do not “make” a tree. In fact, the tree makes the leaves! Each step of morphogenesis transforms a previous whole, in which the connected parts go through some kind of patterned restructuring. They may group together, they may differentiate, they may form various kinds of structured sets in relation to one another — but always, they do so in characteristic patterns, based on fundamental properties of space and the physical structure of the cosmos. The more important evolution occurs in the connections, though these are much harder to visualize.

There is one more key issue to note. Aesthetics is not a “mere” psychological phenomenon. It is the way that our participation in the structure of things forms a distinctive experience. Evolution has given us a remarkable ability to perceive qualities within the structures of the universe, which are neither artificial nor arbitrary but manifestations of a kind of resonance with coherent real structures. From software engineer Helmut Leitner: “properties of life and categories of form are also inevitable concepts of our cognitive system”. Thus we find a radially symmetric pattern to be highly pleasing, and it is no accident that this is a fundamental spatial phenomenon.

By implication, art is not simply a freely invented construction of abstractions at the whim of the artist, but a participation in a more structured cosmos, and a way of elucidating that profound structure. We are not “constructing a narrative” arbitrarily, but are actually relating what really does matter to human beings at a deep level, as living creatures. Art is thus fundamentally not arbitrary, and not abstract (though it may delve into those realms temporarily). Another implication is that public art in cities (including the art of architecture) has a responsibility to human wellbeing not to impose its expressions at the whim of the artist. Rather, there is an ethical obligation to serve the elucidation of a richer geometrical and sensory experience of our world, and the profound dimensions of our lives.

Searching to create life in an artifact before the age of industrial technology leads to a definite and recognizable geometrical quality. We have gradually lost this intuitive understanding with the advent of industrialization! Photo: Alexia Salingaros.

A current example might serve to illustrate the point: Frank Gehry’s controversial design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., which features monolithic eight-story cylinders holding up enormous stainless steel mesh panels. The gargantuan proposal has drawn heated opposition from many quarters, including members of Eisenhower’s own family.  The famed architect seems intent on making an outsized “statement”, imposing a large-scale industrial structure, without much regard to the scale of human beings, or the quality of their ordinary experience. There is no effort to elucidate the rich geometrical pattern of the city; the effort is all geared toward imposing the artist’s statement — as if by a gigantic advertising billboard.

A product of archaic industrial technology and its thinking. Eisenhower Memorial Proposed Design by Frank Gehry.  Photo courtesy of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission

What does all this mean for today’s urgently needed reform of technology? Form-generating processes are required that work with, not against, the larger processes of natural systems. Our current technologies, however, because they conceive of structure as being fundamentally independent (a kind of useful deception that later backfires) are, in critically important ways, incapable of doing this. They default to a crude aggregation of parts through a linear process meeting largely pre-defined goals.

Take, for example, the notion of a blueprint — a standard tool of most technological production today. Blueprints are supposed to predefine what is going to be made, as a composition of pre-defined elements turned into an “object”. The blueprint is a linear set of instructions to the maker of that composition about precisely what to make, and how.

But nature never makes blueprints! Nature does not just bring together collections of elements. Instead it follows coded guides akin to computations or recipes, and it uses them to make step-wise transformations. This is how Nature continues to make “wholes” through integrated structures that grow in complexity and richness. It also appears that this contextual transformative process is how Nature achieves sustainability. The insights into such processes are opening the door to a very possible revolution in human technology.

To achieve the power of this revolution, we have to get away from the prison of what Jane Jacobs called “thing theories” — that is, theories about non-interactive objects — and develop a much clearer “web way of thinking” that really models the interconnected way the world works. This may sound abstract and philosophical, but it has very concrete implications for how we go about our lives. It also points us in the direction of a different way of thinking about design — a very different living technology of design. We are using an assumed technology of design all the time, but Alexander argues that what is needed must be different in five key respects:

1.      Adaptive design cannot start from a supposed tabula rasa condition, but will always transform what already exists. Even similar design problems, in different contexts, have the task of transforming distinct configurations. In mathematical terms, every design problem has distinct initial conditions that strongly influence the solution.

2.      Adaptive design has to engage multiple actors, forming a “collective intelligence” to explore the universe of available solutions and non-solutions. Otherwise, the search algorithm seeking good solutions can take forever, so someone chooses an arbitrary, poorly adapted or dysfunctional solution out of desperation.

3.      Adaptive design explicitly employs simple stepwise procedures, operating sometimes at fine scales that can vary and adapt as they develop. This is known in the software community as “interactive computation”, in which the momentary configuration influences the solution as it develops. Computation is affected by feedback in real time.

4.      An intelligent approach to design recapitulates the evolutionary successes of the past, and avoids the evolutionary failures of the past, by retaining “genetic information” on the most successful patterns, which we can re-use. Again, it is the software people who have profited most from this insight.

5.      A revolutionary aspect is to use the qualitative aspects of living systems, and in particular, the qualities of feeling that we bring to the design process. Surprisingly, this qualitative “selection by systemic attributes” very effectively helps to narrow down the search for adaptive solutions.

That last point bears some further explanation. Just as living systems are not simple mechanical structures, but integrated biological wholes, so too, life is not a simple assembly of quantities — this much potassium, that much nitrogen, etc. — but a class of whole systems that have important, even essential, qualitative aspects. These qualities are not particularly mysterious (we now understand very well that they are intrinsic to the structure of life) yet they are exceedingly complex. It is critically important for organisms like us to be able to perceive these qualitative characteristics of complex systems, so that we can avoid threats to our well being, and promote what is quite literally our “quality of life”.

Luckily for us, nature has evolved a powerful tool to do exactly that — our sensory and aesthetic perception. Far from being a trivial diversion, undamaged aesthetic discernment can make the difference between eating poisonous meat versus healthy meat, breathing fresh air versus dangerously contaminated air. And it can help us to find many other ways of being well within our environments. This is the revolutionary new field of “biophilia”.

To use this powerful tool, however, we must apply it skillfully within our own processes of design. We cannot override it with abstract schemata, or simplistic formulas, or clever games, or narrow specialized considerations. Nor can we trivialize it, or consider it a mere form of titillation or diversion — or a rarefied aesthetic adventure, divorced from the other concerns and responsibilities of life. That too is a dangerous form of specialization, and even derangement. It results in dangerously maladaptive designs. This is the antithesis of sustainable design.

People surrounded by products of the technology of death are so numbed by them that they cannot be argued out of that sterile worldview; they can only be awakened from this state of acceptance. Previous cultures used a technology of life for every generated structure: from their coins, to the sculptures of their Gods, to their buildings, to their cities.  Photo: Alexia Salingaros

Instead, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to use these built-in sensors of living structure, working within a kind of “collective intelligence” with many other co-designers, including the actual or eventual users, to detect the most important qualities of buildings and settlements. Those perceived qualities can, indeed, promote our common well being, and the well-being of the ecosystems on which our lives depend.

Armed with these new insights and approaches, we can begin to transform the old failing technologies of design — and thus initiate the necessary transition to a world that is no longer built on a technology of death, but instead, a technology of life.

  Source:  www.metropolismag.com

Artena (Rome), Italy

Photography: Stefano Serafini, Italy

Many of you, while hearing the words “peer to peer”, would instantly remember Napster, eMule and the plethora of technologies and solutions for file sharing that allow the free exchange of files of any type, with the associated problems and controversies related to copyright protection.In reality, the term P2P refers, since a long time now, to the range of solutions, paradigms and approaches focusing on co-design (collaborative design) and co-creation, openness and freedom: that is, each decentralized, shared, distributed, equal mean to provide free and open solutions to common problems.

Technology and technology platforms (and software in particular) therefore are just one of the many aspects of this movement, which poses no limits whatsoever: the long-term goal is to facilitate the emergence and consolidation of peer made communities to play a new role, a role that is traditionally a prerogative of companies and industries, according to the model of capitalistic production of goods and services.

The peer production model stands quite in opposition to neoliberalism but, inevitably, P2P processes both transform, but also adapt, to the existing society: this synthesis is perhaps the only way out of the historical problems humanity is facing these days. Open, equal and participatory platforms and paradigms, able to put people in direct contact with each other, shown tremendous potential during recent years: with the mission to help other p2p alternatives to emerge and consolidate, the “Foundation for P2P alternatives” was founded by Michel Bauwens years ago. Michel is an amazing speaker, researcher, analyst and writer: the very perfect person to help us investigate the impacts that these changes, those summarized in this piece today, will hopefully have on the world to come.

[Simone Cicero]: What is today’s role of p2p movement in the world? What level of adoption has this paradigm reached so far?

[Michel Bauwens]: My answer is that the p2p movement has a very important historical role to play, but that it is rather difficult to quantify this. First, what do we mean by the p2p movement? The underlying set of causes is due to the horizontalisation of human relationships that are enabled with the new peer to peer technologies, understood in the very broad sense of allowing the free aggregation of individuals around shared values or common value creation. This is of course a huge sociological shift. We could argue that an emerging socio-cultural vanguard is actively building new life forms, social practices and human institutions, some of which I have tried to map out here. So all around the world emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm. On an other level this is also ethical revolution, with the growth of core values such as openness and freedom regarding the shared ‘input’ into peer production processes; participation and inclusivity as to the process of cooperation, and a commons orientation (universal distribution) as to the output of the process. Economically for example, one recent study estimated the open content industry in the U.S. to reach one sixth of GDP. Finally, there are the new political expressions. I consider the European occupied squares mobilizations to be expressions of the emerging p2p mentality. You could say the movement has two wings, a constructive wing of people building new tools and practices, as for example described in Chris Carlsson’s book Nowtopia, and a more active wing of resistance to neoliberalism, which is groping for a new way of conceiving social change, that is not a carbon copy of the old left approaches. Nevertheless, we are at a stage of emergence, not a level of parity with the mainstream neoliberal world yet.

[MB]: That’s a good question. The difference is related to the difficulty of implementing full p2p solutions in the current dominant system. Collaborative consumption is more easy, and can be organized by firms that take charge of the collective product-service system infrastructure, and they can either invest in a shared infrastructure or develop a platform for sharing what is already available (the latter could also be done by communities and nonprofits). Production can be done in the immaterial sphere of knowledge, code and design without too much difficulty, but hits many problems once you want to translate it into physical production, which is costly. At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms ‘capturing that value’, but they both need each other. Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration. My own proposal is that peer producing communities should create their own ‘mission-oriented’ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now. Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other. Where the horizontal meets the vertical, you get mostly hybrid ‘diagonal’ adaptations. The crucial question then becomes: “how do we adapt”, when does adaptation become cooptation if not worse, pure exploitation. You could say that this is the class struggle of the 21st century, between the two emerging classes that in my opinion, will be the major factors in the transition towards a new type of society. For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.

[SC]: Why p2p have failed to create successful alternatives in some areas? For example in social networks, things like diaspora has been marginal up to now and we rely on commercial entities, sometimes corporations, to empower the peer community of doing great things (for example thinking about Maghreb and middle-est movements). Is there an issue in this? I mean third, commercial entities running huge peer communities that build value, allowing them to make huge profits?

[MB]: In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests. So, this tension is certainly an issue, but as your example indicates, it is not crucial. Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. What’s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities. Sometimes this requires a clever adaptation to whatever the status quo is already producing. Important questions are: what imperfect means can we use for our own benefit; what infrastructures really need to be independent of control, what do we need to demand from platform owners who ‘exploit’ free labour without giving anything in return. For example, the Free Culture Forum demands a 15% share in the revenue generated, in order to sustain the creative commoners.

The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create, like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc … platforms that can easily and quickly offer services, creating network effects that are very difficult, but not theoretically impossible, to emulate by ‘pure’ P2P plays which may not have the same facility to marshal resources so quickly and efficiently. The problem with Diaspora is that, without network effects, there is no ‘there’ there, just an empty potential platform. If you want to reach people, you still need to be where they effectively are, i.e. in the mainstream platforms. But p2p activists should work on both fronts, i.e. using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the ‘long haul’, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.

[SC]: Are the commons the real p2p application field or we can think of p2p being used also as a potential model for profit applications?

[MB]: The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons. Remember, I don’t use p2p in a technological sense, but in a sociological sense, as a type of relationship. So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.

[SC]: Could the adoption of p2p currencies like Bitcoin ease the fusion of p2p value production systems with commercial/trading aspects?

[MB]: We have to be careful here. One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing. In the case of bitcoin, it is a scarcity-based money, subject to the same speculative forces as rare metals, it operates fully within the logic of capital; and so do social lending sites etc … What we really need is a second wave of distributed infrastructures, which also embed new ethical values. Bitcoin could operate with demurrage for example, or within the context of a credit commons. Social lending could be used for ‘slow money’ investment in ethical businesses or communities. Without that, we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.

[SC]: We, more and more often, see p2p solutions creating shortcuts where commercial systems don’t work or are not enough efficient, or simply costly (sometimes unreasonably): how, old fashioned companies, should adapt to p2p to avoid being outdated, outperformed, by p2p based alternatives?

[MB]: No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities. It is this that drives every business to adapt in some way or another, to the p2p dynamics. As a company, you get more innovation, a deeper linkage within networks, lower cost structures, and many more competitive advantages. But it also comes as a price, i.e. the necessary adaptation to the rules and norms of the new networked culture and the particular communities you are working with. And the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.

[SC]: Is a “new kind of company” needed to embed the peer production model or new kind of “community” to embed trading, profit aspects?

[MB]: Absolutely, the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs, and ignore externalities. For a for-profit company, what is legal is ethical, and external regulation can only moderate such behaviours. This means that ‘regulation’ must also be internal, and for this, we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons. Following lasindias.net, I use the concept of phyles. and the P2P Foundation itself has created such a global coop that aims to make the work on the P2P knowledge commons sustainable. These new entities should become the core of a new private sector, and that are structurally inherently sustainable.

[SC]: Is there a special link between resource crisis, peak oil, and sustainability topics in general, and the p2p movement? Is sustainability a substantial attribute of p2p, decentralized, collective systems?

[MB]: I make a strong argumentation about this link. In my opinion, for-profit companies are inherently non-sustainable in their DNA, because they depend on scarcity, i.e. abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets; one particular pernicious practice is planned obsolescence. But a open design community has no such perverse incentives and will inherently design for sustainability. It will also design for inclusion, to allow others to add to the design; and finally, it will also conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing, that do not require financial and geographic centralisation. Ecars for example, produces conversion designs for hybrid cars, so that any mechanic in the world can download the design and work at your car locally. The Common Car is designed modularily with a biodegradable skin that can be exchanged without needing a full new car. This means that entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.

[SC]: How is your feeling today about the “high road” vs “low road” perspective?

[MB]: The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that ‘enables and empowers’ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances. The problem today is that the social movements are too weak to impose structural reforms, though that could change and is changing as we speak, see the mobilisations on the European squares; but also that the classic economic 60- year “Kondratieff wave”, which ended with the 2008 meltdown, is compounded with the biospheric and other crises (climate change, sixth great extinction, peak oil), which in my view signal the accelerated end of capitalism. While I’m confident that the infinite growth system is nearing its usability, this does of course not mean that what replaces it will be better. Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!

[SC]: What are the next potentially breakthrough applications of P2P model?

[MB]: I don’t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing. Stopping this, in fact endangers the future of the earth and humanity. We are living in a bio-pathic system, which literally destroys the basis of human and natural life; and p2p is needed to ensure the transition to a biophilic civilisation, which ensures the continuity of our natural habitat and its gifts to humanity. Technology is just a tool, though a very important one, for transformation, but we should avoid any technological determinism as well as misguided utopianism depending on the next big magical breakthrough of technology.

[Simone Cicero]

http://meedabyte.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/how-peer-to-peer-communities-will-change-the-world-interview-with-michel-bauwens-p2p-foundation-founder

Letter to Mr. Steve Jobs | Apple Inc.

June 14, 2011

Dear Mr Jobs,

Due to the wonders of the iPad, I came across your June 7th presentation to the Cupertino council of the plans for the new Apple campus. My excitement at the start of your presentation — expecting Apple’s cutting edge tradition to appear in the Architecture and Planning — soon turned to a profound disappointment. You were absolutely right to state that the intended capacity of 12,000 people in a single building is “rather odd”. It is certainly not unique. Each of the destroyed WTC “twin towers” had a larger capacity. However, the idea of a single circular building in the park and, indeed, a “campus” is odd in more than one aspect.

It is odd because, since Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of the Great American Cities” (published in 1961) every one knows that dividing the city to single function zones, a practice known as “Zoning”, is bad urban practice. Industrial “parks”, which is essentially what you are planning at Cupertino, are inhabited on working hours and abandoned at night inviting all kinds of security hazards. They are tremendous generators of traffic congestion at peak hours, morning and afternoon, requiring supper wide roads that stay empty during most of both, day and night.

It is odd because, while humanity must find ways to reduce CO emissions by private cars and invest in efficient means of human mobility, Apple is planning huge parking facilities that will encourage its employees to drive to work. You may think of an alternative to the costly construction of under or over ground parking in the shape of encouraging your staff to live next door and walk to work or; for those who live a little further, you could buy them a Segway. And for those who are even further away you could pay their bus ticket. The overall cost for society will be far lower and even more so for Apple.

It is odd because even in the USA people are beginning to realize the ills of suburbia and urban sprawl, both concepts belonging to the middle of the last Century. A project the size of yours could mark the beginning of a new era in American urbanism, an era that puts human beings before the car, pedestrians before drivers. It could invest in creating a lively public realm, in the shape of streets rather than roads, where the people of Cupertino, including Apple employees, could meet, connect, do business and interact for their mutual benefit. Instead, your project replaces parking lot placelessness with “green” placelessness.

If, as you said, your existing campus is boring, you obviously don’t have the means to imagine how boring your circular “spaceship” building will be. It will simply look the same from every angle. Even the curved glass will look the same all around. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

The circular plan is not new. It was tried before and revealed that it creates real problems of orientation. No matter where you are, it all looks the same. When next in Washington DC don’t miss a visit to the Hirshhorn museum (1974) and it’s fine collection of modern Art. If they haven’t altered it since my last visit, you will at some point ask yourself: have I been here before? Have I reached the end of the exhibit? Did I already see this painting? You may also want to travel to Paris, France, where you can visit the once admired but always-disorienting circular terminal 1 at Charles De Gaulle airport (also 1974 vintage!).

Moreover, also the idea of the building in the park is not new. It’s the disastrous idea of Le Corbusier that swept the world in the 30′s and seems to have a hold on you still. You can visit the urban wasteland of Brasilia, planned in the mid 50′s in Le Corbusier’s spirit, to realize the magnitude of the disaster.

In your presentation you used the all too often misused term of “human scale”, saying that the projected buildings on site will not exceed four stories in height, as if the height of a building is the single factor defining “human scale”. I have never been to Cupertino, but I bet you there is not a single street, there, that feels as good (for humans, not cars) as most streets in Manhattan — which is, despite its tall buildings, far more “human scaled” than Cupertino.

You avoided naming your excellent architects. At some point, Sir Norman Foster was mentioned, but you might have selected any other “starchitect.” This is not surprising. Foster’s is a big name, fit for the big job of a conservative client. He is also a great technician who can easily cope with a few kilometers of bent glass and exciting structure. These qualifications are all very important, but to conceive “the best office building in the world,” you need more. True, today’s world looks for excitement and extravaganza, but misses on quality. Not just quality of construction and detail (which is very important, of course) but quality of living. One could have hoped that a visionary like you would understand that there is more to a building than just serving its occupants’ functional needs. A good building serves its surrounding community first. A suburban community, housed by private homes within private gardens, does not need another super-sized park. Its members need to be able to mingle on the street, sit in a sidewalk cafe, buy something at a corner shop, and do all that while walking outdoors along a street — not among the wastelands of Stevens Creek Blvd. Apple’s staff needs more. Your employees should be able to select where and what to eat during their lunch break, and also, yes, whom they meet. The best 3,000 sq.m. In-house café, in which workers are forced to eat every single day, just won’t do.

I’ve seen great buildings, mediocre ones and even bad ones visited by student of architecture. Only very exceptional few are visited more then 10 years after they were built. Your “odd” spaceship will not last that long.

Having, so far, been critical of the proposed Apple campus, let me end on a positive and hopeful note. “APPLE CITY” is what you want for Apple and Cupertino. Your current site is a perfect start.

You might begin by looking at the surrounding roads with the intention to turn them into lively streets. These public spaces would be your anchors to Cupertino. Your exciting, state-of-the-art buildings, most probably built along these streets, could allow for commercial uses at ground level with mixed uses of offices and housing in the floors above. In order to encourage people to walk, you should examine the dimension of the street grid in the adjacent area and align new streets with those, so that people from the surrounding residential areas would be encouraged to walk across your site to other locations in the vicinity. You might allocate some plots for public buildings like an “Apple School,” Apple “iSport,” or an Apple “iShow” theatre to be used for Apple’s events, presentations, and (also) for public performances. You will still have ample area for a public park for the recreation of both Apple staff and Cupertino’s citizens.

 Apple, Google, and Facebook capitalize on the basic human need for contact. Urban habitation – the City — predates them by few millennia. Like them, a city’s raison d’être is to provide each individual with a huge network of potential contacts. However advanced and powerful, Apple, Google, Facebook (and others yet to come) will never replace the City; they will always complement it.

You have a unique opportunity to lead urban planning and development in America and all over the world towards new horizons. A pioneering project such as this will draw visitors from all over the globe. Grab it!

Sincerely,

Hillel Schocken

Hillel Schocken has been Principal at Schocken Architects since its establishment in 1978 leading projects in a large variety of building types and programs including Urban Planning, Museums, Educational facilities, Offices, Housing, Industry and Conservation. Under his Direction, Schocken Architects won high esteem among professional peers for the high quality of work produced. Schocken is held in high regard with officials in local authorities throughout the country and was invited to serve as member of numerous Juries for prizes and competitions. In parallel to his professional activity, Schocken has been teaching in Architecture schools throughout the country as well as abroad. Until recently, he served as director of the Azrieli School of Architecture at the Tel Aviv University. In 2000 Schocken was nominated Curator of the Israeli pavilion exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture where he exhibited his original Urban Theory – “Intimate Anonymity”. Schocken is among the founders of MIU – Movement for Israeli Urbanism as well as acting Chairman of the Board of directors of the “Israel Stage Orchestra” and  publishes periodically articles in the national press covering both general and professional subjects.

Stefano Serafini, research director of the International Society of Biourbanism, awarded as honorary member of Greenaccord Association, by the President Alfonso Cauteruccio.