When I ask myself this question, what requirements come to mind? Who am I wanting to make this the perfect world for? And would I even want to “design” it, or would I rather let it come about naturally? Do I even have the choice?
This journal is designed for me to write without a clear ending in sight.
What community are you designing?
This is more of a thought experiment to outline some dreams and goals. I’m not worrying about the weather, for example. I’m outlining a community where the infrastructure augments, and does not detract from, the human experience. Design you can’t feel.
What morals do you have in mind for this project?
- Don’t enforce human behavior. Instead, let your own understanding of human nature be the focus. Let design follow our natural behavior. “Intuitive” comes to mind.
- Don’t exclude someone from the human experience you’re building. Understand that designing a city designs the backdrop of thousands upon thousands of lives.
I ask myself a question now that I ask myself a lot: Is it appropriate to design nature? Is it a redundant job? Half of me thinks it is redundant… That natural human behavior could create something livable and enjoyable enough on its own. But the other half, well, wants the glory of figuring out exactly what everyone wants before they know they want it. The dream of creating a habitat so successful that nobody questions if it’s natural or handmade, just remarks upon its beauty, is something very attractive to me.
Target Audience: “Who are you making this for?”
I would design for everyone. To clarify: I would design for homeless individuals, for the disabled and elderly and the people with kids.
But if you did design to alter current human behavior…
Designing for everyone in mind encapsulates most of it. If you design where you do not exclude homeless people, well, each and every one of us has to face even more often the realities of the problem there.
I believe in a baseline level of kindness from individuals, statistically. I believe that if we all had to get over ourselves and actually see the daily struggles firsthand, hear the people talking firsthand, we would be kinder and more of us would certainly take it upon themselves to fight for a “good human experience” (as I’d put it) for the ones who clearly aren’t getting so lucky with it.
My designs would just bring out the best in human behavior, and that would be the goal. Less cold cruelty, more opportunities for kindness. And more time for you all to sit and deal with the realities of people suffering in your own backyards.
So what’s the actual design, then?
- No anti-homeless architecture.
- Wide sidewalks
- Tree cover (reduce heat)
- Medians in road with tree cover (decrease pedestrian crossing distance to increase pedestrian safety; decrease vehicle speeds to 1. decrease noise to increase “sense of peace” and 2. increase pedestrian safety during crossings; increase aesthetic appeal to 1. increase “sense of peace” and 2. decrease vehicle speeds to increase pedestrian safety.)
Overall, it would just be a world I think we all deserve. It wouldn’t be for rich people only, like all these aesthetic walkable places are today. It wouldn’t be some magical village lifestyle… so it wouldn’t be touristy either. But you would be able to get everything you needed to lead a good, fulfilling life in the area.
- No suburban subdevelopment neighborhoods (no, not even the ones that promise that “walkable lifestyle” from inside their gates).
- Residential communities would be mixed-income (people should always face the realities of their place in society, to ultimately make a better world).
After all of this design… What would life be missing?
I guess it would be… people to share the space with. The right people, for you.
In my heart, I guess I don’t believe in ready-made community design. I believe in organic design, even if I do want the mental challenge and pride that would come with creating a ready-made, livable design. I feel like I could do it, but… that doesn’t mean I should, even if given the opportunity. But what else to challenge myself with as a career goal? If a ready-made design isn’t what I would want, what am I supposed to do?
I worked for a state government one summer, and got to see lots of road construction. From this, it became very obvious that most in my profession will not be able to choose a damn thing about what gets put here or there. I didn’t see much of anything being designed. My boss was an engineer, and if you brought up a design concern that wasn’t strictly against code or what have you, it was deemed unimportant.
One of the pitfalls of my chosen field
Every career has its morals attached. We have not ever gotten away from the “guilds” of the past, even if we think we have.
Engineers, thus, are incredible rule-followers. I can’t really say we do much except do the computing that a computer cannot. We learn math in school, not creativity. No arguing with math… no arguing with us. We manage data and check it for logical accuracy. We make sure it can work, not if it should. We’re short-sighted. We’re problem solvers. But we have to be given a problem.
And I don’t think “lack of a fulfilling life by residents” is a problem we hear.
I chose to go into civil engineering because it does give my brain a workout, and I need something like this day-to-day. But I can also see beyond that, and I know that I need to be in the right sort of environment to do good in the world. The skills I’m learning are very useful, and I’m thinking it’s better to look at my skillset as a set of tools… tools that I don’t want to be used for some nonsense like building more suburban hellscapes that this world doesn’t need.
The artist’s side of things
This journal today was inspired by a drawing I made on a post-it note of a fictional city grid. There was a river running through it, and many corridors of non-car travel. It was supposed to be natural, and follow the motions of what I remember to be a human’s city life. It was a grid of a place in my head that would make me happy, just being in it.
The environment of this post-it note was well cared for, and the water of the river was clean. Safeguards had been put in place to make it as such. You could fish in it. The city government was in the process of even figuring out how to clear the waters of PFAS.
People in this city cared about the level of peace they felt. Not everywhere was peaceful… and there was a lot of dirt where the teenagers hung out… but there was a level of respect for what they had built together, and they didn’t want to ruin it with car exhaust to choke on or boiling deserts of asphalt to be surrounded by. They had decided they wanted neighbors, and wanted to see them too, and they realized they wanted their kids to have adventures again like their grandparents did, not keep them trapped and growing up in little boxes. They let their kids go out again, because all the adults came to a mutual understanding that dealing with their children 24/7 was a nightmare that neither parent nor child wanted, and the parents had only been keeping up their prison guard sentiments because they didn’t trust the world and they also thought everyone would call the authorities on them otherwise as “bad parents”. But they all got together one day, and talked, and realized nobody in their own community was so scary, and even if there was some questionable people, they could see now that most neighbors were good… at least they were good now that their community felt like it was really in all of the adults’ hands, and they needed to all be real again and that made them snap out of their nonsense from before. They started understanding each other instead of hiding in their stupid houses and brooding on their couches and having delusional arguments in their heads and lashing out later at a person they didn’t even argue the real points with.
They realized they cared about their health, and laziness was a poor substitute for happiness, and then even the most wealthy of the city became pedestrians quite often and stopped buying big stupid trucks that their now-fellow pedestrians choked on the exhaust pollution of whenever they drove by. Even the most wealthy realized they didn’t gain anything from the high horse of their Ford F-150, realizing that they would be laid to rest, someday, somewhere on this same Earth that they never wanted to walk upon or care for yesterday. So they started caring again. They started becoming humans who walked upon this Earth as a living thing again. I don’t know who convinced them, but it happened, if only on this little post-it note.
This post-it note must have contained people who really thought hard about their place in the world. Maybe after something like a pandemic which kept them thinking, inside, thinking of what the world could really be. The people must have been inspired by something. Maybe they were inspired by a writer, someone like me, but probably someone more concise. (I’ve been thinking I use so many words that I start to sound like an AI). Maybe they were inspired by an internet/broadcasting outage that stopped Fox News from reaching all of our grandparents’ (or parents’, or peers’) ears, and they stopped being so damn delusional and mad at us for wanting a good, warm world again, and realized they actually did love their kids deep down and wanted the best for them, not just the best for themselves.
Maybe it was an internet outage on this little post-it note that made the young people get off their asses and build something worth living in, and argue and complain and use whatever careers they had started to actually get there. Maybe they didn’t wanna be overwhelmed anymore by social media when it all came back, and instead wanted to actually do what they could with a single human life that wasn’t holding a position of government. Maybe they realized that rebelling against some bullshit rules could look different than they imagined, and it was also worth it to do so.
Final Thoughts
I want to both live in and build a community which I have a stake in; somewhere I’m proud of. I have a lot of common sentiments with my generation. I could very well be describing the goal of playing Stardew Valley, but in real life. We all crave something of that simple life.
I would be happy if going to the market was the highlight of my week. I used to go to a city hours away just to ride the trams back and forth, for my actual birthday. The sentiment of my generation is that we want things simplified, for us, compared to the modern life that seems to offer data-sifting or ignorance as the only two paths to happiness. Data-sifting for the educated and energetic (you need both traits), and ignorance for the uneducated or tired. Data-sifting through the onslaught of information available to us all can you get far via research, to understandings of the world and your place in it and what your body/mind/soul needs to be happy according to science. Ignorance can probably get you far in improving your mental health, especially if you go the faith-based route that seeks to alleviate feelings, not realities.
I try to look to history for where to be happy, but I also take a step back recently and realize that finding the right place to live is only half the battle. You do need to live in a place that respects you as a human being, but… how far into the world that respect must reach is up to you to decide. Is it your family? Everyone but your family? Your neighbors? Your entire town? Your entire country? Do you need to change to be respected, in dress or action or lifestyle? Do you want to? And then after that, you have to look at the timeline of how long you’d like to stay somewhere, and come to terms with your personal ability to shape the world immediately around you to your liking. Obviously, this is a skill not everyone takes advantage of, but it’s something we all have. The longer you’re in one place, interacting with the same community, the more they’ll have to deal with you and get along, even if you’re not necessarily strong-willed.
This was another very messy post, which is why I titled it ‘Journal’. I feel like I can’t really expect myself to make enough clean-looking posts, so I’ll likely journal more often than I initially expected myself to.
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