Village - Urban Planning

The very best communities I have been in have been given some thought before they were built. We need to think about some of this in order to set up water supply and sanitary systems.

I would like to use this thread to start to think about the general structure of the village. What "institutions" do we need? School is obvious. There is already talk of a park. A market? A communal kitchen?

What kinds of houses do we want to build? What does the weather require? In Thailand, kitchened are outside the house. How about in Uganda?

Maybe a park with a performance pavilion in the center of the village?

Can we brain storm this for a while? Being a visual kind of person, at some point I will want to start drawing pictures.... now that is a scary thought!

Last comment added: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:00:18 PST

Comment 1 on Village - Urban Planning

Thank you so much for starting this thread! This is something I've been thinking about so much.

I want very much to discuss ideas in a book, The Production of Houses. Architect Christopher Alexander is often considered either a genius or madman. I'm in the genius opinion camp. But the problem is that his long career has produced long and interconnected threads of thinking about quite fundamental things.

The book, The Production of Houses is I believe is a way to gain some insight into Alexander's ideas and how those ideas interrelate. One problem with the book is that it's essentially an academic piece about an academic experiment played out in the real world. It is a "how to" book in a sense, but the "how to" is often very specific to the particular project, building houses in Mexicali Mexico. It does seem possible and desirable to extrapolate from this experiment to the Opok Farm Village, but that takes some doing.

I was so excited by Norbert's interested in soil cement block making. I have been doing a bit of research on that, and trying to figure out a useful way of presenting some of that information here at Ned. But as I've been thinking, I also wanted to relate that to ideas in this book The Production of Houses. One idea was to use my personal news page to begin laying out some of the ideas in the book.

It occurs to me I can do that in a workspace here. This is something that will take me some time and effort to do. It's not as if I automatically imagine that people will find it useful. But I suppose it is the case that feedback, especially of the sort: "no this is not useful" is important to me as I would rather not waste time doing futile things.

I'm busy today and going out tonight. But I will try to make a workspace for soil cement blocks and the production of houses here tomorrow. Tell me if that's not okay, and if my efforts in those matters is useless.

Comment 2 on Village - Urban Planning

It sure sounds interesting to me!

Comment 3 on Village - Urban Planning

There was a time when we were talking about 2 acre plots with houses on them but seeing how the old fields (that we are now clearing) are actually laid out makes that a less attractive proposition than planning residences in a partially forested area. The fields are shaped like long fingers and highly irregular in size, ranging from 2-5 acres each. They run in various angles alongside the main road that cuts right through the middle of them.

There is a ridge at a curve in the road where the old farmhouse used to be. It's the highest point on the farm. Not far from the ruins of the old farmhouse there is already a 1/4 constructed building that the workers are using as an eating place. We've been imagining the farm head office, a general store and a pharmacy health clinic there at that ridge, which is already mostly cleared. We'd like to cleanup and keep the old farmhouse ruin as a historical site. There is an old borehole up there that needs renovating, and 2 additional springs within walking distance - one of them at the site of a planned nursery bed. If we complete the 1/4 building to be a (better) community kitchen, we can build out a shaded eating area on the back that looks over across the valley.

About 1/2 km before that ridge there are a couple of large cleared areas where I am imagining dorm-like structures. Somewhere not far from there - or perhaps up on the ridge itself - a large shaded (thatch covered?) outdoor space where groups can gather.

A bit further (about 1.5km) down the road from the ridge on the other side, just at the edge of the fields that are on that side of the road, there is another ridge with a view where we've imagined a main school building. Charcoal makers have been in behind that area clearing many trees, but leaving some. So there are some pre-existing clearings in a forested area where family houses can be built.

Moving further down the hill about another 1km toward the river, there is a maram pit where it will make sense to make bricks. We've thought about constructing the main storage buildings there, giving lots of room to expand.

In talking about a park, Linda, are you meaning the playground ideas we've been talking about with Cynthia? Actually, we kind of think as the whole place as a park, and hope to have nature walks mapped out that include a number of natural features along the way - there is a rocky place where we would like to build a stone hut using some of the stranger large rocks on the farm; there are a couple of trees we'd like to do treehouses in, and there is a place we've identified where a scaffold like sky walk in the trees might work. I imagine we'll eventually have a connectivity tower somewhere at the first ridge, and have always hoped to combine that with a birdwatching tower.

John I got a contact from someone the other day on a locally made hand press for packed soil bricks that runs for about $1,500. I've yet to pass it on to Norbert, but he's really very keen to use those kinds of bricks so any additional info you can help put together is most welcome!

IF we can get funding for materials/machinery to be able to start building with pressed earth bricks this fall, then we could have most of the structures above constructed by the end of the year. If not, then our best bet is baked bricks that we can burn Dec-Feb. when weather allows. Under that scenario, construction could happen early next year. But we definitely need to have some kind of farm store before then for the produce that will come in at the end of this year.

Comment 4 on Village - Urban Planning

I have looked at the Google Earth maps for the Gulu region and they suck but that is pretty much true for this area in Thailand as well. There is an alternative here called pointasia.com. Is there an alternate source of satellite maps for East Africa? I am resisting asking for maps! hahahha (Sharing an office with a geographer is affecting me!)

Has anyone looked at the area where you envision family houses in terms of water sources and location of sanitation? What kind of flow is there from the bore hole?

The park I was envisioning in the center of the village was more a gathering place. Maybe a place to put a TV for the community to use. (I have a VCR, and a DVD player/tape player that I could probably box up and bring as a gift - I never use them!) You could center the communal areas off of the center...the kitchen, the school, a store for things you can't make yourself.

Comment 5 on Village - Urban Planning

The park I was envisioning in the center of the village was more a gathering place. Maybe a place to put a TV for the community to use. (I have a VCR, and a DVD player/tape player that I could probably box up and bring as a gift - I never use them!) You could center the communal areas off of the center...the kitchen, the school, a store for things you can't make yourself.

One of the things driving our thoughts on where to put what is making use of places where the forest has already been chopped down. We really do not want to cut any more of the forest canopy than is absolutely necessary.

What I see happening is development of a residential community within the larger Opok Farms space, that also hosts visitors and other kinds of group/vocational training activities and events for community and school groups. So all of the structures we are building now are meant to play a facilitating role in developing the residential community, which actually can't expand much at the ridge because that's where a lot of the farming fields are. Once the school village structures have been built by those who've chosen to reside there (in a place more appropriate for expansion and further urban development planning), these facilitating structures will still have a function in providing space for outside (non-residential) groups to visit the farm.

The area we've been thinking about for the school village is more at the edge of the agricultural fields with a couple of square kilometers available to expand into the forest. There used to be a rather large residence there so we know it's a livable space. We know there are springs on that side of the road but will have to do some work on them to make them accessible. There is water all over the farm - it's surrounded on 3 of 4 sides by rivers.

I do have some maps and will see if I can get them uploaded.

Comment 6 on Village - Urban Planning

The people living in the village as well as the students need to have access to farming land. They need to be able to provide for themselves on that land. The farming and processing and building...that is the learning by doing.

Wasn't there a welding training program on the old LiA/C4P site? Were any of the LiA members involved i that?

Comment 7 on Village - Urban Planning

yes, Linda, a lot of the land we are currently mostly self-financing the clearing of is intended to be turned over to the school village. But the school village is not the only thing that will be developing on the Opok Farm landmass, which is HUGE. There really is enough land for everyone - on the land that's allocated to the school village they can do whatever they want, from scratch, as I thought it was supposed to be.

But there will also be other land within the Opok Farm landmass that's allocated to the family, the university, to WE Center Gulu, possibly to some commercial organic demonstration partners. All of those partners and more might be working on different kinds of organic and/or community learning philosophies. The school village is a more intentional long-term community within it's own space on the larger farm landmass, that will hopefully attract participants from the people involved in other activities at the farm.

The land we are looking at for the school village planning is next to (at the edge of) a large block of fields. The ridge area where we are planning the main farm office etc is in the middle of a lot of fields, so there is no room for a large amount of housing/processing unless we use the land that's already being used for agriculture for urban purposes.

Comment 8 on Village - Urban Planning

That sounds like it works...I am just trying to visualize the lay of the land.

Comment 9 on Village - Urban Planning

I had a better map somewhere but this gives a very rough idea

The larger circle is previously cleared agricultural land (very roughly - I think I drew it too big).

The cross-hatched parts around A are the 70 acres of fields that have already been cleared.

A is the ridge where the farm office/shops and eventually an event center would be. People coming out to start the school in the first stage can stay there and commute 1.5k down to B where the permanent residential area can expand.

New areas to be cleared in our next round of clearing expand up to the edge of B.

Comment 10 on Village - Urban Planning

[Deleted by author on 22 Sep 2007 06:20 PDT: oops]

Comment 11 on Village - Urban Planning

Actually, I think A in the photo above should be more toward the eastern edge of the circle.

Comment 12 on Village - Urban Planning

The other day I collected bookmarks two tags: soilcement and cinvaram can be used to find them here You can go directly to them at http://del.icio.us/protoslacker/ putting either soilcement or cinvaram after the last slash.

$1500 seems like quite a lot, but I'm not sure what the machine's features are. The South African Terrabric costs about $550 at their site and is available for about $700 at Sustainable Village.

KickStart has a press which is available in Uganda. they don't list the prices on the Web site, but I strongly doubt it costs $1500 being of the type that should be available in the $300-$600 range.

These presses are of a classic design often called a Cinva Ram. In this design the bricks are flat bricks. Many compressed soil machines are designed to make interlocking brick which require no mortar. Clearly this technique is conservative of expensive cement.

There are many industrial size machines different from the cinva ram. Of course as soon as you get thinking about these machines there are related machines for handling and mixing the soil. Just from pictures one of the most innovative designs seems to fit somewhere in the middle between the mechanized machines and the simple cinva ram is made in Auroraville. There maybe readers here who have some connection with Auroraville and could carry on the correspondence to price these machines. In any case the various brick shapes and dies for them are worth looking at.

I noticed a page from Habitat for Humanity where they are using a cinva ram to make interlocking bricks. It would not surprise me that Habitat for Humanity has made connections with the company making the KickStart press in Kenya. Again, there may be someone reading that already has a connection to Habitat for Humanity who might be able to find out more about their interlocking brick design.

Something that interested me is what the soil is like there, I suspect because ordinary bricks are fired that the soil has a large composition of clay in it. The best soil for making these sorts of bricks is rather sandy. An Auroraville page (PDF)provides this soil composition mixture as optimal: 15% gravel, 50% sand, 15% silt, 20% clay.

Bless the Internet! But I'm sure that many also curse their availability. I came across this guy's profile. It seems he's written the book on Uganda's geology. It might be worth contacting him, or someone like him to discuss soil for brick making strategies--how to collect the best soil for cement stabilized bricks.

I'm not very organized about getting information about this to you. Be sure to tell me what to do and I'll try to do it.

Comment 13 on Village - Urban Planning

It's not an easy thing to summarize a book in a way that the summary is of any use. I have begun to try on the resources page. Any comments are welcome, and I'll happily take it down if it doesn't seem to fit.

I do understand Christina about how the idea of houses is out. I still believe that the book is useful for the kind of construction you are envisioning.

The book "The Production of Houses" is part of a series of books from which the arguments in the book are drawn. The books in the series are:

The Timeless Way of Building

A Pattern Language

The Oregon Experiment

The Linz Cafe

The Production of Houses

A New Theory of Urban Design

I have not read any of Alexander's new magnum opus, "The Nature of Order."

Of particular interest is the book "A Pattern Language." There are 253 patterns mostly deduced from, and descriptive of elements contained in beautiful architecture. The patterns are ordered from large geographical ideas like Independent Regions and The Distribution of Towns, to very specific local concerns like Floor Surface and Front Door Bench.

Pattern number 104 is Site Repair--"Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best." It sounds counter-intuitive, but when I read about what you thought about building, I remembered the pattern. The point of the pattern is to consider the site and its buildings as a single ecosystem. The idea of preserving what is most special to the site, the forest canopy, is precisely thinking in this eco-system kind of way.

Comment 14 on Village - Urban Planning

John Powers said:

I do understand Christina about how the idea of houses is out.

Hey John - I never intended to say houses are out!! Sorry you misunderstood that

Comment 15 on Village - Urban Planning

People say that the Internet is creating a big echo chamber--that we only engage with people like ourselves. I'm not sure I see it that way.

I've read all six of Christopher Alexander's Center for Environmental Structure series, reading and trying to talk about the ideas since the mid 1970's. Nobody I ever talked to was interested.

A little while back I was with friends. One couple talked about a game they invented on a road trip: "Who is it?" The idea of "Who is it?" was to produce a little stream of words that a person might say and the others would guess who it is that might say them. So for example a little snippet was produced; something about the beauty of asters and the rise of American fascism. Without a beat everyone said: "That's John."

It seems to me not trivial in the least to be able to meet and converse with people online with shared interests.

I understand that Opok Village Farms is a real project, not merely a talking point. What's exciting is really being a part of something real. Too much talk indeed gets in the way, because of the limits of time.

How to enlist others to apply their skills and attention isn't an easy problem to solve. But something to be said in its favor is the solution is distributed, and so it seems their must be something I can do.

I understand is the difficulty of Internet speeds in Uganda. People like me can be useful in relaying information by using my handy access to the Internet.

There are many architects and engineers who are interested in designs for the real world. I would mention Cameron Sinclair (TED Talk), the Open Architecture Network and Sinclair's Architecture for Humanity Here also is the Osafa.org (Open Source Architecture For Africa) Web site and the RSS feed for recent activity of Osafa on Social Source Commons.

None of the above really has much to do with Christopher Alexander, but rather shows that there are sophisticated networks which can be engaged in the process of planning Opok Farm Village.

Back to Alexander, his ideas are not really that hard, it's just that there are so many of them.

His new four-book series is something I'd very much like to get a hold of and read sometime, but it's too big a financial investment. I have been amused by the reader reviews of that series of books at Amazon. One of them by Mark Twain has a title that really captures the tone of the negative reviews: "Carlos Castaneda meets Architecture."

Part of what interests me so much about Alexander is his thinking about knowing. His work informs an approach I've been studying since my early college days. I know there are many very smart people quite critical of the theoretical underpinnings, so for example the label "Constructivism" is a productive place to begin to explore the pros and cons of the approach.

But what's important is one need not get bogged down in Alexander's thinking. Much of his writing is very succinct and even like a recipe. I want to try to provide a summary of the book "The Production of Houses" not as a tangent, but because it seems to me it contains practical information about a challenging planning process.

I do understand that because I think it useful and interesting doesn't mean others are likely to see it that way. On the other hand Alexander's ideas are popular, and among those familiar there is an easy common language which makes collaborating more efficient. I imagine that my summary will be a waste of time. That's not a problem so much as the idea that my doing that will make people imagine I'm not good for anything practical.

In Cameron Sinclair's talk he pointed to a mobile health clinic in South Africa. Part of the funding for it was through hot chocolate sales in Atlanta. I'm available for that sort of thing too.

Linda in another thread wrote about the difficulty of translating Buddhist ideas into English. It's not so much the words as the way sets of ideas are nested. So to make sense of an apparently simple idea often means going up or down a logical level to make the words fit there as well. But in doing, often the words are not so hard to explain because the project itself provides a reference. Linda knows that when she immerses herself there in Uganda that the problems of translation she's concerned about will be easier to solve.

The underlying ideas of Christopher Alexander are quite deep and interesting, just as the underlying ideas of Buddhist economics are. But these ideas don't get in the way of practical planning, rather as we plan and find ways to plan, sound ideas are demonstrated and made clear.

Comment 16 on Village - Urban Planning

John - I understand Cory Richardson is planning to come to Uganda in november. Any chance you might want to come then too? I don't know how much time Cory would plan to spend at the farm, but it would be a tremendous help to have some thoughtful input on mapping the land use so that we can get the basic community infrastructure moving. I know it's a wild idea - and I don't have any budget to support you - but I really think it could be a great idea if you were at all in a position to do it.

Comment 17 on Village - Urban Planning

Oh Christina I certainly want to travel to Uganda, but there is little chance I will be able to any time soon.

Comment 18 on Village - Urban Planning

I was talking with some people at the Asoke Community today (lots of them wearing their "Humanity Before Politics" shirts) and hey all felt the the first building that should be built is a "church"/"chapel"/"temple"/"mosque" so that the people keep the community centered on the soul. So they have a place to share gratitude and thankfulness. One of them said - if the people get their hearts worked on first, the other work of living comes easy because it is recognized as a gift.

Comment 19 on Village - Urban Planning

Sorry I've not caught up with this thread before - some great ideas. And I just love maps!

Christina, have you talked with Ray and Jackie about making building blocks? Did you see Jackie's good news post yesterday?

And I know someone who has been on Habitat for Humanity construction workparties in India and Tanzania recently who may know someone who knows about the interlocking bricks. I'll find out.

And did you manage to make contact with the Birdguides of Uganda. They were both Kampala based and seemed really keen to arrange a bird survey in the North (once it was safe) - I can dig out their contact details again if you need them.

Cheers

David