9. Living

9.4 Villages

While the high-rises of our cities are very centralized (whether they are owned by a company, a collective, or the state), villages are the places of individualism—for those who want to take everything into their own hands. To live in a house you own, perhaps even one you built yourself, with a large garden to grow at least part of your own food.

We will not, as a state, come in and dictate how a village has to be organized. That is something each village should decide for itself. Villagers will be less well protected than city residents with their underground traffic networks and protected basements. But they are also a less attractive target: while tens of thousands live in a city, in a village it is only a few hundred. In many disaster scenarios, that will mean they are less severely affected. Either way, the villagers themselves decide whether and how to prepare for emergencies, with whatever consequences that has.

We are not trying to decide whether city or village is “better”. That is not an either/or, but a both/and. Cities offer major advantages through their centralization and can provide far more services than is possible in villages (see also Chapter 8.2, “Public Transportation”). Villages, by contrast, are important so that people live close to agricultural land. Even if, in the future, all of that should one day be automated, and even if cities are better subdivided into neighborhoods and greener: villages make societies more resilient through their diversity and autonomy, and they are an important place to try out different forms of community organization.
This futurity makes cities significantly better while leaving villages unchanged. However, before that, with the futurity of free public transportation, we have made villages more attractive through good connections to the city. Villages are meant to remain a genuine alternative to the city.

What’s interesting is that my city design partially reverses the roles of city and village: the village is the loud, busy place, close to economically used land (fields and livestock). The city, by contrast, is the place where you know everyone in the neighborhood well, have greenery right outside your apartment door, and where forests and hiking trails begin right outside the door of the high-rise, without any traffic noise.