"The City as an Ecosystem"--Linked Article

The City as an Ecosystem, or Nature Loves Edges--WrathofGnon

The solution to the many problems of modern cities is not one of centralized or even globalized command and control, but in reality the exact opposite: localization, reproduction, a multitude of small centers, or, creative marginalization if you wish. Instead of like now, only allowing ever larger and larger developments to happen in and around cities, it is time to start dividing them up into pieces large enough to be handled by organic, human scaled, individuals or groups of individuals (from family to co-operative or NPO). Instead of having a square mile sized chunk of city redeveloped by a single large corporation, divide it into thousands of smaller lots to fit a range of purposes fit to serve the entirety of a human life: play, pray, work and rest. In mature cities this can be tricky but in entirely new developments this is easy: undeveloped land is so cheap that any one who is willing to invest a minimum of cash and a maximum of sweat equity should be able to buy enough land for a family or a business to thrive.

Permies interested in city formation and city repair will find lots of good stuff to ponder in this piece, and the author's many others on such topics!

Also very good:
How to Build a Small Town in Texas by WrathofGnon

Of all the questions I get on Twitter the most common is this: “How do you build a town?” We know well how it used to be done, but these last one or two centuries we have forgotten how to do it (with only a handful of notable exceptions during the last century1). The other day I was asked again, but this time with a set of premises that made the question a little easier to approach. I have anonymized all the details but the general idea remains: four guys (friends) with money have bought a suitably large piece of land in Texas and now want to create a car-free human-scaled town2 of the kind that I am always writing about.

In this text I intend to set out the most bare-bone basic premises for how to start a good town, what is needed to build something anti-fragile3 and sustainable4 under the above mentioned scenario. I will go back to this text and edit it, add points, or discuss certain aspects deeper in future texts, especially those points that stimulate questions or controversy....

The author of that blog has some good ideas.

For the first one:

Instead of like now, only allowing ever larger and larger developments to happen in and around cities, it is time to start dividing them up into pieces large enough to be handled by organic, human scaled, individuals or groups of individuals

How would a city do this?

For the second one:

“How do you build a town?”

Most town were developed by pioneer just stoping in a spot and building a home.  Then more folks came and built more homes.  Soon a form of city services was needed.  Now it is a city or town.

Other times it was a developer who sold lots.  I live in such a situation though it was called a HOA rather than a town.

I would love to hear how others feel about these two situations.

Neat stuff; worth thinking about. I like the idea of a big city being more meaningfully a bunch of towns crammed together.