Cosmopolis
Discussion
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“While village communities have for a long time been the place where social bonds were being forged and one’s own identity was being formed, that changed radically in the course of industrialization. Our everyday life has been divided into private and professional life, our space into individualistic housing estates and private office buildings, and our social environment into a circle of family and friends and work colleagues while the largest part of society just appears as service providers or strangers. But it is precisely this dichotomy that is beginning to dissolve as many jobs will become automated and most work is no longer bound to a specific place or time. As there is a growing number of people feeling isolated and alienated in their homes, we need to reinvent what it means in the 21st century to live as part of a thriving community ecosystem. A highly automated, distributed and open technological supply infrastructure and the possibility to be constantly connected with the world lay the economic ground for free, autonomous and cosmopolitan communities. The physical place of such communities we call the “Cosmopolis”. The word “Cosmo” is referring to the idea of “world citizenship”, while the second term “polis” (originating from ancient Greece) stands for self-governed and autonomous city-states. Thus, the Cosmopolis could be seen as a self-organized, self-sufficient and autonomous citystate that acts at the same time as a node in a universal and collaborative digital network. Below we propose various physical growth stages.”
The Nested ‘Cosmopolis’
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
Neighborhood (approx. 150-200 residents)
On the smallest scale, we could have thriving, modular and largely self-sustaining neighborhoods with a size of around 150 - 200 people. This corresponds roughly to the Dunbar number, which throughout history proved to be the natural group size, within which we could maintain and organize social relationships around the principle of generalized reciprocity, meaning that individual contributions are not being quantified or settled with money, but instead imbedded in a social and cultural context, in which social capital played the major role. The flourishing of the community on a neighborhood scale depends largely on the open access to the smart supply infrastructure (see chapter economics) enabling to live in a state of freedom, the culture and values, as well as the chemistry on an interpersonal level. Whereas today the specific composition of a community in neighborhoods is being randomly determined by market mechanisms with the ability to pay the price as the main criterion, new possibilities are opening up enabling people to form co-living communities in a more meaningful, coordinated and fluid way.
Cosmo-Village (approx. 600 – 1’200 residents)
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“The neighborhoods together could form a Cosmo-village. While each neighborhood is largely self-sustainable, they could at the same time have a specific economic and/or cultural function. This specialization could create a mutual dependency, ensuring constant circulation and exchange amongst the members in the village preventing the formation of bubbles, while at the same time giving each area a unique identity and thus creating a social magnet for like-minded people to be in a certain neighborhood they feel attracted to. Living in an age of freedom means that no one has to confine oneself to a certain “job” or “role”, but rather has the freedom to have multiple identities, roles and areas of self-actualization, spending daytime in different neighborhoods of the Cosmo-village.”
Cosmopolis (approx. 3’600 – 7’200 residents)
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“On an aggregated scale, the Cosmo-villages could form the Cosmopolis, which could be the largest self-organized body on a local level. As history has shown, there is a strong correlation between the degree of social self-determination and the size of a city. Whereas the Greek polis left enough space for thinkers such as Plato and Aristoteles to imagine a better world by formulating a new model of civilization, that freedom and optimism was taken away under the vast administrative apparatus of the empire after the conquest of Alexander the Great. The bigger a certain administrative district becomes, the smaller and more irrelevant the citizens feel, and their quest to create a better world together turns into a search for individual happiness – or as Theodor W. Adorno has put it – to “the right life in the wrong one”. There are many parallels to today’s society where utopian thinking as a constructive force of progress remains absent since the capitalist market structure paired with the administrative apparatus of the nation-state leaves not enough civic design space. Therefore, we propose that the Cosmopolis needs to be limited in size within the physical dimension in order to prevail social self-determination and freedom. “
=Cloud City
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“After a city has reached a certain size we argue that physical growth no longer contributes to social flourishing. The reverse side of mega cities are a shrinking civic design space, overused infrastructure & overcrowded physical space, lost connection to nature and faster spread of viruses. To further increase our collective intelligence, forge meaningful relationships beyond our local environment, expand our cultural horizon and strengthen our innovation capability the virtual dimensions become essential. Cloud City can be thought of as the global and virtual metaspace, acting as digital commons for the citizens of the Cosmopolis-Network and the world at large. It could be built from the ground up by its members as a virtual and augmented reality world, creating a whole new experience of social interaction between people around the planet. In contrast to the physical city, it can harbor an indefinite number of people due to its non-rivalrous nature and facilitate meaningful relationships amongst them due to the extensive information network Cloud City is built upon. Below we outline some of the functions that Cloud City could provide (not exhaustive).
Cloud City could function as the “brain” of the Cosmopolis-Network, where knowledge, data, software, production designs and other immaterial assets are being pooled, intelligently organized and made openly accessible to everyone. The more data that is being gathered, organized and shared in an intelligent manner, the more powerful the network becomes, resulting in a drastic increase of the collective intelligence.”