User:Buderman

I have an interest in promoting more self-reliance and practical alternatives to current top down economic and development models.

I come from a diverse background of working class and professional class parents who were inspired by the countercultural movement in the USA in the 60s and 70s. Brought up as a flower child led me to have freedom to explore alternative ideas and perspectives from an early age. This continued as a teenage as I had a chance to live in a rural lifestyle that included several years living on a cattle ranch.

My college career led me towards a undergraduate liberal arts degree in Political Science and a minor in International Relations. While in college I studied alternative political philosophies and ideas such as the Gaia Hypothesis. I also became interested in the sustainability, Intentional Communities and EcoVillage movements. This led me to research the work of Paolo Soleri and to eventually visit his lifelong project Arcosanti which is one of the more well known alternative projects/communities.

Living at Arcosanti led me to a convergence of people and ideas that helped to see the emergence of a new more decentralized model of human development that sought to better integrate our built environments.

Soleri's vision sought him to develop Arcosanti as a prototype Arcology - a hyper-dense, urban megastructures that he believed was central to confronting the twin demons that menace humanity: suburban sprawl and overconsumption.

What I began to realize in my time at Arcosanti was that Arcology has never been well defined. However like the man who came up with the idea, it is fraught with contradictions. One goal of my EdenSpace Project is to reinterpret the definition and meaning of Arcology and more clearly define its potential applications and implications for humanity.

I am currently focused on how Soleri's Arcology terminology and thinking could be reinterpreted to focus on sustainable, human scale community development. Rather than focusing one project as was the case with Arcosanti, a regional scale out and replication model would be advocated that encouraging the proliferation of prototypes in key regions of the planet. This would be put forward to show how compact urban/arcology themed habitats could offer one possible route to sustainability embracing concepts like permaculture, vertical farming, aquaponics, etc in a way that is relevant to the local conditions. This would include exploring how such projects could be linked to each other and similar projects by Internet augmented P2P global networks.