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| | #REDIRECT [[P2P Urbanism]] |
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| | | [[Category:Urbanism]] |
| =Description=
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| Nikos A. Salingaros and Agatino Rizzo, August 2010 (definition in progress, currently being discussed).
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| "PEER-TO-PEER URBANISM is an innovative way of conceiving, constructing, and repairing the city that rests upon three basic principles.
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| 1) The citizens have a fundamental right to choose the built environment in which to live;
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| 2) The users themselves should actively participate in designing and building the city;
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| 3) Urbanism relies on available open-source theories, technologies, and implemented practices for human-scale urban fabric that are freely for anyone to use and review.
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| A new generation of urban researchers has been deriving evidence-based rules for architecture and urbanism, using scientific methods and logic. These rules replace outdated working assumptions that have created dysfunctional urban regions following World-War II. A body of recently derived theoretical work underpins human-scale urbanism, and helps to link developing architectural movements such as New Urbanism, the Network City, Biophilic Design, Self-built Housing, Generative Codes, and Sustainable Architecture. Open-source urbanism allows active users to freely adapt and modify theories, research, and practices following proven experience. This collaborative scientific approach based on biological and social needs supersedes the century-long practice where an “expert” urbanist determines the form of the built environment based upon unprovable and “secret” rules, which are often nothing more than images and ideologies. Unfortunately, those unprovable rules were claimed to be “scientific” since they maximized vehicular speed and building density at the expense of the residents’ quality of life.
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| Peer-to-peer urbanism applies across a range of implementations benefiting from various degrees and forms of user participation. The most “formal” instance assigns the responsibility of constructing urban fabric to professionals, who however are applying open-source rules and are working together with end-users to develop the design. Even in this instance, which is most congruent to practice in the wealthier industrialized nations, design is carried out jointly and collaboratively. The other end of the peer-to-peer spectrum occurs in “informal” building, where professionals who are trained in open-source urbanism act mostly in an advisory capacity to guide citizens primarily responsible for both design and construction.
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| Throughout history, “human-scale” urban fabric was always designed by people to fit their bodily dimensions, to accommodate their everyday movements, and to feed their sensory system and need for socialization and interaction. With industrialization, architects and planners turned away from these basic needs to instead impose a visually empty environment built with spaces and dimensions that are far larger than the human scale. Since then, a visually sterile gigantism has become the goal of a false urban modernity.
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| The visionary architect and software pioneer Christopher Alexander anticipated Peer-to-peer urbanism by writing the book “A Pattern Language” in 1977. Not only did he and his co-authors launch the idea of the right of citizens to design and have a say in their own environment: he also gave open-source methodology for doing so (the 253 “Patterns”). Furthermore, these Patterns were not offered as a final word on design, but as working documents that could be adjusted and supplemented as needed after further research.
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| Similarly, communicative-action planners have sought to re-discuss rational, scientific urban planning by advocating the need for better and truly engaged democratic participation. Rather than being only a science — and one that was badly misapplied up until now — urban planning should be understood as a communicative, pragmatic practice where planners need to get their “hands dirty” so as to facilitate intercultural dialogue and implementation.
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| A separate strand for reflection comes from urban activism and transdisciplinary urbanism. Here, innovative thinkers have sought to contest classic and market-led urban planning and policies. Moving beyond the purely physical form-oriented aspect of urbanism, we are beginning to emphasize the political and social interpretations of urban environments. Artists, designers, and activists have cooperated with local stakeholders to claim alternative forms of democratic participation (full citizen participation, etc.) and urban living.
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| The free software movement, thinkers who are establishing a new domain of open-source productions freed from the restrictions of copyright, and the peer-to-peer network emerged from the World-Wide Web re-discussing the basis of closed-source thinking. The Internet has made possible an open-source environment, thus challenging the obscurantist wave of “experts” and copyrighters who drastically limit both choice and innovation.
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| In the XXI century new architecture movements, socially engaged urban planners, innovative urban theorist, and online/offline P2P communities altogether are challenging the established post-modern professional and architectural academia environment – the latter dominated by the belief that few single demiurge-architects may affect urban dynamics. The definition and ideals of peer-to-peer urbanism are constructed from the bottom-up. This process takes scientific results and theories on human biological and social needs and adds them to the on-the-ground experience of a myriad of actors and agencies (architects, urbanists, small firms, professional studios, NGOs, social workers, etc.) that are confronted daily with urban problems on the micro-scale. Peer-to-peer urbanism is now in continuous development, and merges technology with practical experience in a way that is innovative, open, and modifiable.
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| After the work of Edward O. Wilson on Biophilia, we now know that human beings react positively to the biological information in their environment and to specific types of complex mathematical structures such as fractals. Thus, the need for a certain type of structural complexity in our surroundings is not simply a matter of aesthetics but a key to our physiological wellbeing. Alexander, and other researchers following his lead, identified those precise structures that generate a healing environment.
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| A new synthesis between consolidated architectural and urbanist thinking and peer-to-peer urbanists is arising from the failures of neoliberal and neomarxist principles, and this will allow us to plan for a better urban environment."
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| =More Information=
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| Background on human-scale urbanism.
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| http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/lifeandthegeometry.pdf
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| Some publications on Peer-to-peer Urbanism.
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| http://www.greekarchitects.gr/en/architectural-review/peer-to-peer-urbanism-id1973
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| http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/urban-seeding-and-the-city-as-computer/2008/09/08
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| http://p2pfoundation.net/Peer-to-Peer_Themes_and_Urban_Priorities_for_the_Self-organizing_Society
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