RECODE Magazine Issue 0

RECODE dna for 21st century dwelling

Developing sustainable living solutions at the village scale…

Realising integrated visions through collaborative design processes…

Growing new and revitalised destinations…

#0

Our gameplan “now”

+ bring a team of experts together for a series of prepared 3 day Labs + analyse existing projects with similar intentions + co-design a replicable and adaptive sustainable village masterplan strategy with creative commons licensing + start a dialog with a host community and location

“soon”

+ find public and private support to start retrofitting or building a village + make it into a platform with business models that empower the local economy + create a destination where anyone can experience a desirable form of sustainable living

CLEAR VILLAGE VISION “later”

+ assemble a toolkit that communities and experts can use cohesively + emulate the process and implement it in other places partially or completely

Over 50% of the world population still lives in peri-urban and rural areas These spaces may hold the key to a sounder future… little is done to find out…

The CLEAR Village Foundation aims to develop and share complete solutions to the challenges of genuine sustainability. By bringing together leading figures from a variety of disciplines to encourage shared high-level dialogue and cross fertilisation, it will create a replicable design methodology and masterplanning framework that can be used to stimulate change in mid-sized rural and periurban communities.

Eco villages and projects to achieve sustainability are plentiful nowadays. CLEAR Village is not trying to reinvent the wheel or claim uniqueness but rather to enter a process of systemic thinking with collaboration at its heart which draws on the sound knowledge already available for communities aspiring to reach their full potential and thrive in a new light.

Mission

1. Grow awareness & share knowledge about good practice in sustainable community design, in village, neighbourhood or new building context 2. Create a brand, label, framework that can serve as an adaptive template and basis for the right solutions, products, technologies and services to be plugged in for different contexts 3. Directly or indirectly raise funds to develop an expression and proof of concept of the CLEAR Village “operating system” in the form of a place

why a village?

Goals of the CLEAR Village Foundation

+ the CLEAR Village will be a tangible experience-environment and destination serving as a local innovation cluster and microcosm of international intelligence and R&D to inspire communities, government and industry on how they can achieve best-practice + economically reboot rural & peri-urban areas and create local development opportunities + make the most of existing places to grow alternatives to new builds that entail massive embodied emissions + work in dialog with existing communities and revive overlooked spaces + become a unique talent network gathering best practice and adapting and realising it in dialogue with communities The intention of this initiative is not to build a ‘perfect place’, but rather to foster a dynamic, living community which embraces principles, technologies and forms of governance that

allow for a more profoundly sustainable future way of living and can provide a benchmark for other communities to follow.

Branches of Activity

The CLEAR Village Foundation has three organisational legs. The first is the project itself – creating a village - which involves an event sequence.

The second is the Observatory, which focuses on researching, benchmarking and awarding pioneering work.

The third is building an expert network as a collaborative “operating system” for systemic, sustainable village masterplanning.

The CLEAR Village Foundation believes that appropriate scale and participatory excellence can be great drivers of change and significantly alter some assumptions about urbanism.

Urban sprawl and rural depression are big topics in the recession that we face and in the light of global sustainability targets and the coming Climate Change Summit (COP15).

A combination of complexity and urgency is creating a bottleneck in decision-making circles. Urban developments are overshadowing opportunities in overlooked areas and there is a growing need and demand to empower communities.

To many, sustainability feels like a regression leading to an austere lifestyle. We need an aspirational vision for living in the midst of financial and ecological crisis, to drive the shift towards realistic yet desirable outcomes. They may combine low-tech romantic ideals with 21st century high-tech solutions and offer alternative routes to indifference and apathy

or the alarming proliferation of nonsensical new builds.

Our definition of a “village”:

+ an environment where people live in an interdependent way, and striving to achieve self-sufficiency or a positive footprint + most often a rural or peri-urban space with a lack of infrastructure, limited public services, a strong agricultural potential and which is somewhat marginalised from planning focus by being disconnected from centres of activity and power + a meta-psychological identification sphere of a community not necessarily limited to a spatial phenomenon

FOR WHO = For YOU, HER, HIM, THEM, ME

“THE VILLAGE NICHE”

For locals/region

Exploring the potential for overlooked incubators of sustainable living

a development opportunity, ideally of a derelict or impoverished area that is in need of an economic reboot with alternative business models.

For visitors

experiencing the future of sustainable living as well as participating in defining it or bringing it home.

For key partners

to showcase knowledge and new products

NEW HORIzONS FOR PLANNING & SUSTAINABILITY AGENDAS

Over half the world’s population lives in rural or peri-urban areas. According to statistical forecasts, somewhere near half of these will live in cities by 2050. The implications for sustainability are drastic and require a search for alternatives in both urban and rural areas.

In general, due to the atomised nature of villages and rural settlements, these fall under less planning scrutiny, at least in terms of how they can be used to challenge some of our assumptions about how we want to live and what to do beyond having these « hinterlands » as resource stockpiles, temporary retreats or forgotten places.

A SCALE FOR IMPACTFUL HOLISTIC DESIGN & HAPPINESS?

The CLEAR Village Foundation believes that the village scale is optimal for tackling issues of sustainability systemically, developing innovation clusters to achieve lasting solutions faster.

This scale allows for systems thinking to be demonstrated in its entirety – technologies can be trialled from start to finish and the results will be experienced by the residents, who will then be able to provide realistic feedback.

It embodies the notion of a nucleus of sustainability. It is something that can be scaled up, grafted, connected or be used as a magnet for further development in areas that lack a sense of community which is a growing problem in peri-urban and rural areas as economic activities are fleeing towards citycentres along with the youth and vital energies in human resources.

A village of between five hundred and five thousand residents would be a tangible environment in which to experience the future

of living, a community of sustainable wealth created through open collaboration, collective intelligence and inspired design.

Also a key motivation for focusing on the village scale is you can engage in a strong conversation with local inhabitants and future residents. You can therefore apply design thinking that starts from the desires of dwellers and avoid the constraints that larger demographic settings bring in terms of decision-making, diverging opinions, factions and so on.

There can also be benefits for communities in larger cities that fail to develop a sense of interconnectedness and spatial correlation, which tend to be erased by extensive commuting, lack of time, and digital ersatzes.

A NATURAL IDENTIFICATION SPHERE

Most of us already live in a ‘village’. That is, even in large cities and across the urban sprawl, most of us perform most of our daily tasks within a defined space and have

a sense of community that we can identify with. It includes things like our favourite local restaurant, most frequented corner shop, the friends we visit most often…

Of course, modern transport systems make commuting over greater distances more possible and frequent. Also, digital space helps us to transcend previously insurmountable spatial and geographic boundaries, facilitating tele-working and reducing the problems associated with intercity and even international commuting. Yet, most of us do have a smaller radius within even the largest of cities that we consider our ‘turf’, our ‘homeground’, our ‘hood’ or our own personal ‘village’. Often, the village is inhabited by other people with whom we imagine ourselves sharing common values or ideals, despite diverse social, economic and ethnic backgrounds. The interpersonal relationships and sense of ‘community’ they produce is another important part of human living environments and how we conceive of our ideal living conditions.

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON URBAN-RURAL DEVELOPMENTS…

The vast majority of sustainable villages and neighbourhoods existing today tend to be isolated or personality-driven and barely define a vision that most people would embrace.

Few of the ambitious real estate projects that have tried to solve the equation of intensive urbanisation and environmental concern have been community-centred. Most often, the notion of appropriate scale for holistic and systemic development of solutions has not been the starting point.

Rural, peri-urban and other economically marginalised areas have struggled to find their path into the 21st century, and the potential of retrofitting existing locations with partial new builds is repeatedly overlooked whilst collaborative tools and information technology for complex planning are underutilised.

That is not to say that many of the existing projects or those in development do not have their strengths. CLEAR Village does not oper-

ate in a vacuum, nor does it wish to reinvent the wheel. Rather, CLEAR Village wants to build on what has come before it and pave the way for what will come after it.

In fact we are also establishing a filtered database of projects through our Observatory, which looks at the whole range of pioneering experience including the more extreme and more incremental approaches in order to take their experiences into account.

KEEPING THE BIG PICTURE IN MIND

We need dense and efficient cities if we are to live with 8 billion people soon, not just for the environment’s conservation, but just as likely to meet needs for food, water, and fuel. On the one hand, villages are not an answer to this problem and we make no claim that they address it. On the other hand, we strongly believe that having a multitude of communities that are helped to self-organise with smart strategies and appropriate technologies that people can visit and contribute to, and which provide a living example of alternatives to urban sprawl would be a step forward, demonstrating what

FLASH FAQ pleasurable sustainability could look like.

From a greater perspective, we also believe that by working at this nano-scale of urbanism we can durably bridge the gap between the living conditions that people aspire to and what is possible within the resource limitations we face - environmental, economic and political. It would be fair to say CLEAR Village aims to bundle needs and means in a molecular structure that is stable enough to reinforce urban contexts and positively contaminate their sociological formula. Villages could become village-towns or midsize towns and, later, cities. Similar to the Central-BusinessDistrict planning theories and multi-polar urban constellations, these villages could be healing neighbourhoods grafted into existing or new cities.

The places we might look to learn from in this initiative are not necessarily the most polluting or problematic places - environmental problems have sociological roots and the solutions will lie in understanding holistically

how to address people’s wide-ranging needs and desires in a way that is at the same time environmentally positive. What CLEAR Village has at its heart is the drive to start a movement of collaboration, just as the Transition Towns have done, and provide sharable designs such as the Open Architecture Network has done, to support communities with knowledge and ground know-how as the social entrepreneurship organisation Ashoka is doing.

Last but not least, to many sustainability feels like a regression leading to an austere lifestyle. We need an aspirational vision for living in the midst of financial and ecological crisis to drive the shift through realistic yet desirable outcomes. They may combine low-tech romantic ideals with 21st century high-tech solutions and offer alternative routes to disregard and apathy or the alarming proliferation of non-sensical new builds.

1. Is this not another top down idea?

Our approach is to push the pull factors.

Making the knowledge sharable so that a place and community can engage with it.

2. Would it be set up in a tabula rasa or an existing environment?

CLEAR Village aims to build proof of concept in a few years and will therefore be opportunistic. Ideally we would first work in a partial retrofit scenario where the focus would be to align with overlapping local ambitions by collaborating with the existing community.

3. Is it a one size fits all standard that we want to replicate?

Far from it, we are only looking for a framework in which people can collaborate to build a matrix of solutions that fit cultures, climate, socio-economic agendas and contexts. It can also be seen as a toolkit for communities or a specialist product for inspired developers.

4. Would it succumb to a combination of greenwashing and nostalgia?

By working with urbanites and rurals, locals and globals, industrialists, social thinkers and institutions or NGOs, the objective is to balance the ideals and interests of all parties without becoming naively idealistic or just commercial.

CLEAR Village Lab 5. What about the embodied energy profile, the funding structure and construction labour force that have been typical problems in other projects?

The desire to build at a certain scale with as much of a retrofit angle as possible, using a local labour force and community development logic, should naturally address some of these concerns and avoid the shortcomings of mega projects such as Masdar and Dongtan.

6. Would it be for eco-monks?

It seems that sustainability and the future in general has been stained with a new kind of dark-age feel where pleasure is a sin again and only a minimal footprint can be connected with virtue. There is evidence that if we are to reach 80% CO2 reductions by 2050, it is going to need to be one of the largest undertakings of mankind. Still there is room for fun, enjoyment and as Niels Peter Flint

said, one should probably consider the possibility of an alternative type of ideology in our consumerist, comfort-flooded society which would resonate with a kind of conscious, “holistic hedonism”. So, if there is a goal for the lifestyle that one could lead in a place like this, it would be to make it attractive. That is actually one of the main motivations because it is hard to believe that we will all collectively sacrifice ourselves for our planet. A positive vision of pleasurable abundance is what leads this initiative, along with a great spirit of opportunity rather than the spectre of an environmental apocalypse.

7. How big, for how many people, where?

Somewhere between 500 and 5000 people in Europe to start with. Dense in settlement and targeting to be resource-positive.

The CLEAR Village Labs are collaborative design events and the cornerstone of the project. A ‘dream team’ of 100 professionals from complementary industries will be assembled to elaborate the methodology.

Successive CLEAR Village Labs will produce and execute a masterplan to realise a first village. We have planned the Labs to run for five consecutive years, over which the work will transform the intangible issues of a village into tangible strategies, moving towards building phase 1 of the village.

The first CLEAR Village Lab will be held at the Institute of Advanced Architecture in Barcelona on the 5-7 November 2009.

The CLEAR Village Lab is a three-day, immersive event. The basis of the Lab work sessions will be the ‘Kernel’. This document is the starting point for the CLEAR Village methodology which will be developed through the series of CLEAR Village Labs until there is a final masterplan.

Input Lifestyle brief Methods brief Locations

Lab experience Group Sessions Plenary Sessions

Output Handbook Creative Commons Licensed

The Kernel is the product of months of development by the Founders and Thought Leaders of the CLEAR Village

‘input’:

1. Lifestyle: which will facilitate a brainstorm about what people want the village to be like 2. Methods: enabling decisions to be made about the best way to achieve the desired lifestyle 3. Destinations: factual ‘templates’ which will allow designs to be made with reference to real places with various climatic and cultural conditions in place

OBSERVATORY Based on this material, Lab attendees will respond to a set of challenges, which will be the starting point for the village masterplan.

The Kernel is not designed to limit the thinking of Lab attendees. Rather, it is to provide a stimulating starting point to allow the best use of time at the Lab.

Experience

The Labs combine a mix of plenary and group sessions evolving organically and allowing participants to focus on the areas they find most progressive and synergetic.

Guided by renowned Thought Leaders, Lab participants will be provided with background information and stimuli developed over many months in order to encourage them to respond as fully as possible to a set of challenges to conceptualise what a village could look like and what it should achieve to be sustainable in its own space.

Starting with the bigger picture, teams will drill down to specific components and features, trying to build a matrix of possibilities.

Output

CLEAR Village Labs focus on creating collaborative and evolutive content where contributions from all parties are protected under creative commons licensing. The outcomes of each Lab group’s design concept will be placed online to be enhanced by the web’s untapped collective intelligence.

This process will be the basis for a dialog with communities and municipalities across Europe to claim their privilege to be the focus of the enthusiastic expert group. Once a host community has been found, the next steps will be to adapt the method to the place and build a CLEAR Village with local participation.

Its role is to gather, analyse and share the knowledge that is already out there about successful, integrated sustainable community living, and feed this into the collaborative creation of new knowledge and new solutions through the CLEAR village process.

The starting point for our work is the view that there is a wealth of experience out there about sustainable living - many of the solutions already exist, but these are rarely brought together in any systematic or holistic way. Too often this knowledge is locked up in narrow areas of technical specialism, or in the personal but unarticulated experience of innovators and pioneers, or in the memory of inward-looking communities. We believe that it is our responsibility to learn from what already exists and use this as the basis of our project - galvanising all this existing wisdom to avoid re-inventing any wheels - and at the same time to celebrate everything that has already been achieved.

Initially the key functions of the Observatory are to + provide inspiration to the Labs/network of collaborators, by drawing on the experience of pioneering experiences in sustainable living that have already been created, tried and tested - in multiple places, on different scales, and with a wide range of focuses + enter into dialogue with that wide network of people already experienced in manifesting sustainable community living, or researching, guiding and advising it ensuring that the CLEAR village project establishes the relationships that will test and build the credibility and robustness of our ideas + stimulate reflexivity and learning across the whole process - building a culture of selfquestioning, constructive challenging, and creative experimentation which will provide the fertile soil from which new ideas can grow

As the CLEAR village project takes shape the Observatory will evolve so that it will be involved in + celebrating and rewarding success through giving awards, acknowledging successful practices, and spreading stories of innovation + developing tools for assessing, bench marking and improving practice in key areas, so that the CLEAR village and other sustainable communities can develop strategies for emulating others’ best experiences + providing guidance and advice to communities as they seek to evolve and adapt the lessons from elsewhere to the particularities of their own context, resources and vision.

In the CLEAR village project we are focused on the concept of a village - which implies a certain scale and density of population, intensity of social interaction and identification, and a location that is somehow marginal.

However, it would be a mistake to limit our

learning by only looking to villages as sources of inspiration. Many of the most exciting and radical experiments with sustainable living - or with creating the tools for sustainable living - are taking place in other contexts, and we intend to learn from all of them. Some of the types of experiment we will seek to learn from include: + Ecovillages – deliberate experiments in radically different ways of living designed to reduce ecological footprint, address human needs for community or solidarity, and in some cases pursue a spiritual path as well. These have a wide range of cultural, political and spiritual values associated with them and exist on various scales; + Cutting edge urban developments –spaces for living, working and trading in cities, which meet more demanding ecological standards whilst addressing social and economic needs. These range from a tiny scale (a few houses) to the enormous (tens of thousands of inhabitants and other users); + Centres of experimentation, teaching and

outreach– which specifically aim to stretch the boundaries of what is known about how to live within ecological limits and propagate the knowledge they create to encourage people to live differently; + Responses to climate change and peak oil in existing communities such as the transition movement – where people can’t design their way out of the problem by rethinking the physical environment because it already exists - the hardware is already in place, but communities are working to rework the software of how they live within it to become more resilient and at the same time address the need for community and a good life. + ...and there are more...

We’re starting by mapping some of these initiatives, which enables us to get an overview of the range of experiments out there we can draw on, and where there is experience to learn from.

Moving forward from here our next steps include: + deepen and broaden the mapping by including more communities, more criteria, and more sources of data; + identify most successful practices in specific areas - for instance waste and water management, zero-carbon building, retro-fitting, community self-governance, renewable energy generation - and asking questions such as: + What is the state of the art in this area? + Where is it being practiced? + How and why does it work there? + Which aspects could be replicated or adapted? + What have they learned from developing this solution? + How is this experience documented or shared, so others can learn from it?... + Explore deeper research and learning questions such as: + What are some of the core principles that seem to enable sustainable communities to flourish?

+ What are the factors that have enabled and constrained them in different ways? + How are innovations made, where do they come from and what enables them to be integrated into community life? + How do community-building processes and the creation of the physical infrastructure of communities inter-relate?

Which comes first? Which reacts to the other? + What impacts to sustainable communities have on the contexts around them?

How far and in what ways do they contribute to ‘re-booting’ the locality?

In line with the whole CLEAR village ethos our approach will be collaborative so we will be doing this work through close working relationships with others including: + sustainable communities themselves those who want to become ‘learning communities’, who want to develop further or resolve some issues or simply consolidate their learning so far. Through establishing learning relationships with these commu-

nities we will facilitate their self-exploration while generating learning for the broader project; + research institutions and departments who are exploring aspects of sustainable living for academic enquiry or commercial enterprise; + virtual networks and broader communities of practice who share experience, knowledge and concerns with each other in the context of enacting or studying sustainable living.

The learning generated by the Observatory will be continuously fed into the CLEAR village process.

Some Organisations we look to for inspiration: Transition Towns movement - grassroots logics in a system that can be used anywhere Open Architecture Network, Index and DesignBoost - best ways to get design improve life of many Ashoka & GrameenBank - supporting social entrepreneurship where it is most needed Worldchanging, Inhabitat and Treehugger making knowledge about sustainable solutions visible Slowfood - vernacular heritage, lifestyle and biodiversity mixed in style Permaculture - designing for abundance and resilience in every area from food-growing to energy use, construction, community-building and education.

ORGANISATION Founders, Board & Senior Advisors

Thomas Ugo Ermacora, Founder & Chairman, London Thomas is the Founder and Creative Director of Etikstudio, an urbanist-geographer, and entrepreneur focused on sustainable designs.

Felix B. Bopp, Co-Founder & Vice-Chairman, Amsterdam Felix is the Founder of the Club of Amsterdam and has been involved with innovation and collaborative platforms for the past 20 years.

Wouter Steiner Commercial & Legal Advisor

Josephine Green

Senior Advisor, President of the Bitten & Mads Clausen Foundation

Management, Coordination & Research Staff Alice Chowdhury Holmberg Project Manager

Artur Moustafa

Thought Leader to CLEAR Village, Copenhagen Henning is the former Head of DAC Sustainable Cities and currently Practice Manager at Gehl Architects. He is also a Member of the Danish green think tank CONCITO and of the World Future Council Expert Commission on Cities and Climate Change.

LEGAL & FINANCIAL DETAILS

Joanna Kamath

Jennifer Leonard

Executive Coordinator

Thought Leader to CLEAR Village, San Francisco Jennifer co-authored “Massive Change” with Bruce Mau, a book about the future of global design, voted 1 of 5 top books of 2004 by Wallpaper magazine. She is currently an interdisciplinary Project Leader at IDEO. Paul Hughes, Thought Leader to CLEAR Village, Amsterdam

Rav Panesar Sales Consultant

Alastair MacKenzie Community Specialist

Kate Hamilton Research Leader

Helena Uesson

Tim Smit Senior Advisor, Founder of the Eden Project Hartley Booth

Cate Trotter

Per Have

John Manoochehri

Henning Thomsen

Partnerships Manager

Social Innovation Advisor, Philips Design Social Innovation Director

Senior Advisor, Founding Member of the British Urban Regeneration Association

Key contributors

Research Assistant Press & PR

Paul Hughes Paul is partner and strategy director at the graphic design company Lava Studios in Amsterdam. As an expert in design thinking he provokes and advises the creative process of a number of important companies.

Thought Leader to CLEAR Village, Stockholm John is the Founder of Resource Vision and works on international architecture, urban development and design projects worldwide.

CLEAR Village is a Dutch non-profit foundation with activities and proceeds strictly correlated to its mission.

It is currently privately funded with third party service agreements and work in kind arrangements with diverse contributors in place. It will be funded through donations and sponsorships related to the events it organises and through potential public-private partnerships to be created.

Selection of CLEAR Village Partners Etikstudio is a sustainability strategy consultancy focused on creative direction, concept design and curation of exhibition/events to grow awareness and debate on issues of sustainability. www.etikstudio.com The Club of Amsterdam is an independent, international think tank that organises regular high-level discussions on preferred futures. www.clubofamsterdam.com

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IaaC) is a latest-generation education and research centre dedicated to the development of sustainable architecture and self-sufficient places. www.iaac.net Germination organises live events and cultural projects using the convening power of a great experience to engage audiences around issues that matter, and give them the tools before, during and after to do something about it. www.germination.co.ukÂ

Inhabitat.com is the world’s most popular online publication devoted to the future of design, tracking the innovations in technology, practices and materials that are pushing architecture and home design towards a smarter and more sustainable future.

www.inhabitat.com

Urban Re:Vision is a revolutionary initiative to create the prototype for an innovative, sustainable urban community. At the heart of the process is a series of contests. A site in Dallas, Texas is to be developed based on the submissions. www.urbanrevision.com The Danish Architecture Centre (DAC) is a globally-oriented visionarium for cultural and commercial development and for dissemination of Danish architecture and construction. www.dac.dk

Lava Graphic Studios is a cutting edge visual communication and design company seeking a balance between consistency and change - renewal while conserving recognition of a graphic identity. www.lava.nl

WHY JOIN

+ Be part of a journey in concert with global experts and exciting communities + Learn new ways to use your skills and open doors to new design horizons + Experiment new technologies, products, services, yours or others + Engage with a collective of likeminded progressive people driven by sustainability + Add your name to the methodology and design to profile your values and beliefs + Leverage the commercial potential within the creative commons framework *Participants who contribute intellectual property to the common pool will be credited and may derive commercial value by having taken part in the process design and masterplan exercise. Also, although at all times, CLEAR Village residents and local shareholders and decision

makers will be able to select their own suppliers of products and services whether related to tender or not, it is likely that this proven compatibility will give contributors’ products or services the competitive edge.

HOW?

Apply for the Lab at www.clear-village.org

Or contact us at info@clear-village.org

London 101 Talbot Road, London W11 2AT, United Kingdom Amsterdam Spiegelgracht 15, 1017 JP, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

“By bringing together experts and talented creatives we want to build a sustainable village through a co-design process in dialog with a community... our ambition is to participate in the upgrade of 1% of the overlooked villages in the world using that creative commons collaborative methodology and toolkit for them to reach sustainability in ways most of us aspire to experience... “,

ICONS NEBULA

collaborative design systemic process global vernacularism holistic community village reboot multifunctional spaces positive footprint

Graphic Design by Lava.nl

Thomas Ugo Ermacora