A New Look at the Left Wing

Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.

The ideas that guide the GVCS are:

Open Source - we freely publish our 3d designs, schematics, instructional videos, budgets, and product manuals on our open source wiki and we harness open collaboration with technical contributors.

Low-Cost - The cost of making or buying our machines are, on average, 8x cheaper than buying from an Industrial Manufacturer, including an average labor cost of $15 hour for a GVCS fabricator.

Modular - Motors, parts, assemblies, and power units can interchange, where units can be grouped together to diversify the functionality that is achievable from a small set of units.

User-Serviceable - Design-for-disassembly allows the user to take apart, maintain, and fix tools readily without the need to rely on expensive repairmen.

DIY - (do-it-yourself) The user gains control of designing, producing, and modifying the GVCS tool set.

Closed Loop Manufacturing - Metal is an essential component of advanced civilization, and our platform allows for recycling metal into virgin feedstock for producing further GVCS technologies - thereby allowing for cradle-to-cradle manufacturing cycles

High Performance - Performance standards must match or exceed those of industrial counterparts for the GVCS to be viable.

Flexible Fabrication - It has been demonstrated that the flexible use of generalized machinery in appropriate-scale production is a viable alternative to centralized production.

Distributive Economics - We encourage the replication of enterprises that derive from the GVCS platform as a route to truly free enterprise - along the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy.

Industrial Efficiency - In order to provide a viable choice for a resilient lifestyle, the GVCS platform matches or exceeds productivity standards of industrial counterparts.

These are fantastic ideas.

As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role.

utnereader:

One of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the past few years is the “food movement,” or perhaps I should say “movements,” … It’s a big, lumpy tent, and sometimes the various factions beneath it work at cross-purposes.

The Ecological Urbanism conference 2009 at Harvard’s GSD ambitiously set out to define a ‘new ethics and aesthetics of the urban’, taking a design approach to developing a multi-disciplinary understanding of urban ecology. The contributions in the accompanying publication are highly diverse, contradictory even; ranging from small scale to the regional, practical to polemical, from favelas to futuristic utopias. The results are rich, muddled, often fascinating, and fail to reach any consensus on ecological urbanism. I propose here that a true multi-disciplinary understanding of urban ecology needs to interface between design and the social-sciences, particularly economics and geography, an approach rarely touched on in this volume.

In the introduction Mohensen Mostafavi argues that ecological urbanism can define a new set of revolutionary sensibilities and practices in design that challenge established socio-economic and political structures. Indeed the book includes many inspiring examples of small scale eco-architecture. The difficulty is whether architectural projects can really ‘scale-up’ to bring about city-wide and global change. Cities are not the result of architectural design, but emerge through complex social and economic (generally capitalist) interactions. Urban development is subject to this capitalist order, with iconic buildings used to brand cities to compete in global markets.