On a lark, I decided to do a google search for ‘Cohousing’ after commenting on it earlier, and the third result was for the Austin Cohousing web page.  It turns out that there’s a community of people in the process of building a large cohousing community a few blocks from my house, and I had no idea.

According to their web page they originally intended to develop a portion of the Mueller development, but Mueller was taking too long so they found a difference piece of land further East on MLK.  They’re planning to build about 20 residential units with a good deal of shared spaces, all in what they call “Texas Vernacular (with a hint of Texas Eclectic)”.  I’m curious to see how this thing evolves, and how well the community is able to implement ‘consensus decisionmaking’ over the long term.  I also wonder how they’re structuring the legal entities involved.

I posted earlier about the development process, trying to express some ideas that have been floating around the office regarding how buildings are financed, designed, and built.  What was lacking from that post was any consideration of what happens once the building has been built.  As builders, architects tend to think of buildings as artifacts, objects to be photographed and admired.  This approach ignores the reality that architecture is an element in the dynamic process of human society.

Stepping back to consider architecture as a process allows us to consider a much wider variety of concerns; the lifetime cost of building maintenance, the environmental impact of powering the building, the cultural flows that the building mediates, etc.  Let me touch on a couple such topics before getting into any ideas about how things might be improved.

Bruce Schneier (my favorite cryptanalyst) has a great post about the psychological bases and effects of group size on organizations:

Primatologist Robin Dunbar derived this number by comparing neocortex — the “thinking” part of the mammalian brain — volume with the size of primate social groups. By analyzing data from 38 primate genera and extrapolating to the human neocortex size, he predicted a human “mean group size” of roughly 150.

This number appears regularly in human society; it’s the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village, the size at which Hittite settlements split, and the basic unit in professional armies from Roman times to the present day. Larger group sizes aren’t as stable because their members don’t know each other well enough. Instead of thinking of the members as people, we think of them as groups of people. For such groups to function well, they need externally imposed structure, such as name badges.

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More generally, there are several layers of natural human group size that increase with a ratio of approximately three: 5, 15, 50, 150, 500, and 1500 — although, really, the numbers aren’t as precise as all that, and groups that are less focused on survival tend to be smaller. The layers relate to both the intensity and intimacy of relationship and the frequency of contact.

The smallest, three to five, is a “clique”: the number of people from whom you would seek help in times of severe emotional distress. The twelve to 20 group is the “sympathy group”: people with which you have special ties. After that, 30 to 50 is the typical size of hunter-gatherer overnight camps, generally drawn from the same pool of 150 people. No matter what size company you work for, there are only about 150 people you consider to be “co-workers.” (In small companies, Alice and Bob handle accounting. In larger companies, it’s the accounting department — and maybe you know someone there personally.) The 500-person group is the “megaband,” and the 1,500-person group is the “tribe.” Fifteen hundred is roughly the number of faces we can put names to, and the typical size of a hunter-gatherer society.

These numbers are reflected in military organization throughout history: squads of 10 to 15 organized into platoons of three to four squads, organized into companies of three to four platoons, organized into battalions of three to four companies, organized into regiments of three to four batallions, organized into divisions of two to three regiments, and organized into corps of two to three divisions.

Coherence can become a real problem once organizations get above about 150 in size. So as group sizes grow across these boundaries, they have more externally imposed infrastructure — and more formalized security systems. In intimate groups, pretty much all security is ad hoc. Companies smaller than 150 don’t bother with name badges; companies greater than 500 hire a guard to sit in the lobby and check badges. The military have had centuries of experience with this under rather trying circumstances, but even there the real commitment and bonding invariably occurs at the company level. Above that you need to have rank imposed by discipline.

Aside from being an interesting piece of neuro-psych trivia, this seems like something worth considering in the context of our discussions of shared space and community.  If an apartment complex with 300 people has no chance of developing a coherent community identity, how can we go about providing the structure to allow localized community identity to develop within portions of the complex?  What is a ‘good’ size for such a community?  It would seem that aside from the capacity of the brain to maintain relations with other individuals, other matters would come into play: having enough neighbors you can ignore the ones you don’t like, but not so many you never feel encouraged to speak to any of them, providing a good mix of privacy and shared space, etc.  It would be interesting to look into research along these lines, I’m sure it’s been done…

One of the biggest shocks I had after graduating from architecture school and working in an office was that architects don’t generally work at the same scale as we’re trained to in school.  My design eduction emphasized creatively approaching a site and considering what mix of uses would be appropriate, investigating demographic trends, exploring how architecture can influence cultural development, and proposing new types of build environments.  It quickly became clear that most architectural firms do little or none of that; they are hired essentially to provide window-dressing for a project which is dictated primarily by either a developer’s market analysis or an institution’s project brief.  While there are plenty of counter-examples, the majority of buildings seem to be built in a system in which the architect is not the primary decision-maker as to what should be built.

The development ecosystem has become defined by a couple primary actors; clients, developers, investors, institutions, builders and regulatory agencies.  Decisions as to what should be built is made by these actors, then architects and engineers are commissioned to implement these decisions.  I see a lot of benefits to this ecosystem, it is good at responding to market forces, partitions risk to appropriate parties, and works well in the free-market economy.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t do a great job of addressing objectives which are not easily monetized; coherent communities, sustainable building practices, innovation and others.  My feeling is that to change the outcomes of development, we must first change the ecosystem in which development occurs.

From Good

Lake Mead stores water from the Colorado River. When full, it holds 9.3 trillion gallons, an amount equal to the water that flows through the Colorado River in two years. The water from Lake Mead is used for many things. It irrigates a million acres of crops in the United States and Mexico, and supplies water to tens of millions of people. Its mighty Hoover Dam generates enough electricity to power a half-million homes. Additionally, the power from Hoover Dam is used to carry water up and across the Sierra Nevada Mountains on its way to Southern California.

In 2000, the water level at Lake Mead was 1,214 feet, close to its all-time high. It’s been dropping ever since. When Lake Mead was built during the 1920s and 1930s, the western United States was enjoying one of the wettest periods of the past 1,200 years. Even today, our so-called drought is still wetter than the average precipitation for the area averaged over centuries. In other words, for the last 75 years, we’ve been partying like it’s 1929. Farmers grow rice by flooding arid farmland with water from Lake Mead; residents of desert communities maintain front lawns of green grass; golfers demand courses in areas where the temperature exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer.

In 2008, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography issued a paper titled “When will Lake Mead go dry?” which set the odds of Lake Mead drying up by 2021 at 50-50. No more water, no more electricity, no more pumping power.

“Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system,” concluded the paper’s authors. “The alternative to reasoned solutions to this coming water crisis is a major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest; something that will affect each of us living in the region.”

One of the more radical proposals involves pumping water from the eastern United States (where many regions are suffering the consequences of flooded rivers) over the Rockies to the West. In a Las Vegas Sun interview on May 1, Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said, “We’ve taken water from the West now for a hundred years, maybe it’s time to start taking water from the East, rather than from the West.” Another speculative proposal lies beyond the shores of California, where there’s an ocean of water available for desalinization. In April, the California Coastal Commission approved the West Basin Municipal Water District’s plan to build a desalination system in Redondo Beach that can desalt 100,000 gallons of seawater per day.

The power requirement for either proposal—desalting seawater or transporting water over great distance—is enormous. But if the only other alternative is a mass evacuation from the western United States, what other choice do we have?

There’s a piece in Portfolio discussing the possibilities ubiquitous computing enables in the realm of complimentary currencies:

Futurist Douglas Rushkoff, famous for correctly predicting the rise of social media, is trying to convince Craigslist’s Craig Newmark to create “craigbucks.” He thinks it’s the obvious next step in the evolution of money. “People could buy and sell things exclusively on Craigslist using craigbucks,” Rushkoff enthuses. “Sure they’ll want to keep their Visas and their MasterCards, but they’ll want a specialized, alternative form of cash too.”

The idea is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Economists already have a term for this kind of community-specific money; they’re called “complimentary currencies” and they naturally take root when conditions are right. For example, in 2006, a Chinese online social network called QQ produced “QQ coins” that became widely traded, used for almost a billion dollars a year in transactions. Even though the currency was designed just to buy things on the QQ network, other websites started accepting QQ coins for payment of even non-virtual goods, and a black market sprung up to convert QQ coins directly to Yuan. The Chinese government cracked down: They feared that QQ could trigger inflation of the Yuan by increasing the total money supply in China.

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When the developed world gets over its bias for “printing press–era cash technology” then complementary currencies will be commonplace here too, Rushkoff predicts. He sees a future that has people literally reprogramming their economic systems, using computer networks and handheld devices to administer new forms of grassroots cash. Those currencies could be almost anything: Cash we can use only at one local restaurant, cash cards for Wal-Mart or other chain stores, babysitting dollars we can trade in our neighborhoods.

There are some small examples of people of this future here now. In Japan, people trade “elder-care units,” which are measured in time spent caring for elders in the community, and they’ve become quite valuable as the population in that country ages. In the United States, hours of service are exchanged via the online Time Bank or locally in Ithaca, New York. Then there are the “Life Dollars,” an electronic currency used in the Pacific Northwest. The experiments have been successful, albeit quite small. The total amount of Ithaca hours in circulation is $100,000, while Life Dollars are used for perhaps $2,000 worth of transactions per month.

There’s some interesting work being done on implementing cryptographic digital ‘coins’, and another interesting project that’s trying to create a payment system by collecting a large network of trust relations between friends which allows people who don’t know each other, but who can be connected by mutual friends to transact.

After reading Tom’s post and thinking about it a little, I started to wonder what would be the best way to go about participating in the recent spirit of change.  The traditional way to do this is to join a PAC or an industry group or give money to representatives in hopes of securing some access.  But that was before the internet.

Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford, and has been one of the guiding influences in the copyleft movement.  He’s recently stopped working on intellectual property issues (he hates that term btw) and has started focusing on the influence of money on politics (a nice way of saying pervasive corruption).  His primary tools of influence?  Web pages.

His first page is Change Congress, a home base of sorts for people interested in dealing with the corruption issue.  It’s mostly a quick way for people to register their support, make dontations and get their representative’s contact info.

More recently, he’s started OpenGovernment.org, which seems to be aimed at persuading the new administration to use technology to open the governing process to the public as much as possible.

Obama’s campaign itself has been an excellent example of how the internet can facilitate grassroots movements – it was designed to be highly interactive and to facilitate irl meetings between supporters while providing easily accessible information regarding ‘the cause’.  After the election he put up the cleverly named Change.gov which I haven’t spent much time looking over, but seems to be an attempt to transform the vibrant campaign web community into some form of governing community.

So where am I going with all this?  The internet provides an ideal method to integrate advocacy, petitioning, community organizing and fundraising.  If we can develop a concise and attractive message, it should be extremely easy to get that message out.  Why limit ourselves to local representatives when we can work at multiple scales simultaneously?