life of an urbanist

K asked, "how do you expect to get ceos interested in stuff about Arcosanti?"

"That's why I'm posting about a lot other stuff, too."

Then, I'm thinking about Endeavor, how they stopped answering my emails because they decided I'm crazy. How can they not be interested in a stream of ideas for business? There's got to be money to be made and lots of action in all of these ideas. But it's true, I've struggled to coherently articulate my whole plan. The idea that it's just an ongoing stream of ideas on a million different topics is baffling to people, but that may be my fault, tending to just describe fragments of it. Why so many different areas of interest? Because they all come together as a broad based economy. The idea is to gradually integrate commerce into neighborhoods, creating, in each walkable zone, a diverse self referent culture of activity.

On the micro scale, this means operating networks of small shops, galleries, b&bs, home services, fabrication studios, micro-warehousing, and reasearch and high tech publishing field stations, for example. On the macro scale it means Radical Urbanism, beginning with proposals for arcosanti, and now extending to proposals for Tempe, looking out ten to thirty years, with the general idea being planning for cities everywhere, in a similar manner. These proposals revolve around, or begin as, bridges, configured as intersection spanning elevated garden environments, highly articulated in plan so that light filters through them, hopping from one corner to the next, and then across the sreet and up the block to connect with a pedestrian zone there. At the other end, it's in a residential neighborhood, near numerous businesses and fully accessable by foot from 10,000 houses. This pedestrian connection will make downtown tempe completely accessable from the old tempe neighborhoods. Up in the bridge environment, people will be hanging out for the sheer pleasure of it, since it will be populated with magical gardens, small shops and offices, pocket parks, and criss-crossing paths. The structure will be thin-shell concrete supported on intricate beam matrices and beautiful variably formed sculptural pillars, with University boulevard flowing along underneath, and all surrounding architecture LEFT COMPLETELY INTACT.

In order to make the kind of construction just described practical, not just in an isolated instance by as a matter of course in and between cities everywhere, I'm innovating construction methods, manufactured architectural and engineering elements, an urbanistic block set for distribution everywhere, and in order to communicate, i'm innovating web technology and exploring socioeconomic modeling, because air travel is so fantastic, but so resource dependent, i'm innovating in fuel-economy systems for aircraft, and because it's not a complete view of the landcape to focus only on big, broad categories, I'm innovating in rechargeable batteries and solar power systems, tools and hardware, furniture, fashion, and, addressing a larger landscape, i'm making proposals in tourism, forest products, and farming.

I sort of glossed over the food products division. Think Martha Stewart Omnimedia with a bit of coop in the mix ... a good bit of it.

"What do you want me to do about all this?" K asked, quite annoyed.

"Kiyomi, I just want you to affirm it."

"Really?"

"Yes, when I feel like talking, that's when we can affirm all these things, ceos calling me to talk, all sort of really great assistance, meeting people every day, to talk about plans."

"Hm." !!