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this is a radical design office it's permaculture informed the work that we do is kind of value centered we want to build community
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whether it's a houseless village or a co-housing retrofit so we want to address you know issues across the spectrum from
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food security to housing okay where are we headed right now well we're headed through the fabric of the city on our way to a variety of different villages
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and some of them are nestled into existing neighborhoods as retrofits for instance kailash eco village is the conversion of a former apartment building into
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essentially a form of co-housing in the american experience this is a rare thing that people would create their own collective environment together and collective is kind of a charged word i mean to work collaboratively to create
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their own habitat together so most people don't even realize that when they live in america they live in a housing development that was created for profit and because it's normal not to talk to people
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it's also normal that americans don't know that they don't have a single kind of village heart or community gathering place in their community like a piazza for the italian or the a
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plaza for the spanish or a place for french people or plots for german people or a platia for greek people we're coming to this intersection because i heard it was about to be repainted with this giant sunflower
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but it hasn't quite happened yet but you do see they put sunnyside piazza so they're trying to maybe adopt ideas as you were talking about yeah but the sunnyside piazza is the second
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case of an intersection being transformed retroactively into a public square in the city of portland the american journal of public health and new england journal of public health
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have published studies that established that simply by painting the street that the neighborhood becomes safer and they become physically and mentally healthier measurably
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now which way are we going we're really close i think it's right over here we're approaching cully grove and colley green it's right over there because i know her oh really
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this is the kali neighborhood it's an area of the city where developers put relatively small and really modest houses on very large rural lots this
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isn't really widely understood in the us but on a federal level to fund such projects would help to grow the economy of the country but in this context the city is wanting
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to encourage more density and what's what's really kind of marvelous about this is that these two very intentional urban retrofit villages are right across the streets from each
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other so they have kind of a sister relationship to each other across public space this is kali green that you're looking at now there's many different kind of environments in this
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co-housing community you're kind of looking at sort of the urban street right here and when you come around the corner you can see some a grove of fir trees so people have a great commons for social
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gatherings and playing there's different green spaces there's community gardens and you can see here that everyone their front porches are very generous they're very large and they kind of spill out with edible
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landscapes you can see a lot of permaculture principles at work here the terminus of the view here is the community building where there's a large kitchen and gathering spaces and shared laundry facilities
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and even guest apartments and then there are small units for kind of starting couples or families this whole place was built very recently for
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only about 170 dollars a square foot and we were able to achieve that economy through the repetition of models it has a lot of solar power to it the walls are all very all of the thermal
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envelopes are very thick so we start off being very efficient by not needing much energy to heat or cool the space this is the city where water catchment swales were first innovated this is
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where water will run along the edge of the curb and then find a curb cut and flow into a depression just adjacent to the street and what we're trying to do here is just remediate water locally
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rather than collecting it all or having it discharge into the local river which you know then carries stuff off of the street all kinds of particulate into the waterway that then contributes to the decline of fish populations
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this is a curb cut that just lets water flow directly into the adjacent swale and this is a structured swale there's actually layers of mulch and plants and
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compost and then you know ultimately there's gravel at the bottom of this which creates a lot of air space and that holds space for water to fill in the the voids between the stones so this
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is a structured street swale and this is kind of a wonderful foreground to the entry to the village over here which is a built gateway right along the street edge you can see
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a variety of different fruit trees so they're making a statement about urban food security for sure here so this is the gateway into cully grove you can kind of see as you look through
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that the way the landscape was designed is it just gracefully falls you know toward the slope and you come from one environment to another environment you get places to rest along the way
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most developments are characterized by a kind of a approach where things are kind of regimented in space and they're very repetitious expressing kind of an interest in efficiency but villages are characterized by a
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balance of objects and spaces that are generative there's a common spaces where people actually do things together so there's different kinds of important common organs to the body of this
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community and then the whole thing is punctuated by artistic expression you know and definitely on everyone's porch you see things that are dear to them or conducive or cozy
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and when that's very successful people really will thrive together the best villages in the world according to this famous author kevin lynch who wrote a book the image of the city he said that
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most vital robust villages in the world are characterized by a kind of menu of consistent essential elements or patterns the first would be that when you come to the perimeter of a village that there
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would be a celebration of your passage through the boundary as you come inside there's a network of paths the paths themselves actually are meant to be like a journey
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they're not just incidental for a perfunctory experience to get you from one place to another you're supposed to be enjoying yourself so the pathways are really laid out so that you know you'll find yourself walking in loops and being
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able to go anywhere you would like but you're constantly arriving at nodes of interest and activity so nodes of activity within a network of pathways and all of those leading to a distinct
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central commons where everyone can just know that they belong the main thing that characterizes this community and the one across the street is that there's a social infrastructure
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of people that actually self-govern they own the place together they own their individual homes separately and then they own the land that they're sitting on collectively so that
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it really is like a village in that sense frankly you can do this kind of thing as a project like this where you're building everything at once like we did here or you can actually retrofit an existing
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neighborhood with this same kind of benefit basically we're reinvesting in the civic infrastructure within the city boundaries that already exist and just trying to you know add population
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which obviously means we have to add places and we have to add services to just simply transform the city as it exists now how would you do that how difficult would that be
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so one of the secrets to integrating a project like this that we haven't been employing is that the fabric of the architecture is not itself radical what's radical in this context is the fact that people actually have
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cooperative ownership and what's not radical is the architecture and they're also profoundly social like these are bigger porches that make a commitment to the public space of the village this avenue
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is lined by the homes of everyone who lives here so this whole pathway is a public space where it's kind of hard to walk through here without having the opportunity to interact with someone or see something
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beautiful and in this case luckily there's a lot of families with children it's extraordinary how many people live here with kids but you know it's not surprising a lot of people would would really
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rather have their children grow up with ready-made playmates and lots and lots of babysitters around them and people that can help them when they they need help and support than to live in a place where people
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don't even speak to each other yeah so is there a farm in the back yeah there's an extensive community garden you know it's just an opportunity for the people who live here to get outside and do things with each other but
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there's a lot of cooperative management there's huge swales one of the largest swales features an orchard so you're actually watering trees that feed you by using the runoff from the buildings
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and one of the things that they're going to be doing shortly is to install a giant unifying graphic in the street and other features that really make it feel like they're a continuous village that are connected to
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each other in portland we've made it possible we've made it easy by passing a few key ordinances the first one allows any neighborhood to transform as many street intersections
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into public squares for people as they want to do for free and for anybody who's hearing that and thinking well that's outrageous that must be crazy i just want to remind people that it wasn't until 1920 that the streets were for cars and for the
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previous countless thousands of years the spaces between people's homes was actually a commons that was characterized by all manner of programmed and planned and unplanned activities in that context children were
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free to play and safe within earshot of their parents just imagine a mother being able to look out the window and see her children playing because they don't have to go blocks away to go to a designated
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playground so in about 1920 we lost the ability to have this space to utilize for a cultural context and instead it became just for cars in portland we've legalized the
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transformation of street intersections into public squares as many as any residential neighborhood wants all of them if they like and then the streets that connect the intersections together are all available now for being recreated
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and you are able to put things in this space between the sidewalk and the curb and between the sidewalk and your property line
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free of charge and free of permit so really what you might say liberalized the community right of way to be reinvented based on the initiative of local residents who are right
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there really nothing is stopping portland oregon from entirely transforming itself because you know if there's one thing we know for sure about all this activism this is the key the public realm transforming it from a
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place where all of the cues just say that you won't talk to each other and you have no power to a place that is exuberant and it models participation and expression is really revolutionizing the commons reclaiming
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the commons making it accessible again functionally and symbolically so it changes how everyone sees each other and that's we think that's the key to changing the world you
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