7 ms·

I always joke with the idea of starting a new town with select people. Whether it is tech people, or just smart folks in general, I think it would be a fun expe

by reustle 11y ago

I always joke with the idea of starting a new town with select people. Whether it is tech people, or just smart folks in general, I think it would be a fun experiment. What types of issues might come up with such a commune? I expect most low level work would have to be contracted out to people outside the town, until they can be automated. An alternative idea is to buy one of the many abandoned malls in the US and turn that into housing, common space, and shops. Is anyone doing this?

BrandonSmith 11y ago
> expect most low level work would have to be contracted out to people outside the town If we're honest with ourselves, isn't this roughly what much of the U.S. has going on now? "New towns" are started as suburbs with economical segregation. Complete with gated communities. Or gentrifying urban areas. Low level work is performed by those from poorer, neighboring communities.
- matt4077 11y ago
  And the cycle of gentrification has shown us that it's the low-income high-creativity people that raise the standard of living in a neighbourhood. Once all the students, musicians and architects-working-at-cafe-and-having-too-much-free-time are driven out by the doctors & architects-with-jobs-and-kids, the previously hip community sinks back into boredom.
  - mafribe 11y ago
    And in practise, most of the "students, musicians and architects-working-at-cafe-and-having-too-much-free-time" will turn into the "doctors & architects-with-jobs-and-kids", so it's really the ageing process that drives this process. Later the "doctors & architects-with-jobs-and-kids" will turn into pensioners, and when they move on to the next world, the cycle restarts. So it's not some kind of nefarious scheme that 'drives out' the allegedly more creative people, but rather communities evolve around ageing and family creating.
  - theorique 11y ago
    Gentrification is often driven by young, gay men and "creatives" - communities who cluster together and want affordable houses. Once the neighborhoods is "cleaned up" and full of hip businesses, the chains come in and the neighborhood turns "family friendly". Finally it reaches that "doctors and architects" state and it's too expensive for the vast majority.
    - robmcm 11y ago
      I have seen this happen in London many times, each phase seems to last about 5 to 10 years.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
I like both ideas. I would live in the former and invest in the second. I am not entirely sure you would want smart people only in the village. I think you should have a great mix of people, who share similar values and ethics. At any rate if the exercise of setting up a small town interests you, the Republic of Plato as well as The Social Contract give you some good starting point. At least philosophically.
archagon 11y ago
This would be my dream housing arrangement — a permanent little village in some beautiful country filled with self-directed and creative people. When I was visiting Europe this past year, I saw plenty of gorgeous little hillside villages (pop. ~100) that relied on a larger town below. Some were within sight of major cities, while some were more remote. Even stayed in one for a few days, hiking down and back up whenever I needed groceries. It was really interesting and quite relaxing. My main issue is that it feels like a rather, um, "colonialist" idea. It would be very important to integrate with the local community and culture.
- prawn 11y ago
  I think you'd then end up interacting with all those people and finding the majority of them to be just as annoying as everyone who currently frustrates you where you live already! Too idealistic to plan just for creatives when so many in that category have less-than-creative partners who need regular jobs to get by. Maybe better to own one of these smaller villages and have friends and colleagues drop in and out as they wished. There'd be reasons the locals have abandoned them. Poor services, poor land, poor connectivity, etc. Do you snatch up cheap-but-remote housing in your own country? I know I don't. These just seem exotic and enticing but I imagine they're an expensive pain to fix up in reality.
  - archagon 11y ago
    > I think you'd then end up interacting with all those people and finding the majority of them to be just as annoying as everyone who currently frustrates you where you live already! Perhaps, except I don't meet many people who'd be willing to permanently relocate to some remote village in my everyday life. (As opposed to the travel-back-and-forth-to-a-swanky-coworking-space-in-Thailand type people. Nothing wrong with that, but different breed, I think.) There's a higher chance I'd get along with them than with most people around me. > Too idealistic to plan just for creatives when so many in that category have less-than-creative partners who need regular jobs to get by. I agree, and I didn't mean creatives exclusively. More like, "mostly people who want to work on their own projects" as opposed to, like, radical isolationists or farmers or something. > Do you snatch up cheap-but-remote housing in your own country? I know I don't. Yeah, because by myself, I don't really have the funds to do so. :) > These just seem exotic and enticing but I imagine they're an expensive pain to fix up in reality. I agree, and I'm not talking about the villages in the article exclusively. Communes and ecovillages[1] have been successful in the past. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecovillage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecovillage
mjklin 11y ago
Look up Twin Oaks in Virginia, they're probably the most successful commune in the US.
jdeibele 11y ago
One concern would be connectivity. Maybe you could read Hacker News via an (expensive) satellite hookup but it seems like it would be more difficult to have streaming video. Areas that are depopulating wouldn't seem like good candidates for cell service or wired internet, let alone fiber to the home. Also, there are definitely people whose ideal living circumstances would be on a farm without restaurants or other city amenities. My paternal grandfather retired from the city to a farm. But he did it after my grandmother died. And his kids were grown - no need for schooling. Articles here have talked about Japan having the same type of problem. And so do American farming communities in the midwest. For every farmer (or wannabe) there seems to be thousands or tens of thousands who don't want to leave the city. And that's accelerating.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  "it seems like it would be more difficult to have streaming video." And that's just one of the benefits!
- lsc 11y ago
  > One concern would be connectivity. Maybe you could read Hacker News via an (expensive) satellite hookup but it seems like it would be more difficult to have streaming video. I know this isn't really your point, but video is actually one of the better use-cases for satellite internet. The problem with Satellite isn't bandwidth (I mean, it is, but that's only because most of them are old and there aren't enough of them.) The fundamental problem with satellite internet is latency; the speed of light to get up to where we usually put 'em and back down is... significant. The only realistic way to overcome that is to put the satellite in a much lower (and thus much less stable) orbit, which means replacing them frequently; there have been a bunch of cool-sounding proposals to do this, but it hasn't happened. But... the point is that satellite is great for non-interactive stuff. If you can buffer, say, half a second without causing problems, there's no reason why you would be unhappy with Satellite, so streaming video would work beautifully. Games and skype would be unusable. Web pages would load noticeably slower. But your streaming video and large downloads, potentially, would be competitive with the shitty broadband we're used to here in the US.
- 11y ago
demallien 11y ago
Just don't call it Rapture
troels 11y ago
A gated community?
ArekDymalski 11y ago
> most low level work would have to be contracted out to people outside the town Well, you could always select interesting, smart people who enjoy what you call "low level work" and mix them with interesting, smart people who do not perceive such work as low level/low prestige even if they do something more "high level" for a living. Now that would be an interesting, smart community.
- ghgr 11y ago
  I think the GP was thinking on high/low level as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-_and_low-level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-_and_low-level and not regarding prestige or self-worth.
rmason 11y ago
Forget the mall. I raised the idea on here a few years ago of getting a group of hackers together to buy a skyscraper in Detroit or a group of houses all in one neighborhood. Advantage is that there are both jobs and fiber available. However prices are much higher than a few years ago and skyscrapers downtown are scarce due to Chinese investors.
klunger 11y ago
http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrincham http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrincham
rayiner 11y ago
> Whether it is tech people, or just smart folks in general, I think it would be a fun experiment. A fun experiment in segregation?
codeshaman 11y ago
Yeah, but why live there full time ? I would love to be able go to a place where like-minded people come and live for a while (weeks, months), working on their projects, while surrounded by neighbours they can engage with and discuss interesting ideas, but also with cool events going on around the village. A kind of a permanent 'boot camp' which you can visit at any time. Some old forgotten village in the mountains, inhabited by programmers, sysadmins and designers (with family/ kids of course) , with fast Internet, night time parties with visiting DJs, cooking experiments, group sports, hiking in the mountins, fishing, camp fires; tech conferences in the village center with invited speakers, meetups and hacklabs. :)
joeyspn 11y ago
> Is anyone doing this? Yes... also in Spain there's this place named Ca La Fou: https://calafou.org/en https://calafou.org/en Ca La Fou is an ambitious ‘eco-industrial postcapitalist colony’, a day’s cycle outside barcelona. The group first visited this site in october 2010, and only moved here in july 2011. The enormous space was bought as a housing cooperative by the group with a loan from an ecological bank and support from a wider network. The thirty permanent collective members work at a slow pace but have achieved a great deal by making the space livible and have already built a number of functioning workshops. These include: - An impressive hacklab where broken computers are recycled into new ones - A collaborative car workshop where engines are fixed to run with vegetable oil - A Ukelele workshop - A chemistry lab where soap is made from recycled vegetable oil mixed with caustic soda, (and sometimes recycled animal fat) - A chicken-run and chick creche. https://www.ecotopiabiketour.net/2012/an-introduction-to-ca-la-fou https://www.ecotopiabiketour.net/2012/an-introduction-to-ca-...
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
I think the first question to answer is why would you do it? Kibbutzim work and they can be wonderful, but they're created often with very specific ideas in mind, like a communal way of life or a desire for ethnic homogeneity, not simply 'oh the land is cheap, what if we started a town there'. I can't think of a lot of benefits over starting a private space within the richness and diversity of an existing city, like say the mall idea you mentioned. (which is restricted by law, not by interest. There are legal restrictions that prohibit housing in offices or shopping areas which I think make a lot of sense, but it'd certainly be great if they were more flexible. For example in my city there's enormous housing shortages, and office surpluses, and companies offering to convert office units to housing, but the government rarely changes city planning for which legitimate reasons sometimes also exist, but it can be really frustrating)
vtlynch 11y ago
sounds like a great idea. all the self-titled tech elite could move to their own town and everyone else would be much happier
sauco82 11y ago
Actually I am, and coincidentally I have been joking with the same idea for several years. In the last 2 years the idea became more tempting I investigated which kind of villages were in Spain and what kind of work was needed to make this work. As you might expect as prices goes down utilities, accessibility and general connection to the world decreases. But it is also true that even if not with those outrageously low prices there are several villages with just a few thousand inhabitants, all the utilities you might need, low prices and just at 20 minutes from well connected airports and the capital. From this September we are moving to one of those in the Southern coast of Spain and try to implement a really simple model in which part of the community bring in economic resources and the rest brings in quality of life, all in an environmentally friendly and socially responsible way. The ones bringing in the economic resources at the beginning would be mostly developers like myself or designers. The reason for that is they can move and work remotely quite easily and they are quite frequently looking for some more colleagues to work with in their projects or Startups (again, like myself). The quality of life is something abstract depending on the members of the community, it could be anything from organizing bootcamps or accelerators to yoga, paragliding or having a good chef cooking for everyone. We haven't yet started to make all the work to promote this but if anyone is interested or would like to participate I'm here to answer any questions.
- reustle 11y ago
  Would love to keep updated. There is no contact info in your HN profile.
  - sauco82 11y ago
    Great :) I've just updated my about data with some social networks links. Once we begin with the social media campaign I will be posting there too.

by reustle 11y ago

BrandonSmith 11y ago

> expect most low level work would have to be contracted out to people outside the town If we're honest with ourselves, isn't this roughly what much of the U.S. has going on now? "New towns" are started as suburbs with economical segregation. Complete with gated communities. Or gentrifying urban areas. Low level work is performed by those from poorer, neighboring communities.

matt4077 11y ago
And the cycle of gentrification has shown us that it's the low-income high-creativity people that raise the standard of living in a neighbourhood. Once all the students, musicians and architects-working-at-cafe-and-having-too-much-free-time are driven out by the doctors & architects-with-jobs-and-kids, the previously hip community sinks back into boredom.
- mafribe 11y ago
  And in practise, most of the "students, musicians and architects-working-at-cafe-and-having-too-much-free-time" will turn into the "doctors & architects-with-jobs-and-kids", so it's really the ageing process that drives this process. Later the "doctors & architects-with-jobs-and-kids" will turn into pensioners, and when they move on to the next world, the cycle restarts. So it's not some kind of nefarious scheme that 'drives out' the allegedly more creative people, but rather communities evolve around ageing and family creating.
- theorique 11y ago
  Gentrification is often driven by young, gay men and "creatives" - communities who cluster together and want affordable houses. Once the neighborhoods is "cleaned up" and full of hip businesses, the chains come in and the neighborhood turns "family friendly". Finally it reaches that "doctors and architects" state and it's too expensive for the vast majority.
  - robmcm 11y ago
    I have seen this happen in London many times, each phase seems to last about 5 to 10 years.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

I like both ideas. I would live in the former and invest in the second. I am not entirely sure you would want smart people only in the village. I think you should have a great mix of people, who share similar values and ethics. At any rate if the exercise of setting up a small town interests you, the Republic of Plato as well as The Social Contract give you some good starting point. At least philosophically.

archagon 11y ago

This would be my dream housing arrangement — a permanent little village in some beautiful country filled with self-directed and creative people. When I was visiting Europe this past year, I saw plenty of gorgeous little hillside villages (pop. ~100) that relied on a larger town below. Some were within sight of major cities, while some were more remote. Even stayed in one for a few days, hiking down and back up whenever I needed groceries. It was really interesting and quite relaxing. My main issue is that it feels like a rather, um, "colonialist" idea. It would be very important to integrate with the local community and culture.

prawn 11y ago
I think you'd then end up interacting with all those people and finding the majority of them to be just as annoying as everyone who currently frustrates you where you live already! Too idealistic to plan just for creatives when so many in that category have less-than-creative partners who need regular jobs to get by. Maybe better to own one of these smaller villages and have friends and colleagues drop in and out as they wished. There'd be reasons the locals have abandoned them. Poor services, poor land, poor connectivity, etc. Do you snatch up cheap-but-remote housing in your own country? I know I don't. These just seem exotic and enticing but I imagine they're an expensive pain to fix up in reality.
- archagon 11y ago
  > I think you'd then end up interacting with all those people and finding the majority of them to be just as annoying as everyone who currently frustrates you where you live already! Perhaps, except I don't meet many people who'd be willing to permanently relocate to some remote village in my everyday life. (As opposed to the travel-back-and-forth-to-a-swanky-coworking-space-in-Thailand type people. Nothing wrong with that, but different breed, I think.) There's a higher chance I'd get along with them than with most people around me. > Too idealistic to plan just for creatives when so many in that category have less-than-creative partners who need regular jobs to get by. I agree, and I didn't mean creatives exclusively. More like, "mostly people who want to work on their own projects" as opposed to, like, radical isolationists or farmers or something. > Do you snatch up cheap-but-remote housing in your own country? I know I don't. Yeah, because by myself, I don't really have the funds to do so. :) > These just seem exotic and enticing but I imagine they're an expensive pain to fix up in reality. I agree, and I'm not talking about the villages in the article exclusively. Communes and ecovillages[1] have been successful in the past. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecovillage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecovillage

mjklin 11y ago

Look up Twin Oaks in Virginia, they're probably the most successful commune in the US.

jdeibele 11y ago

One concern would be connectivity. Maybe you could read Hacker News via an (expensive) satellite hookup but it seems like it would be more difficult to have streaming video. Areas that are depopulating wouldn't seem like good candidates for cell service or wired internet, let alone fiber to the home. Also, there are definitely people whose ideal living circumstances would be on a farm without restaurants or other city amenities. My paternal grandfather retired from the city to a farm. But he did it after my grandmother died. And his kids were grown - no need for schooling. Articles here have talked about Japan having the same type of problem. And so do American farming communities in the midwest. For every farmer (or wannabe) there seems to be thousands or tens of thousands who don't want to leave the city. And that's accelerating.

dllthomas 11y ago
"it seems like it would be more difficult to have streaming video." And that's just one of the benefits!
lsc 11y ago
> One concern would be connectivity. Maybe you could read Hacker News via an (expensive) satellite hookup but it seems like it would be more difficult to have streaming video. I know this isn't really your point, but video is actually one of the better use-cases for satellite internet. The problem with Satellite isn't bandwidth (I mean, it is, but that's only because most of them are old and there aren't enough of them.) The fundamental problem with satellite internet is latency; the speed of light to get up to where we usually put 'em and back down is... significant. The only realistic way to overcome that is to put the satellite in a much lower (and thus much less stable) orbit, which means replacing them frequently; there have been a bunch of cool-sounding proposals to do this, but it hasn't happened. But... the point is that satellite is great for non-interactive stuff. If you can buffer, say, half a second without causing problems, there's no reason why you would be unhappy with Satellite, so streaming video would work beautifully. Games and skype would be unusable. Web pages would load noticeably slower. But your streaming video and large downloads, potentially, would be competitive with the shitty broadband we're used to here in the US.
11y ago

demallien 11y ago

Just don't call it Rapture

troels 11y ago

A gated community?

ArekDymalski 11y ago

> most low level work would have to be contracted out to people outside the town Well, you could always select interesting, smart people who enjoy what you call "low level work" and mix them with interesting, smart people who do not perceive such work as low level/low prestige even if they do something more "high level" for a living. Now that would be an interesting, smart community.

ghgr 11y ago
I think the GP was thinking on high/low level as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-_and_low-level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-_and_low-level and not regarding prestige or self-worth.

rmason 11y ago

Forget the mall. I raised the idea on here a few years ago of getting a group of hackers together to buy a skyscraper in Detroit or a group of houses all in one neighborhood. Advantage is that there are both jobs and fiber available. However prices are much higher than a few years ago and skyscrapers downtown are scarce due to Chinese investors.

klunger 11y ago

http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrincham http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrincham

rayiner 11y ago

> Whether it is tech people, or just smart folks in general, I think it would be a fun experiment. A fun experiment in segregation?

codeshaman 11y ago

Yeah, but why live there full time ? I would love to be able go to a place where like-minded people come and live for a while (weeks, months), working on their projects, while surrounded by neighbours they can engage with and discuss interesting ideas, but also with cool events going on around the village. A kind of a permanent 'boot camp' which you can visit at any time. Some old forgotten village in the mountains, inhabited by programmers, sysadmins and designers (with family/ kids of course) , with fast Internet, night time parties with visiting DJs, cooking experiments, group sports, hiking in the mountins, fishing, camp fires; tech conferences in the village center with invited speakers, meetups and hacklabs. :)

joeyspn 11y ago

> Is anyone doing this? Yes... also in Spain there's this place named Ca La Fou: https://calafou.org/en https://calafou.org/en Ca La Fou is an ambitious ‘eco-industrial postcapitalist colony’, a day’s cycle outside barcelona. The group first visited this site in october 2010, and only moved here in july 2011. The enormous space was bought as a housing cooperative by the group with a loan from an ecological bank and support from a wider network. The thirty permanent collective members work at a slow pace but have achieved a great deal by making the space livible and have already built a number of functioning workshops. These include: - An impressive hacklab where broken computers are recycled into new ones - A collaborative car workshop where engines are fixed to run with vegetable oil - A Ukelele workshop - A chemistry lab where soap is made from recycled vegetable oil mixed with caustic soda, (and sometimes recycled animal fat) - A chicken-run and chick creche. https://www.ecotopiabiketour.net/2012/an-introduction-to-ca-la-fou https://www.ecotopiabiketour.net/2012/an-introduction-to-ca-...

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

I think the first question to answer is why would you do it? Kibbutzim work and they can be wonderful, but they're created often with very specific ideas in mind, like a communal way of life or a desire for ethnic homogeneity, not simply 'oh the land is cheap, what if we started a town there'. I can't think of a lot of benefits over starting a private space within the richness and diversity of an existing city, like say the mall idea you mentioned. (which is restricted by law, not by interest. There are legal restrictions that prohibit housing in offices or shopping areas which I think make a lot of sense, but it'd certainly be great if they were more flexible. For example in my city there's enormous housing shortages, and office surpluses, and companies offering to convert office units to housing, but the government rarely changes city planning for which legitimate reasons sometimes also exist, but it can be really frustrating)

vtlynch 11y ago

sounds like a great idea. all the self-titled tech elite could move to their own town and everyone else would be much happier

sauco82 11y ago

Actually I am, and coincidentally I have been joking with the same idea for several years. In the last 2 years the idea became more tempting I investigated which kind of villages were in Spain and what kind of work was needed to make this work. As you might expect as prices goes down utilities, accessibility and general connection to the world decreases. But it is also true that even if not with those outrageously low prices there are several villages with just a few thousand inhabitants, all the utilities you might need, low prices and just at 20 minutes from well connected airports and the capital. From this September we are moving to one of those in the Southern coast of Spain and try to implement a really simple model in which part of the community bring in economic resources and the rest brings in quality of life, all in an environmentally friendly and socially responsible way. The ones bringing in the economic resources at the beginning would be mostly developers like myself or designers. The reason for that is they can move and work remotely quite easily and they are quite frequently looking for some more colleagues to work with in their projects or Startups (again, like myself). The quality of life is something abstract depending on the members of the community, it could be anything from organizing bootcamps or accelerators to yoga, paragliding or having a good chef cooking for everyone. We haven't yet started to make all the work to promote this but if anyone is interested or would like to participate I'm here to answer any questions.

reustle 11y ago
Would love to keep updated. There is no contact info in your HN profile.
- sauco82 11y ago
  Great :) I've just updated my about data with some social networks links. Once we begin with the social media campaign I will be posting there too.