I have a suggested alternative to building Latin-American-style (in your view) towns from scratch in the U.S.It seems to me that the kinds of towns you are talking about are built organicaly, but a very large number of small developers, all making individual choices over a long period of time. In some sense, you simply *can't* reproduce that by fiat: the development is inherently cumulative, incremental, and deeply involved with the culture that dwells there. You risk creating a cargo-cult of a village if you try to plan it out as you've suggested.
Rather: look to the most impoverished areas and use your charitable largesse to aim for break-even investments in the development of small businesses owned and operated by the people there. People say things like "The Web destroyed mainstreet" but I think that's only the story *so far*. Historic retailers are (mostly were) irredeemably old fashioned in how they managed their supply chains, retail space utilitization, and more -- geeky entrepreneurs should be able to find a lot of new efficiencies, sufficient to support at least small local enterprises.
In that way, you can build a constituency of community leaders with whom to, next, turn to questions such as regional development policies.
-t
-- Thomas Lord, November 20, 2007
I like your ideas.Wikipedia is amazing. The power of volunteer groups in general is surprising to me.
The "Latin American Village" would be hard, but it might work due to current demographic trends. The current baby bust and divorce is causing a lot of loneliness in the suburbs.
You would need a special zoning exception from the city, and any home owners association might quickly kill most of the in-home businesses. People do no like the idea of businesses springing up next door and bringing a daily traffic of strangers past their door.
Latin Americans lived the way they did out of necessity and because extended families were still economic in the hinterlands.
The ideal American life in the 1970's was like Bonanza, with Pop, Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe plus some women and children. The show had a sad tone to it without wives and children.
People in the 1970's were trying to recreate that family isolation in the suburbs, but I think that may shift again to the practice of the 1950's when there were no fences allowed between neighbors. That idea became fashionable among the intelligentsia during the baby bust before WWII.
-- David Lee, July 27, 2008
I like your idea of Internet content prizes, except that this would ultimately lead to less choice on our bookshelves, virtual or physical, as only one prize per category means only one author in a category of thousands of authors who actually gets paid. If all authors turned to this over night as a way to earn money, the volume of authors and with it the volume of published works would diminish over time.I do think its high time the copyrighters recongnised that with Internet distribution, the price of the information (read that as author) should be the bulk of the price consumers should pay. I don't understand the cost model behind iTunes et al charging the same price for an online virtual CD as Best Buy does for the same instore physical CD.
Authors should get paid. That's my $0.02 worth I'll be collecting some day :)
-- Tim Fisher-Jeffes, July 30, 2008
re LA Villages - you have to solve the problem that in the USA, every street must be wide enough for 2 fire trucks to pass each other - if you don't you won't be able to insure any of the property.Possibly engineering a different solution might add $10-20 million (as a guess, design places for pumper trucks to plug in to the underground pipe system nearby but not on that street) , but the real hurdle will be the building codes and the ability to get the insurance companies to write insurance on the affected properties.
-- Patrick Giagnocavo, February 18, 2013