http://www.slideshare.net/montejohnlatham/the-ecopicality-factor-02
Maybe Adam and Eve’s Eden had natural housings. Ideal places to play house, to utilise for liaisons, eating, making contact or whatever. We don’t know about the daily consciousness of these two unique forebears. Think of it as the Z factor. Maybe there was no need for domestic facility. Food was easy; straight from the trees. The meaning of ecopicality will unfold – in Z surely personality epitomising ecopicality was rife. It was pleasant enough to sleep on the grass. Perhaps the opalescent glow of the night sun refracting through the firmament discouraged sleep. They were tending the garden in consciousness Z. Moving a boulder to make a clear area in a place of splendour. A modification of place to keep optional implements for cracking coconuts and spooning passionfruit. Domestic developments would be an option. Sewerage would be negated by perfect eating, or something. But we really don’t know all about Z.
I heard a Maasai say, “God intended us to farm animals by seasonal movement and not by planted boundaried farming.” We see in this a very significant choice that says no to settled housing. These people as I write are threatened with flooding and its dire implications for them, which are supposedly justified by the need for a dam to provide water to the houses of others. They are balanced, fair minded, highly articulate people. I am certain they understand ecopicality – as you will. If it wasn’t for the ways of the built cities Talkabout would know of them not via tv but as faint distant energy in his dreaming.
Minimum is a practical thing, an abstinence thing, an affordability thing, a fundamental necessities thing, a cultural and social thing, a thing of the mind and a very personal thing. It is time away from home as much as time at home. Economy of housing activity – not merely house construction. Usually it’s most beautiful to the dweller whose economy it is - usually giving some freedom from cleaning, maintenance, building and guilt. There should always be an option for a person to have a plot of land somewhere practical, where an encampment is allowed to be begun and slowly to grow into exactly what the dweller wants. An option for a Gallopilong to camp in town.
Minimum. It should be the maximum.
Oodles of money can confuse and change these values. And really the only stop on those capitalist sorts of minima is educated acknowledgement of ecology, town planning, hearty needs and environmental beauty - of ecopicality. Sustainability is a down-to-earth subset of ecopicality. The global accumulation has surpassed ecological minima. The bridge is cracking.
What is minimum for you? If you are part of a growing sprawl it is too much. When it comes to eco-minima it’s hard to beat renovation as a limit to your housing activity.
Biocities - might be our only hope. Correction, surely; it is our only hope – improved by the cultural sensitivities of simple ecopicality and supporting ecopical ecological principles. There is a psyche thing with this. You are very likely to have a plastic switch in a wall near you at the moment; to make an electricity flow. The flick of a switch is a reminder of industry, invention - capacities generally beyond the individual or small community. It is also a bread and butter thing - a r
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☼An urban architect’s perspective follows:
Under the footprints of the world’s housing are some exceedingly complex issues. I simplify these with custom-made language.
Nomadism and urbanism. We can surmise that behind both is a common ground. A nub of thoughts, a crossroads or an unaware reflex. A ground from which we either;
Settle into place, building and farming or,
ζ Move through places, with the mood, the hunt, the herd or the seasonal foods - which may lead to a place of abundance, with an option for non-urban indigenous settlement.
Thus, we venture into the mind ethers which underpin our basic domestic options; the vapours of the motivations underpinning both dusty campfire and plush penthouse. Whichever, from this common ground, we variously diverged, still taking our ancient circadian steps, making our domestic-arrangements, doing our housing. Dancing the Housefandango, Campfandango and Localefandango.
There’s a flip side to this common ground, this nub. Another common ground, real but rarely visited. A ground of convergent mutual acknowledgement among the nomadic and the urban. A ground fertilised with the unification of the advantages of both lifestyles. A ground to minimise the adversities of both. On this fertile flip-side common ground, nomadic lifestyle breeds with urbanic lifestyle to produce a mutual overarching domestic ethos. Call it, nomurbism – an ethos producing a humane but strictly protocoled urbia alongside the room for the nomadic roam. Nomurbic understanding assists the Campfandango and indigenous settlement in their daunted interface with rampant cities. Nomurbics is also a facilitator for a full range of urban/country nomadisms.
A spectrum of nomurbic options lives between the two extremes.
Call this perfect urbia, Ecopia. ‘Nomurbia’ might do as well for a name but a link with ‘Utopia’ is descriptive.
These ‘cities’, with their remote outposts, urbs, surveys and houses are mutually protocoled to sit happily organically and spiritually within the nomadic realms. And the nomadic realms within them. With this, ecopicality is uncovered; an urgent modern way of dancing the Housefandango and the first-principles mindset that includes environmental sustainability also for its ethic, beauty and lifestyle.
Campfandango is in not my focus here.
These, probably heretobeforeanywhere unmentioned by any name, rhythmic sciences of ecopics and nomurbics are not teased out in this discussion. The ogres of current pragmatics devour the flowering romance. These sciences can be observed faintly notional and intuitive in the creative activities of many people today and yesterday, non-descripts included. Perhaps some are Carlos Santana, Paolo Soleri, Arthur C. Clark, David Suzuki and John Smith. The covered wagons loaded with settler people and their embryonic residential accumulations, rattling through Sitting Bull’s nomadic indigenous heaven, dangerously threatened his livelihood, as their noise and numbers scuttled away the buffalo. The railway brought it on heavier and the opportunity for mutual nomurbic togetherness, incorporating ecopian townships, in lieu of a fight for survival, was gone – a faint hope that it might come right one day. Give me a house; rather give me no more than a tipi-village with horses – and perhaps a gentle trading neighbour in an ecopian town.
Modern times and urban ways have grown a megamonster. It sounds like kid stuff, but look behind the name tag. It is the commonly acknowledged untamed unecologic giant multinational current pragmatic of industrial society which harms more than just the nomads. The deeply urban individuals are plagued with unfortunate mindsets, from the dodo that creeps into their unwitting thoughts. Undoubtedly, without a blast from the sun, the rampant city end of potentially ecopian lifestyle would swing around and swallow the nomad whole – as it does currently, still.
The dodo is urban deviance caused by ignorance, apathy, greed and desperation. The dodo feeds its decisions to the megamonster. In turn, the monster spawns the orthogonal houselocusts – the machinemarked grid of boxed domestic-contraptions. The houselocusts, with their theodolite-surveyed industry, consume the wonderful world of the nomad, the land, the country; and the resources too - the playdough of the Earth. The dodo is responsible for pale people, boulevard excess and deceptive opulence.
Ecopical attitudes and actions, having no scope for deviance beyond practical compromise, will convert the playdough into tame balanced urban solutions. Thus, providing variously an abundance of health-giving natural physicality; nature’s earthy nurtures. And with it domestic room as a basis for settlement that is sensitive to environmental beauty, creature habitats, ecology and nomadic realm. Ecopicality will also renovate, debox, degrid and defang the houselocusts. But comfort zones for most must change. Comfort zones will change.
☼ A tracker’s perspective:
The dweller is the trackee. Its bed may be housed comfortably under a tree. Or in a room of colourful vinyl-coated walls. It defies rain with roofing and mosquitoes with net or smoke, even though we love to see the stars from bed. It’s an historic prehistoric compromise - house components may obscure natural wonders. We counter this compromise with design, décor and affable materials. We make the place nice and a romance grows – imbued with palaeolithic glow.
Various ripples roll out into our community and our world. Yours is yours, not just anybody's. The world is eventually everybody's - a piece of a broken door washes ashore at Tierra del Fuego concurrent with an ultra-violet inclemency through holes in the ozone shield. Ultra-violet footprints, sprawl and depleted natural amenity lie broken and discarded on the track. The houselocust shoots itself in the foot. The additional inclemency it brings upon even the nomad creates more purpose for the house, more mutation for the houselocust. A deviance from sane simple values – trading scenic delight and fresh air for crisp synthetic slums, effluent and smog. But with tv and the somas of entertainment and irrelevant luxury.
It can be done well. Changing trees to rafters. Wide open space to interiors. Lifestyle. House has worldly impact. As it adds, converts and complements; it depletes, marks, modifies, opens. Woodgrain and quarry-face are revealed to the light of day. The foundation trench consorts with its pile of dirt and the manner of its extraction. Housemarks - the resultants of the construction and existence of house. A tree will not sprout through the porcelain bath. A worm cannot poke his head through your road. Eye can’t see through your brickwork. Time spent, playdough of the Earth used, energy burned - to produce a house. Especially for you - or for a welfare number.
The egg is fried; the mind is civilised, tantalised, homogenised, tempted and romanced by the cultural concept and existence of house. Sometimes Globalised, never Gallopilongised. An amazing range of impact when multiplied by the number of houses and factored with the number of people who ever will have lived, multiplied again by our tendencies to crowd together and go for more. The innocent little house. Oink - the deviant houselocust pigs out. Global Pale, plagued by a long nurtured dodo, is driving. Everybody on the bus is skipping the Housefandango. Some, nourished by the skip, are mobilizing, unwittingly towards ecopicality, like Bobby Dazzler. Ecopical architectures must multiply.
The ripples continuously go out, washing over people and earth. Holocaust and fandango. Lifestyle, identity, health, doings, feelings, appearances, society, ecology - are all house affected. Substantiated by utopian purpose, house, or at least domestic-arrangement is the burning torch of unique personal beingrowing in gregarious settlement, planetary participation. Holy holy. But, plagued by our foibles and inadequacies - houseless people, incubated people, dirty people, stuffy people, tasteless, unfortunate environmental impacts and hopeless interiors. Walk on Blackfella. Apes born in cages from apes born in cages - mere shadows of apes. Pale shadows. Years moving back and forth. Cage removed. His movements remained the same - despite the freedom to go further. A frozen mind without scope to liquefy, he was never to cross the threshold from his limitation, his familiar life. The steam engine and the internal combustion engine once developed each began immense unstoppable cultural transformation. Both bane and joy; the evolution of house has had far greater impact. Carbon monoxide and tyre dumps; shadows of people and sewerage. Cheekyfella, like the Namibian nomads, intuitively ecological, has compassion for Global.
Some people push on without houses. Some with gentle impact or indigenous houses. Will they all be overcome by the house-burst phenomenon? The houselocust holocaust. The room boom. Bang bang. They need the oil oil (again as I type).
Skipping the Housefandango, doing our housing, opening a window, manufacturing a doorknocker, felling a tree to make particleboard, a dollar in a charity cup, so many hours of one’s job, a photograph of the landscape, an optic-fibre cable to an acrylic-rendered gable; they all relate to our housing quanta. They are all new things on the clean slate of a houseless world. A house is a responsibility.
Without house a whole lot of ....
Ecopicality…
♫Walk with ecopicality, talk with ecopicality.
Swing with switches, spears and personality.
‘Ecopicality’,
… sing it as ‘Personality’ (the old ‘60s Lloyd Price song, google it now) – THIS IS HOW WE SHOULD FEEL ABOUT OUR FIGHT FOR OPTIMUM ABODE; sing it in the kitchen with the crumbs on the table….
♫ We’ve got ecopicality ♪. …
It’s a new name for a common nameless body of understanding that claims psychoecology critically in tandem with enviroecology. I may have to pen another little book about this:
check Dazzlers Dictionary in the back porch.
ecopicality:DD; a wholistic quality of any environmental interventions (incl. housemaking); aspects of this quality are harmonies in: ecologies, economy, community, dweller compatibilities, nature’s nurtures, dweller personality, urban design, synthetic aesthetic(DD);
an urgent modern way of dancing the Housefandango(DD), of doing our housing. ecopical(DD), ecopology(DD); if a house has ecopicality it’s a winner, so we sing to the tune of the old L Price song “she’s got personality …
“she’s got ecopicality, walks with ecopicality, talks with ecopicality…”;
term developed during the writing of this book.
▒
Houses come together in a world we share.
We may seek to ‘inherit the Earth’; fascinating concept. Why would somebody say such?
It's 2018 now but seems this fellow was cooking up an academic package in the same songline: http://www.biophilicdesign.net
Might have to acknowledge same in House Fandango
https://www.facebook.com/House...
It says, sorry about some repeat;
Ecopia:DD; Nomurbia(DD), a typical ecopian Utopia; socio-ecologically perfect urbia; ecopical(DD), ecopicality(DD), ecopology(DD).
Ecopiala:DD; special ecopia; fantastic ecopian city, loved by nomads and urban stick-in-the-muds alike, frequented by nomads, introduces settlers to nomadism.
ecopicality:DD; .................. ”she’s got ecopicality, walks with ecopicality, talks with ecopicality…”..... This word 'ecopical' is basically about that and includes the aspect of social personality - as people, we do best what people understand, love and are correctly prone to do – and so politics is part of ecopicality also – we cop the truth of our failings. Ecopicality is not yet in our consensus dictionaries, but its imprints belong in our frames of mind when we develop our public realms, grids, offices and factories.
ecopian:DD; according to ecopicality(DD).
ecopiate:DD; rest in adjusting & managing toward understanding nonecopian compromise toward ecopical comfort & stimulation.
ecopical:DD; pertaining to ecopicality(DD). ecopology:DD; as yet undeveloped science-art of socio-ecologically perfect urbia incl. housing, in association with nomurbics(DD).
Great Southern Streetwalking Nomad,2018, says;
ecopicality: a wholistic eco-social quality of any environmental intervention (incl. house, bridge, pasture making); aspects of this quality are harmonies in ecologies, nomurbics, economy, community, dweller compatibilities, nature’s nurtures, dweller personality, urban design, synthetic aesthetic; an urgent modern way of dancing the House Fandango, of doing our housing); a house with ecopicality is a winner, so we sing to the tune of the old L Price song “she’s got personality …
”she’s got ecopicality, walks with ecopicality, talks with ecopicality…”; term developed during the writing of House Fandango.
This word 'ecopical' is basically about that and includes the aspect of social personality - as people, we do best what people understand, love and are correctly prone to do – and so politics is part of ecopicality also – we cop the truth of our failings. Ecopicality is not yet in our consensus dictionaries, but its imprints belong in our frames of mind when we develop our public realms, grids, offices and factories.
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