Franz+Nahrada

=Franz = **Home page**: http://www.globalvillages.org
 * Your Country : Austria**
 * Affiliation: GLOBAL VILLAGES NETWORK**
 * Contact:** F.NAHRADA_AT_REFLEX_dot_AT

Working with community informatics since 20 years and more, although not formally involved.

Globally Integrated Village Environment project:

"the ultimate expression of the social is in space". (S.Kracauer).

I neglected my academic career basically because I felt in the presence of the wrong people and goals there. So I am currently making my life as a hotel manager and waiting for a good opportunity to go back fully into research. But not the type of research that produces mere paper ;-)

My topic since more than 20 years has been the interconnection of new information and communication technologies with human habitat - especially the way they give new freedom to design smaller. leaner, greener community spaces.

I went to the extremity of things and went for the best ideas to have those who want and desire it find a viable alternative in new and regenerated village life, whilst connecting those villages to urban centers that me and my friends chose to call the Mothercities. (the name says it all: become a hub rather than a vacuum cleaner). I find much confirmation in Christopher Alexanders introductory notes about the distribution of settlements in the pattern language, although Alexander totally focussed on urban developments and neither cared much about the very center nor the very periphery.

see some very enlighteing references on Alexander [|here]!

The hypothesis is: with the advent of new communication technologies, specialised knowledge can be permanently present, active and effective within a small scale human settlement without a drastical surge of the population. We can live in a distributed manner, yet cluster in urban ways in small human settlements. There possibilities in an age of global communication have not been explored - neither have they even been realized!

So I am working to fill that gap, and as you can guess not in a descriptive manner, but in a constructive. Villages as we know them today are autdated and threatened by totalitarian urbanisation, so one conclusion - and thats the one I follow - is that they have to be radically reinvented and exploration and realisation go hand-in-hand.

The village of the futuire is deeply influenced by the urban experience and its explosion in human possibilities and it "brings the mind home", as my friend Tony S. Gwilliam (member of Archigram and now also fellow hospitality manager in Bloo Lagoon Village in Bali) used to title his groundbreaking essay on Global Villages.

In fact, there is a certain optimism built in that new media allow us to retrieve what is forgotten and combine it with new and exciting possibilities. The new patterns that emerge are clearly visible, like local education centers, theme based co-working, village as an intentional cooperative endavour and so on.

I would very much like to point your attention to those possibilities. Recently I started to work with a foundation based in London based on similar principles, the Clear Village Foundation. They focus on village rejuvenation by participatory planning - and invited me to participate in their first "Lab" in the center for advanced architecture in Barcelona, Spain, last November. For the first time I see the real possibility of a global community of researcher-activists who are collectively determined to bring a wave of change to the world and shatter the "2050 75% will live in cities" assumption.

I started an attempt to build such a community back in 1997, the Global Villages Network, but it is still stagnant and needs to be brought to life, There is enormous demand for such a network, but without some funding and permanent staff things will not move.

will you join to make it alive?


 * @http://p2pfoundation.net/Global_Villages
 * @http://p2pfoundation.net/GIVE