My Ideal Neighborhood

My Ideal Neighborhood

By John Taylor; 2006 July 12

It is nigh on ten years since we bought this house. The first five years I was ambitious, did everything I could myself and read everything I could get my hands on about how to make the place better and more efficient. This was silly of me since I have almost zero budget to spend but it kept me busy at least. At one point I called in a local contractor to see if it would be possible to install some special type of heating system that I had heard about -- we are presently electrically heated. He probably knew right off that our house was not air tight enough but he knew the story of every house in town and seemed to be curious to see ours from the inside. He told me that the same Toronto contractors who built the townhouses behind us did our place as well, and that their sole object was to build houses as quickly and cheaply as possible, make a quick buck and then get out.

Somehow that invidious anecdote by a rival contractor stuck in my mind and refused to get out. My enthusiasm fell like a house of cards. Gradually I gave up on home improvement completely. For this second five years of our residence I did as little work as possible and dreamed of what can and should be done in home building. First of all, human dwellings should be owned and controlled collectively. Governments, local and higher, should be part owners with certain rights in decision-making. Owners should own only partly their own living space, and have shares in other parts of the neighborhood block. Renters and other temporary residents should gain credits, set aside from part of their rent which would be cashed in when they decide to own a permanent home. This would ease the transition into full shareholdership in a neighborhood. These shares would be transferable anywhere, so that if they move away they should be able to use these credits to become permanent homeowners anywhere else.

Our home is hopeless. It is a disaster area, like almost every other house that you see. The more I learned about the right way to build homes the more hopeless my house and every other house became. First of all, our home, though better than most in this respect, is still askew to the sun. I would have to put solar panels on two of the three sides of our roof at great expense and even then both faces would miss the sun for half the day. So the question grew in my mind: how might a house be built from the ground up for maximal benefit to residents and the environment?

The farmer should come first, as we all know. The inherent waste built into every home right now has to be eliminated. Converting the southern exposure of buildings to other primary uses cannot be an option. Solar energy is our cheapest and most available natural energy source. It falls on every square inch of the planet. The sun, therefore, must "own" its side of the building. Our houses, therefore, should be designed with the needs of farming first in mind. Farming should be going on in the closest possible proximity to housing. In fact, this would be not only cheaper and more efficient, it would also be much better for our health, as I shall explain presently.

Putting farmers and gardeners first would mean designing every home, apartment and housing block so as to take in the maximum amount of sunlight. The sunward side of residences would be treated as agricultural "land," with all the rights and legal protection that is now afforded to agricultural areas. It should be either leased out to local farmers or tended as communal gardens by residents themselves. If there are problems, other farmers could be hired or fired according to given criteria. If a roof turns out not to be economically viable for growing, its sunny space could be converted to solar panels but in no case would that resource be wasted.

I mentioned that mixing residential with agricultural land uses would be healthier. This I got out of an article in MacLean's Magazine called "The Allergy Epidemic" (June 5, 2006, p. 34). According to findings reported here, children raised from a baby with a dog in the home have a lower incidence of allergies and asthma, and farm children raised with domesticated animals all around have even lower incidence of autoimmune disease. Third World nations and the ghettos of richer nations are what the article calls "viper's nests of bacterial contamination" and yet this kind of health problem is almost unknown in these areas.

Having said that, I am exposing myself to the accusation of being a hypocrite. Our neighbor but one recently bought a chicken. She keeps it in a cage in their back yard with a sign proclaiming, "Cathy's Chicken." Now, from morn to evening I get to listen to "Mrep pep pep pep... Mrep pep pep pep pep..." It is not cluck, it is mrep pep. Anyway, I am well aware that keeping farm animals within city limits -- and Dunnville legally is considered a city --is against the bane of hillside housing, the all powerful zoning laws. I know this because Marie wanted to do the same thing, get a chicken, and we found out about that law and decided against it. I recently saw a film set in Africa, and there, at least in villages, chickens are allowed to wander freely, even in traffic. Cars do not even slow down for them and run right over them. As often as not the chicken runs away Scot free, albeit protesting very loudly and violently. Now I hate zoning laws, at least as they are now; but I also hate noise. So every day I ask myself, do I make a complaint about the noise, or do I live up to my principles and tolerate it like the Africans do?

Actually, this is not such a big problem as it seems. Noise canceling contraptions have been invented that actively dampen clucks and moos and neighs of domestic beasts. For every wave up on the sine curve, they pump out a wave down, rendering a noise source, be it machine or animal, silent. No longer is there an excuse to segregate agricultural and even industrial land uses from residential uses. And since there are many benefits from diversity, only a few of which I mention here, as much mixing as possible should be done ASAP.

A well designed hillside development would have barns built underground so that noise could not escape evenings and at night. Goats, sheep, chickens and cows might be allowed to pasture at local lawns and roofs only at times of the day when people are at work and then go to distant pasturage when residents are at home. Children, who benefit most from being around animals not only physically but psychologically, would be encouraged to tour the local barn and do chores there. Mostly, since local residents would be benefiting from this agricultural activity (not only from the food but also from the low-level exposure to anti-allergenic beasts) it would be known that it is in their interest to tolerate a modicum of noise and other inconveniences in order to gain greater diversity.

Local by-laws must reflect the consequence of farmers coming first. A hillside development, as I see it, would be the natural effect of reforming local building codes to reflect real human needs. Sunnyside greenhouses and so-called growing roofs (where grass is grown to feed ruminants or herbs to feed humans) need to be not only allowed but required by law.

Segregating agriculture has had terrible effects not only on society but agriculture itself. Being separate, farming has become industrialized, extremely smelly, loud and environmentally dangerous. This is very profitable for large corporations but bad for farmers and the public alike. Even as things are, certain organic farmers are finding that old ways are still the best ways. Some are even getting rid of their tractors and using horses to plow, plant and harvest crops again. By mixing farms into residences such environmentally friendly techniques would become obligatory.

Another feature of hillside developments would be interspersed towers. These would be used as farmers' silos, wind turbines and heat towers. I am a typical city person, though raised in rural areas, and I had no idea what silos are used for until I got an idle moment at a corn maze as the kids were fooling around somewhere else. I asked the farmer there why he did not have a silo and he explained that he did not have animals, he grew crops. I still did not understand. He went on, saying that when you have beef cattle you pile corn up to the rim of the silo and through the winter the farmer scrapes off a layer at a time to feed to the cows. I had no idea. So, if hillside housing did mix agriculture with residential there would have to be silos at every animal barn.

But silos and other cylindrical towers would have other uses as well. One use is as a heat tower, an ancient invention used originally in the deserts of Babylon and the Fertile Crescent. Heat towers were the original air conditioners. Such a tower at night draws off excess heat built up in a building during the day. With some tweaking, it could be adapted to accomplish more active air conditioning, all free and powered by the sun. In winter water can be pumped up high, frozen, and the ice cubes piped underground for cooling during the summer. A silo can also be used as a home base or hanger for a wind turbine; the generators and propellers would soar on a tower high above the silo, but when needed the whole assembly can be lowered into the silo for maintenance and shelter during high winds. When not used for that, silos have recreational uses as well. For example, a silo can have a large spiral water slide running around it, inside and out. It can be used as a neighborhood observation post, encouraging people to build physical activity into their daily routine as they climb up and down long spiral stairs in order to look at the panorama and meditate. Or a silo can be an airship dock; or if a dome is placed on its summit, it becomes a high flying stage or Imax cinema.

I also fantasize about mixing industrial activity into hillside developments. This too started in my garage, which though thrilling during the first five years, now also seems hopelessly inadequate during the second half of my tenure. I thought I might be interested in learning how to turn wood, so I bought a lathe and piles of material and equipment. I reached a certain level of skill and did not progress. Finally I lost interest and had to sell it all off in order to have room to do other things. Here is how it would work in a hillside housing development.

Not only houses but garages would be shared and communally owned and run. That is, a person interested in learning a manual skill would walk over to the local craft and hobby workshop where he or she would have the right to a certain work area. While you could buy your own tools, you would also have the option of leasing or borrowing tools and equipment for a trial period while you learn enough about the craft to know whether you want to continue or do something else. Similarly, professionals would be mixed in with amateurs so that informal teaching would be going on constantly. If I find that I ask a great number of questions to one expert, I might easily set up an informal apprenticeship with this craftsperson. Like the transition from renter to owner, there would be no hard divide between amateur crafts persons and professional journeymen, or between one person operations and large industrial operations.

In such a setup, I could donate my lathe to the local workshop and know that a neighbor is putting it to use and that someday, if one of my children takes an interest, I would still be able to access it in order to give them a quick introduction to woodturning. Plus I see open shops and communal craft guilds as a way to reverse the present trend of offloading manual labor from rich lands to the Third World. If this continues skilled trades will disappear and we will face collapse. Neighborhoods with communal guilds should introduce every child to a wide variety of skilled trades by welcoming these workers into their bosom.

What I think we need in order to make such communal garages and mixed use construction possible is not our present dichotomy between owner and dispossessed but, again, unity in a broad diversity, a full and moving spectrum between informal borrower, donor, renter, leaser and full owner. To do that we need what I have called consultative housing. And this in turn is dependent on a new form of democracy that might be called "merit-based, multi-level democracy." That will be the topic of the next essay.

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John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com