This book inspired me in 1976. I began a project to rehab a dilapidated house in a an old company tract housing area just outside of Pittsburgh. It was a monumental failure. I'm a goof. Perhaps I've failed in interesting ways sometimes.
Here's a set of photos of the book by James King at Flickr which gives a nice flavor of the book.
What made me think of the book was seeing a post at Ukiah Blog, How “Giftivism” Helped Turn a Tough Oakland Street Into a Close-Knit Community… with a great 6 minute video.
Certainly a part of what made my own attempts a failure was not having others involved with me.
The people involved with the book were also involved with starting The Centre for Alternative Technology. CAT has been going on for 40 years now. There's a nice video by two Polish filmmakers, which amounts to Peter Harper talking about how they might go about setting a a similar center in Poland. What makes it interesting is Harper reflecting on how CAT has managed for 40 years. And he chocks a lot of it up to luck.
This article in The Guardian puts it: "Welsh hippies ushered in an era of sustainable living well before the world had woken up to climate change." Lot's of people my age once considered themselves hippies, but rather quickly put that behind them. I've always been slow, so it wasn't until I got online around 1998 hippies are anathema to lots of folks.
Sometimes on my stream I get a sense that the vision of the Casa de Paz mentioned in the video at Ukiah Blog is something like many young people aspire to today. But I think there's a hump to get over and that's not liking hippies much.
Forty years or so is a long time and provides some distance to view the way people did stuff. Lots and lots of stuff didn't work, but even what didn't work can be informative.
I saw a page today that's For Further Reading for the book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch. I was surprised to see some books from the 1970's on the list. There is a corpus of texts to mine. And if one can get over the hump about hippies with just a bit of humor, I suspect it can be fun too.
