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Today, we have the opportunity to create far happier and healthier human life.
This goal or desire of course is not new. What is new is our growing modern accumulation of health-related science – physiological, psychological, sociological, and ecological – describing in more certain terms what this effort entails, how it best might be achieved, and where it can begin most easily.
As I will explore with you in concept and practice, and again confirming intuitions we have had for centuries, contemporary science underscores that happier and healthier life for all people is an outcome, endeavor, and indeed created condition that is at once realistic and waiting, with all or most of its needed features adequately understood and within our grasp (for a more careful summary and synthesis of this science, see Our Three Natural Paths and its free companion Three Paths Community Health Program).
Importantly, in our discussion, and as is my custom, I will take happiness as sustained positive feeling or emotion, and health as the more fundamental or ultimately selected natural quality that is sustainability or durability itself – and whether as respects an organism, group, species, or system. As a practical and empirical matter, happiness appears to follow health closely in nature, and also to be a general signal and motivator of health, especially in stable conditions of life.
Overall, the science of creating happier and healthier modern life suggests a three-part approach, or underlying model of action, and one employed simultaneously at the communal or local and societal or global levels. First, and fundamentally, is for us consciously to seek and prioritize these outcomes, and notably above all, which demonstrably is not evenly or even commonly the case today. Second, and unsurprisingly, is for us widely to use available empirical science to guide us in this naturally broad, complex, and overriding effort. Third, and given inevitable imperfection in our understandings and actions, is for us continually to adjust, improve, or evolve our sense and seeking of happiness and health, in order to achieve these core and related natural aims of life more readily, and more durably.
This three-part and only seemingly simple process for progressing modern happiness and health may strike you as obvious, even as it remains largely unused and overlooked in our time – with the natural, and naturally foundational, advancement of our health and ensuing happiness routinely subordinated to other goals, preoccupations, and formulations. As I have written about elsewhere, these alternative aims and efforts can be framed helpfully as surrounding or broadly emerging from the historically new, naturally isolated or indifferent, and discernably less happy and healthy phenomenon that is human competition for wealth. This now frequently dominating state of life in turn is well-approached as occurring in place of and keeping us from more widespread, more naturally advanced and advancing, and predictably more harmonious and enduring cooperation for health. Crucially, and as you can confirm for yourself, our exploration of conscious, scientific, and evolving human cooperation for health reliably leads us to the conclusion that we now collectively must live much more carefully or attentively with our science, with one another, with our natural happiness and health, and with health-bestowing nature.
These critical and observable premodern and modern social dynamics underscore that, although far happier and healthier life may be waiting for us in a scientific age, action in this direction must confront and overcome substantial barriers to realizing our new potential to design and build our communities, societies, and thus lives for transformed, and naturally transforming, happiness and health. As suggested, and as you will see in the science-derived construct or model for happier and healthier human life I will introduce, movement toward appreciably healthier or naturally superior conditions today appears to involve a basic shift and thus change in the general direction or emphasis of modern life and society. In practice, this means stopping a great deal of what we now do, and often making more than incremental or modest adjustments to the ways in which we currently think, organize, plan, design, build, and live.
Making these essential and life-altering ideas more pointed and palpable, and now specifically addressing those of us who plan, create, and finance our modern built environment as their profession, I concurrently and more emphatically would say this: there is something deeply flawed, irrational, self-limiting, far from optimal, recurrently unhappy and unhealthy, and thus unnatural in the ways that we design and build our communities, cities, and societies at present. Around the world, our existing planning, design, and development practices routinely and measurably squander natural resources and human effort, precariously pollute and impair our planet’s ecosystems, and simultaneously diminish our environment and ourselves. Relatedly, and again measurably, our development methods also frequently and now needlessly create insecure and unstable communities and societies, perpetuate strained and unsustainable human relations and conditions more generally, leave us individually less fit and well than we readily might be, and in all produce much less human happiness and health than is possible in our time – and naturally will be necessary in time.
Against these important and intersecting shortfalls in our modern design and development practices, our opportunity to plan and build life in superior and more advancing ways – and thereby naturally or quintessentially to create superior and more advancing conditions of health for all people, and even all of life around us – once more appears to begin from and depend on our new science-enabled ability to understand and construct life in more careful, deliberate, foreseeing, and beneficial ways. For all of us, but again especially those of us in and funding the design and development professions, this inevitably means better comprehending why and improving how we build the structures and thus structure of life, and in turn steadily and ultimately acting in ever more patient, informed, reflective, prospective, and health-minded terms.
To consider these naturally essential and now pressing themes more deeply, concretely, and actionably, I will introduce and explore a science-synthesizing, healthfully-remaking, and far-reaching model for modern design and development, one that I call the natural city. As you will see, this alternative and remarkably simple approach to community and ultimately societal design makes clear, conceptually and practically, that my introductory ideas are substantially true and ready for urgent attention. As part of this discussion, the natural city model will demonstrate how an array of limiting and largely inherited shortfalls in modern quality of life can be simultaneously, systematically, and fairly easily remedied, beginning in our time, and again largely through superior or more health-minded design and development practices.
In keeping with my overview graphic above, and as you will see in our exploration of the city, the natural city is a tangible, practicable, and ready alternative to our dominant modes of community and societal design and development today. In all, the natural city aims at, and appears likely to produce, immediately much happier and healthier modern people, communities, and societies. At the same time, the natural city also aims at, and similarly appears likely to produce, human life that is recurringly or enduringly efficient and effective at achieving these core natural aims, leading to far more stable and sustainable conditions in time than is probable at present. Importantly, this increased stability and sustainability is for our societies and species, and interrelatedly, for all or much of natural life on our planet as well.
As its seemingly, and thus instructively, contradictory name implies, the natural city first is very much a city – though importantly, one envisioned as becoming societal and eventually global in scale – affording the social, economic, efficiency, and intellectual advantages of urbane, interconnected, dense, and cosmopolitan human life. At the same time, and in keeping with its name, the natural city also is an urban entity innovatively placed directly in and subordinated to the natural landscape. Owing to this second essential attribute, the natural city thereby is a construct seeking the reliable physical, emotional, perceptual, informational, and ecological benefits of human life in close proximity to and intimacy with the natural world, and not only to and with itself, as of course was our long, long-evolved, long-enduring, and health-advancing ancestral condition.
Looking across these twin and constructively united features of the natural city, and countering frequent modern presumption about cities and nature overall, I further would emphasize that the city is designed or planned as a naturally, and thus highly, decentralized or distributed arrangement of human communal life – and even radically so by modern and premodern urban standards. In this way, the city’s development is intended, and again appears likely to produce or promote, crucial political, economic, and social health benefits as a consequence, and not only experiential, perceptual, and ecological ones.
Presaging our practice-minded discussion of the city’s construction, and here focusing on this idea of radical urban decentralization, I would highlight that in the natural city, and by design: 1) every home and almost every building is autonomous in key areas, including energy, water, and wastewater processing (via building-level solar power, rainwater harvesting, and septic systems), 2) all homes, neighborhoods, and communities are dispersed in the natural landscape, and directly border either natural or agricultural land, providing easy access to locally-produced food, and 3) the majority of life and work is home and community-based, amid and aiding the city’s deliberate decentralization of urban life into nature, promoting healthy decentralization of essential services and skills as well. In these and other ways, and as you will see as we trace the city’s key features, the natural city importantly, substantially, intentionally, and health-mindedly turns much of traditional urban design on its head, or rather inside-out.
Critically however, despite the city’s broad decentralization and insertion into the natural landscape, the natural city is designed to be neither sprawling or nature-displacing in the typical and pejorative senses of these words, and notably unlike much of modern community design and development. Within the city’s basic plan, which seeks to directly border and overlook local natural conditions at all points, this outcome is achieved by several aiding design features. These again include ensuring that every home and most buildings are constructed in ways preserving or revitalizing surrounding natural conditions. They similarly involve employing compact neighborhoods and communities, and ones whose construction requires minimal resources and related natural disruption. As importantly, and substantially enabling these sprawl-limiting and widely beneficial design features, the city also is based entirely on pedestrian neighborhoods and communities, and specifically ones designed so that every home and most buildings are a short walk or bike ride to a community center, and its co-located intercommunity transportation hub.
Within and aiding these essential local features of the natural city, it is important to add that the city’s buildings are relatedly designed and constructed to minimize their spatial footprint and volume, and thus maximize preservation of their natural surroundings, as before emphasizing closeness and deference to natural conditions. Further, as a pedestrian system at the neighborhood and community levels, the city also does not require and employ motor vehicles – with their natural resource-depleting, socially-isolating, scale-altering, and sprawl-inducing effects – other than for commercial and governmental activities, and for intercommunal and wider transportation needs. Somewhat more subtly, but still crucially, the city naturally employs an open and space-efficient branching or fractal structure for its local plan, instead of an environmentally encompassing, precluding, and coopting roadway grid, whether rectilinear or not. For all of these reasons and as outlined in my overview graphic, despite the city’s broad decentralization, the natural city would leave the vast majority of land both intact and contiguous at a local level, employed for agriculture or left as wilderness, and thereby substantially free of degrading and blighting sprawl.
On this essential set of design points, and reflecting the natural efficiency of the city’s compact pedestrian communities and locally open fractal plan, I would emphasize that, despite the city’s wide decentralization and insertion into the natural landscape, and even occupying only 10% of the Earth’s landmass, it appears the natural city would easily, happily, healthfully, securely, and sustainably accommodate every person alive today, and perhaps much higher population levels. In calculations I will return to later, and notably using a population density of 1000 people per square kilometer, my estimate is that the city could contain roughly 15 billion people (148 million km2 x 0.1 x 1000/km2). This again is while leaving 90% of the Earth’s land either natural or in a semi-natural state. In the latter case, and to ensure sustainable food supplies at this population level, this presumes a concurrent movement to sustainable, restorative, and nature-based perennial agriculture, in concert with modern high-yield holistic food production techniques.
Overall, as we will explore next in more detail, and again upendingly, the natural city consciously moves modern design, development, and communal life beyond historical, widely continuing, broadly nature-contravening or disregarding, now needlessly and senselessly less healthy, and in all substantially denaturalized standards and norms. Once more from both practical and empirical standpoints, these deleterious and strongly circular conventions of modern life and design are well-understood as typified, and substantially driven or unleashed, by our near-universal, still relatively recent, and largely unexamined custom of enclosing and overriding the natural landscape, as we construct and thus shape life. Relatedly, they also substantially arise from our general, anachronistic, limiting, and again circular view that human development and urbanity are apart from nature, and naturally displacing or despoiling.
Recapping and formalizing my introductory themes, these undesirable or less healthy modern outlooks and design norms can be taken as at once resulting from, and in turn perpetuating, our broad, inertial, inattentive, and now science-disregarding creation of local communities and larger societies that are: 1) physically and psychologically separated from, and often inimical toward, living nature, 2) primarily self-referential and internally-oriented, and inadequately observant of nature and environment, 3) socioeconomically centralized and dependent on political and technical management from urban cores, 4) inherently and often steadily unequal and divided, 5) sharply status-emphasizing, competitive, and consumptive as a result, 6) broadly subject to both increasing resource scarcity and declining fertility, and 7) naturally unstable and unsustainable in time. Owing to these critical social features, or design and development outcomes, our current health-oblique or eccentric forms of city and civilization again are naturally more at risk of increasing social and personal discord, external and assuaging resource demands, ecological and economic untenability, structural or systemic volatility, and premature or even needless societal collapse.
Emerging from this often unseen character of our current built and social conditions is the consciously decentralizing, equalizing, economizing, uplifting, health-emphasizing, and thus renaturalizing alternative to, or for, modern life that is the natural city. While the city’s plan and construction may have many finer points, it is crucial to appreciate, as outlined before and again now in more formal terms, that as a practical proposal for superior local and globally connected human living conditions, the natural city can begin and proceed with just five essential and relatively uncomplicated design features, and as before ones aimed at optimizing personal, communal, and ecological health and vitality in time. In keeping with our discussion, first, most transformational, and likely most foundational of these is human design and development without encircling and otherwise diminishing wild nature. Once more, this design feature is intended to guide us, locally and globally, toward human life situated in and benefiting nature, and the natural ecosystems on which we all depend, collectively must navigate, and perpetually might cultivate.
Second, and in one of two features refining the natural city’s first or foundational design quality, and also substantially improving its expected health effects, is building, neighborhood, and community design and development fostering naturally restorative, satisfying, informing, and often truing human life in close contact with the ancient and health-emphasizing natural world. Relatedly, the third design feature, and the second appreciably refining the natural city’s overall form and health, is the city’s use of pedestrian and relatively compact communities, leading to people living in close contact with one another and not only with living nature. This general practice is now well documented as producing superior modern personal and communal health outcomes on multiple fronts – from increased exercise and beneficial interpersonal interaction to more open, transparent, and harmonious communities in total.
In parallel and yet potentiating ways, these second and third essential design features of the natural city are intended to create more intimate and informed life through greater natural and human interaction. Importantly, in keeping with the natural city’s core rationale or reaction to modern shortfalls in human happiness and health, and again highlighting the inherent power or impact of design and development practices overall, the city’s interlinked goals of compact pedestrian community directly in nature of course are nearly in complete opposition to our urban, suburban, and exurban design and development standards today. As a result, these novelly combined or alloyed features of the natural city may seem contradictory, paradoxical, or even impossible at first, but once more on examination can be viewed as both entirely realistic and likely to produce greatly improved modern health and quality of life.
The fourth essential design feature of the natural city, partly arising from but also aiding and propelling the first three qualities, is design and development efforts that intentionally seek distributed and autonomous, secure and equitable, and thus stable and sustainable socioeconomic conditions across modern life – that is, and more proximately, human infrastructure and built conditions that efficiently and easily promote high and ongoing quality of life for all people. Fifth, and interrelatedly but more extra-locally, is design and development assuring that the city’s larger societal and overall built infrastructure allows relatively easy, unfettered, or cosmopolitan movement of people, goods, and ideas around the world. Crucially, this fifth design feature is intended as an aid to the healthy and more widely beneficial equalization, integration, and thus globalization of our species. In all, and as before underscoring the many advantages and waiting synergies of naturally health-minded design, these five essential design features of the natural city can be expected to be at once beneficial and strongly circular, with development efforts in this general mode producing superior socioeconomic and cultural conditions, and these conditions in turn encouraging superior communal design and development practices.
Perhaps interestingly, although these health-seeking design features of the natural city, and the natural city overall as a concept, are pragmatic, empirical, and forward-looking, I would highlight that in an important and likely instructive sense, they also all move us backward somewhat, and notably to the earliest forms of built habitation and human settlement. By this, I mean to the era of roughly 25,000 years ago, when we had begun to house ourselves in modest shelters and fixed communities, but each still primarily overlooking rather than enclosing nature, and each highly compact in basic form as well. This earlier or preliminary arrangement of fixed human life stemmed broadly from the fact that we were still foragers needing wilderness for sustenance, had not developed formal agriculture, and durably benefited from close communal arrangements defensively and psychosocially. As such, and if unknowingly, we had not yet begun to enclose both the natural world and ourselves in the subsequent, thereby historically new, and substantially denaturalized human environment or fabric of traditional urban life and culture.
My natural city graphic above provides a broad but likely sufficient overview of these core design features of the city taken together, and thus an enabling map of the far happier and healthier, more socially and environmentally integrative, more stable and durable, and in all more beneficial natural city that we now might begin to build and live amid – and of course, explore and improve upon as we proceed. As you might sense immediately, this community-level summary design of the natural city is at once plain and plainly waiting today, and as before even to the point of obviousness in each case. Similarly, and if with some reflection, you also may see how this alternative approach to modern building, community, and society might be vastly superior to and more enduring than the ways we currently design, build, and live, and in turn how the city might close all or most of the modern socioeconomic and ecological gaps outlined above.
In keeping with our discussion, the natural city is designed overall to be at once nature situated and culturally urbane, and thus to counter our common supposition that these often healthy human qualities are largely excluding to one another. Owing to this, the natural city’s basic plan is dramatically different than that of traditional and modern cities, equally in appearance and substance, and is perhaps far more inviting than each as well. Importantly, although this nature-relocating design plan is described as a city, and seeks to preserve and indeed globalize the advantages of urbane and cosmopolitan life, its globally connecting and socially transforming plan once again is intended as an overriding alternative not only to our urban settings, but equally to our traditional towns and villages, modern suburbs, more distant exurbs, and common approaches to agricultural and wilderness land management.
Underlying and propelling this plan however, and significantly distilling all of my design concepts to this point, the natural city’s plan more fundamentally gives form or substance to the central or quintessential proposal within our discussion. This again is the idea that we now can and should make a basic, science-informed, practical, renaturalizing, decentralizing, tellingly often opposing or reversing, and in all consciously health-emphasizing change in our core expectations and practices for modern planning, design, building, and life overall. Reflecting the natural power of this most essential of the ideas we will consider, it is crucial to emphasize that the natural city’s plan is intended not only to improve local communities and their immediate environments, but equally modern societal and globally-minded life, and in turn ever globally-linked natural and ecological life as well. Similarly, it is vital to highlight that although the natural city can be developed in large part locally and regionally, it also naturally can aid and be aided by degrees of interregional and global health-minded governance and coordination, and by potent species health opportunities naturally, and only, waiting at these levels of life, now and always.
Reflecting these deeper considerations, the natural city’s primary design features and overall plan of relatively dense, but nature-situated and naturally distributed, urban life plainly involves and encourages a decisive and health-minded break from both the design and social norms of our settled past and present. As a designed and now waiting entity, the natural city moves us – conceptually, physically, economically, socially, culturally, and crucially – beyond the often deleterious and devitalizing socioeconomic values and ideals that current urban design and civilization contain and impose on us all, wherever we live. At the same time, the basic, sweeping, and health-seeking changes to life and quality of life that mark or are heralded by the natural city also are well-understood as entirely modern, or as able to ensue or proceed directly and without intermediate steps from our modern conditions.
In parallel to this, I would add that this renaturalizing break or change in life today, and the natural city in total, clearly involves a return to or renewal of natural life as well, and thus might be seen as a new, more historically-aware, nevertheless forward-looking, and naturally health-minded synthesis of modern and ancestral life. In this important sense, construction of the natural city involves movement at once back and ahead to human life directly, distributedly, intimately, happily, and sustainably in living nature, though now in far more advanced and advancing terms. On this set of points, it again is vital to underscore that the natural city, and the advanced or unprecedented state of life and society it seeks, naturally depends upon and indeed is an extension, compilation, and application of modern health science, rather than a naturally untenable, undesirable, or unhealthy return to earlier and less informed human conditions.
Across these core ideas, and once more reflecting both their modernity and naturalness, the progressing or optimizing changes to life embodied in the natural city’s plan in all are well-viewed as sweeping and transforming, and yet ready to begin from, and owing to, our modern conditions, capacities, and understandings of human and natural life. The city is thus viewable as principally awaiting new awareness of its opportunity, and the conscious and committed choice to seize this concurrently new and natural opportunity by increasing numbers of people. In addition, and in keeping with the idea that the changes in design and life enabling and enabled by the natural city are highly practicable and actionable, I would highlight that they are readily and widely begun in many locations today, again in a decentralized and independent way, and as before in a decentralizing and independence-increasing way as well.
On this essential modern opportunity for the decentralized and decentralizing construction of the natural city, I would highlight that there are today many hundreds of declining small towns and villages around the world, often ones with transport or ride-sharing services to other communities and the wider world, and many in wilderness areas or ones that quickly might be restored to vibrant natural conditions. As such, these and other locations clearly wait to be rebuilt and built outward in the natural city framework. Importantly, and reflecting the modernity of these ideas, this opportunity may be newly and not only plainly the case, and a product of our emerging internet-based world economy – once again, where work increasingly can be conducted from home or locally, and regardless of our physical or communal location.
To conclude this exploration of the natural city’s key design features, and before turning to more detailed and practical consideration of the city’s local and wider construction, let me end this part of our discussion by again underscoring that the natural city’s alternative but wholly modern model or method for urban and societal planning, design, building, and living is not only highly actionable, locally and regionally, it also appears to be enormously valuable as well, and here perhaps globally as well. As before, by this I mean ready to promote a number of empirically beneficial and reliably healthy personal and communal human attributes, and at once today and for our future. As outlined, these include enabling or creating conditions for new modern naturalness and natural vitality, increased personal autonomy and freedom, healthy physical movement and exposure to living nature, richer and more satisfying environmental and interpersonal experiences, new cognitive depth and reflectiveness, greater human historical and self-awareness, essential human sustainability and stabilizing socioeconomics, enriching new human urbanity and global civility, and thus new human capacity for both more endearing and enduring life overall.
Still, in the spirit of full disclosure and practical realism, and to inspire progressive action and learning on your part, I would add that the natural city and its many waiting advances not only provide or promote, but naturally and circularly require from us, all or many of these qualities or health attributes, if in a building or compounding way over time. Indeed, remaking increases in our self-awareness and health consciousness are likely essential in the present, simply to motivate and enable initial local construction of the city, and then in an ongoing and increasing way to grow and evolve it. This latter step appears crucial in order to widen and improve the city’s natural development and progression, and in turn the city’s natural and reciprocal development and progression of us.
For a more constructive or practical examination of the natural city, focusing on how or in what ways the city best might be built beginning in our time, let us turn to a mainly practice-minded review and exploration of my overview graphic introducing the city’s local plan. With this new discussion, we will move beyond foundational exploration of the city’s rationale and overall goals, expected benefits, and essential form and features, in favor of considering particular design steps and development practices likely to be crucial to the natural city’s physical and life-altering realization, initially and over time.
To begin this pragmatic consideration of the natural city, and as should be abundantly clear at this point, I would start by emphasizing that the concept and basic design of the city is not intended to describe, as some might presume initially, the comparatively superficial or inessential greening, botanical bedecking, or naturalistic adornment of our existing cities, larger built environment, and their at once supporting and reinforcing socioeconomic conditions. In keeping with our foundational discussions, and more importantly with the growing modern science of human and natural health, the natural city instead endeavors to move us steadily, deliberately, and beneficially to a transformed and more durable model or method of human building, settlement, infrastructure, urbanity, culture, and ultimately global civilization. Once again, the underlying aim of this movement is to create new and more advanced conditions of human life, and in particular ones where we and our built environment are consciously, harmoniously, equitably, resiliently, and in all happily and healthfully situated in and integrated with the rest of living nature on our planet.
In the natural city, and now specifically in practice or substance, there is everywhere human building and wild nature, human activity and natural activity, human conditions and natural ones, each coexisting with and aiding the other, and local ecologies allowed and helped to advance and flourish alongside advancing and flourishing human life. Citizens and communities of the natural city – and the concordant global human civilization they naturally can form and inform in total – enjoy recognizably vibrant, cultivated, and enriching life and society. But their life and society also is one bordering and tangibly part of living nature at every point. In this way, human life and culture in the natural city is designed to be naturally healthy amid nature’s overarching lesson of health, relatedly optimized in multiple ways or health dimensions, and in turn broadly distributed, autonomous, pragmatic, and resilient at every point as well.
As before, these conditions or outcomes are both radically and practicably very different than our social and physical settings today, again where human and natural conditions are broadly in opposition to, estranged from, and denigrating or degenerating toward one another. Given this now needless, ultimately untenable, and therefore fundamentally irrational opposition, the natural city pursues and seeks to organize a transformed and far more sophisticated and integral form of natural, and thus both enjoyable and sustainable, human life – and one that may be impossible with human urbanity and natural conservation taken alone, or apart or in isolation from the other. But owing to this set of changes, as highlighted earlier, construction of the natural city thereby demands or requires, and not only fosters or promotes, substantive and ongoing changes in both our built and cognitive human environments.
Given this, I would add that while the natural city may be built, in practice and in time, with materials, labor, and machines, it always fundamentally, unavoidably, and tangibly is constructed from ideas and their application. Once again, these ideas involve new human understandings and values, and specifically ones that are more science-leveraging and integrative, self-aware and self-enabling, progressive and transforming, and renaturalizing and naturally health-minded than dominate at present. These twin and circular outcomes or effects, one constructive or material and the other cognitive or motivational, in turn are qualities that we importantly might approach as natural civilization and natural culture, respectively.
As with its basic concept and design, the natural city similarly is an uncomplicated and highly accessible construction or creation in practice, and as before even as it is a radical or upending and substantially unprecedented one too. On this last point, I again would underscore that, while the natural city may be intuitive and compelling once understood, it is imperative and likely to be empowering for builders of the city to appreciate that what ultimately is a global human city, civilization, and culture in and of nature is an idea, potential, or possibility that remains almost entirely overlooked by people today, or perhaps only vaguely or partially grasped. As before, this is similarly among modern urbanites, suburbanites, and exurbanites alike, and by people of all socioeconomic status levels. Equally, it may be crucial to appreciate that the city’s preliminary design and evolving presence naturally will disrupt, and not only improve, the status quo of our times. The natural city thus can be expected to be opposed by many beneficiaries of our status quo, despite the many failings of life today, and whether their benefit is economic or psychological.
These initial constructive or practical truths of the natural city of course are reflected, and indeed deeply rooted, in the ways in which we commonly design, build, live, and thus prioritize today. This once more is well below our health and quality of life potential, amid already rich and advancing health science, and neglecting both clearly waiting and empirically healthier communal design alternatives. In fact, once our modern potential for healthier or superior design, development, and society is understood or appreciated, this inattention to or dismissal of alternative becomes remarkable and revealing about our current human condition – providing essential and empowering perspective on our broadly and unhealthfully unseen immersion in, or allegiance toward, status quo conditions and short-term preoccupations.
Importantly, our modern immersion, health indifference, or lack of situational awareness is palpable even in purely local and incremental terms. Here, I would call attention to the many relatively simple, immediately beneficial, compelling, locally-organizable, and yet widely overlooked opportunities for communities to improve life today, and with only modest new cooperation for health (for examples, again see the Three Paths Community Health Program and its Three Paths Community Assessment Worksheet). Sustained and built upon in time, such steps well might lead to the natural city on their own, and equally to global natural civilization and culture, and all perhaps without a guiding formulation or plan.
Extending these proposals, and helping to ground and facilitate our practice-minded exploration of the natural city, I again want to underscore that our modern conceptual or perceptual oversight of the natural city exists today – arguably as it has for centuries, and in particular since the rise of modern scientific and democratic life – despite the fact that the natural city can be built on, or begun from, almost any point on Earth, and at once quickly, fairly easily, advantageously, and directly from our modern conditions. Similarly, and as we will discuss, nearly any initial initiation or beneficial instance of the natural city readily can be extended, locally and simply, in a remaking, self-funding, self-propelling, and self-integrating way. Such outward expansion and development of the city of course naturally requires increasing local and regional coordination, but can be expected concurrently to garner increasing local and regional resources and support as well, as the city grows in scale and thus its quality of life impact.
Given this, and especially compared with the high cost and complex effort of modern community and societal development today, initial and subsequent efforts to construct the city are likely to be modest or economical by contemporary standards. In any case, owing to the above waiting natural growth dynamics, the city’s simple and decentralized format, and its move to pedestrian-based and thus less resource-intensive life, the natural city is ready to begin and grow in many places around the world, without large-scale or costly constructive efforts, and again equally without the need for centralized leadership, planning, and decision-making. Indeed, reflecting these attributes, and as I will explain next, such local, spontaneous, and progressive development and interconnection of the city appears ready to occur and proceed with a remarkably compact set of local design and construction rules, practices, or conventions.
My four-part graphic immediately above is intended to help you tangibly consider the essential outlines and practical construction of the natural city, as before especially at a local level, and both in itself and relative to our dominant modes of building, living, and interconnection today. Combined with my earlier overview graphic of the natural city, this new graphic should allow you better to sense how the city might be begun and steadily built – ever locally in essential regards, but eventually regionally and then globally.
Looking at the new natural city graphic from left to right, you can see that it visually summarizes or offers fragments of four potential ways of creating our modern and longer-term built environment, and their circularly resulting social conditions. The leftmost panel on the four-part graphic provides an archetypical summary of traditional and modern physically and socially dense cities and towns. These widespread human settings of course are substantially pedestrian-oriented and socially interactive, and thus also potentially physically fortifying, psychologically satisfying, and materially efficient. At the same time, these historical and still common conditions again also are ones inherently and often strongly isolated from nature and natural experience, often highly stratified and divided, frequently denaturalized and eccentrically self-focused, and in turn more apt to foster both lower human happiness and health.
By contrast, the second leftmost panel in the graphic summarizes the historically new but already ubiquitous modern suburb. This built condition is one that is less densely populated than traditional city and town settings, commonly car-centric and dependent, relatedly more energy-intensive and sedentary, often more personally encapsulating and socially weakening, and yet typically still highly demarcating and isolating from nature. Moving rightward in the graphic, and extending these trends, the third panel is intended to represent today’s growing, physically rural, often anti-urban, still less dense, and thus more sprawling exurb. As you may understand, and as is fairly intuitive, this naturally expansive and car-centric construct largely continues the negative resource efficiency and social isolation trends of modern suburban life. Importantly, while exurban life and design often afford greater interaction and involvement with nature, they also typically and paradoxically cause greater natural displacement and disruption of local ecosystems, compared to urban and suburban settings with similar population levels.
The fourth and larger panel in the graphic in turn represents the now waiting natural city, a built condition intentionally designed as an overcoming or transforming, health-emphasizing, nature-resituating, primarily pedestrian, and more naturally satisfying and efficient alternative for modern life. As before, I will characterize this alternative plan or construct for modern life as science-leveraging, and likely to prove vastly superior at providing happy and healthy human life than typical urban, suburban, and exurban development. Crucially, this is not only by physically promoting greater social stability and ecological sustainability, but equally by fostering broader and essential conditions of natural civilization and natural culture, each circularly prioritizing and propelling human social and environmental harmony in time.
I want to examine for a moment, and in slightly more detail, the first three of these potential modes of contemporary design, development, building, and thus life. This is to better demonstrate the weaknesses of current development practices and corresponding strengths of the natural city, and also as an immediate prelude to consideration of the natural city’s local and wider construction. To aid this discussion, I will use a simple but likely aiding model of natural or health-seeking design and construction, one employing three enabling goals or attributes: ecological mediation, economic optimization, and social integration. These descriptors should be fairly clear at this point, but I would highlight my use of the word optimization, instead of moderation or minimization, as this appears a healthier quality in time, and in particular by better promoting essential or uplifting social prosperity, activity, and innovation.
For our examination of traditional urban development, let me start by highlighting that the modern city image in the graphic is likely immediately familiar and in fact is quite iconic. This particular city employs a strong rectilinear roadway grid, especially at its core, but looser city plans of course are possible and not uncommon. Still, in all cases, and as we see vividly here, traditional city and town plans dominatingly enclose, alter, replace, and displace the natural landscape, and in turn impede or even preclude human life amid and experiencing living nature and the larger cosmos. Notably, this level of human enclosure and separation from nature is far beyond what is required, inherently or practically, to create both buildings and connecting transportation systems within a particular area or volume of terrain or space. While there may be immediate efficiency or wealth gains from this historical way of designing our built environment, the overall result – here and notably as it recurs substantially in the design of our agricultural systems – comes with substantial and still largely unappreciated, though sometimes knowingly dismissed, human costs and natural risks over time. Overall, traditional and modern urban settings often are fair-to-good at social integration, but generally poor at both ecological mediation and economic optimization.
At the root of this assessment, as outlined earlier, and absent active and health-minded mitigation, the natural or common disadvantages of traditional and modern urban planning and construction include: 1) physical separation and resulting human estrangement from intrinsically satisfying, edifying, enriching, and fortifying experiences of living and elemental nature, 2) concurrent collective immersion and cognitive anchoring in artificial or denaturalized, frequently unhappy or disaffecting, and commonly narrowing or limiting environmental conditions, 3) resulting from the first two effects, increased human self-focus and social comparison, dependency on extrinsic reward and motivation, and thus often compounding resource demands to maintain psychological well-being, 4) unnatural reliance and precarious dependence on circularly centralized infrastructure and sociopolitical systems, 5) inadequate or reduced appreciation of natural systems and their essential lessons of robust, adaptive, and sustainable human life and society – again notably via the natural norms of healthy natural decentralization, autonomy, resilience, and flexibility in organisms, groups, and species, 6) as before in combination with traditional and similarly constructed agricultural systems, destruction of native habitat and impairment or even desertification of essential ecosystems, and 7) typically ongoing, unsustainable, and perhaps steadily increasing pollutive or erosive harm to both local and global environments in turn – notably including steady and perilous degradation of natural air, water, and soil health systems.
Turning again to the two middle images or design fragments of my four-panel graphic, these highlight the likely familiar settings and common features of modern suburbia and more newly emerging exurbia in the industrially-developed world. In these related or overlapping cases, human living densities progressively are reduced, and steadily more naturalistic settings and nature-minded outlooks potentially are fostered. However, in these general designs or arrangement of our built environment and modern life, there often is substantial and here visible continuation of many traditional urban attributes. In themes we have surveyed, and crucially for our discussion,, these begin with the above denaturalizing, disaffecting, and immersive effects of highly enclosed or heavily grided life and setting overall, and broad human physical, emotional, cognitive, and ecological separation from the natural environment.
Other continuing or outwardly projected urban attributes include the perpetuation of traditional social inequality and stratification, resulting elevated and often unhappy social striving and status-minded materialism, and at once deceptive and irrational maximalism in the pursuit and display of property. At the same time, these legacy attributes are now compounded by the new suburban and exurban norm of vehicle-centered life, in all inviting the health negatives of markedly more sedentary and resource-intensive life, sprawling and ecologically undermining development practices, and human separation not only from nature, but from one another as well. For all of these reasons, and again in keeping with our discussion, modern suburban and exurban settings typically are poor-to-fair at economic optimization and social integration, though at times may be fair-to-good at ecological mediation, intentionally or not.
Thus, in partly opposing and partly consistent ways, dense traditional and modern urban environments and then more expansive contemporary suburban and exurban settings each practically and predictably arrive at a number of similar and undesirable long-term outcomes. Once again, and testably, a principal cause of these undesirable social, ecological, and economic attributes, and their ensuing quality of life effects, appears to be our historical and still central movement to enclose and dominate, and thus denaturalize and degrade, both the natural environment and communities of people living within our built structures. As such, we unsurprisingly see that past and current urban, suburban, and exurban design and development tends to promote broad, often compounding, and now needless human estrangement from nature and one another, personal and cultural artificiality and devitalization, human inequity and disaffection, habitat destruction and wider environmental harm, and paradoxically precarious and unsustainable resource demands amid, and indeed owing to, declining human happiness and health.
In clear and conscious contrast to these first three common and doubtless familiar, but still inadequately examined, modes of design and development today, the fourth frame in my graphic of course offers a fragment, and in this case a neighborhood portrait, of the natural city. In keeping with our discussion, this at once old and new model or method for human community building and societal interconnection again is well-understood as plainly waiting, readily constructed, demonstrably far healthier, and likely to be vastly happier and more harmonious as a built environment. Once more, both this outlining neighborhood fragment and my earlier graphic, describing the natural city at a community level, are outlines or directional sketches only. As such, they contain significant basic information about the natural city, but also beg further exploration and refinement, and may lead to superior ideas and findings about the essential features of the city – especially in time, and amid its construction and habitation.
Nevertheless, reflecting the city’s overall simplicity, and as will become clear next, my graphical and narrative explorations of the natural city appear to highlight all or many of its essential features, including key practices needed to plan and construct the city locally and regionally. Notably, this may be in any time and place, or to create any built human environment, by any name, with similar ambitions of optimizing immediate and long-term health, sustainability, naturalness, natural health-mindedness, and natural happiness. Given this, these brief, partial, or sampling graphical and descriptive fragments of the natural city likely offer a sufficiently informing, guiding, and enabling portrait of the city’s essential and perhaps enduring character. In any case, and again by any name, the natural city is aidingly approached as seeking ongoing excellence at achieving healthy or enduring ecological mediation, economic optimization, and social integration. Once again, this is primarily through superior communal design and development practices, and appreciating their often strong natural effects on human civilization, culture, and cognition.
Examining my two graphical summaries of the natural city more closely and constructively – and now working carefully from the city’s outermost neighborhood periphery or perimeter, and inward toward its connecting community hubs and intercommunity transportation system – I again would begin by describing each home and most buildings in the city as quintessentially existing, and indeed as carefully situated by design, either in the natural landscape or instead in a semi-natural agricultural area. As highlighted by both graphics, all homes in the natural city are built in fairly dense and as before fully pedestrian neighborhoods, and concurrently in ways where the natural environment is preserved, brought to each building’s edge, and thereby continuously intertwined with the city’s edge in total.
Given this, each home in the natural city enjoys a close relationship with both its local neighborhood and environment, and is provided with a direct and substantially unimpeded view of its immediate human and natural settings. Owing to this, and here especially to promote setting enjoyment and transparency, city homes, neighborhoods, workplaces, and communities overall commonly are designed for an open and surveying view of their surroundings. As before, while these combined qualities may be intuitively inviting or appealing, these neighborhood design practices are more than simply aesthetic or ideological, and aim directly at furthering essential social, ecological, and economic health goals. In this case, these steps specifically work to promote healthy social and natural interconnection, ecological integrity and vibrancy, environmental oversight and security, and intrinsic or background satisfaction and well-being.
In keeping with the natural city’s core goals, and as touched on in my introduction to the city, all homes and community buildings also typically are autonomous for energy and water use. This again is achieved by employing rooftop solar and rainwater collection systems, and the recycling of wastewater and sewerage on site, with the latter practices notably working to increase land hydration and soil fertility. In addition, homes and buildings in the natural city are constructed in other interrelated or corresponding ways, again to promote building, neighborhood, and overall community autonomy, density, and resource efficiency, or as a consequence of their placement directly in the natural landscape. Key measures in this regard include homes and other structures designed to be fireproof and vermin-proof, resistant to or protective against other local perils, affordable and simply assembled, readily maintainable and repairable, comprised of non-polluting and highly recyclable materials, and highly energy-efficient.
As a direct consequence of this set of neighborhood design measures or perimeter construction practices – and consistent with the city’s goal of healthy social and economic decentralization and equalization, and high local autonomy and resilience – homes and other community buildings in the natural city normally are designed without external utility connections, and the natural city in total has no widespread or regional utility systems. That said, community and regional waste material management systems typically are required, as are community-based water and wastewater systems in especially dry or otherwise ecologically sensitive areas. Notably, and instructively, this is to the extent that human habitation and building in these naturally less desirable and efficient community areas cannot be avoided.
Importantly, since some of the principal aims and benefits of the natural city are landscape preservation and natural experience, and complementary neighborhood and community compactness favoring social interaction and cohesion, all homes and most buildings in the natural city are designed not only to overlook their landscape and setting, but equally to fit within and reduce their imposition on each as well. Essential steps in this regard, which I will describe as nature-integrating architecture, include simple, appealing, externally harmonious or yielding, and in all low-contrast building designs.
Relatedly, and again to promote landscape naturalness and general enjoyment of neighborhood and community conditions at the city’s periphery, essential design and construction measures also include use of building courtyards and attached patios, with no traditional outbuildings or outstretching yards, avoidance of all fencing or walls beyond each building’s natural footprint, and limiting personal property in common view (except at building, neighborhood, and community entrance areas). As before, all of these practices are intended to allow each building, neighborhood, and community to be maximally preserving of, abutted by, and situated in natural, vibrant, and unhindered landscape – and once more for ecological, psychological, and thus socioeconomic health reasons.
In contrast to these steps, although ancillary construction beyond buildings and private property sprawling into the landscape are each prevented to foster natural preservation and overall communal harmony – by local regulation or holding all land in common – careful nature-harmonizing planting, plant clearing or thinning, and earthworks are common and commonly encouraged at the building and neighborhood levels. As touched on before, this typically is to enhance building surroundings and safety, promote sunlight harvesting and other practical aims, and improve ecosystem vitality or diversity.
Similarly, the design and construction of neighborhoods overall, and not only particular homes within them, are done in ways that limit their visual and spatial intrusion into the landscape, and so that both adjacent homes and neighborhoods obstruct the natural views of one another to the lowest extent possible. Related to this set of design points, since community neighborhoods are both pedestrian only and free of cluttering personal property, provisions are made at the common entrance or gateway to each neighborhood to park, shelter, and charge bicycles and small electric carts, as well as to accommodate the temporary presence of larger delivery and service vehicles at neighborhood entrances and as needed on neighborhood walkways.
Moving from individual neighborhood to overall community design considerations, as outlined earlier and again as shown in the above graphics, each neighborhood entrance in the natural city is linked to a local community center and intercommunity transportation hub by a pathway designed for foot, bike, and cart traffic. As before, these pathways also are constructed to accommodate temporary delivery and service vehicles coming from the community center, where these and other vehicles are garaged as needed.
Importantly, the community pathways themselves are constructed in ways that allow easy and safe passage by people, and their ready crossing by local animals. Aiding each outcome, all domestic animals are kept indoors or in courtyards when unattended, leashed or in travel containers when walking or being moved, or reside on farms beyond the city’s edge. Much as with the compact buildings and neighborhoods of each community, and once more in the interest of landscape preservation and uplifting natural experience, all local community roadways similarly are designed largely to be free of buildings and other structures, especially away from each neighborhood’s entrance or gateway area. This pattern in turn is repeated along the city’s intercommunity transportation lines, with building consciously and conspicuously limited between community centers and other hubs on the city’s transportation system.
In this way, and again as with homes in local neighborhoods and most buildings in community areas, community pathways in the natural city are set directly in wild nature, designed to follow and harmonize with the natural landscape, attentively make their way in and through the natural environment with minimal disruption or negative ecological impact, and seek to provide a welcoming natural experience to pathway travelers. Crucially, as shown in the graphics, and as with neighborhood and other walkways connecting to the community pathways, each pathway in the natural city’s communities integratively connects to and in turn radiates from a local community center and intercommunity transportation hub.
As their names suggest, these community centers and intercommunity hubs are designed and built as crucial areas for local community gathering, civic functions and services, local and regional government offices, marketplaces and specialty stores, transportation services, and commercial and other workplaces that are not home-based. Importantly, one exception to this location of workplaces in community centers involves the case of heavy or resource-intensive industries, which will be discussed shortly. In general, these are designed and constructed as distinct industrial zones and dedicated city hubs, readily reachable but also apart from residential communities, thereby balancing practical and quality of life needs.
Perhaps instructively, and as you may have sensed already, this structure of neighborhood walkways and community pathways, together leading from individual homes and other buildings in the natural city to its community and intercommunity transportation centers, is not unlike earlier communal arrangements in traditional agricultural villages, and preindustrial cities and towns. However, at least two key attributes of the natural city are materially different from these earlier community design patterns.
First is that all land surrounding each community’s buildings, neighborhoods, and connecting pathways is left open, unenclosed, natural or agricultural, and broadly undisturbed. Apart from the community centers themselves, one’s experience of community life in the natural city is therefore decidedly and consistently one of nature, rather than of edifice or construct. Everywhere, human building and conveyance are folded into nature, and each is designed to be both practically and psychologically in harmony with the natural environment. A second difference from premodern village and urban design, though here only a partial one, is the expected population density of the natural city’s decentralized network of interlinked communities, walkable community pathways, and wholly pedestrian neighborhoods. In all, and as touch on earlier, these typically will produce both populations and densities well beyond those of traditional villages, and much more like those of premodern pedestrian cities.
Keeping in mind the design goal of having all community centers in the natural city readily reached on foot or with modest mechanized assistance via its community pathways, this suggests a maximum community diameter or basin of about 10 kilometers – though in many cases, communities will be much smaller than this, either for demographic reasons or owing to natural geographic boundaries. Using this maximum area, assuming a quarter of community land is built upon at a density of 10 homes per hectare and with an average household size of four people, or 40 people per hectare in all, population densities of 1000 people per square kilometer are realized and the natural city regularly enables communities of 25,000-75,000 people, amid highly naturalized conditions. This once more reflects the natural efficiency of both fractal networks and pedestrian development overall. As an example, and in the perhaps maximal case of a community with an average diameter of 10 kilometers, this equates to an area of 78.5 km2. Using the values of 25% land usage, 100 hectares/km2, and 40 people/hectare on developed land, a population of 78,500 people is projected (78.5 km2 x 0.25 usage x 100 hectare/km2 x 40 people/hectare).
Again tracing my graphical summaries of the natural city, I next would highlight that intersecting with, and often physically beneath, each individual community center, the next and in many ways innermost layer of the natural city is its intercommunity and often multimodal transportation system. Once again, this transport system, and its various nodes or links and modes or lines, connect all of the communities and other local zones of the city into a distributed but united whole. This system in turn provides easy and environmentally sustainable travel and trade between communities, and in all fosters highly-interactive or cosmopolitan regional and globalized human life. Crucially, this last feature again is in concert with the far more equitable, secure, and attentive human conditions the city naturally affords for all people, by design and through its enabling culture, and consistently across its many decentralized local communities.
Exploring the essential feature of the natural city that is its intercommunity transportation system, I want to emphasize that the city’s developing interlocal transportation lines naturally will vary by locality, especially at first but also more durably. On this point, consider that a mix of local and long distance train service may be the ideal long-term travel mode in many areas, in particular where there are a high number and density of communities, and large amounts of people and goods moving intercommunally. However, whether owing to demographic, economic, geographic, or other factors, bus, truck, and other roadway traffic may remain the principal mode of intercommunal transportation in other cases, and an option in all cases. In addition, it is important to highlight that intercommunity foot and bike paths are a regular, and perhaps steadily universal, interlocal transportation mode and feature of the natural city, enabling middle and long-distance travel by bike and on foot for practical, recreational, and other reasons.
Do these interwoven ideas adequately describe the essential plan, features, aims, and construction of the natural city? In an important sense, and reflecting the sweeping and yet simple nature of the city and its overarching design, I think yes. Indeed, I even would say that we might take this description as potentially covering and guiding 90% of the natural city by area, population, and built conditions – with its nature-abutting homes and pedestrian neighborhoods, community-linking and largely non-vehicular pathways, intercommunity transportation system, and highly decentralized but interlinked global structure. At the same time, there plainly are other important and waiting features of the city, different from but supporting, or as a consequence of, this basic plan or design for renaturalized modern life.
First among these, and leading to other secondary or supporting features of the natural city, are various practical consequences resulting from the inevitable variability in community size across the city. As touched on, and for an assortment of reasons, some natural city communities and larger regions are likely to be considerably and durably more populous than others. This again is even as they share the same basic design features and living standards, and even as community size overall is capped in scale and population by the natural bounds of pedestrian and nature-preserving community.
Larger communities within the city of course are likely to be proportionately more abundant or diverse in services and activities, thereby ones naturally serving as general resources or nexuses for smaller area communities, and especially in specialty, technical, educational, governmental, and other scale-advantaged domains. This natural characteristic of larger communities commonly will extend to their serving as aggregating links for long-distance travel and trade, at least including major rail and roadway nodes, and in some cases the hosting of nearby port and airport operations as well. In all, this suggests a cascading or graduated system of communal hubs of different sizes and service levels, somewhat as with life today but involving much smaller communities in all cases, and notably in ways strongly akin to the decentralized information technology networks that now exist and substantially enable the natural city.
Another secondary or supporting feature of the natural city is its industrial and technological production areas, which the city and its occupying society each naturally depend upon for advanced conditions of civilization and culture. Key operations here include mining and materials production, fabrication and assembly plants, energy production for heavy and advanced industry, industrial research and innovation, spaceports, and of course waste and material recycling. These operations naturally or more favorably are best located near ocean or inland marine ports and airports, but also at some distance from community, commercial, cultural, and residential areas. This again suggests that industrial areas should be planned and built as distinct nodes, and perhaps often as spurs, on the intercommunal transportation lines of the city, and equally as ones orbited by larger communities to the extent that industrial operations remain labor-intensive and unautomated. In all cases, these nodes and spurs of the city still can and should be constructed in ways that are spatially-efficient, nature-preserving, and landscape-harmonizing – perhaps including placing industrial facilities underground for aesthetic, ecological, and protective reasons.
A third, and somewhat analogous, supporting feature of the natural city are its essential regional and global civic, cultural, and governance areas. These are likely to be common or co-located nodes of the city where members of the city’s otherwise strongly decentralized communities can meet to evaluate and coordinate their activities, plan and make investments in the city and its population at scale, solve intercommunal problems, settle regional and global disputes, administer interlocal and global government operations, and gather in large numbers for cultural purposes – and all of course to the extent that these intercommunal activities cannot occur virtually. As with industrial areas, and similarly owing to their specialized nature, these civic, cultural, and governance areas are likely to be located near, but not within and controlled by, one or more larger communities, thereby again forming distinct nodes on the city’s intercommunal transportation system.
Within this particular category of specialty areas or nodes of the natural city are the important cases of security and military operations – with the former defined as involving internal community and wider policing, the latter external regional and thus global defense, and each potentially including civil defense or disaster response functions. First, let me highlight that policing services in the natural city are likely to be greatly reduced overall, and especially compared with all or much of the world today. This is because our core material and psychological needs are far more fully, efficiently, easily, and evenly met within and across human communities than at present. As such, life in the city is more intrinsically enjoyable and less crime-prone for all or most people. Additionally, city neighborhoods and communities are transparent and intimate by design, with people in them familiar and thereby naturally accountable to one another.
For similar reasons, but especially the city’s decentralized and security-promoting nature, and thus its more limited inherent opportunities and incentives for extreme wealth and structural conquest, we can expect reduced military actions and eventual universal demilitarization, as the natural city and its quality of life effects grow in and between the regions of the world. In this process, our current needs for military services and armament are likely to decline steadily and then abruptly, in each case by multilateral treaty, and eventually to become historical artifacts with the city’s ubiquity and evolution. Taken together, we can expect police services to be housed within larger but not smaller communities in the natural city, for regional and global policing activities to continue as a natural part of intercommunal governmental operations, and for regional and global military organizations to continue for a time, but then to diminish, circularly allowing for more peace-leveraging and promoting health investments in their place.
In a less weighty but still important topic, I also want to highlight the place of outdoor recreational and educational activities, within and beyond the borders of the natural city. Already, we have discussed the design of the city’s communities and its intercommunity transport lines for local and more extensive walking and biking, but this hardly exhausts the city’s opportunities for enriching outdoor activities and natural experiences. In particular, since the city and its communities are fully surrounded by wholly natural and semi-natural agricultural areas by design, this creates the potential for vast wilderness trail networks, and camping and gathering areas, around communities and more widely – though access to especially pristine wilderness areas may be limited by consensus, and for ecological or safety reasons.
At this point in our exploration of the natural city, you likely have begun to consider not only what the city is and why it should exist, each in concept, but also more practically how and where we might begin to build, explore, expand, connect, and optimize the city. In this change or shift, we begin to seek and not merely contemplate the new, superior and happier, renaturalized and renaturalizing, and far healthier or more durable conditions, and supporting systems, of human civilization and culture that now wait for us.
As emphasized, and as this tellingly brief but broadly sufficient outline of the city suggests, in practice there appears little stopping us from beginning to build the natural city. This appears especially so in the rural areas of the democratic world, and at the individual building, neighborhood, and community levels as well. Given this, and returning to the idea that the main contemporary barriers to the city’s construction are intellectual or ideological, rather than procedural or technical, let me reprise and expand on two earlier, crucial, guiding, encouraging, and decidedly action-oriented observations.
First is that, as a highly decentralized and locally autonomous construct, the natural city already can be – and indeed, ideally or naturally should be – begun concurrently and at first even somewhat independently in many locations around the world. In particular, and again as outlined before, a substantial number of rural towns and villages, often with declining and aging populations amid modern mass urbanization and suburbanization, now wait as fertile starting points for initial construction and steady expansion of the natural city. Of course, these are only one of a number of possible starting points for the city today.
Others include resort areas and other small settlements in or near natural wilderness, as well as small farming communities, and in all cases especially ones with bus or potential ride-sharing services to larger towns. Still other starting points include areas adjoining existing towns that are either undeveloped, underdeveloped, aging, or substantially blighted and in disuse. As such, nearly regardless of where you live, there likely are multiple locations waiting for beneficial and economizing development or redevelopment in the natural city model near you, almost certainly one or more within 100 kilometers of you, and once again whether this effort begins at the building, neighborhood, or whole community level.
The second action-minded and encouraging observation I want to repeat is that, at these local levels at least, there similarly appear to be few overall construction practices, procedures, rules, or directions needed to initiate and grow the city. This again owes to the simplicity and intuitiveness of the natural city’s underlying design, the decentralized and substantially autonomous nature of its buildings and communities, and the city’s resulting potential to form and interconnect itself fairly naturally and spontaneously. In fact, there may be only one construction rule, practice, or convention needed, equally simple and sweeping, to begin to build and expand the natural city. This once more is especially at a local level, but perhaps further and wider than this, and today but perhaps more durably as well.
As emphasized before, this simple and sweeping, and at once cognitively and practically reorienting, local construction rule or convention, to reveal and realize the natural city, is to always border or build amid and never encircle, obstruct, dominate, or degrade the surrounding natural environment. Overall, as with the natural city itself in concept, this uncomplicated and humble, but remaking and propelling, construction guideline is one with vast immediate and long-term consequences for the way we approach building, nature, society, and life. On its own, and understanding the inevitable need for natural exception, this one foundational rule well may lead progressively to the natural city, in itself and through its circular cognitive and cultural effects. At the same time, and as I will summarize next, a small number of ancillary or pendant local design norms and building customs are likely to prove useful in giving form to and aiding exploration of this one reorienting and renaturalizing design principle, and in turn to catalyzing the decentralized and connecting development of the natural city in time.
In this way, beginning from the simple goals and plan of the natural city, and with the single and similarly simple city-organizing design rule, guideline, or convention of bordering rather than encircling the natural environment, little beyond local collaborative and health-minded constructive efforts appears needed to begin, guide, and develop the natural city at a community level. Following and building on this local effort, larger but still relatively modest regional actions may be required to expand and integrate the city’s transportation and land-use framework between communities, thereby to expand and improve the city’s more natural and supportive conditions to greater numbers of people, and in turn to promote the city’s new and circularly enabling culture and values.
Still, exploring and seeking to anticipate the likely practical effects and limits of this one design or development rule, I want to offer seven additional design guidelines and suggested construction practices, again especially to aid and guide early local development and expansion of the city. As before, this is with the understanding that these are supporting features and may prove inessential amid the city’s central design principle and practice of bordering rather than encircling the natural landscape. In any case, these guidelines, and the city’s first design principle, always and above all seek satisfying and durable urbanity amid and informed by nature, and thus to construct life that is naturally decentralized and harmonized, locally autonomous and resilient, sustaining and sustainable, and progressively happy and healthy for all.
These additional local design and development practices for the natural city are:
- Maximize natural health and quality of life at the city’s perimeter
- Make buildings and communities naturally and optimally autonomous
- Bring nature to each building’s edge, with buildings overlooking the landscape
- Minimize building and neighborhood footprints to maximize natural conditions
- Simplify building and neighborhood exteriors to harmonize with their settings
- Unify building, neighborhood, and community entrance or access points
- Always an enjoyable walk to a community center or other transport hub
Following on our reasonably detailed discussions of the natural city, each of these supporting community design and development guidelines, the larger and at once urbane and natural neighborhood and community conditions they seek to engender, and their combined rationale all should be fairly clear and integrated. But to clarify the guidelines in a few key areas, and to conclude our overall outlining discussion of the natural city, I would touch on several final practical points.
First is the idea that these seven ancillary design guidelines and the natural city’s core organizing principle – locally and continuously to border, follow, and overlook, and never to encircle, impede, and degrade the natural landscape surrounding buildings, neighborhoods, and communities – all seek to embody and promote the essential spirit and primary aim of the natural city. This again is its health-seeking and thus renaturalizing goal of building advanced human civilization beneficially in and integrally with nature, and our own nature, rather than antagonistically and hinderingly opposing or disregarding each.
In their essence, the city’s first design principle of bordering rather than encircling nature, and all of the city’s potential iterations and associated design guidelines, once again center on returning human life to close contact with nature and itself, and never working against the healthy flow or course and integrity or wholeness of these things. At both the community and intercommunity levels, this includes removing and preventing future human obstructions to the optimal health or sustaining integrity of evolving nature, and to our own optimal health and health-evolved nature.
More practically, the first design principle of the natural city, or its first principle of natural urban design, and these and any other ancillary or supporting practices, naturally will lead us to avoid and then actively remove nature-enclosing and obstructing historical roadways and transportation lines, electrical grid and other utility infrastructure, environmental barriers such as fences, buildings outside or not in keeping with the natural city, obsolete motor vehicles and assembly plants, and eventually whole cities and towns. In all cases, these steps will lead to extensive reuse and recycling opportunities, and thus significant material and financial resources to construct and expand the natural city locally, regionally, and globally.
As I said, the above ancillary community design guidelines are intended primarily to aid, clarify, embody, and support this first, pivotal, and perhaps only essential design and development principle of the natural city. Taking these guidelines in order, consider that if building and development follow or observe the first design principle of the natural city, or of natural urban design, high quality of human and natural life in the decentralized periphery or perimeter of the city will be a crucial aim, an essential test of design success and expandability, and in turn the central driver of the city’s natural growth and progression.
Consistent with and aiding these developments, we concurrently should expect to find across the city’s decentralized periphery the norm of naturally autonomous homes, buildings, neighborhoods, and communities, since the alternative of course is centrally-led, naturally precarious, and nature-disrupting utility systems. Importantly, as indicated before, building and community autonomy here is understood at least as including energy, water, and wastewater management, but potentially may extend beyond these areas, in the quest for ever healthier human life, community, economy, and society in nature.
Similarly, we should anticipate that either wild nature or open agricultural lands will reach to the edge of, and thus be overlooked by, every home and most buildings within the natural city. As before, effort in these areas is likely to include designing homes with adjoining courtyards or patios to prevent disturbance of the natural landscape alongside homes and neighborhoods, and building communities with defined public gathering areas for the same reason. Natural preservation also practically leads to the design of homes, buildings, and other structures as integrated or uninterrupted wholes, notably without nature-encircling appendages or outbuildings extending or apart from each building’s core plan.
Extending these practices, and again to maximize natural landscape and our satisfying experience of it, we equally should expect building footprints and profiles to be compact overall, building appearances to be simple and muted, and buildings typically to blend with and observe, rather than displace and impair, their environment and surroundings. In all, citizens and builders of the natural city are thus likely to place strong emphasis on buildings that are externally small and yet internally open and spacious, intimately and upliftingly surveying of their settings, attentively nested within and yielding to their landscapes, and thus perhaps both more polygonal and panoramic in plan than is typical in our time.
As part of the renaturalizing, revitalizing, landscape-liberating, efficiently branching or fractal, and socially-integrative structure of the natural city, another common and aiding design practice is likely to involve unifying building, neighborhood, and community access points, again encouraging compactness, and in turn highlighting or celebrating these architectural points, encouraging positive senses of place. Lastly for the guidelines – and specifically to promote city compactness, community intimacy and cohesion, citizen physical and emotional health, and natural autonomy and sustainability – we once again should expect all communities and the city’s interlocal transportation system always to be a short and enjoyable walk or cycle from every home and building, and as before typically one not more than 5 kilometers of length.
With this broad and probing exploration of the natural city, I have provided you with an integrating and I hope compelling alternative to modern design, development, and building today, and likely have given you much to consider and pursue. This includes our new science-leveraging potential and now waiting practical opportunity to build human civilization, community, and culture in more natural, attentive, informed, seeking, satisfying, and sustainable ways. It also extends to the many natural and social health benefits contained or nested with in this effort, and their combined potential to create at once renaturalized and far more naturally advanced human life generally, progressively, and durably.
Owing to this, and turning you to the essential use, testing, and improvement of these new, science-derived, still widely overlooked or unappreciated, and perhaps species-critical ideas and proposals seeking maximally happy and healthy human life, let me end our discussion simply and practically. This is by encouraging you to begin constructing the natural city, wherever and near to where you are, to act locally however you can in its early design and construction, to test and demonstrate its waiting power and transformative benefits for us and nature alike, and to explore and refine this health-seeking and very different design or framework for human city and civilization – in our time, across time, and for all.
Mark Lundegren is the founder of ArchaNatura.
Tell others about ArchaNatura…encourage modern natural design & sustainability!
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