The Integrated Biosphere

August 19, 2005

by Joel Akin

People do pay attention to integration. What is happening today in our housing industry reveals this. Companies build homes all the time and they come together like pieces of a puzzle. Some homes are finished in less then 1-3 months of hard labor. But the house alone is only part of the issue. Part of the problem we face today are urban sprawls which spread across the land. Growing up you had the local grocery store on every corner or nearly so. You could get your five cent candy bar and ten cent bottle of pop. It sounds like a small thing but the corner store helped hold the community together. Yet there is little integration of the housing industry. There are areas marked aside for schooling, churches, malls, gas stations, community halls and court houses, public works etc. These all play a role in a home center. Each time you add a role you integrate it into your personal concept of a town. Public works for example is important. Setting up lines for poles, sewage, telephones, cable, electrical works, transformer stations. Where do you stop drawing the line and how do you integrate all these things?

I know part of the answer is to rethink how we build and why we build the way we do. Everything depends on the battle of our thinkers. Talk to some and they like houses sprawling out for miles. Send in a disaster such as a massive tornado or hurricane and you’ve got problems. Send in a gasoline shortage and you’ve got even bigger problems. And fuel shortages are now the critical danger even to us American’s and Canadians. Though you haven’t heard much of shortages you soon will and once they complicate the monthly budget you can expect other things to slow down as well. The problem still is houses that are sprawled together with the nearest store 3-4 miles away. Without a vehicle you just might be in trouble.

A Biosphere concept is simply the integration of a community. Back in the 70’s and even today some call it a commune but my mind works a little differently. A commune is where people of similar ilk live together with one common purpose, such as religion. This simply means we have to take the community down to its basic components and integrate it into a community whole. While the rest of the world drives ten miles to work you just walk to work. The entire town consists of 300 people and everyone is involved in ‘stations’ of that town and its infrastructure. Vehicles are still going to be needed and people can come and go as they please. Its just that the center will be vehicle free and the center of town now becomes a joining center for commerce and conversation. You can also expand these if you want but the problem arises when you get into another ring outside that one. Everyone wants a vehicle these days so perhaps single people who ride the buses could live there and thus there would be no garages, no streets, only greens and places for people to sit down and visit.