I received this email a couple of days ago, from a friend who's now traveling in SouthEast Asia. His writing is so vividly "on the spot" that I thought to share it here on SCIY. ~ ron

Here in Siem Riep (Angkor Wat) Cambodia, there is no shortage of entrepreneurial capitalism….just like in Thailand. Because of all the foreign dollars, euros and yen flowing into here because of Angkor´s famous temples, there´s a plethora of people catering to the foreigner´s needs. ...   more »

Ok, this review convinced me. I'm going to order my own copy of this new book, created by Alex Steffen, the executive editor of the amazingly informative website "Worldchanging.com," which Rich alerted us to in a recent post to SCIY. ~ ron

...Part encyclopedia of socially conscious companies and movements, part picture-book (it includes gorgeous color photographs by leading photographers such as Edward Burtynsky), and part how-to instructions on becoming a greener consumer or business, the nearly 600-page volume is an invaluable resource you can use without booting up your computer... And to justify the dead trees required to produce the tome—and set a compelling example for readers—publisher Harry N. Abrams printed each copy on 100% recycled, chlorine-free paper. Abrams also purchased wind credits (from www.renewablechoice.com) equal to the amount of electricity needed to manufacture the book.   more »

I wonder if Auroville's planners are keeping up with the immensely creative work on urban design now underway around the world?

New York’s Van Alen Institute['s] The Good Life: New Public Spaces of Recreation, an exhibition at Hudson River Park’s Pier 40 showcasing dozens of projects either planned, under construction, or already realized that insert the rare combination of scenic refuge and pure pleasure into the hurly-burly of cities. “People are just desperate for these sites,” senior curator Zoë Ryan says. “Not everyone can escape the city during the summer, so this sort of destination has become increasingly important.” ...   more »

Check out these remarkable automated construction systems. The Binishell System has already been used to construct over 1,500 buildings in 23 countries, at significantly less cost & time than conventional methods.

This web site deals with research and development in the use of automation in constructing building structures for a variety of purposes. The applications range from affordable housing, schools and shopping centers, etc., built in different countries of the world, to conceptual cities' infrastructures to be built from the sea floor or in deserts. Extra terrestrial projects where construction automation using applied physics and robotics are also envisioned and described herein. ...   more »

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed -- some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. ... - Stewart Brand   more »

...a decade or two from now, when we look back at this period, it is more likely that the work that will fix the long zoom in the popular imagination will be neither a movie nor a book nor anything associated with the cultural products that dominated the 20th century. It will be a computer game. ...   more »

Perimeter Institute is a community of theoretical physicists dedicated to extending theories of space, time and matter. It's home is an innovative building in Waterloo, Canada, whose archetectonics are designed to foster interaction and creative community across normally disparate disciplines.
In just five years, Perimeter researchers have contributed over 500 meaningful, peer-reviewed, scientific findings and transferred this knowledge to all manner of partners in the entire research chain. Their current areas of cross-disciplinary research include: * Foundations of Quantum Theory * Quantum Information Theory * Quantum Gravity * Superstring Theory * Particle Physics * Cosmology ...   more »

Paolo Soleri celebrated his 87th. Birthday this week at Arcosanti. Staff, visitors, and members of Paolo's "School of Thought" gathered for the traditional "frugal soup," in which Paolo cooks and serves a healthy but small meal to remind us of the great inequities remaining in our world.

During his long and productive life, Paolo has been an inspiration for many people around the world, especially those of us who have had the good fortune to know him personally. (I spent several years in the mid-90's studying and working with him at Arcosanti.) ...   more »

This is the outline of a "visioning workshop" my friend & colleague Michael Gosney held last weekend in San Francisco re CALIFIA, his Green Century Institute’s proposed 10,000-person Bay Area EcoCity. Lots of connections, formal & informal, with Auroville here. -- I wonder if their "Word Cafe" method could be useful at Auroville? ...   more »

Ask anyone here and they will tell you: Shanghai is the future. But that is not so. Shanghai is not the future; it is every future, a palimpsest of urban visions, a history of what is to come. Visiting Shanghai is a journey to the very near future by way of the very near past, a fact that contributes to a strange form of urban vertigo: I came here looking for the city of tomorrow and was immediately overwhelmed with a sense of déjà vu. Shanghai is a fantasyland of architectural grandiosity where any drawing, no matter how insane or adolescent, may come to life almost instantly, without the citizens' committees, building restrictions, and expensive labor that hamper architectural geniuses elsewhere. ...   more »

.. For architects, China is the land of dreams. The construction statistics tantalize. The Chinese consume 54.7 percent of the concrete and 36.1 percent of the steel produced in the world, .. But Herzog & de Meuron .. has more work than it can handle. What attracted the [Swiss] firm's leaders to China is an openness to audacious projects, which they attribute to the lack of timidity and inhibition in the people there.
"They are so fresh in their mind," Herzog says. "They have the most radical things in their tradition, the most amazing faience and perforated jades and scholar's rocks. Everyone is encouraged to do their most stupid and extravagant designs there. ...   more »

Paolo Soleri is best known for his concept of "arcology," which most people think of in terms of its surface meaning: “architecture plus ecology,” the design of car-less, ecologically sustainable cities. Many people have seen Soleri's beautiful renderings of arcologies - miniaturized three-dimensional structures that require less ground area than conventional cities and can therefore utilize the surrounding land for farming, habitat preservation, and enjoyment by the city's inhabitants..

Less well known is the fact that Soleri's architectural designs are only a small part of an overarching comprehensive philosophy he has developed.. For Soleri, true long-term well-being can only be realized in a cosmic end-state he calls the “Omega Seed,” and he sees arcologies as "instruments for the acceleration of the evolution of human culture" toward the achievement of this state. ...   more »

Archaeologists have uncovered an elegantly painted 30-foot-long mural in a ceremonial chamber beneath a Guatemalan jungle pyramid, providing new evidence that Mayan civilization was in full flower more than 2,000 years ago. Archaeologist William Saturno of the University of New Hampshire and Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology said yesterday that the San Bartolo site, in Guatemala's Peten wilderness, is "the find of a lifetime," depicting the Mayan creation myth and the crowning of a king in vivid color on a plaster wall as though "parts of it . . . were painted yesterday." ...   more »

On April 23 and 24, 2005, Debashish Banerji of the Sri Aurobindo Center of Los Angeles offered a presentation on "Visions of Future Societies" and engaged in a dialog on "An Improved Tomorrow" with Paolo Soleri at Arcosanti, the future-oriented community combining architecture and ecology started by architect-philosopher Paolo Soleri. The talk was a prelude to the dialog, where Paolo Soleri's atheistic conscious evolutionism was engaged counteractively with the interventionist evolutionism of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.   more »