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Part 1: Step Back and Re-Vision
the Architecture of Cities
As I said in my article "Move Your Money", human culture should be constructed out of symbols that are alive physically/monetarily and emotionally/socially/politically, and intellectually/artistically and spiritually.
Because our society is very bottom heavy with an over-emphasis concerning cultural money symbols, that money system is rotting out, for it is alone and without the other needed elements that human culture should have.
Exceedingly clever matters having to do with money are given us by Ellen Brown and that has its place. But there is more needed. Wisdom is needed as well. One should be both clever and wise when dealing with money. And the addition of more ethereal elements and higher order matters into our culture would make it stronger and make money an asset and a cultural element easy to control.
As money morphs into its many concrete manifestations we see it take form as a typical city. But future cities might look much different than our cities of today look.
What we see today on main street USA is a collection of stores that trade in physical/monetary wealth and one or two churchs, churchs that by their presence in such a culturally dead place seem to condone the lopsided nature of our current money-mad inner city downtown and mainstreet interactions. And much of the rest of our culture is just as vacuous.
To give expression to the idea that people should not serve money, as is done in capitalism, but rather money should serve people, we need to redesign towns and cities and put the people in the middle of town.
I think that the architecture of a town should be built around a small park. You see these central park areas occasionally in the very center of a small town but the small park area is always empty. Why? There is something missing in today's cultural activities. One thing that is missing is feasting.
A feast is something that a culturally alive place does and culturally alive people do. It is a Yin/feminine function. It is a natural and needed complement to our dying patriarchal culture where everything is private property and rarely any shared feasting.
Too many people today feast by overindulgence in drugs. That is the wrong way to feast but it does give a needed break from the humdrum nature of life. Feasting is supposed to be physical feasting with shared food, it is supposed to be emotional feasting with shared good time, mental feasting with shared artistic performance and spiritual feasting as a spiritual something manifests in the middle of all that, as it all synthesizes into a greater whole.
To make sure that the right people were at the feast, the ones who most need it, the town should put bare bones housing near the central park. Instead of marginalizing the poorest we should let them have the center of town and they would have the easiest access to feasting. Somebody would surely then show up for feasting and parks could be full of people having a good time. And city taxes should help pay for feasting.
Just as once tribal things long ago took care of the collective, and just as patriarchal things today take care of the individual, so we need now to fuse them and take care of a collective/individual synthesis in cultural life. And with this synthesis of the cooperative/collective/Yin-feminine elements of culture with its feasting and the competitive/individual/Yang-masculine elements of culture, and its hoarding, we might see an exponential explosion of cultural activity. Feasting would be a vital part of that cultural explosion of activity.
In a culture as dead as ours feasting might turn to riot and so perhaps it should be done on a smaller level at first. But it still does need to be integrated.
Everyone should receive food stamps which they can use or not at times when there is no feasting. How would the republicans complain if everyone got the food stamps? And everyone should receive free "Inalienable right of place to be" stamps. If a person has a nice place of his own and does not want the stamps for the bare bones housing then these would go unused. Or maybe the rich man could trade his "inalienable right of place to be" stamps for something else.
And the only business in the center of town should be a grocery store that could be accessed by the poor, the old, and those without transportation for whatever reason. Churchs and centers for the arts could go there too. The hubbub of vehicles and noisy business could be taken to another part of town and a quiet peaceful place close to Nature could be kept for human cultural activity.
