PLANNING A Better Place to Live~ by Michael Corbett, 1981, 164pp., $14.95, from: Rodale Press, Inc. 33 East Minor Street Emmaus, PA 18049 The Edible City Resource Manual, ·by Richard Britz, 1981, 335pp·., $12.95, from: William Kaufmann, Inc. One First Stre~t Los Altos, CA 94022 I have one big paranoia to get off my chest before I go on about these books. I am very concerned that these "planned communities," with their food and energy production, their bike paths and their sandal shops, will all look and live alike. They'll all be little Eugene, Oregons and Boulder, Colorados with their shopping malls and oh-so-white homogeneity. The dreams are good, the plans careful and often very creative, but they leave out a large portion of our people and our country. Both of these books take the concepts of · self-sufficient housing to neighborhood and ACCESS city levels. Corbett draws on the 19th century work of Ebenezer Howard (Garden Cities of Tomorrow, MIT Press, 1965) in designing a set of strategies for creating smaller semi-urban communities which produce most of their own food and energy while encouraging the overall quality of life that we associate with physical, emotional and spiritual comfort. He lays out 12 assumptions about this "quality of life," assumptions about the interrelatedness of life forms, the basic necessities for living, and the social · and economic questions which arise from these assumptions. He makes some suggestions for dealing with urban areas but really fails to come up with any new information here. Where he excels is in "new towns." Here he's in his element. Corbett was the developer behind Davis, California's Village Homes Project (See RAIN V:lO, 22). Planning new communities from scratch is his forte. Whether we like these new towns or · not,.they will be built. The least we can require of them is that they not add to the strain on our limited resources. Corbett's . model communities go beyond that to being good examples worth studying for their attention hot only to their own intrinsic needs, but to the needs of the larger c.ommunity surrounding them. The Edible City Resource Manual may have as its major flaw an attempt to do everything in one book. Curiously enough, it does most everything it sets out to do-with October 1981 RAIN Page 15 gusto! The book is one of the by-products of the Whiteaker Project (see RAIN V:2,14), a National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT) sponsored plan in a low-income community of Eugene, Oregon. The goal of the Proje~t was to attempt to integrate several aspects of life in the city; food production, energy use, health care; housing, etc., into a planning model which would 'grow out of the community rather than be imposed on ~t. The Edible City section of the project revolved around food production and distribution. However, this is no simple community gardening text or direct marketing manifesto. It's both of these and more. It's a curriculum for educating children about urban agriculture. It's a set of multi-year plans for "neighborhood transformation." It's a simple.nutrition guide. There's everything from raising rabbits to recycling water towers here and it's difficult to tell the dreams from the real thing. That's the second flaw in the . book. Which of these ideas are underway and which are still on paper? The third flaw is noted in the publisher's comment at the beginning of the book. This is an "experimental edition." "Never mind its incompleteness, its mixtures of type, script, and art· styles, its still imperfect state." Well, the book could use some cleaning up, but it's so dam enthusiastic this way that I almost hope they leave it as it is. Oh yeah, it's also got resource lists all over the place. -CC
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz