My
name is E. Christopher Mare. My professional title is “Village Designer.” I
am postulating a theoretical ekistics for the 21st century. I
specialize in conceptualizing, designing, promoting, and germinating sustainable
human settlements at the ‘village’ scale. Since ‘village’ is an
anthropomorphological ecological climax stage that has its own self-organizing
rate of development, growth and refinement, I always focus my attention on the
viability of the seed potential. I focus on the seed potential because I will
not live long enough to see any of my village design projects grow to fruition;
that could very well take millennia. So I begin by looking for fertile ground
where I imagine a village could grow, or where I sense a village wants to grow,
and then I proceed by planting my own seeds of pure intention. My lifelong
client is the goddess Gaia. I am very attentive at making sure that
communication is open and true between us. I continually ask for feedback to
ensure that my client’s needs are being addressed. She has many delightful
ways of expressing to me her wishes.
Once
a ‘village seed’ has sprouted, and a core community has initiated
re-inhabitation, coevolving a longterm symbiotic relationship with a particular
place, sending down a firm taprot, then I take great care to nurture and guide
the seedling’s early development. This is a crucial stage: How can a strong,
robust, healthy village grow to ripe, abundant maturity without a strong,
promising, healthy seedling beginning? And so, I resort to systems thinking to
consciously design and provide a four-dimensional context within which the
village-seedling may grow toward a teleological attractor of equfinality. My
purpose is to create a living system, an autopoietic unity that can assume a
life of its own, with a capacity for reproducing itself. For this reason I
actively engage in, emphasize, reinforce and reiterate organic growth processes
at every stage of a project’s development. I educate and consult with
communities and individuals at any scale on the fundamental principles and
concepts underlying the establishment and maintenance of sustainable human
settlements, highlighting the strategies just outlined.
Homo
sapiens’ mission on Earth is waxing complete. Village Design: Ekistics for
the 21st Century is a professional practice whose purpose is
nurturing, encouraging, and coaxing the naturally integrated, primordially
patterned, vibrantly fertile wombs that will give birth to the next evolutionary
generation of humanity. In that way, the needs and desires of my client may be
fulfilled.