On Thursday a lot of my classes didn’t really have too much to do, and several let us out early. So I found myself with some time to waste before my next class. Usually, I’d nap, but it wasn’t really enough time to enjoy a nap, and I didn’t really feel like it. I dropped by the office of the professor of my next class – he had mentioned something on Tuesday that had sparked my interest. He told us about Peter Goldmark (the guy who invented the LP) and a project he attempted later in his life. He started something called the New Rural Society, with the intent of replacing cities with small rural communities connected by new technologies. I had googled it and not found much (I did find more later), so I asked him if there was anything else he could tell me about it.
The project was started in the late 60s, and launched in the early 70s, but didn’t have much support. The idea was to have rural communities connected by telecommunication, using technology that was available at that time in new ways. Businesses and government agencies could have employees working remotely across the country, in smaller, sustainable towns. There were two test sites that had any real development: somewhere in Montana (my professor didn’t remember where exactly) and Windham County, CT. He actually worked with Fairfield University on a lot of this project, and there are records of the New Rural Society on file there.
He also told me a story of a project someone created in the 60s down in Appalachia concerning libraries. Libraries are usually large centralized structures that improve depending on the size of the community they belong to. Appalachia was very poor and sparse, and could not support decent libraries in each community, but it had an incredible infrastructure of train tracks because of the mining industry. So someone made a library on a railcar, and moved it from community to community, harnessing the power of all of the small communities combined to make a decent, mobile, library. He also made an interesting sidenote, “…and they wonder why people watch TV instead of reading books. TV comes to them!”
Before I left he gave me a book, called Communitas, which seems to be right in the vein of what we were talking about. I’ve only been able to read the introduction so far, but it seems to be questioning the fundamental problems with urban society (instead of thinking about how to improve transportation for commuters, thinking about why people need to commute).
These are all things I’m going to be posting a lot more about.