Transition from City to Civium

Discussion

Jordan Hall:

"The transition from city to civium will involve re-building humane places, re-learning how to live properly with each other and our environment, coming into symbiotic relationship with the virtual and re-grounding in the sacred.

We should be mindful that this transition is not one simply of architecture and urban design. Everything is implicated. Governance at human scale is an entirely different kind of problem than the mass governance that we have become used to. Our approaches to food production, physical manufacturing and waste have been entirely defined by the needs and capacities of the city. We will need to invent entirely new economies in the new context of distributed human-scale civium.

Perhaps even more importantly, family and all of the interpersonal elements of life (education, health care, religion) will undergo a profound (and positive) change. In many ways the move to civium will represent a *restoration* of the personal in these areas rendered so impersonal and inhumane by the territorial logic of the city.

All of this is going to take time and, like it or not, a lot of trial and error experimentation. Civium will not be built in a day.

But here are some things to consider that are a tailwind in our efforts:

• The fourth industrial revolution really is at hand — but the WEF is completely wrong. They are correct in recognizing that a massive technical wave is sweeping across our economic landscape. But they made the mistake of thinking that the city (and its nature) is an invariant. As a result, they have found themselves imagining “15 minute cities” of the future. But when you realize that the city is no longer the center and investigate the technologies underlying the fourth industrial revolution with new eyes, you notice how perfectly many of these technologies support a highly distributed and highly local economy.

• More and more obviously the “ecological crisis” (sometimes narrowly grasped as “climate change”) requires a level of intimacy and sensitivity to entangled complex reality that the technocratic institutions (and technocratic mindsets) of civilization simply cannot produce. Civium, by contrast, is precisely the right instrument to reorient our physical and spiritual relationship with our environment. A people who are intimately connected to their local water and local land, who are intimately connected with each-other and with themselves, and who are buttressed by the innovative capacity of a superliner planetary network are properly positioned to take full and proper stewardship of the world.

• The challenge of changing demographics (sometimes identified as “demographic collapse”) might only be addressable by something like civium. If we look at the underlying causation of collapsing birthrates throughout the world, it is a very complex affair. On one hand education and a real change in the necessity of large families (due both to decreased child mortality and a changed economy) have played a role. But on the other hand, things like the precipitous decline in testosterone and sperm count; increase in microplastics and myraids of other toxins; and the dramatic decline in mental health (especially in the West) have played a much less healthy role. To put it simply, it just doesn’t make sense to have and raise children in the city. The opposite is true in every way in civium. (Re)connection to the meaningfulness of wholesome family will be a powerful attractor into civium, and as the people of the city evaporate into below-replacement rate demographics, the people of the Civium will naturally replace them over the generations."

(https://medium.com/@jordangreenhall/from-city-to-civium-5838e0cdfe31)