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A
"WE THE PEOPLE"
interview with
Paolo Soleri
and
Jerry Brown |
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The following transcript is of a two
day interview of Paolo Soleri broadcast on Jerry Brown's nationally
syndicated talkshow, "We the People." The program aired on
12/9/95 and 12/11/95. An open and closed parenthesis,(), indicates
a loss of information in the process of transcribing the interview.
DAY 1 : Part |
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
DAY 2 : Part |
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 | |
DAY 2 : PART 3
JB: Paolo, you've got the planet, should be on our side because
it's giving us some very unsubtle warnings that it is being
abused. I want to push this idea of laboratories...
PS: Yes.
JB: ...the city, the city based on compassion,
the family of man. You've got another criteria, if the whole
family can't enjoy it, then it's wrong. It's almost like the
Chinchin imperative, you have to universalize it and...
PS: Right.
JB: ...does it work if it is for everyone?
And obviously the shopping center can't work for ten billion
people, or even eight billion. So then that means that's wrong,
and we have to acknowledge it's wrong and we have to create
something different and get about doing that, and so in order
for to break the log jam, we're going to have to have some
kind of step here. And I want to hear concretely if you can
help us describe what that step would be or that laboratory.
PS: Okay, I mean, you're asking me to be
knowledgeable, but wise in everything, and I'm not. So, what
I'm trying to do with Arcosanti is to set up some perimeters,
some ways of organizing spaces so that perhaps by mere guidance
towards reorganization of our communities, and since the means
of classic () , it's a very modest kind of enterprise. But
we do have the beginning of a community, a community by necessity
is frugal, but it tries to make () into some kind of a ()
, because frugality is not the dimming of joy or the reduction
of fulfillment. Frugality is, as I say, the ability to find
within yourself more, and more, and more by way of coping
and acting upon reality, upon the physical surroundings, and
the social surroundings, and the cultural surroundings.
JB: Now, if you could start listing some
of the traits, some of conditions or the check list of an
urban laboratory. You started with frugality, and frugality
not as some kind of hair shirt, but just the opposite, a rich
interior life...
PS: That's right.
JB: ...that would
liberate the mind and make use of its creativity as oppose
to crushing it with all the contraptions and gadgets. So frugality
would be your first factor.
PS: And actually, frugality goes well with
paladin complexity and gathering, so what we are doing at
Arcosanti, for instance, number one, we had a gathering not
on good farmland, we're gathering on one of the shelves, one
of the mesas. So you might call that marginal land in terms
of agriculture, so we don't want to go down at the lower level
where you can cultivate. We want to keep that for cultivation,
and we are up on the mesa.
JB: Number one, so you aren't going to cultivate
your own food then.
PS: No, we're not very good at it, but the
land is there and we are doing some cultivation, yes. We've
been doing that for many years.
JB: Okay. So you're not going to use good
land for your habitat, you're going to use second rate land.
Was there a second thing?
PS: Number two, we are very small now, so
it is very easy for us to say that we like to belong to the
habitat, let's say to the town, but we also like to belong
to the open landscape, and that's what's happening. We are
on the edge between what you might call the manmade environment,
the habitat, and nature. And that's really a physical fact,
we are really stepping out of our places and we are in the
middle of the high desert. That's another point that's very
critical if we want to partake both in what you might call
the culture of development, civilized development of society
and the beauty of nature and the resources that nature can
give us in () culture, farming, on and on. That's a second
point.
JB: Okay, you're in between.
PS: Yeah, we're really on the edge of both
of them, so we can partake in both...
JB: Would you say then that you couldn't
have an urban laboratory of the new frugal city inside an
old city where there isn't much nature around, at least nature
is covered up?
PS: Given the condition
by which nature has been transformed for a hundred square
miles for a city like Phoenix, then you might want to may
be also this gigantic system culture into smaller structure
but more three-dimensional so that each one of the spots can
regenerate at least some greenery around itself. So what you
might call urban villages.
JB: You'd carve those out of this immense
urban sprawl.
PS: That's right. Naturally you can take
the blighted areas first, and then again in terms of laboratory
to generate a different kind...
JB: Okay, so now that's an interesting point.
The places that have been abandoned, the South Bronx, parts
of South Central Los Angeles, parts of Oakland, what you could
do is take these abandoned places and regenerate them both
with your dense, complex, frugal habitat, and with the nature
being right outside the door.
PS: Yeah, reintroducing some kind of farming
or gardening, or parks, and so on. But naturally you need
the physical unit and you need the human, so not only you
have to work on the architectural state of the system, but
also on the special () you are going to have the system filled
with.
JB: Is there anybody working on this in terms
of trying to transform a existing urban space in accordance
with ideas we are now talking about?
PS: I think in Europe there is quite a bit
of that, and also in the States, in San Francisco, Berkeley,
I think there was an attempt there, and they did some work
about that, but again our priorities are so mixed up. If we
invest the money that we invest in oneself paying, say 3 billion
dollars in some laboratory work in urban questions, we would
gain lots of knowledge and we would begin to transform our
habitat. We are not willing to do that.
JB: We would first of all have to have a
very experimental bent of mind willing to try something.
PS: You would have to. We do that in every
field including medicine. We tend to use ourselves as guinea
pigs in order to carry medicine forward and beyond the limits
of the tests now. So that's human flesh that we are putting
in the grinder. We should do the same thing with the urban
condition, knowing it's not the final, highly successful laboratory
where new relationship, including the physical relationship
and human relationship are developed so that we can learn
more. Keeping in mind that there is a learning which comes
from history. The history of Europe, for instance, is the
history of the making of the city, and civilization.
JB: Yeah, your point there about the experimentation
on human flesh. It goes on by the millions because a lot of
stuff that's going on in terms of medical intervention is
definitely experimental even when they say it isn't.
PS: Oh, yeah.
JB: So your talking about a very...in terms
of the human physical impact, immediate. It's a far less invasive
of the body.
PS: It's much more gentle than medicine,
because medicine has to go to extreme in order to come out
with good answers, but now the habitat is the most complex
because it reaches everywhere, and it's the most complex,
the most costly, involving the most of the planet in terms
of resources, in terms of space, so it's a very serious undertak-
ing, and we need to learn about it, not to just throw out
things that are somehow, some kind of re-collage, and say,
well, it didn't work very well so we demolish it. Let's be
more systematic.
JB: Are you talking about the building of
buildings in downtown areas and then tearing them down twenty
years later?
PS: Yeah, the same buildings in a Europe
city would work perfectly. That shows the buildings per se
cannot give the answers. The answers come from the building
plus the social
JB: Oh, you're saying...now I think I understand...that
a lot of buildings have been torn down to make way for modern
buildings that if they were in Europe, they would have been
left alone and it would have...the space would have been utilized...
PS: What I am thinking of the dynamiting
in the early we dynamite something because it was inhumane.
Different kinds of society would find that unacceptable.
JB: They'd find a
way to use it.
PS: Yeah.
JB: And also I was thinking that as the United
States with all its power is pioneering new weapons system,
new medical interventions, to the hundreds of billions. The
military is 240 - 50 billions right now. The medical experimentation
also goes into the hundreds of billions, and here what your
saying, you made a reference to a very modest sum for some
urban laboratories.
PS: Yes, and but...
JB: Which we probably of the countries are
capably of doing and which will have the exemplary effect,
just like we're teaching China, in fact General Motors is
building cars there and we're even letting contracts for eight-lane
roads and freeways, so willy nilly we are already setting
the tone, it's just that we're missing the boat on this omega
seed unfolding of a laboratory of frugality and interior-kinds
of being.
PS: Naturally in order to get to that point
we would like to persuade our politicians and our power people
that as things are developing now there is no way we can succeed.
Again, I am speaking about the family of man, not the 250
or so Americans, because I think that ethically we will not
be able to say, well, we don't care about the rest, 250 million
Americans are going to have a good time. Well, that's no longer
feasible as we know. Resources are not there, the isolation
and the segregation of us one chunk of humanity is not going
to work, so we have to be slowly realized the () and this
notion of we of the elected people is utterly a fossil. Cannot
do that any longer.
JB: Well, if you just looked at it from the
religious point of view, the religions are saying that their
is a Fatherhood of God, a Brotherhood of Human Beings, and
that would under validate the notion that we are all in one
family. Then you have science that we are interpenetrated
by the same molecules. That would also validate that we are
in the family of man, the family of human beings, and then,
of course, the etiology of democracy or equality, of races
and sexes, that would also validate the notion that we are
in a family together, except we've got these parochial hangovers
saying there is a boundary between Mexico and the United States,
or between China and United States, and so we're not really
rubbing our nose or put our mind in the face of this utter
discrepancy between the way we are and the way it would be
if everybody was the way we are, which couldn't be, because
then we would all be dead, or destroyed, the whole thing would
be over. So, I think what, more than just the politicians,
we are going to have to get this idea in our own minds and
really deepen it and share it. And as we understand it, it
can become part of the base, of the philosophical base of
where our country, and any country is going, if it can be
grasped by enough people at a deep enough level.
PS: Yeah, and
I mean we have this gift of democracy that we can give to
everybody, and we are trying to do that in many ways, but
then we fall short when we say, well, we are the chosen people,
so no matter what, America first, and soon or later that has
to be understood for what it is and we have to get rid of
it, or the family of man is just a fantasy. So in a way we
are living a utopian time where we think that we can isolate
something and say, this is sufficient. There is nothing so
self-sufficient about anything. The only self-sufficient thing
is the cosmos. Actually if the cosmos is created by God, even
the cosmos is not self-sufficient. Let's forget about these
chosen people...
JB: Chosen people, living a lie. Let us come
back, we've got to take a break. Paolo, we'll be right back.
You're listening to "We the People."
Next
DAY 1 : Part |
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
DAY 2 : Part |
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 | |
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