Small is beautiful/Appropriateness is beautiful

I am starting to worry about becoming a curmudgeon. Because I am always clamoring for the ideal, but seemingly "conservative" because too often I don't see the need for some "pathbreaking" somesuch.

Multi-housing News has an article about a new FEMA program focused on supporting the development of decent transitional housing, rather than creating awful trailer parks. See "FEMA to Create Alternative Housing Pilot Program for Katrina Victims." Yet I find one of the quotes maybe troubling:

“We’re going to see a variety of different housing concepts,” Darryl J. Madden, a spokesperson for FEMA’s Gulf Coast Recovery Office, told MHN. “We’re looking for some real ingenuity. It’s an interactive process. We want to review the ideas that come in and use them to determine how we can approach disaster housing in the future.”

How much ingenuity is required? Create projects that are more than warehouses for people, but places.
Lowes Katrina Cottage in process, photo from Laura Hall.
FEMA Trailer Park, Baker, Louisiana. Shreveport Times photo by Shane Bevel.

This reminds me of the "appropriate technology" movement, which was especially big in the 1970s, and back when I first started college. E.F. Schumacher wrote the book Small is Beautiful, and you saw it all over campus, although his term was "intermediate technology." (See The EF Schumacher Society for more information.)

A lot of what we need to do in urban revitalization isn't new. But the knowledge and learning and realizations are still being ignored. Cities are chasing after the big projects still, and not focusing more on what I call "building a local economy," which is an element not present in Comprehensive Plans.

Shumacher focused on the "third world." But I think the idea of appropriate technology is still more than apt when it comes to first world development.

One example would be a Segway vs. a Bicycle... but another is toll-road vs. transit, and Hummer vs. Smart Car. Car sharing vs. owning. Garbage disposals in sinks vs. composting (which I don't do) vs. landfilling. Ethanol vs. coming up with a land use paradigm that isn't dependent on driving. Etc.

Historic houses seem to be an appropriate technology, given that in some of the neighborhoods I frequent, they've been around for up to 130 years.

And waste. From people to land, our resources are underutilized. Increasingly, this comes at great cost.

For me, I call this philosophy "minimalism." Trying to get the most value, for the least amount of resource inputs.

Index Keywords: urban-revitalization