How Do You Build a City?

I am embarking on an experiment. A city is being built in Auroville. It is dedicated to humanity. It is about exploring consciousness, about spirituality and unity. UNESCO supports the project, the state of India, many people around the world. There is a charter, a plan, many plans, many opinions, progress and difficulties. Nobody is perfect…

I am going there to help, and so I do not want to comment now, before arriving there. That would be entirely presumptuous. But I ask myself what I am looking for there, or hope to find. Who does something like that, builds a city that wants to function without money and constraints? Why doesn’t everyone do it? How do you do something like that?

Most cities have somehow grown historically; at some point there was a first settlement, then farming and construction. Prosperity and war with neighbors. Growth, destruction, rebuilding… Probably, in between, ideas from rulers or architects again and again. Sometimes things were improved, sometimes interests were imposed. Sometimes there were few beneficiaries, sometimes the community benefited, occasionally both together or against one another. You can see this organic growth in cities. If you know how to read them, you can see this history through the architecture, the courses and names of streets, the fountains and parks, the schools and administrative buildings, the villas and factories, feel it; it is lived, it is real. The material determines consciousness. This organic formation is used, questioned, shaped; it oppresses and enables, inspires or depresses.

Define goals?

But if you build a new city, what are the guidelines? What is the purpose? How should a society be organized? Should an architect think something up, or should a community think it through together? I think this is already where things begin to become complicated. Perhaps a community agrees on a plan. How does such a process unfold? You consider: How many people should live there, what do they need? Housing, food, education. Who does what?

What is it about? Should this become a settlement that produces an economic surplus, is militarily strong, devotes itself to the arts, is spiritual? Is this a city that imposes strong rules on itself, or trusts in respect? What principles should there be? It took us millennia to formulate human rights. Surely they should apply there too, shouldn’t they? And what else, or what not?

Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller—there are architects and artists’ visions. But also political ideas: the commune, the kibbutz, the collective. There are the entrepreneurs, for example, Werner von Siemens. Scientists make plans for a city on the Moon or Mars. The question has been asked often, after all, and answered often. How do we deal with this discourse? Do we want to learn from the mistakes of generals, for example? Would that help?

Did Atlantis exist? What is relevant?