High Tech Villages
In the Pacific Northwest
Where to put the glamping sites? They move around. “Glamping” (glamor camping) sounds a bit on the frivolous side. The campers might be inexperienced when it comes to starry night campsites, coming from cities as they do, where the stars never penetrate the urban glow. They’re here because of the “must see the Milky Way to graduate high school” requirement (with exemptions).
I’m situated in Portland, Oregon, where “outdoor school” is already the norm, a public school program the gets kids out in the woods. The camps are already built. However there’s room for improvement.
Plus we have adults to think about, not just 6th graders. Many adults live in tents, but in cities. For those folks our model was “EPCOT West”. Dignity Village near the airport: a glamping site; try before you buy (like an outdoor IKEA, for exteriors not just interiors). This plan got shelved, in favor of tiny house experiments. I’d say it doesn’t need to be either / or.
Is Metro behind any of this planning? I’d say the futurism in play here is geographically informed, and so urban and regional planning concerns make a Venn diagram intersection with others using these same GIS / GPS tools such as H3, though outside of our subculture not many use the Dymaxion Projection (ESRI has it as an option).
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When I worked for Associated Oregon Industries, as an outside consultant and programmer, I got a sense of how our n8v tech sector includes the geospatially-aware engineering companies, some of which might today be using H3 as their discrete global grid system (my AOI experience was over a decade ago, back when Visual FoxPro was still a thing — a Microsoft product).
The overall plan is to allow for a lot of small scale experimentation, but with the basic surrounding logistics already worked out, as we find on a typical farm, already engaged in growing crops and/or livestock. “Housing for farm workers” might be the best way to describe it, but then picture a dwelling unit more like this:
Part of the aesthetic is unit mobility. They come and go. In some of my storyboards, they’re there for only a couple weeks, with the video crews documenting the experience for social media. We need more prototypes and more tests, especially when it comes to the helicopters.
You’re probably thinking “no way, only the military gets to have that kind of fun” and you’d be right, to some extent. The base commanders in our region have similar responsibilities, to harbor economic refugees. Oregon is only lightly militarized, however further north we find some enormous bases. The coast guard is likewise equipped with helicopters, which are mainly in the business of rescuing people from drowning. The forestry business uses helicopters to lift trees sometimes, which is closer to what’s in our storyboards.
The best model is probably “university dorm unit” as that adds in a familiar structure, with its internal residential colleges (such as I enjoyed in my first year at Princeton). The campus network is more sprawling and some of the villages are remote, because the point is to let communities of ecologists, entomologists, geologists, get along in their training. Dwelling unit logistics, and resulting metrics (user feedback) will help us steer a course forward, as to what strategies work best.
Farmers, like truckers, might be getting PhDs in their respective deep and multi-faceted disciplines, in curricula requiring world travel. These university villages, once prototyped and sufficiently debugged, will be replicable in many places with a similar climate.
