Bryce Tolpen

Your expanded sense of what makes a community is promising in the town my wife and I moved to a year ago in south-central Tennessee. It's very community oriented, but the view of who's in the community isn't nearly as expansive as that of indigenous peoples of whom I'm aware.

This account of your mind wandering about your local flora and fauna while showering is both beautiful and compelling. If rewilding starts with relationships, we have all we need to start outside our front doors.

"It is an artist’s job to have impossible ideas." Yes! A self-governing forest, or a self-governing park adjacent to Wall Street. The artists set the agenda for the Occupy movement, Nathan Schneider argues in Thank You, Anarchy (pages 145-47), and they saved the movement from a debilitating schism between its nonviolent contingency and its "diversity of tactics" contingency by exciting the creative sides of both sides, enticing both sides to work together again.

The self-governing forest aided by human beings reminds me of the indigenous concept of a forest and its occupants as people. Saving the earth while merely reigning in global capitalism, I think, would take everything the likes of artists, anarchists, and indigenous wisdom could summon on the earth's behalf, and then some.

What a lively history of futurism. Thank you also for introducing me to Daan Samson's work. It speaks to me of a utopia perhaps disassociated from the Enlightenment. In his art, nature and artifact seem to find their extremes in an Edenic past without humanity's influence and a futuristic perfection through humanity. This pairing suggests to me modernity’s false binary of humanity and nature. Real nature is artificial, I think, the work of both creation and humanity. The desire to recreate a past located in "untouched" nature or to construct a future in technology made impervious to nature seems to avoid the kind of longstanding artifice (in the old sense of the word) that many indigenous cultures mastered. So his art strikes me as a means of suggesting how these two desires may stem from the same broken worldview but point to a particular utopia--the new expression of an artificial nature.

This article a great thought experiment that, to me, implicitly calls into question the imagined communities (see Benedict Anderson's famous book by that title) we call nation-states. What's more real, a nation-state or a community formed by digital nomads? My daughter helped to start an online community that led to a small, physical community of a few friends. What would it be like to scale that?

This essay is excellent. You’ve processed lots of material from political theorists and others to arrive at what seems to me to outline a workable governmental system that would win the hearts of citizens, as our first Constitution did.

I have a few random observations before getting into what I admire most about your proposal.

Jones’ bicameral legislature combined with Bouricius’s lower chamber with its up-or-down vote reminds me of Harrington’s model, with its upper chamber made up of the “natural aristocracy” and the lower chamber as the democratic chamber with an up-or down vote.

I wonder if a “venire” of the prospective members of the interest panels could be randomly drawn from the community to avoid a reprise of lobbyists pushing “special” interests.

It would be interesting to discuss how an executive branch (would we need one?) and a judicial branch would fit into this. There’s so much balance here already to avoid the dangers of populism (the people’s reaction when “representative democracy” proves itself undemocratic) and bureaucracy (perhaps with the exception of Jones).

I’m with Landemore on representative democracies amounting to elected oligarchies. I’m with her on the merits of sortition and rotation over election. Finally, I’m with her on experts serving in an explicitly advisory role. I love the idea of this kind of jury. I don’t know much about how ancient Athens handled its 1,500-or-more-member juries from a procedural standpoint, but I wonder if the citizens learned through practice both the worth of experts (if they were recognized as such) and their inherent advisory capacity in a democracy. I hasten to add that I knew nothing about Landemore or Jones before you compared and then synthesized their approaches.

Your synthesis of their approaches is excellent. When you add in Athens’s Nomothetai, Bouricius on multi-body sortition, and improvements to up-or-down voting in the revision council (my favorite is approval voting), I’m sold. I hope you become the James Madison of our nation’s long-delayed second constitutional convention.

I like the idea of new cities. I lived in Reston, VA for many years, which is something between a planned community and a small city. (As you probably know, it's not incorporated in Virginia as a county, city, or town.) I loved Reston's vibe and the (for its time) mixed uses.

I wonder about two things. First, I'm big on Jane Jacobs and James C. Scott, both of whom have a distrust for utopian cities. Scott has it out particularly for cities built from scratch, such as Brasíila, where mixed use doesn't happen. I probably need to get my urban planning up to date; I know it has swung in Jacobs's direction in recent decades.

My second hesitation has to do with aesthetics. Here I turn to my suburban experience in a neo-traditional neighborhood. The look was better (in my opinion) than the standard suburban single-family neighborhoods surrounding ours. But there was an artificiality to our neighborhood. It sort of said, "We wish we were an old New England town, but we'll do the best we can under the budget constraints and the state's and county's strictures," such as road widths and zoning, which prevented narrow roads and foot traffic.

I love that photograph of “Ghibli-Hobbit” architecture, but how can you build something to look as if it were built by accretion over decades, as “Ghibli-Hobbit” architecture does? Trying to look like something from the past didn't entirely work in our suburban neighborhood.

Of course, you're talking about entire cities and not just neighborhoods. I love the mixed uses, walkability, and transit systems that your diagram suggests.

Thanks for your cool and stimulating thought experiment here.

Reading your post reminded me of Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which I love. She speaks of what municipalities can do to make cities livable (i.e., walkable), but she also speaks about what we can do as citizens to make changes to our specific corners of the city. It heartens me to read your article.

I know of a church in Arlington, Virginia that sold their old church building to make way for affordable housing. After the sale, they had a couple of parcels from the original land left over and were considering selling them on the open market. But after consultation with the community, they made the property into a lovely green space for the community to use. They meet in rented space in the new affordable housing building and maintain the green space themselves. This process took years of hard work by church members and those supporting them. I so admire their heart for the community around them.

This village sounds successful because (1) they are conscious of their own heritage of resiliency, (2) they didn't create programs to invest in but invested in longstanding programs (theaters, museums) that I suppose had been dreaming of what they would do with more money, and (3) the village's history since 1951 sounds as if it wasn’t the money that got them going, that they showed that they knew what to do with success.

I see this so often: experts from out of town who don't take the time to become members of the community. It would almost be better for them to hide their expertise.

It's interesting that they didn't try to attract tourism but that the cultural investment attracted tourism anyway. Perhaps the tourists sensed a connection between the place and the people that live in that place--a connection that many tourist destinations lose over time.

I wonder three things:
What were the innovative approaches to democracy?
What was the significance of the passports?
What caused the increase in citizen involvement just in the past ten years?

What a great letter! Thank you. We sometimes consider terms like “communism” and “anarchy” in these contexts anachronistic, but I think our discomfort actually stems from the applications (and appropriations) of these terms in modern history.

Yesterday I ran across a note by a New Testament translator that your comment reminded me of. David Bentley Hart translates the writer of 1 Timothy’s instructions to the rich—be “willing to communicate” (as the King James puts it)—as “communalists.” His footnote reads, “In fact, it would probably be accurate to render the term here as ‘communists.’” But I noted that he didn’t (dare to?) employ “communists” in his translation . . .

How refreshing to think of the decision of whether to annex or to separate as a rational decision that one might discuss outside of a war room.

I think the biggest arguments for separation involves political participation and (what you raise) innovation.

Security is a problem for separating or staying separate, and it can create strange bedfellows. One intro I read to The Prince explained Machiavelli’s entire exercise as an attempt to persuade the Medici to rid Italy of foreign powers so that Florence could go back to being a republic. In other words, Machiavelli wanted a republican city-state with the help of an authoritarian.

I wonder if multi-country civilizations would help to bring about the end of nation-states, which I consider a modern plague.

Finally, I loved Jane Jacobs’s The Life and Death of Great American Cities. How wonderful to see that the same mind wrote about the relationship between cities and nations and wrote about separatism.