Thoughts Of A Guy Named Mason

"Maker City"

Writing is an excellent thing. I am very happy that I can take the time to write out my thoughts. I do this a fair bit but maybe I should do it even more? What if all my thoughts came from writing them out as i fathom them?

I have a lot of things that I aspire to. Soooooooo many things I want to make and things i want to do. I want to live in a community that functions and is more efficient and equal than rural australian town with 2 main demographics - junkie, and retired white hetrosexual people. I probably have written about my brain child of a semi-urban(not suburban, it is urban, but placed in a rural area) self sufficient neighbourhood. It is fairly inspired by a lot of what I know about the Netherlands and how they do people first urban design. I have spent a while searching but I cannot find my diagram of how it might be layed out. But I can describe it. It would work on a main street or possibly several intersecting main streets, and these streets are for places that shit happens. They are likely 2 stories and mixed use and we need to have space for specialty stores. This is not the kind of place where you can only have a storefront if your a generalist bussiness. It should have a place for the teenagers running science experiments to do those experiments that is not in their home. And then on the backstreets which should not be parralel to the main street but rather in a dense intersecting grid that allows it to be walkable. The housing sections, probably townhouses, I cannot see why people seem so angry at the concept of a townhouse? its efficient and essentially the same as dense suburbia? Look at dutch canal homes and give it a private backyard and make it a bit wider and 1-2 stories instead of 3-5 and you have a space efficient block of housing?

What was I going on about. yeah so essentially a community that is self sufficient - as in you can walk to the grocery store and if its large enough there might be a medical clinic or a school. But also I really like the idea of letting people have space and room to experiment with things and learn.

I may have written this already but I'll write it agian. What if, instead of someone wanting to do something really really niche like setup a place for photo film developing or run an aquarium or a 3d printing farm or a music recording studio, and in a not very populus area they have the oportunity to do that, not because it is comerially viable but because there is a system in place to allow them to do so. When planning this out I am reminded of the homestead act in the USA in the 1800s. To my knowledge the government was just handing out land to anyone who could do the paperwork and said they would run a homestead and use the land.

I am not exactly in a position to develop land into a neo-urbanist community like what I just described. But what I am in the position to do is write about it, as in write properly rather than these ramblings. However this brain fart I have is still far to underdeveloped to present formally, so I will treat this like the breeding grounds for the idea. Some dot points: