Month: March 2020

The following is an excerpt from the prologue to Building the Agricultural City

The Agricultural City
The title for this book was inspired by the phrase “agricultural city,” coined by Chicago architect Joe Lambke. Joe used the phrase in the title of a pamphlet which described his vision of a possible future for northeast Iowa. In Joe’s vision, the towns and villages of this four-county rural area in northeast Iowa would be considered as nodes of population within one unit—an agricultural city. Unlike the cities we habitually envision, this one would be comprised primarily of farmland, with agriculture the glue that bound cities, villages, towns and farms together.

I learned about Joe in the early 1990s when I was pondering the problem of rural economic development. I discussed it with Bill Burke, the city planner for Waukon, Iowa, and told him of my own vision for regional development. Bill then mentioned Joe and told me that Joe had submitted a proposal to ten northeast Iowa towns for cooperative economic development. He gave me a copy of the proposal.

I called Joe and we met, many times, in Chicago and in northeast Iowa. But eventually we lost touch. Joe went on to design furniture and buildings, but the notion of an agricultural city stayed with me, and in 1994 I wrote a six-part editorial for Iowa Public Radio, “Developing Regional, Rural Economies.” This won the Sigma Delta Chi Award and Bronze Medal from the Society of Professional Journalists for Best Radio Editorial of the year. The Des Moines Register reprinted it one Sunday for their lead editorial, and that, as far as the public was concerned, was pretty much the end of it.

But I continued pondering how a cluster of cities might collaborate; my ideas are sketched in chapter one of part two. Here it is enough to say that I envisioned several Agricultural Cities in Iowa, in Wisconsin, and in Minnesota, but only one in the small portion of northwest Illinois’ that is in the Driftless.
For the next decade I continued to write and publish essays on regionalism and conducted and published two regional surveys. None of these efforts attracted much more notice than a corpse in a funeral home.

The End of a World
Lewis Mumford coined the apt phrase “Power Complex,” indicating the convergent forces in government, industry, finance, and military that control our society. But the Power Complex, as increasing numbers of people see, is in its last years, and unless sufficient numbers of people can agree on what a sustainable culture might look like, and begin working to achieve it, chaos and violence will follow the approaching collapse.

The desire for unlimited control, which is the goal of the Power Complex, is a telling instance of rigidity: it is persistent and undeviating. It has an autonomous life, for as one set of leaders retires or dies, another set—a virtual carbon copy—replaces it. The Power Complex is rigid in its dogma of free trade and unrestrained competition. Everyone everywhere must see things as it does. If not, it will force compliance, as John Perkins testified in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. A healthy society is defined in part by its ability to make self-corrective measures; whereas dogmatism and the desire for total control are forms of rigidity, and rigidity is a sign of death.

Conversely, flexibility and adaptability are signs of life and health. As the seventy-sixth verse of the Tao Teh Ching says, “When living, man is supple and yielding; when dead, man is hard and stiff. When living, all animals and plants are soft and pliant; when dead, they are withered and brittle. Thus, being inflexible and unyielding is part of dying; being flexible and yielding is part of living.” Like a belief system before it dies, a civilization rigidifies as it atrophies: dominant beliefs become dogma, and the civilization becomes incapable of adapting to change, incapable of self-corrective, rectifying measures.
The great internal contradiction within the Power Complex is that since it has lost its manufacturing base, since its financial empire is built upon mere speculation, and since the United States government is deeply in debt, the search for total world control is illusory. Worse, it is delusional.

Regionalism and Possibility
A new world, now in embryo, is struggling to be born. Human scale communities and human scale sustainable institutions are arising around the planet, and they are arising in reaction to the inhumanity and self-destructive tendencies of the present system.

As of this writing small community discussion groups on various facets of community sustainability are meeting regularly in cities as well as rural towns. People across the country from all walks of life now share an increased sense of the urgency with which their locality, their region, must become more self-reliant, more self-sufficient. They may seldom articulate exactly what needs doing, but they know that our present system is falling apart.

Over the past few years increasing numbers of people have been promoting local food systems, local energy production, and community development banks as means by which to restrict the reach of transnational corporations and large urban banks into every corner of our economic and cultural life. They are understood to be a means by which to retain more dollars within local economies. Now what some people are coming to realize is that local strategies for economic sustainability can be applied on a regional level.