is an illegal village inside Taipei City, Taiwan. The population is mainly elderly Kuomingtang veterans that are continuing old Chinese village living in the middle of the hectic city. The life is very much down to earth and based on basic human values. The city wanted to bulldoze down the village and plant a park to the site. I was comissioned by the Taipei City Goverment Department of Cultural Affairs to realize and architectonic or landscape installation for the city. I chose Treasure Hill to work with and started to implant and reinforce values in the village that I feel the modern city is missing. Treasure Hill turned into an urban laboratory of sustainable living and ecological rehabilitation. The values found in Treasure Hill will be brought to Taipei as the megastructure of Organic Layer_Taipei in future. I worked in Treasure Hill with altogether 200 students from different universities, mainly Tamkang University and National Taiwanese University. After realizing the fragments of Organic Layer_Taipei in Treasure Hill the values were brought to the city center in a parade of Trojan Horses.
Homo conclusus Tommy Plummer We live in a society that established itself on community and developed through science. While the foundation of community is a pure one, the advancement of science has gradually removed itself from such a pure gesture. The notion of purity has been warped and now society has adopted science over community. We have forgotten our natural roots. Speculation is replaced by fact, supported by undisputable evidence. Ignorance is bliss, but bliss seems unimportant in modern society. Nature is naturally and effortlessly beautiful (it has had the practice and paid for its mistakes). Humans have negated the process of natural selection and the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest through the evolution of tools, weapons, religious doctrine and science, thus replacing it with technology, and the philosophies of dominance and servitude (renouncing our equality to our fellow inhabitants of the earth). Humans have taken the process of evolution into their own hands and made it redundant in its own species. They have dispatched of a vital process and the replacement will be weighed and found wanting. It is my ,and i짜m sure many others짜, opinion, however, that before technology kills man it will make humans and humanity impotent, physically and philosophically. Humans are the only animals who have anything more than a stick as a tool or weapon. Certain things have been granted us by our own permission. Such as the ability for conflict on a multiplicitous level - one man can extinguish an entire population with his index finger. Such as the ability to cut down the producers of our life-breath, the trees, faster than they will grow. The removal of interactions with nature and instinctive behaviour is the process and the increase of allergies, disease, depression and suicide has been the cost. Medicine won't save us, it's most prominent facet, genetics allows us to meddle with evolution which has been perfecting it`s art for hundreds of millions of years. Genetics cannot compete with this, and now medicine is facing an evolutionary regression whereby the genome can be manipulated for human benefit. No longer are we homo sapiens, we gave up the right to such a dignified name when we embraced these multiplicitous technologies. We may, I suggest, more accurately call ourselves homo conclusus. Humankind is going nowhere but to its own extinction and we짜re going to drag as many other species as we possibly can, with us. Society does not work without humanity, without humanity society is ugly.
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A STUDY for an urban strategy for sustainable living in Taipei City, Taiwan by changing the illegal settlement of Treasure Hill into an urban laboratory of testing different solution of sustainable urban life. Composting of organic community waste, grey water vegetation filtering, vegetable gardens, shelter for playing mah-jong and ping-pong, fireplace, complex system of stairways, terraces and bridges activating the vertically built village, occupation of houses for student living units. Changing the illegal village for a part of permanent piece of environmental art.
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FINLAND GERMANY NETHERLANDS IRELAND ITALY GREECE FRANCE AUSTRIA BELGIUM SWEDEN ENGLAND
POPULATION 5 200 000 82 357 000 16 150 000 3 920 000 5 748 000 10 970 000 60 144 000 8 116 000 1 031 800 8 880 000 58 789 194
1
4 11 2 7
3 5 6
OVERNIGHT TOURISTS 2 826 17 969 99 095 6 746 39 799 14 180 77 012 18 611 6 724 2 894 6 957
HOMELESS 9 660 41 000 3 200 5 500 17 000 1 700 55 000 70 000 20 000 12 600 9 680
Urban planning is an obvious answer for the anguishes suffered in society as a result of the disconnection from nature. Removing of preconceived ideas of the city superstructure - in essence removing city from city, breaking it down to multiple individual communities and the family unit and building it up in the form of the prime factor of that community, the family unit and the home, rather than a homogenised mass of inhumane walking brains, is the cornerstone of the human layer. It's the instinct of animals to establish a territory, and many root themselves further by building shelter for warmth, protection etc.. So why not extend the basic home unit so that it encapsulates many such individual units. Making the city a house, forming the city in the mould of a home. You can eat here, sleep there, relax in the CityZen garden here, store things there. But all this is sensed on the level of community, shared experience and rehabilitated culture. A common goal is thus realised, humanity develops. So the human layer provides a zone not just for the individual, or a group made up of plural individuals, but one where humanity is reintroduced in its basic, pure, and undistorted form; reintroduced by small gestures of kindness provided by community. Urban metamorphosis. Everything functions on some level, whether mechanically, emotionally, or to serve the senses. The human layer restores humanity to society. The human layer works and so it is beautiful. The writer Tommy Plummer is a biologist who joined C-Laboratory in Tallinn on his way back home from a bicycle trip from England to Moscow.