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Nikolayhg

Friends,

Frithjof Bergmann is working world-wide since 30 years on New Work New Culture
with main vision the transformation from Industrial to small-scale
community production creating a new self-determined and meaningful
life-style and culture.

At the end of this week he will go to South Africa to suggest how to
develop a huge unused land area and he is searching for practical
solutions. Creating a basic workshop and replicating the construction GVCS machines
could be one part of that. He is searching for people who know
technically how to start from scratch and especially in the context of
Africa. If you have any ideas or can connect him with people who are
working on similar goals in Africa you can email him at: newworkannarbor
in gmail dot com

You can check a 2 minute video and 30 minutes conversation with him: http://osede.org/2012/04/frithjof-bergmann-and-development-in-south-africa/

Thanks! Nikolay

mjn

I had a look at his website at http://newworknewculture.com/  One that that sorta bothered me was the "for profit" slant to it all. Also, it was rather light with no real depth to it. Some good ideas, perhaps, but I greatly prefer the concrete approach that OSE is taking.

- Mark

Nikolayhg

Hi Mark, to some degree yes, but it can develop together with OSE. Open Source and Modularity fit very well in their goals. What we are doing is uniting the people around open source.

Ned_Ludd

I too have a few as yet unsatisfied concerns, but I am in principle open to persuasion. The "community work" element, for instance: if I understand it correctly, by what mechanism is this to be prevented from becoming a fungible and negotiable commodity? I might suggest that that eventuality might not be a bad thing, but then why propose it in the first place? (To establish a sort of "responsibility-currency"? The problem with any attempt to make a currency do something other than what people want from it is that people will ignore it and find something else to use as currency - unless they are prevented, which brings me back to the question, by what mechanism? But I think I might be getting ahead of myself here ...)

On the other hand, I have an abiding interest in urban design and some fairly well-developed and immediately-applicable ideas, so I am tempted to be excited at the prospect of a new development along these sorts of lines here in South Africa. I should like to be involved, even if I do not envisage myself living in the resulting settlement (at least not until the original city fathers have been defenestrated ...)

Can you give me any information about the land yet, Nikolay? In which province is it? (I'm based in the Western Cape and have first-hand experience of the difficulty of administering a building site by remote control. But I should certainly like to be involved up to a point in the process.) What sort of tenure? Who owns/holds it now?

Nikolayhg

Hi Dawie, I sent again email to Frithjof, he knows best about the land.
He may be traveling now and be a bit late with his response.

Nikolay

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