The Galaxy model is revolutionary

This is the second in the series ‘city perspectives’ in which individuals with a deep interest in the urban dimension of Auroville talk about what this means to them.

David Nightingale trained as an architect and explored this role both before and since coming to Auroville in the late 1990s. Some years ago he was part of a team which conceived ‘Crownways’, a proposal to encourage the development of the Crown more in line with the original Galaxy model, and recently he presented his proposal, ‘A Strategic Approach to Mobility on the Crown in Auroville’, in an attempt to trigger some discussion on the issue. However, his main interest over the years has been exploring different processes where the community can creatively share common visions and ideas towards the manifestation of that ever-elusive human unity.

Auroville Today: Are you a city person?

It’s an interesting question. I have lived in cities – in Newcastle (UK), Toronto (Canada) and Berlin (Germany). As a young professional in my first job I loved Berlin. So much was happening there: it could take you a day just to read through the weekly magazine of events. There’s something around the youthful vitality and energy of cities which is very attractive where you feel have you got your fingers on the pulse.

But as I grow older I’m glad I’m not living in a big city, although I’m happy that they are there and that I can visit them.

Actually, when we talk about the cities we love, what often comes to mind are places like Florence or Siena which, in spite of the tourists, still have something of what made them special. Although I would consider these to be more large towns rather than cities.

In fact, what attracts me to Auroville is that it is not a city in the modern sense of the word, since 50,000 is clearly the population of a small town, which means it can never become like a Tokyo, Berlin or Delhi.

In fact, in Auroville we have an opportunity to completely redefine what a city or town is for the 21st century.

Why does Auroville need an urban dimension? 

One reason is critical mass. A common argument is that we need a certain critical mass from a spiritual perspective. I can’t comment on this particular aspect, but on a very practical level we see how many skills are missing in Auroville today. It’s impressive how many activities we have for a population of three and a half thousand residents, yet we are constantly needing to reach out for help to people outside, who we feel have a connection to Auroville, in order to help provide us with all the inputs we require.

So I think there is not only something about a few tens of thousands of people living in a fairly dense environment which can nurture a certain quality of life, but which would similarly help to maintain that quality of life. 

But, for many people, urbanism has acquired a negative image.

When we think of the cities and towns that we like, they developed around a set of traditional values that people lived day-to-day, like Christianity in Europe or Hinduism in India. As societies are shifting to a mindset which is more individualistic, the day-to-day focus has shifted to being successful, and this has pushed the whole developmental bubble which we see in cities throughout the world today, resulting in even greater inequalities than before.

What has added to the destruction of many cities was the invention of the automobile at the beginning of the last century, the subsequent cranking up of automobile production after the Second World War with the resulting planning decisions that have allowed the ploughing of massive roads through city centres.

But surely cities had acquired a negative connotation before this. For example, big cities in the 19th century were a hotbed of disease and insecurity.

It’s true that industrialized cities in the 19th century had problems with disease and security but, as Lewis Mumford points out, technological advances in disease prevention and the establishment of police forces etc. ultimately made cities safer places.

However, when the car came along the disruption to the social fabric became much more permanent.

Is this why people were attracted to the suburbs?

Many of the first suburbs came about in the US after the American troops came back from the war and there was a huge push to provide them with a house with a picket fence, and a car in the drive as an embodiment of the “American Dream”. The idea was to provide the best of the countryside, the ‘bucolic’ experience, and the best of urban life, but the ever-sprawling suburbs ended up providing neither.

In Dreamcatching we came up with the idea of ‘supra-urban’, a way to combine nature and dense living which the suburbs failed to do. But to do this you need a completely different planning approach with an economic foundation which is egalitarian rather than capitalist, because capitalism further skews development.

I think one of the key points why cities do not work today comes down to the inequalities and environmental problems created when money is the dictating force. Money will plough over greenfield sites on the outskirts of cities to build soul-destroying housing estates, and to do this money will convince people in government to deregulate protected areas to achieve it. And money can also afford the best lawyers in this evasion and undercutting of planning regulations.

However, when it comes to the conditions for creating a ‘supra-urban’ town or city, I feel that here we are already aspiring for quite a few of the elements that we require. Here money is not intended to be the ‘sovereign Lord’, we have the Matrimandir as the soul of Auroville at the centre of our development, and we have the possibility to integrate the urban and green elements in a built environment designed around alternative transport.

Do you feel that the Galaxy concept allows for such a ‘supra-urban’ township?

Totally. It is truly revolutionary. There is so much potential in this model. We have been given this incredible vision and it potentially ticks every box that you can imagine, but we are not truly embracing it for what it can be.

It’s all about interpretation. Does the Crown have to be a certain number of metres wide, or can we do something which is adaptable? Adaptability is crucial, not just because our values will change over time, but also because of factors like climate change. What if the temperature, rainfall, or the prevailing wind direction radically change? All this will anyway force us to adapt our architecture and planning ‘on the go’. 

Regarding inequality, one view is that dense clusters of population, like cities and towns, actually increase inequality because they require top-down structures to administer them. Isn’t there a danger that this will happen in Auroville?

That is always the danger and it’s already happening.

So how does one change that trend?

I think that’s exactly what we have been tasked to do here, to come up with an alternative, to break free of 10,000 years of doing it that way. And there is so much potential here in terms of an alternative to the traditional top-down approach. That is why we have been doing Dreamcatching and Dreamweaving. It’s also what drew me to the Citizens Assembly concept, because all these initiatives finally give us the possibility of exploring how we can make wiser collective decisions under the auspices of the Residents Assembly.

Then just as I felt we were getting somewhere, it has suddenly all been put in question [see below the note from the Dreamweaving coordinators eds.] For me, this is the tragedy of what has been happening recently. Now we are being told that others will solve it for us, but I don’t think they realise they’re potentially threatening the very thing we have been tasked to do.

In other words, I don’t think it’s about finishing the city first and then Mother will do what she has to do, which, for me, is a rather unusual form of collective ‘spiritual bypassing’. My interpretation of what Mother said is that it is about developing ourselves and our understanding of this place through the process of building it. The Galaxy as a destination is an ideal goal, as Mother foresaw, but the work is in getting there.

Doesn’t any profound change depend upon us changing our value systems?

Absolutely. The values that we inculcate manifest day by day in what we choose to do, so we need to change our mindset. The solution will come from a new economic system, a new governance system and a new decision-making system. Those are the methodologies which will allow us to start thinking differently about how we plan and how we inhabit this emerging Galactic Township. 

From my perspective, Auroville is trying to be what in Spiral Dynamics [a model of the evolutionary development of individuals, organizations, and societies eds.] would be called a ‘second-tier’ collective where, among other things, the energies are centred upon blending and harmonizing multiple perspectives among a collection of strong individuals – our elusive ‘unity in diversity’. We’re in the very early stages of this, but I think we already have one or two examples, like the way the Botanical Gardens has evolved, and I also think we’re tapping into that energy on a community level with the Citizens Assembly approach.

The planet desperately needs a collective second-tier solution, and Auroville could provide this. It’s a fascinating time. We are facing a very serious, even existential, threat at the moment, and the outcome is uncertain. But an existential challenge may be exactly what’s needed for something truly new to emerge.