| Summary about the eco-cathedral
project, by Louis Le Roy: (Klik hier voor een nederlandse samenvatting) (Drück hier für eine Deutsche zusammenfassung.) |
| The ecocathedral A centre for our future urban society. Today's urban surroundings are a prefabricated environment. In them, people are observers, not participants. They exist disconnected from space and time. Within such a limited urban ecosystem, how can a natural system develop: a complex set of surroundings in which time is given space and in which space is given time? This is the key issue proposed in this essay. 
Such a development would mean a fundamental change that would be directly
opposed to the current structures of politics, money and regulations. According
to Le Roy, these natural structures could be created by involving available
energy and by the interaction of humans, plants and animals. We could call
these structures 'eco-cathedrals'. Le Roy bases his vision on new scientific
insights. The Chaos Theory, for example, proposes that complex systems develop
by means of self-organisation by giving free reign to the time factor. The
more complex a system, the more autonomy can develop, and the more autonomy
that is given, the higher the degree of order that is possible. He sees complexity
as the opposite of diversity. Just as the market vendor displays his wares,
50 is today's urban space the sum of its spatial diversity. 
Thirty years ago, he started his experiment known as the Ecokathedraal
in the Dutch town of Mildam, a project that was open-ended in terms of time.
At the basis of this experiment was the three-fold question posed by Nobel
Prize winner, Ilya Prigogine: Ilya Prigogine: "What can nature do,
what can living humans do, and what are living organisms capable of"?
Le Roy wondered what a single person could do and then set about to find out
by doing something himself. On a four-hectare site, he started planting in
a completely random manner. The signing of a contract with the municipal government
was foliowed by having road workers dump their residual materials at the
site for several years. Le Roy processed this material by hand without any
outside assistance. The result was the building of assorted structures, low
walls, pathways and towers that due to their ingenious construction could
serve as purification plants for acid rain. His Ecokathedraal demonstrates
the potential of human energy interacting with the forces of nature. Employing
all the potential available from all human beings would provide a mega-source
of clean energy. Using such a method, a new habitat could take shape in which
everyone could participate creatively in building a living environment without
a ground plan and without the boundaries of private property. Following his
ideas would mean a revolution in designing urban space. 
For the time being, Le Roy advocates a double city: an alternative
system as weil as the existing one. Within this double city, the available
energy of people must not be seen as tampering with the market. His ideas
have met with much positive response elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany
and Switzerland, in recent decades. To date, however, all the very enthusiastic
experiments launched in urban spaces have been prematurely abandoned. According
to Le Roy, political systems will never allow creative potential applied to
space and time to be really carried out in full. To change such a situation
would require radical decisions to be made by politicians, industry and consumers,
enmeshed as they are in the regulations of the current consumer society.
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