Freedomland

“Neither wou’d we have it thought a labour so tedious, as ‘tis generally fancy’d, to establish in this manner a Colony, which may become not only an advantage, but a glory to the Nation: We have Prospects before us most attractive, and unprecedented, in the three tempting Points wealth, safety, and liberty: Benefits, like these, can never fail of drawing Numbers of Inhabitants from Every Corner: And, Men once got together, ‘tis as easy to dispose them regularly, and with due Regard to Order, Beauty, and the Comforts of Society, as to leave them to the Folly of fixing at Random, and destroying their Interest by indulging their Humour; So that we have more than ordinary Cause to expect, that in a very short Time, we shall be able to present the solid life its self, as now we give the shadow only, in the following Explanation.”

Robert Mountgomery, A Discourse Concerning the design’d Establishment of a New Colony to the South of Carolina in the Most delightful Country of the Universe, 1717.

Freedomland: A Description

Having been required by the times to draw up a detailed plan for the general improvement of American housing in the aftermath of the great financial crisis and its effect upon our collective confidence in the correctness of our living patterns, I humbly submit the following proposal.

We begin our description as did Sir Robert Mountgomery in describing his fabled proposal for the Margravate of Azilia: “You must suppose a level, dry, and fruitful Tract of Land, in some fine Plain or Valley” that, having been surveyed as part of the great parceling of America according to the methods set forth in the Land Ordinance of 1785, is continuously gridded into square townships of six miles per side, each containing 36 one-mile square sections of 640 acres.

This grid, the framework for Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a rural democratic society of citizen farmers but also a great game board of rampant real estate speculation, provides the underlying structure for Freedomland, a new settlement model that reconciles resurgent dreams for an agrarian urbanism with long-habituated domestic appetites, it now being fully established by learned persons, and increasingly acknowledged by laypersons, that our current settlement patterns are both unlovely and unsustainable. Freedomland is premised, then, on the following irrefutable truths: that local farming is good, being that it provides better food and makes better use of our increasingly limited resources than commercial agriculture; that urban living is also good, improving as it does the health, happiness, and prosperity of the populace; and that the majority of Americans, the veracity of the above notwithstanding, still aspire to the material and spatial luxuries represented by the detached single-family house as it is most resplendently found in suburbia.

The plan of Freedomland results from the sub-division of a typical survey township into four equal squares, three miles to each side. The northwest and southeast quadrants are established as new towns and further subdivided to form 36 square sections of 160 acres each, excepting that area dedicated to the town’s primary roads which divide them at intervals of one half mile. As in the original survey townships, these sections are numbered “beginning with the number one in the northeast section and proceeding west and east alternately through the township with progressive numbers, until the thirty-six be completed.” The two remaining quadrants are preserved in, or if necessary restored to, their natural state as unencumbered retreats for the pleasure of the townspeople.

One survey township divided to form two towns and two natural preserves is the absolute minimum area necessary for the establishment of Freedomland. If this plan is aggregated to form a group larger than a single 36 square mile survey township then a checkerboard layout results, in a like manner to that proposed by Mr. Jefferson, producing, at the grand scale, an alternating arrangement of town and country. There is no maximum limit to such an aggregation except for any geographical or political obstacles that may arise to thwart the just and proper extension of the settlement by the townspeople.

The four sections at the center of each town are occupied by a civic core comprised of the infrastructures necessary to the maintenance and preservation of the community. Whereas the original Land Ordinance reserved section 16, at the center of every township, for the use of education, in Freedomland, it being recognized that the choices in means and methods of education are best left to individual families, the central squares are rightly devoted to more pressing and universal needs: The waste square, an ever-growing, manicured pyramid of refuse, rises slowly in section 16; the water square, a circular reservoir nearly one-half mile in diameter, occupies section 15; the energy square, a forest of 20-by-20 foot solar panels, powers the town from section 21; and the market square, anchored in section 22 by a ten-acre big box of community and commerce, provides a venue for public assembly as well as access to those products and services not produced through the prodigious industry of the townspeople.

The 32 remaining sections are quartered by roads secondary to those abovementioned to form four equal parcels of 40 acres, less the dimension of the roads by which they are divided and served. The 128 individual neighborhood farm estates thus established, each an independent self-governing community, are further divided into four 10-acre squares of which three are dedicated to agricultural pursuits while the dwellings are located on the fourth. In this manner fully three quarters of every town in Freedomland shall remain open, green, and free of buildings.

Each neighborhood estate in Freedomland is comprised of between 8 and 64 houses, all those within any particular estate being one just like the next and in this manner ensuring a cohesiveness of identity and consistency of character such that property values are protected and community values are promoted. Whereas architects have proven themselves disinclined, or perhaps just ill-prepared, to deliver designs desired by a majority of the American people, the houses in Freedomland are built according to designs carefully selected from among the best produced by the country’s greatest builders, designs that have proven to be highly popular with persons possessed of the most discriminating taste and therefore certain to attract the finest type of citizen. Depending upon the number of houses and the particular manner in which they are arranged, a neighborhood of houses may take on the character of either a large villa or a small village. Families are thus able to select the estate that most closely matches their spatial, stylistic and, consequently, social preferences, thereby affording them a life among like-minded neighbors with a shared sense of duty and purpose.

It being well known that people, by their very nature, are equally desirous of the pleasures of novelty as they are needful of the comforts of familiarity, Freedomland seeks to offer both in due time. Taking advantage of the increasingly short life span of our houses and in a manner similar to crop rotation, the entire estate, including the dwellings, which are dismantled and rebuilt, rotates counterclockwise every twenty years, completing a full rotation after eighty years. This has the positive effect of providing each resident, at regular intervals, with a new home that is exactly the same as their old home. As each estate rotates this has the further beneficial consequence of producing an ever-changing prospect of built and open space throughout the town. Although the debris produced as a result of the dismantling and rebuilding will, in the early years, likely contribute to the rapid growth of the pyramid of waste at the center of each town, it is expected that the spirit of competition naturally occurring in a free society will, as it has in the past, stimulate advances in home building technology that cause the materials and methods employed in the ongoing re-creation of Freedomland to become ever lighter and more efficient. Such advances will allow each town to more sustainably pursue its cyclical regeneration, signaling to its neighbors its deep commitment to the stability and endurance of our beloved nation.

It is hoped that this description, concise though it may be, is sufficient to describe the sublime structure of Freedomland, its natural and rightful connection to the foundational principles of our great country and its superiority to our current modes of settlement.