5 Things Cities Can Learn from Burning Man
While this piece has a somewhat odd tone to me, in terms of catching the lessons I think it’s a win. There are far more lessons, of course – about building refugee camps, and disaster relief, and the limits of isolation – but it’s good as far as it goes. I would like the narrator to try and navigate without the “symbolic” streetlights on a duststorm night, but nevermind.
As the Metropolis theme develops over the next year, expect to see more here about urban design, housing innovations, and related topics.
via YouTube – 5 Things Cities Can Learn from Burning Man.
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Six-year Burner here. I love BRC and my BRC family. Nonetheless, Larry Harvey is a bit arrogant when extending himself into what Burners dub the “default world.” I mean the following list in the most positive way, and hope artists will consider these obstacles when planning their installations for the “Metropolis” of next year.
Point by point:
1. Try attending the burn without a car. Forget the couch, just try carrying your water.
2. People do not take care of their own trash in BRC. They pack it out to another city, which takes care of it.
3. “Icy pandemonium of extraneous wills.” Sounds familiar. Burner cliques anyone? The gift economy, while a nice idea, yields an anti-meritocratic society based on popularity and social networks, the very antithesis of egalitarianism.
4. You can only foster virtue through shame if everyone agrees on what is virtuous and what is shameful. Works well in gemeinschaft but not gesellschaft societies (Google it). BRC is one– it is 98% uppity white folks– NYC is the other.
5. Fireworks? FIREWORKS? I guess two wars in our name, the treasury being sacked by the rich, it’s all okay as long as we have something shiny to look at. We can just burn the negativity away in effigy, along with the Man, and it goes away, right?