American Communities
The Next Human Advance, A New Class of Freedom
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About the Book
American Communities centers upon a critical missing dimension of modern progress: an organizational equivalent to the corporation. The concept rests upon unified, integrated, socially beneficial community living that is comparable to a cruise ship on the inside and opens to a spacious recreational environment like a country club on the outside.
This new Community "corporation" serves its members who control its services and programs, from health care and education to commerce and cultural programs. Its social spaces, built around interior plazas and promenades, offers efficient yet casual opportunities for community members to associate both freely and formally in a vast array of member behaviors.
This community achieves a grand harmony of spaces and programs with closely, yet spaciously, organized facilities serving most daily needs of its members. The compactly organized spaces are necessary to achieve human-scale efficiency and casual interactions.
The most critical principle is that urban spaciousness is possible only by compact development-what a city should be-which then immensely reduces the need for mechanized transport, especially the space consuming, distance promoting, and congestive nature of costly, wasteful automobiles.
About the Author
Following service in the Marine Corps in World War II, Kenneth Schneider studied sociology and city planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He worked in planning for some years, including assignments at the United Nations in New York. Subsequently he worked with CARE in the Philippines, Sierra Leone, and Jordan. Following his overseas work, Schneider stressed his role as a generalist writing The Destiny of Change and Autokind Vs. Mankind, and completed On the Nature of Cities while founding a small business publishing large format post cards. He managed the company for almost twenty years. Since 1997 he has completed four additional books, noted in the front piece, all intended to stimulate a basic dialogue about fundamental change in society.