| The Need for Flexibility |
| The relative isolation of a country life does not suit all of the people all of the time. A world of hythes must also therefore include means for supporting the more gregarious life-styles. |
|
| ||
Hythe-based society - as so far described - comprises a billion hythes in each of which a family lives and works. All these hythes are connected by a transport and communications infrastructure. This allows people to travel from their hythes to all parts of the world. But apart from visiting each other's hythes where would they go and why?
Different people have different strengths and abilities. This gives them different personalities and preferences. For instance, some people are, by nature, more gregarious than others. They need to be much closer to a greater number of other people than would be possible in the relative isolation of a family hythe.
Indeed, any individual's social needs and preferences change during the different stages of life. Children, middle aged and old people would prefer - and benefit more - from life on the hythe. Teenagers and young adults generally prefer a city life where they can mix with others. And there are times when everybody - whatever their age or preference - needs the social stimulation of a large close group of people.
There are also those whose preference is to travel. To live a wandering life, providing the trading conduit through which artisanic produce can be distributed and exchanged. And there will always inevitably be those who are physically or mentally unable to work. These people, at these times, are located away from their family hythes. They are therefore in no position to use the land to turn their labour into their needs of life.
So how should the city-dweller, the wanderer or the infirm deploy their shares of the planet's natural means for turning labour into the needs of life? What use would land be to them? The answer is that their share of the Earth's productive resources is their means of acquiring their needs of life - irrespective of whether or not it is their own bodily labour which is used to bring forth their needs of life from it. In the language of today we would say it is their personal capital. It can produce without labour.
More specifically, an individual's portion of the planet may be made to yield the needs of life for them in response to the labour of another. A wandering merchant can hire an adjacent hythe-farmer to supply labour for the purpose of acquiring the needs of life from his hythe. In return, the merchant provides the farmer with useful goods from a distant land.
The farmer's hythe yields to him the needs of life independently of the fickle ups and downs of a free market or the dictates of any controlling capitalist. But the livelihood of the merchant is open to the blind forces of the free market. He may prosper when the market is up, but his trade may disappear completely when it is down. Nevertheless, whenever his business should fail or recess, he always has the option to return to his hythe and deploy his own labour to acquire from it his needs of life.
In the case of the young city-dweller, his portion of his family hythe is run by the other members of his family while he contributes something useful from whatever he does in the city. There is a good case for each hythe family also to have a city base. The portions of the child, the old and the infirm are run by the able-bodied. The old in their turn provide direction and advice. The infirm are professional observers and thereby provide companionship and insight. The children provide the future.
This diversity in life-style ideally demands a very flexible type of accommodation. When we first got married, my wife and I had a little cottage. It was perfectly adequate for us at the time. When our first child came, suddenly there was no room to move. We needed a bigger house. We moved to a two-bedroom detached chalet. That was fine. When our two sons came along, even that was too small. We built an extension which turned it into a 3-bedroom house.
Now our daughter is 28. She left home some years ago. She lives in London. In that bastion of capitalism, naturally as a single woman with an ordinary job, she simply cannot afford anything which could be described as acceptable accommodation. She has lived in uneasy house-shares and in two-room basement apartments with damp walls and nothing but a padlocked door to keep her possessions secure.
I have often thought it a pity that she could not disconnect her bedroom from our house and couple it to a bathroom/kitchen service unit near where she works in London. We don't need her bedroom: she does.
For this reason, I imagine a hythe-based home of the future to be a very flexible high technology device made up of a central unit to which are attached individual accommodation modules. An accommodation module would be capable of being disconnected from the central unit and moved when the grown-up child wanted to move to a village, city or the hythe of a spouse.
I think the design of such homes would be a very interesting and fulfilling technical challenge.