Projects

The core of The Urbanology Initiative is the development of
functioning Community Centers, exciting and inviting multi-use
facilities that combine education, work, housing and supporting
actvities, centered around a theme.

Current

• The Tango Center

Scheduled

• The Shoe Center
• Tango Bistro
• Childcare at the Tango Center
• Gallery at the Tango Center
• The Tango Store
• The Tango Hostel
• Urbanology promotion
• Sound & video studio

Future Tentative

These are projects based on research and work already done by the Eugene Comunity Trust,
under consideration for downtown spaces.

• Center for Applied Feeling
  In order to fill spaces with community activitiy, it is necessary to find things people want to make,
  which are not made by hand anymore. Then you initiate a stage of instruction & discovery. The
  Center for Applied feeling is a school & project incubator. Economically, it incubates workshop-
  institutions that can grow to replace mass-produced imported goods with better locally made goods.
  But in order to create high-quality, highly differentiated, local, custom-made products, more than
  technical mastery is necessary. To impart human qualities implies using feeling, and life, explicitly
  as criteria for manufacture. This is equally true for creating a building, a bicycle, a meal, a film,
  a shoe, or a fleeting dance. It is something that has been forgotten, so we are putting it in the center.
• Art from Life
  Coherence & proportion are difficult skills, but they are key to doing almost all good work. "Art from Life"
  is a public education center for training the eye & hands to model reality in various media.
• Costume Center
  Compliment to the Shoe Center, a public institute dedicated to teaching
  a high level of handmade, custom, costume & clothing design and creation.
• Eugene Car Co-op
  A local car-sharing network.
• The Linux Center
  A public store and service incubator for open computing. It would include the
  offices for Workspot, a Linux project already owned by the trust.
• Eugene Media Center
  Modeled loosely on Downtown Community Television in New York, this would be
  a school and cooperative work area for producing local film and news about local issues
  & local history. This would include Rain Magazine, and Rain films, the Ollswang Archive,
  and other properties of the trust.
• Urbanology
  A public education center dedicated to improving the human qualities of Eugene

Past Proposed

West End: Proposal and analysis

Alder Street Project

The Woodfire Center

Bicycle Centers

Oopen source center

Cast Glass: A school teaching glass casting, both studio glass and manufacture for local refillable containers.

Dharmis: a music colony

Initiatives

The Quality Map: a community planning project, using methods associated
with patternlanguage.com, to map the areas in Eugene that are good,
and those that are not, and to make community needs explicit.

The Project Catalyst: an incubator of cooperative, sustainable, high-qulity
import-replacement businesses.

Refillables: local replacment of disposable packaging with attractive deposit
containers, with an efficient collection network.

The Oregon Experiment: improve participatory planning on the University
of Oregon campus.

Carshare Housing -- City Code Proposal: to reduce parking requirements for
developments where tenants agree not to own a car, but instead share a motor
pool at a 10 people:1 car ratio.

Proposed clusters

Kesey Central

• The Daily Market
• Movement & Music space
• Work/live space
• Rooftop gardens

(Proposed) Named after Ken Kesey, and the honorary plaza and statue across the street, the center will be filled with the kind of projects he supported whole-heartedly. On the street, 20 indoor cooperative market bays -- part commercial, part educational -- a daily farmer's and crafts market echoing the success of Eugene's Saturday Market, the first in the US, which continues only a block northeast of here. Locally made vegetables, bread, cheese, mushrooms, cloth, soap, etc. Upstairs, classroom, rehearsal and practice space for music, dance and movement (tai chi, yoga, a circus school, etc.) and offices for the organizations initiating them. The top floor will be studio work/live space for those involved in Kesey Central projects.

Center for Applied Feeling

(Proposed) A school, business incubator, and project incubator, which doesn't exist in the world, but which the world clearly needs. This is an incubator where people strive to make ecologically sustainable things, with feeling. The emphasis is important. Carpentry, metal, shoes, costumes, herbals, human-powered machines, furniture, ceramics, clothing, film, media, books, newspapers, paper, pens, toothbrushes, buildings, park benches, planters, statues, displays, etc. all represent projects, economies, and local talent, incubated within this vast bulding.

 

Community Computing Center

(Proposed) Most of the problems with computing stem from a lack of respect for human feeling -- the feelings of programmers and the feelings of users. This is partially because computing didn't emerge from a need to fix the world, and heal a community. We propose creating an public programming space, where computing in the community interest drives a new generation of applications, liberating computing from its past. We are working on moving this Open Source project under our non-profit umbrella, to act as an engine for funding 3C.

Pumping life into community development