A day of visionary urbanists and community designers, speaking at Turkey's Harvest Kaplankaya

From the Turkish coast, at Harvest Kaplankaya

We were honoured to be invited to participate in Harvest Kaplankaya this week, a twice-yearly convention of visionaries, builders and idealists that takes place on the Southern coast of Turkey.

Our editorial this week will cover some of its deeper themes - but today’s (Friday’s) sequence of speakers are worth highlighting in a single post. Urbanist and investor Thomas Ermacora curated four of his peers who are doing extraordinary work in wellbeing-oriented, participatory and regenerative urban design.

We’ll post the title of their talks below - the videos are coming soon - and give you a sense of them and their practice. More from the stars of Harvest Kaplankaya in the coming weeks.

Conscious Living: Community Wellbeing & Regenerative Design with Thomas Ermacora

This 2017 YouTube video captures Thomas’s approach:

Cellular Urbanism: Doing Away with Sprawl & Grid Thinking with Dror Benshetrit

From the transcript of the podcast embedded below, earlier this year:

The first assumption was very basic and very naïve, right? Nature does not break things into blocks the way that we do almost everything, right? And if you look at the natural aggregations, whether it’s cell under the microscope or organizations of planetary systems, you see this similar geometry which we call the Voronoi pattern, which is a cellular logic…

…I realized that we don’t have to any more design streets and buildings adjacent to the streets. But we can use natures most common geometry, which is the cellular logic and create cellular communities of different density.. This is a very unique moment in time where we have the technological capabilities, where we have the manufacturing capabilities to accomplish something like that.

…So [with cellular urbanism], this is the first time in which pedestrian circulation and vehicular circulations are no longer side-by-side. I mean you’re typically walking in the same exact path that the vehicles have, with the exception of one-way streets and things like that, that you can walk and the car cannot work. But with the cellular logic, now pedestrians are able to move from a forest to a forest or from a park to a park or from, whatever you want to use that natural inner space, it can be urban farming, it could be open space for recreation, for anything.

See also Benshetrit’s Supernature: Bioplanning Design Manual

Harnessing the Power of Transformative Technologies to Empower Community Design with Ralph Horat

This 2022 video below shows Ralph’s Next Generation Village Project:

The Next Frontier of Design & Biomimicry: Reinventing the Aesthetics of Habitation with John Brevard

Interesting to read John Brevard’s architectural theory:

Centuries ago, there was an emphasis on the development of “spiritual spaces.” As human consciousness develops further, we are seeing a reemergence of this architecture that will elevate the human frequency and realign humans with natural order and hyper-dimensional realities. This new architecture will be a direct reflection of this shift in consciousness which is occuring now. These designs will consider the implications of human bioenergy, electromagnetism, astrology, earth energy, sacred geometries (fractals), regeneration, and the sacred traditions of Feng Shui and Vastu Shastra.

The Regenerative Renaissance with Christian Jochnick

Christian - who calls himself a “naturepreneur” - has set up a “lifestyle business, located in the countryside of Ibiza island. Our project includes a restaurant ‘Juntos House’, 70 hectares of farmland for regenerative agriculture, a sustainable food products division & a concept store.”

More information here at Producers Market and their home site

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You can see videos from last May’s Harvest Kaplankaya here, and listen to their podcast series here.