Project Cascadia
I doubt I would have proposed a site near the airport for tiny home showcasing if Dignity Village hadn’t already been established, next to a prison, not far from the PDX runways.
Savvy private sector tiny home factories seek a more serene if not outright bucolic ambience for their showcase lots. We even get fighter jets in the Dignity Village airspace, as loud as that Tesla coil at QuarterWorld on Hawthorne (Asylum District, Portland, Oregon, Cascadia).
I scribed that proposal in the good old days, before tiny home village prototyping became all the rage. The airport location had one advantage at least: visiting dignitaries, say UNRA or UNDP experts in refugee housing, could tour our “living diorama” (the dwellers were to be paid and have expense accounts with prop inventory, including vintage wardrobes) and take these “exterior design” ideas back to their home countries.
Just down the road: Ikea, with its interior design expertise.
If you know your history, you know how Burning Man culture spawned a year-around schedule of Burn Out festivals, often on private lands or in civic structures seeking investments, such as Revolution Hall (the old Washington High School I talk about one of my latest Martian Math Youtubes).
Combine Burn Outs with the annual Country Fair near Eugene, and the state-sponsored Vortex One festival (hearkening back to the Nixon Era), and you’ll have that picture of “Glamping meets Woodstock” we’re keen on making our bioregion’s signature prototyping environment.
Weather our festival circuit while working out the kinks, while availing of the engineering expertise of our Whole World Catalog era descendents. The region is imbued with an exuberant experimentalist ethos already, thanks to generations of Silicon Foresters and their commitment to making Portland an open source capital with a post-Prohibition approach to psychoactive substances.
Stewart Brand and Steve Jobs both did stints at Reed College, as did I, not as a student but as a Saturday Academy instructor allowed to occupy a computer science lab for, you guessed it, curriculum prototyping purposes. Quadrays for middle schoolers. A and B modules (of BASKET fame).
I did two rounds of Martian Math at Reed, leveraging some of my earlier work as a parent volunteer, for Winterhaven (PPS). I also used the facilities of Portland State and the University of Portland, also with Saturday Academy.
