Kenneth Schneider

American Communities: the Next Human Advance, a New Class of Freedom Kenneth Schneider

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.