A popular building style around the world is the inward facing apartments surrounding a courtyard. The facade is that of a fortification, a fort, whereas the interior is a kind of atrium oasis.
Cruise ships have been going for this aesthetic, as well as hotels, the kind with the exposed elevators starting inside the very high- ceilinged interior.
Some skyscrapers also play with the atrium motif, if only to take advantage of the soaring view, looking up, a view many designs block.
On the smaller end of the spectrum, the courtyard- and/or atrium-equipped fort might contain an extended family, with exogamous components e.g. families that have married in or otherwise allied. This mosaic or tiling structure, of interconnected families, grows to several buildings or may take on the aspect of a whole village.
These villages may be semi-invisible at first, as they blend within the context of a New York City. We get barrios, or neighborhoods (sometimes ghettos or slums), sometimes with harmonious synergies, popular fusions, other times with interstitial inflammation, from feuding to gang warfare. We've all seen the movies right?
An economics textbook might try to boil it all down to some landlords (owners) versus renters situation, then get into all the borrowing that needs to go on, as some people see their capital appreciate, meaning they can afford to borrow, and pay back with interest. Banks see their money grow in this way, as deposits swell, and so start lending to each other, seeing one another as credit worthy, able to make good on debts.
Not all of them manage to stay out of trouble though. Banks may become riddled with scammers, indirectly perhaps, through depositors. Some get into laundering for suspect clients, which becomes self implicating. Banking is an inherently risky business, especially in a VUCA world (I'm thinking of Greg Hutchins here).
Sometimes speculators bet wrong, such as when imagining driverless cars or AGI just around the next corner. After the hoped for products don't materialize, it becomes easier to cheat on definitions, but what if the public just stops buying the PR? New investors won't stream in to relieve current owners of their stocks.
Then you get the disruptors coming along, such as Bucky Fuller, who wanted to cut out the middleman mortgage moneylenders, thereby putting less financial stress on the moms especially.
Fuller wanted happy sane campers living in sanitary circumstances, and so invented his low cost appliance homes, metal tents, dymaxion yurts (circling a utility pole), thereby making RV-mobile-home quality living affordable, at least in principle, to a newly emergent middle class.
The new lightweight yet durably aerospace designs would spark a revolution in sheltering. Airstream was another trailblazer, in bringing aeronautical tech to the landlubbers.
However the LAWCAP oligarchs were not necessarily ready for any kind of switchover from everyday mortgage lending (a surefire moneymaker) to dwelling appliance vending; they wanted to keep riding the old FinTech rollercoasters at all costs.
Their banking games depend a lot on building ticky-tacky box housing, but also drives improvements to the existing housing stock, such as when enterprising remodelers borrow, buy, upgrade, and flip these homes, swimming upstream towards the ever more upscale, like salmon to spawning grounds. Banks see their portfolios grow in value.
Suburbs clone themselves to produce endless square miles of monoculture, complete with commuter based lifestyles. The need to amp up electricity to these regions is paramount these days, as suburban homeowners increasingly resort to home charging the family vehicles.
The existing natural gas or coal fired power plants may not be prepared to undertake the load.
To what extent will solar and wind, combined with storage batteries, take up the burden of providing transport? That's what any college or university involved in modeling and simulation, is going to be looking at. Even just looking in the rear view mirror we can learn lessons, about what works and what doesn't.
Per David Graeber's work, we needn't box ourselves in with unimaginative cliches about capitalism versus communism. Is it "communist" for a bunch of model railroad aficionados to co-own a model train set in a church basement? That's kind of a nonsense question. It's communal, if that's what you mean, but there's no escaping "community" even in a society run according to capitalist business logic (whatever that is).
We do want to instill a love of trains, of railroads, at a visceral level, in some Global U students. Such a love may be innate, and just need a chance to express itself. We're looking for personnel to take the train system forward. Physically and literally working on a railroad would be a logical pathway into planning and management.
However, with the rampant financialization of ownership, people with no special love of trains, not even in a commuter role, get to squeeze the rail works for purely financial gain, at the expense of having a high quality railroad system. Future generations will need to compensate, by implementing new ways of breeding ownership institutions.
In addition to those museum floors I was imagining, the mixed use campus building needs a communal model train system, perhaps more than one, with established roles for governance, probably rotational. Students with a model train in the basement, and ample opportunities to tour existing infrastructure, are more likely to become engineers in the traditional sense, in the form of people who love engines (not a gender specific role).
If Quakerism plays a role in building governance (in some buildings it might), then the nominating, supervisory committee, business meeting structure might help keep the model train committee going.
