"Our communities are overpriced, poisonous, overcrowded, unhealthy, wasteful energy pigs - not because they have to be but because it suits the vested interests that build, operate, and control them..." Strong words spoken by a character in The Architecture of Hope, Doug MacLeod's compelling glimpse into the near future. And yet this is not, at its core, a work fiction.
The Architecture of Hope offers an immediately compelling glimpse into the future, a near future only 15 years hence, in which we can live and work together to build better communities for tomorrow. Set in the fictitious town of Hope in the Okanagan Valley, it imagines the idea of cooperative communities where people can produce more energy than they use; purify more water than they pollute; grow more food than they consume; and recycle more waste than they produce, with technologies that already exist, or that will be within our grasp in a few years. Most important of all, the people of the community own and profit from these resources. The Architecture of Hope depicts a way of living that is decentralized, re-localized, and regenerative.
As one of the characters notes, "The big idea is that we could restore rather than destroy; we could produce rather than consume; and we could purify rather than pollute - not just the Earth but our bodies and minds as well."
