John Thackara Newsletter August 2025
“Balancing proximity and modernity” is the informal theme for our last MeetUp of the year which starts on 28 August (until 4 September).
I’m borrowing the words from Frédéric Bosqué who’s developing a rural transition neighborhood called Tera in the Aquitaine region of France. https://www.tera.coop/ Bosqué reckons regions like his, and Les Cévennes, where we live, are examples of what he calls Rurality 2.0 – a way of life in which nature, culture, and technology are combined in new ways.
linkedin.com/in/fredericbosque
Is Rurality 2.0 a viable thing? Demand for new ways of living is certainly strong among privileged Europeans. Fifty seven per cent of city dwellers in France, for example, say they would like to live closer to nature. Among them, a significant minority would like to live in some kind of ecological settlement in which housing is shared, and healthy vegetables are produced on cooperative farms, and so on. Despite this strong interest mass resettlement in ecovillages is not happening. “The reality is brutal” Bosqué observes; “80 per cent of planned eco-places never come to fruition. They flourish in people’s minds, and then whither on the ground”.
The short life-expectancy of ecovillages is not a new phenomenon. California’s Utopian Colonies: 1850-1950 – published in 1953 – chronicles a steady stream of projects which failed due to the same political, economic and cultural conflicts that Bosqué identifies, today.
Are there other ways than ecovillages to balance proximity and modernity in practice? We like to think our MeetUps have those qualities – but we don’t live in a designed community. On the contrary, we arrived in this small market town pretty much by accident. But we’re almost local, by now, in a town that’s been adapting to change for more than 1,000 years. We’ll be happy to share what we’ve learned in the last 24 of those. Frédéric Bosqué runs immersive weekends for anyone wishing to experience Tera close up. The next two are 6/7 September and 25/26 October.
Our last MeetUp of the year runs from 28 August to 4 September.
How to apply:
thackara.com/meetinfrance
Urban-Rural and the web of life
New urban-rural economies are the main focus of my work In Shanghai, where I’m a visiting prof at Tongji University. I help senior leadership, and faculty, develop real-world research projects, and I also contribute to events. One of these is the World Design Cities Conference (WDCC), in September, which is shifting the focus of design toward a “web of life” framework. I’ll be doing a follow-up to the AgTech for Agroecology lecture I gave on my on my last visit. I posted a transcript, summary, and takeaways, here:
Care, value, place
System transformations are happening all over – so how can design help? In October, I’m co-curating a second Care, Value, Place (CVP) event at BITS Design school in Mumbai. I say ‘event’ – rather than conference – because CVP is but one element in a knowledge ecosystem that includes grassroots project leaders, student projects, faculty. The library team play a pivotal role as stewards of this emerging knowledge ecosystem. Keynote videos from the first Care Value Place, last September, have been posted on You Tube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKb-m7MDDLrVkoQ1KJHgBtQ
And here are my reflections on that event.
https://thackara.com/care/introduction-to-care-value-place-mumbai/
Talk and converse on zoom
My most popular format on Zoom is a 30 minute talk followed by the same time again for discussion. My conversation-starting topics this year are: Designing For Life; Rewilding AI; Oil Age to Soil Age.
