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A great, great diary, margouillat.  I, too have a question.  It's about those hundreds of kilometres long tunnels.

They quickly evolved in a very sophisticated way, as some gigantic tunnels (hundred of Km long) allowing for four workers to work in it with air and light (some still exist), reducing evaporation and harnessing the water resource!

Do some of the hundred-km-long ones still exist?  Could you offer some names/links?  (Coz I'm fascinated.)

Re: the city as village, well, I've always thought of the centre of the city as a village with excellent amenities.  But town/city in England was a religious designation.  A city has a cathedral.

And I dunno but I like the idea of the city connecting out to its food sources in the countryside, and also keeping food inside its borders, along pathways, in gardens...green cities...  So I suppose the geography and the surrounding agricultural possibilities...work to give each city a "flavour"...on large rivers you can transport a lot by boat, but if the river is small but the surrounding hills and valleys are fertile...and oh yes...I live by the sea, so ports...ships...

Worra great great diary, I'm rambling.  Thanks, I enjoyed reading it, the tone, the approach...I'm rambling...and also this afternoon I will take the bus out of the city centre to the edge of the city and once again view this place...

...an earthship, power independent, it needs quite a bit of land for food...I liked the environment, but my wife and daughter didn't...like you say, utopias are always populated by our friends and not our enemies...did you say that?  I realised this when I realised that by getting rid of the car (e.g. by petrol being too expensive)...the city would soon resound with the sound of a thousand thousand tiny motorbikes revving at lights, teenagers on hybrid bikes making a racket...in yer face...but that's okay...better than the car...

...ach oh aye!  Great diary!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Sat Feb 24th, 2007 at 07:33:19 AM EST
You might be interested then by this PDF on the "Karez" system from Iran to China...

In the south of Italy at "Matera" you'll find the re-use of dew cisterns in troglodytes dwellings... (another sort of water use on limestones pateau) :-)

Thanks for the praise... And for the whinnying motorbikes (I have an old thumping model) :-)


"What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman

by margouillat (hemidactylus(dot)frenatus(at)wanadoo(dot)fr) on Sat Feb 24th, 2007 at 08:22:16 AM EST
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This very old system named Qanat was invented in Persia (it is mentioned by Herodot). It is also named Foggara (plural Foggaret) in the Sahara, where you can still find many of them functioning.

Qanat

"Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes" Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

by Melanchthon on Sat Feb 24th, 2007 at 05:43:03 PM EST
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