42 towns and counting, the book

What if towns had a purpose, a mission, a focus? Something to aim for?

These questions were not on my mind when I started to make notes for Easy Town. Then, my questions were: How to improve the recovery process for neurological patients? And how could the relatives and friends of patients be supported in such difficult times?

But as I kept working on the ideas for Easy Town, and later started to write the easy town books, more town ideas emerged, and at their core are these questions: What if a town had a purpose, or a mission, or a focus? Or something to aim for?

By now more than 77 town ideas are on my radar, and I will publish the first 77 in the collection 42 towns and counting.

This collection has become a journey into what is possible if we allow for new ideas, and if we do some rethinking.

And it seems to me that every single one of these town ideas has advantages over towns which simply house people, or guard the memory of some dead person or some historical event or some old church.

The towns presented in the collection would not only be alive, they would create, inspire, thrive and live, I guess.

42 towns and counting by Charlie Alice Raya is a collection of ideas for thriving and inspiring towns.

The 42+ town ideas will be presented in rough drafts, sometimes as a collection of thoughts, little splashes, dots and notes, sometimes a dialogue, mostly an exploration into what might be possible and how.

Among the features discussed in the collection are: the focus of a town and what that might imply, the composition of a town, its architecture & layout, its businesses & business practices, its particular research questions, its environmental approaches, its societal challenges, its political questions and more.

It will take some more months to transcribe and edit all the notes for these towns.

In the meantime, you can take a look at the accompanying graphics for each town.

And you can download the graphics collection which also includes some snippets for each idea – a bit of food for thought for the road.

And you can take a look at the town list below.