About
this
website
About
The website www.towns-and-cities-international.org is a Charlie Alice Raya website and a project to present ideas for towns and cities with a purpose, including ideas for thriving and inspiring towns.
The idea for Easy Town and some of the other towns which are introduced here originate in the easy town books by Charlie Alice Raya.
What are the easy town books?
The easy town books tell the story of a town built from scratch and for a time run as an experiment, and of the characters involved in planning, building and running it.
‘What I’d like to propose is to build a town from scratch and run it as an experiment. In the experiment, we would treat every aspect of life as a variable, as something we can put to the test, as something we can adjust until it makes more sense than our present systems. We would question every theory we know. We would question how we do business, how patients are treated, how the town is composed in terms of people, businesses, educational and cultural offers, or its layout. And we would try to find out whether we can’t do better if we use our imagination, and hang our complacency in the closet.’
© Charlie Alice Raya, book 1, beginning
Links
For more about the easy town books, the origins of the easy town idea, first insights about the features of Easy Town see: easy-town-books.com
For interactions contact me via email or find me on Bluesky.
contact@towns-and-cities-international.org
For an overview of all my projects see
and on Bluesky
‘I keep discovering how essential every part of the town is for our health. Sometimes it’s a security thing, like avoiding kerbs and everything that is difficult for a wheelchair user. Sometimes it’s the difference between a grey facade and a mural. Sometimes it’s about nurturing biodiversity and with that nurturing us. Sometimes it’s the difference between a filthy sports venue and a sports garden. Sometimes it’s about all the things we seem to have forgotten about, like clean air and water, healthy foods, people who are not frustrated, people to connect and talk to, and places where that can happen, jobs that leave us enough time to connect, unproblematic noise levels, an administration that doesn’t stress us. Skye, I don’t want to do all the talking.’
© Charlie Alice Raya, book 3/1, shaping
Get in touch
last updated: 27 April 2025