42 towns & counting

42 towns and counting

ideas for thriving and inspiring towns

To be published: in summer 2022

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

The town list for this collection is now complete and contains ideas for 77 towns.

It will take some more weeks to transcribe and edit all the notes and sketches for these towns. In the meantime, you can take a look at the accompanying graphics and teasers.

And you can download the graphics & teasers collection for free – a bit of food for thought for the road.

If you have any question about a town idea, or if you would like to contribute to an idea, or challenge one of them, please get in touch.

The following is the present introduction to 42 towns and counting.

Introduction

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: what can be done to make the recovery process for neurological patients more effective, 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 book series, 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?

The following 42+ town ideas are rough drafts, sometimes a collection of thoughts, little splashes, dots and notes for each town, sometimes a dialogue, mostly an exploration into what might be possible and how.

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

While some of the town ideas (will) make an appearance in the easy town book series, most of the following ideas are additional to the series, and only some ideas, quotes and extracts from books 1-4 are included in this collection.

One of my favourite towns is missing from the list since including it would be too much of a spoiler.

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 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 this collection would not only be alive, they would create, inspire, thrive and live, I guess.