Phalanstery

A phalanstery refers to an institutional community-operated housing collective common across the Solidarist world where they typically form the backbone of their housing stock. Similar to co-housing settlements, phalansteries usually feature several shared spaces such as a lounge area, a dinning hall, laundromats, utilities and joint storage, but more recent, larger or region-specific phalansteris may also include childcare services, recreation and home-entertainment facilities, parking lots, telecentres, gyms, carpooling and even swimming pools, while individual housing units may still preserve their own amenities such as private kitchens. Phalansteries are distinguished from traditional co-housing and housing co-operatives in the Serial world by the institutionalized role they play as a social unit to manage collective provisioning, drive community engagement, promote gender equality by socialising child-rearing, and providing multigenerational third places for people from multiple walks of life to interact with each other, and are generally conceived as the smallest social unit in solidarist societies as opposed to contemporary family structures.

Traditionally, especially during the early Postbellum, phalansteries were often associated mixed-use, multi-residential units which often ranged from multiplexes to tower blocks, but in Elia Australis and Abaria in particular most commonly took the form of mid-rise flats, with common facilities usually found on the bottom-most floors. Given the emphasis on mixed-use development it is also not uncommon for the bottom-most floors to host producer cooperatives who usually provide essential community goods and services, such as pharmaceutical drugs, childcare, cinemas and distribution centres, with these services are usually manned by workers who live in the phalanstery themselves. In recent years, particularly in countries like TBA and TBA and influenced by ecological and disurbanist schools of urban planning, there has been a shift towards more dispersed, non-urban living arrangements in the form of semi-detached housing within sustainable and self-contained residential units with shared open spaces often linked to larger cities, somewhat mimicking the sort of surburbanisation process occurring in Serial countries such as Coshaqua.

In non-market solidarist countries, the digitalisation of economic planning that occurred in various solidarist states such as Equatoria and Adanal during the later 20th century towards the 2000s have lead to many phalansteries also hosting telecentres from which inhabitants can access online services as well as accessing community informatics. Many contemporary phalansteries have server rooms with a mainframe from which all in-building terminals are linked to, however this practice is slowly falling out of favour, with recent phalansteries preferring being connected to regional computing centres directly.

Classification

"Elian school"

• Mid-to-high rise apartment blocks with bottom-most floors hosting most common facilities.
• May include semi-detached accessory units which host other services

TBA in TBA, HYLASIA-COUNTRY, is a well known phalanstery unit in combining Central Hylasian and Elian design philosophies. Known know for its biomimicry-inspired design.

Disurbanist School

• instead of all housing units and services being within one building with accessory units, you have microdistricting and mixed-unit composed of multiplexes/bungalow courts with mid-rise apartments making up a single phalanstery unit, with services located in buildings separate from the general community, settlements in a relatively peri-urban regions.
• High density housing in dispersed eco-suburban settlements, lots of greenery

Suburban commuter town in northern Ruthen, showing multiple housing units owned by a local phalanstery servicing over 10,000 occupants.

TBA school

• More recent, support for indoor micro-"arcologies" with housing units ranging from larger family units to elderly units to studio/micro-apartments for single and/or young adults.
• somewhat larger and more open internal spaces, provide wider breath of services and amenities.

Internal skywalks of a TBA phalanstery in Sinaca, Equatoria.

"East Hylasian" School

• Emphasis on courtyard multiplexes/apartment blocks with central green spaces + bungalow court neighbourhoods

File:Hylasian phalanstery neighbourhood.jpg

TBA text

Abarian School

TBA

Institutional role

Governance

Phalansteries are typically organised as syndicates, with governance dictated by various multi-stakeholder representatives boards. The most basic is a bicameral structure whereas governance is split between occupants and community representatives. Larger phalansteries typically operate on a tri- or tetracameral governance structure with power split between community representatives, occupants represented via a tenants union, workers who run the various internal services provided to occupants via a worker's council, and external local suppliers such as the local consumer council, but in market socialist states could also be external investors. Democratic governance is usually driven by deliberation and consensus...

Services

Computing

Recently since the 1980s increasingly more phalansteries have installed mainframes to manage local computing services as a utility. Historically most phalansteries linked up thin client terminals to the central mainframe, with most terminals being located within a computer lab room within the phalanstery building or, for more dispersed disurbanist variants, a separate local facility within the broader collective, but more recently there has been a shift towards also building terminals within individual housing units mimicking telephone lines. Computing services often offered by modern phalansteries included access to national online resources such as digital libraries, newsfeeds and accessing general catalogues from the national coordination networks like SYSNAC in Equatoria.

Local telecentre in Equatoria, owned by a phalanstery as a detached unit from the main housing facility.

More recently with the digitalisation of various solidarist economies, local telecentres have become major centres for organising consumer consumption through collective purchasing orders sent by individual households to consumer councils, as well as localised planning systems allowing communities to pool resources and directly request goods and services from local production units, such as foodstuffs. They have also served as important centres for participatory democracy and community informatics, with local initiatives, polls and municipal voting commonly taking place on self-hosted platforms. Access to community statistics, such as local climate data, crime and policing statistics, traffic congestion, housing pressure data, resource stock and pollution, among others, are available in telecentres, promoting greater community awareness of local issues.

Their proliferation also led to a rise in domestic open source hardware and design in advanced solidarist economies such as Equatoria, with many phalansteries converting their computer labs into makerspaces, fabrication studios and media labs. While initially a hobbyist trend, many contemporary phalansteries which maintain fabrication workshops have direct linkages with local syndicates and cooperatives, research institutes, and universities through concept-sharing platforms and open journals, where they typically also share their design libraries under open-use licencing. Their prominence has been instrumental in promoting technical literacy, DIY design and open innovation within various solidarist economies, allowing for rapid prototyping, experimentation and greater adaptability in face of emerging technologies, propping up domestic competitiveness on the international market. The proliferation of media labs have also been instrumental in promoting collaborative media and entertainment production, linking consumers to media collectives.