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 TBAs 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. TBAs 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, TBAs 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 TBA 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 TBAs preferring being connected to regional computing centres directly.
History
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
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
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.
"East Hylasian" School
- Emphasis on courtyard multiplexes/apartment blocks with central green spaces + bungalow court neighbourhoods
Abarian School
TBA