A Reframing of the Burning Man 10 Principles–for Permanent Communities
Every year in the late summer, a remote corner of the Nevada desert morphs into a raucous, ephemeral assemblage of kaleidoscopic art cars, tents, trailers, and dramatically festooned people on bikes.
Called Black Rock City, this community of 70,000 is the temporary home of Burning Man, a week-long event dedicated to art, self-expression, and self-reliance.
A Bit of Order From The Chaos
The attendees, or “burners”, have a variety of goals, and therefore the Burning Man event doesn’t have a stated single focus. The main idea is that participation is necessary, but the actual features of the event are entirely up to the participants.
However, there are 10 Burning Man principles that all burners are expected to follow. These guidelines were originally written by co-founder Larry Harvey back in 2004. They are:
- radical inclusion
- gifting
- decommodification
- radical self-reliance
- radical self-expression
- communal effort
- civic responsibility
- leaving no trace
- participation
- immediacy
From Transcendence to Permanence
Although the Burning Man event only lasts for a week each year, many have pondered what it would be like to create a permanent place that enables and embodies its values.
Participants are greeted with a heartfelt “welcome home” upon entry to Black Rock City. And from there they get to experience the joys of close proximity and incidental social life. So it’s no wonder that so many long to continue this feeling year-round.
In the spirit of experimentation, we thought it would be fun to build upon the 10 principles and reframe them for engaging conversations about building permanent communities.
In the numbered list below,
The original Burning Man 10 principles are stated first.
With our suggestions for a ‘permanent-community-reframing’ below them in grey.
1. Radical Inclusion
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
It should be easy for anyone to be able to see themselves within the community. Regardless if one is homeless, a foreigner, a square, a radical, or merely flamboyant. Whether destitute or zillionaire, everyone must be able to find a dignified place where it’s easy to participate in the community. The broader the community inclusion, the greater the potential for resiliency and a sense of welcome.
2. Gifting
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift-giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
During the event, a gifting disposition hastens community bonding and intensifies social interactions. In a permanent situation, this might focus more on seeing each other’s simple day-to-day relations within the community as the primary gift that’s being exchanged.
3. Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
One of the most revolutionary acts in contemporary placemaking, but also one of the greatest core values in all well-loved enduring places, is the management of the level of the commodification of the public sphere.
It’s the fact that the playa is so empty and free of anything other than alkali dust, rocky mountains, and sky that the location works so well. This emptiness is what gives the aesthetic space for the emergent self-expression in the first place.
Somewhere permanent should also feel similarly welcoming and unimposing. Mostly free of grotesque branding and other impositions of identity. The place itself should be able to transcend the people within it, and be as effectively blank, passive, familiar, and accommodating as the playa is itself. Also, it should be a place that feels as if it had built up over time and was inherited from previous generations.
4. Radical Self-Reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.
On the playa, self-reliance is largely about equipping yourself adequately for your comfort and survival for the week, and getting along well with each other as temporary neighbors.
Unless a permanent place has a self-maintaining infrastructure, a radical self-reliant lifestyle beyond what’s found in an encampment is expensive and one of the primary sources of civic challenges around the world. It’s also one of the main reasons Arcosanti, for example, has never been able to grow to even 100 people–because affordably scaling its physical infrastructure needs has proven to be impossible.
When it’s permanent and people are now long-term neighbors, radical self-reliance will also mean that everyone honors each other’s space and doesn’t require too much effort or attention from one another. When places start out as architectural or social experiments, they mostly ended up ignoring the time-tested, even if mundane, approaches for growing successful permanent communities. Also, the emotional infrastructure needed to grow a permanent community has always been a problem for small remote counter-culture places.
5. Radical Self-Expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
Part of the reason the Burning Man event succeeds is that the playa and mountains create a simple and elegant backdrop within which self-expression has room to ignite and flourish.
In a permanent place, however, the day-to-day version of self-expression nearly universally tends to be more casual. More radical forms are limited to celebrations and special times. Ultimately, the potency and novelty of the celebrations would be diluted if they were expressed year-round.
As far as radical self-expression in the architecture and urban design, it wouldn’t be enough to only mimic the ‘blank canvas’ that makes the playa such a great setting for the Burning Man event. For a newly-built, permanent place to have cultural longevity, its design and materials should employ the best and brightest of classic global urbanism, while honoring the openness of the playa.
As an example, Mexico is a world-class placemaking model as an enduring, radically self-expressing culture, in one of the architecturally oldest parts of North America.
6. Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
There are plenty of examples of experimental communities, utopian societies, or artist colonies, where the burdens of communal efforts ended up being too great. While practical group efforts and ‘barn raisings’ have been key components of affordable, enduring communities, doing so with simplicity and familiar human-scale patterns are essential for real-world permanent communities to succeed.
7. Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
For a permanent community, systems and structures should be simple and efficient enough to be personally sustainable. There should be a low barrier-to-entry, where it’s easy to succeed at fulfilling one’s civic responsibilities.
8. Leaving No Trace
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
Noise and other pollution prevention is another great civic challenge of our era: How to live a contemporary life, relying on supply chains, while causing no effluent or commotion? It’s one thing for campers to keep a playa clean for a week, especially when there is an array of volunteers to do punch-out after all are gone. But even the best “leave no trace” community in a permanent place can get filled with detritus quickly. This is where successful, enduring places budget for intelligent, time-tested designs and maintenance strategies.
9. Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
Successful communities have systems and structures that allow for a minimum of required participation and effort but still results in strong communities of free-willed participants. Everyone’s personal lives are so fraught with emotional and economic stress already. Participation should be intuitive in the way the place is designed–facilitating incidental, effortless serendipity and community participation in day-to-day life.
How will this new permanent Burning Man place avoid the fate of so many other experimental communities? The first step is to not try to reinvent every wheel, even though there’s been a tendency to assume that the present circumstances are unique and require radical innovation.
10. Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.
One week of immediacy is easy for many to endeavor. However, sustaining it as a daily reality may take a while to take hold for those who are still regaining it. So the community will need to be supportive and forgiving of those who may lag a bit during that process. There’s also the risk that immediacy’s specialness during the Burning Man event will be diluted by requiring a similar level during the rest of the year. Again, veering towards aspects of normalcy or mundanity is a fact of life for enduring communities.
Our Next Step
So those are our 10 principles for what we’re affectionately calling “Burnerville 2029”.
Below is a quick teaser blueprint of a place on a hill in the distance:
