The Paradoxical Black Rock City: All Cities Are Mad

Abstract

Since 1986, Burning Man has evolved from an obscure bohemian San Francisco solstice celebration into the world's largest intentional community, anchored by annual burns on a playa in Nevada's Black Rock country. Participants embrace an ethos that radically challenges mainstream culture through Black Rock City's yearly (re)formation, negotiation, immolation, and deconstruction. Voicing curiosity, as humanists, in who we are, what we do, and why we do it, we examine rituals associated with this transitory yet international‐scale event. Such happenings imply a human need to seek clarity, dwell in close confines, and engage with a utopian desire for concerted communal participation. Yet, there exist historical‐cultural paradoxes associated with Burning Man, including steep entry barriers that reinforce an elite homogeneous population no longer representative of Burning Man's distinctive California roots.

Blockchain urbanism: Evolving geographies of libertarian exit and technopolitical failure

“…The location in the Nevada desert is perhaps unsurprising given the long history of utopian/dystopian experiments in desert landscapes (Koch, 2021b). Indeed, Blockchain's property is located only around 100 miles south of another desert-based utopian libertarian experiment, the annual Burning Man festival (Rohrmeier and Starrs, 2014). Berns' plans for the property were revealed later that year, with a feature article in the New York Times and Berns' keynote address at Prague Blockchain Week.…”

What makes a place urban?

“…but rather a 'city' (burningman.org/event/ -accessed July 05, 2022). Putting aside the question of whether or not it is a city, it is certainly a "notable urban and geographical experiment" (Rohrmeier and Starrs, 2014;169) . For one week every year, tens of thousands of people congregate to live together in a temporary settlement with a distinctly urban character (see Figure 2).…”

Todd LeVasseur, <i>Religious Agrarianism and the Return of Place: From Values to Practice in Sustainable Agriculture</i>

“…The formal aspects of the playa had clearly invigorated the utopic imagination from the inception of an event possessing design parallels with historical intentional communities. While the adaptable concentric site plan of BRC (as designed by Rod Garrett) may have been shaped by precursors like Ebenezer Howard's 'garden city' model (Rohrmeier and Starrs 2014), and while recent research suggests BRC is destined to pass from its wild utopian beginnings into a (mild) suburban future if elitist tendencies go unmitigated (Rohrmeier and Bassett 2015), that discussion cannot be pursued further here.…”