Fractal utopias, near presents
Article for ‘Neutopies’, a book on design futures and new utopias edited by Oscar Guayabero for World Design Capital Valencia 2022
In the current society of the 1% and techno-feudalism, financial delusions make sandcastles to respond to a bloodless reality. Computational times accelerate (un)productive processes and, therefore, also accelerate the social experience of time. In the urgency of the climate emergency, the mystique of hegemonic economy defends the curative properties of extreme growth, and among all this spectacle of increased unreality, the social imagination is paralyzed, when not captured by the promises and returns of billion-dollar escapism .
And obviously, the ability to project futures is unevenly distributed. In the same way that not everyone can build facts — these undeniable things that support reality, not everyone has the same capacity to produce visions of what is going to happen that can be considered desirable or inevitable. Although a large part of our species strives to deploy its agency forward, that of our planet continues to stubbornly show us limits that we refuse to understand.
Does the future have a material dimension, beyond the artifacts that try to represent it? Anticipation is a present experience projected into the future that turns into anxiety in the face of negative uncertainty, but that illuminates it with excitement when what is to come is expected with joy. The future has, therefore, a lived dimension that is expressed in the expectations that, when shared, can coordinate social action to create the conditions for the realization of what is desired.
The fact is that, as Bifo Berardi says, we are perhaps experiencing a “paradigmatic capture”, where current dynamics are managing to reduce the multiplicity of emerging possibilities. Marina Garcés explains it by saying that we live in a posthumous future; after modernity designing futures for all and postmodernity celebrating an inexhaustible present for each individual as a contemporary response to the no future of punk, now it seems that all we do is survive, one against the other, in a sort of a countdown.
David Graeber and David Wengrow have just published The dawn of everything, a tour of the last 10,000 years of human history. In it they question some fundamental assumptions present in several recent works that construct narratives about who we humans are; that there is an original way of being of human societies whose nature was ‘good’ or ‘bad’, that there was a time where there were no social inequalities or political consciousness, and that something happened to change all this, that ‘agriculture’, ‘ civilization’ and ‘complexity’ always come at a cost in freedoms, or that egalitarian relationships are natural in small groups but cannot occur on the large scale of city or nation. The authors deny these approaches by providing scientific evidence. With this, apart from getting closer to our pasts, they broaden the range of what is possible because it has already been done, but above all, they reinforce the reality that we can always undo paths that do not serve us.
In short, either by enriching the memory of the many forms of life experienced in the past by denying historical determinism, or by understanding the formation processes of the future as a social construct, what interests us specifically is the ability to promote the intimate rupture of the perception about what is achievable. For our part, in this death of the future, speculative and fictional design has perhaps shown itself to be too sterile beyond stimulating an imagination that is difficult to articulate in the semiotic-material dimension.
But beyond speculation, what can we do as design professionals? How to put our practice at the service of radically better realities? How to avoid reproducing the absolutist inertias of social engineering of modernist design? How can these utopias be nourished by the prefigurative imagination of social movements and other agents taking care of common goods and everything that sustains life?
In the 16th century, Thomas More wrote Utopia, a satirical fiction that described a society in which, among other issues, land ownership was held collectively. This utopia, apparently collapsed by real estate speculation, is still alive in many parts of the world. A close example is the new wave of cooperative housing that is emerging in Catalonia, in the Valencian Country and in the Balearic Islands.
This new model extends the collective ownership of homes and land, which traditionally in cooperatives was limited only to the construction period, throughout the cohabitation phase. With this, it is possible to extract housing from the speculative logic of the market and ensure its affordability. Another fundamental aspect of this housing model is community life. Maintaining the private space of homes as usual, space is reserved for common services such as laundry, community meals, rooms for guests, nannies or common financial pots for months one can not pay rent. The objective is to redistribute space and time, tasks, and or save resources beyond promoting social interaction to try to facilitate every day domestic life.
In this case, a tangible need can be observed (the right to housing), an affective orientation (to want to live more communally from the will) and at the same time a desire for transformation that works to make it popular — widespread and affordable, the new cooperative housing model. And it is precisely this orientation towards replicability and articulation that flees from the imaginaries of the isolated island and directs it towards the archipelago. This work of infrastructuring transitions, often invisible, is carried out in collective spaces such as the housing committee of the Solidarity Economy Network of Catalonia, where, for example, community instruments (2) are being generated or campaigns (3) are being carried out to co-design the playing field together with the administration, taking into account regulations, incentives and barriers, etc. All these examples of actions in which we have participated are a very small part of a dense magma of people and community, cooperative and public entities working to consolidate the new cooperative path for the right to housing and to articulate it with other dignifying paths, such as public housing, social housing, etc.
These first experiences are, if you want, utopian realities as well as transitional, tender and hesitant. However, they are establishing a precedent that meets the expectations not of a rendering future but of a physical experience of a near present that you can literally visit. It’s a reality in your city or rural area. More than a non-place — of utopia, (not topos) — they create places that make alive the memories of the place where they take root, projecting a practicable reality. That being said, we want to highlight some characteristics that we believe are essential for these neutopias, especially for designers and their potential contribution: both for the well-known role of shaping the materiality of the experience and for facilitating the sustainability of these ecosocial transitions in general.
The first characteristic is to bet on everyday life as a key space from which to generate these intimate breaks in the perception of what is a possible and most desirable reality. Whether it is participating in any night in a community dinner inside a cooperative house; pay by loading the member’s account for quality, organic and local products from the neighborhood cooperative supermarket; or reading the renewable energy consumption bills of the non-profit cooperative that is used. Obviously, transformative daily life does not pass only through conscious consumption or through non-profit cooperatives. There are endless community spaces, mutual support networks, neighborhood unions and other forms of sustaining life in our towns and cities. But what we believe runs through these futurizing practices — to speak with Tony Fry, that they give rise to more futures — is that they center the material experience of the possible and desirable on a day-to-day basis. We could say that these neutopias gather the best of the ethics of prefiguration: finding the way by walking, here and now. We believe that linking desire and joy, the anxiety of uncertainty, the memories of the place and the articulation of shared expectations in a go-do is how the near presents that give rise to these neutopias are realised.
The other aspect that seems fundamental to us for this neutopian capacity to be fostered by designers is to promote social learning as a common thread of the transitions that we are experiencing in housing, energy, mobility, agriculture, etc. In the world of design and technology, public policies or social movements, to say a few, approaches to transform reality from the logic of social “change” continue to predominate. These approaches, although useful in simpler areas, may lose effectiveness in the complexity that emerges when broadening the horizons of impact at the societal level. Specifically, they can lead us to reductionist dynamics in search of the silver bullet that solves all our ills. Or, on the other hand, they can end up paralyzing, making us feel that we never get to everything when we want to decide what actions to use the time and limited resources of our networks or organizations. Moreover, the magnitude of the transformations that are seen as necessary require not only individual and collective involvement, but also societal, planetary, and trans-generational involvement.
In this context, what seems to become more and more evident is the need for an articulating view of local action focused on learning from the system that it forms; be it housing, energy or mobility. An inclination of social action, and of our practices as designers, that, seeking social change, promote above all social learning. At the end of the day, positions that understand utopias as fractal and that seek above all the interrelation and alignment of local interventions to amplify the collective impact.
Although not unlimited, the human and non-human power and resources available in a complex system like housing is gigantic and activatable. Thus, the challenge we find ourselves it may not be deciding who are the good guys and who are the bad ones, even useful at occasions, or in which activities to prioritize the time and existing resources. But in creating the conditions to articulate the learning of daily action within our spaces and with others. This does not imply that social conflict does not exist, nor does it assume that if we could learn better from each other, all our problems would be solved. What it does imply is to assume, following Hannah Arendt’s idea of power as the ability of a whole to transform itself, that by improving the learning dynamics of the system in which we work we increase its collective power and, therefore, we make it move towards the maturity of its social function, such as ensuring the right to housing. This being said, the proposed transition posture most probably would not apply among parties in the system where the conflict lies precisely in the beliefs determining the social function; in the case of housing, homes being a human right or an asset to speculate with.
Above all, in all this ‘going-doing’ we mentioned, the sadness about life on the planet that is being lost forever mixes with the joy of living that the arrival of spring brings, or by neighborhood parties and meals with friends in the warmth of a summer night. And it is in this species paradox that we seek to act with dignity. But it hurts us, both the one who has it in mind every day and is exhausted from transforming herself and the world around her, as well as the one she never thinks about it, be it because of the ecstasy of wealth or extreme poverty. And it is from here that we heal in projecting neutopias by reviewing the memories of places. It is from here that we dedicate ourselves to shape near presents that combine attention to the everyday life of transitions with the social learning that sustains them.
