<nettime> A billion squatters: the true builders of our global urban future

[{ brad brace } <bbrace@eskimo.com>]

If we see society as a mechanism for producing and
protecting individual wealth, then it is only fitting that
property be an individual's sole and despotic dominion over
land. But if we see that people can live alone but come into
political association in order to live well, then
government, laws, and the rest of the system can protect
property or prune it, depending on what creates the most
beneficial situation for the most people. Today we see the
market as the ultimate arbiter of our ability to dwell here
on earth. But when it comes to human necessities (such as
having a place to live or enough to eat) the market doesn't
seem to do such a good job. The world's squatters are
demonstrating a new way forward in the fight to create a
more equitable globe. Without any laws to support them, they
are making their improper, illegal communities grow and
prosper. There is no life without a place to live. Every
consideration of objects, and of buildings too, is produced
out of a dwelling. Concretely speaking the dwelling is not
situated in the objective world, but the objective world is
situated by relation to your dwelling. In other words,
without a home, there is no world.

Global Islands Project -- ongoing series of multi-media
pdf-ebooks -- a pastoral, pictorial and phonic elicitation
of island parameters.

Your (Art)world is based on mutual relief at your common
corruption. Maybe some cultures are based on even worse. But
that wouldn't change the bad faith of it and as years go by,
you wake at night in terror of your whole life being an act
of bad faith, where everything is self-interest and nothing
more, where every human interaction is driven by a silent,
even subconscious calculation of some ulterior motive, to
the point that a sea of bad faith has taken over your whole
life, there's no small island left from which you can even
try to build a bridge of good faith, because even that
effort becomes suspect, even good faith is nothing but
self-interested, even altruism is nothing but solipsistic,
even your professed agonizing right here right now is
nothing but a gesture, made to the conscience in order to
assure it that it exists.

http://bbrace.laughingsquid.net/id.html
http://bbrace.net/id.html

Island 1.0 is Ambergris Caye, Belize
Island 2.0 is Koh Si Chang, Thailand
Island 3.0 is Lamu, Kenya

Global Islands Project:

Island 1.0 -> http://bbrace.net/islands/island1/island1.html
or http://bbrace.laughingsquid.net/islands/island1/island1.html
-- over 800 images and hour-long audiotrack -- 69mb -- (acrobat 6)

Island 2.0 -> http://bbrace.net/islands/island2/island2.html
or http://bbrace.laughingsquid.net/islands/island2/island2.html
 -- over 535 images and hour-long audiotrack -- 78mb -- (acrobat 6)


/:b


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