Peer2Politics

= “In the fall, we’ll be hosting The Civic Consumption Summit to bring this community together and make exciting plans to continue growing Civic Consumption as a new impact-oriented movement within the new economy”. [1]

“There’s a small city in California called Lancaster. They’ve got a dynamic mayor that’s geared up to do something to reverse his community’s slide into economic oblivion (a trend across the US and Europe).

“As Augmented Reality (AR) tentatively moves from obscurity to ubiquity, we find ourselves constantly enticed by the purported capabilities and glossy demonstration videos of this technology. While major corporate players seek to establish unique identities in this emerging information space, their design fictions focus on a product’s ability to improve everyday activities. By using images of comfort, convenience, and efficiency, the companies seeking to monetize Augmented Reality tend to gloss over AR’s potential to create distraction, disinformation, and delusion. As we begin to recognize the capacity for AR technology to obscure or eliminate elements of the real and the digital, we open up a new space for examination Occlusive Reality.

“For health care activist and researcher Jamie Harvie, good health depends on more than just a good doctor and the right medicine. “Only about 10 percent of our health is determined by medical care,” explains Harvie, who helped direct the campaign to ban toxic mercury thermometers. “The rest is environmental and behavioral—clean air, clean water, good food. We can’t be healthy people if our communities aren’t healthy.”

“How can global “constitutional problems”, such as human rights violations by corporations or the catastrophic risks of global capital markets, be dealt with? Societal spheres have to develop their own self-limitative structures, Gunther Teubner suggests in his recently published book “Constitutional Fragments”. The conference on “Transnational Societal Constitutionalism” discussed this idea and analyzed under which conditions such constitutional structures emerge and where in social reality they can currently be observed. The following questions became relevant during the conference:

= an approach to selecting, salvaging, reusing and modifying tools that’s based within ecological design criteria

Contextual economics understands that the economy itself contains at least three spheres. In addition to the for-profit business sphere—the focus of mainstream economics—there is also the core sphere, consisting of families and communities; this is the focus of a good deal of work in feminist and social economics. Third is the public purpose sphere, which includes governments as well as institutions that are both non-governmental and not-for-profit, such as not-for-profit hospitals and universities, environmental advocacy groups, foundations, etc..

 

Around the world, we are seeing the emergence of creative alternatives to destructive economic paradigms. The good news is what is healthy for an ecosystem is also good for people: key ingredients are localization and regionalism. The best economic and environmentally sound solutions are place-based, diverse according to region, and are responsive to local communities and social needs. Instead of fearing a transition to an Earth Community Economy, we can support and enjoy local organic food, vibrant local businesses, a healthy local economy, jobs with justice and the development of clean decentralized energy. I’m not talking about utopias, but rather regenerative, functional, local communities.

 

Coinciding with the rise of digital tools that foster participatory systems, Hybrid Space Lab is an entity that exists in the realm between architect and client, the traditional shapers of space. In this article, originally published here, Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Frans Vogelaar of Hybrid Space Labshare three of their projects and their thoughts on networked participatory design systems today.