The proposal placed 1st internationally for Think.Space’s 2011 [Moral Borders]
competition for an, “Affordable Utopia.”
The competition’s brief was written and jurried by Hrvoje Njiric:
http://www.think-space.org/competitions/moral-borders/
Why
In the United States, as student loans continue to accumulate interest in a stagnate job market, the returns to one’s investment in higher education are placed further out of reach for the forthcoming generation of homeowners.
While governments and banking institutions mitigate the damage of a market predicated on loans lacking substantial cash flow, baby-booming parents forgo retirement and continue to financ¬ially support this generation of the invisible homeless; placing opportunities to build credit for home ownership, further into the future, at the same rate that student loans accumulate interest.
As government spending on this mitigation endangers Social Security, and the construction of hospitals, hospices, and retirement homes to support the baby-booming demographic, a large sector of educated youth remain unemployed or underutilized, and foreclosed homes, unoccupied.
Who
The subject is the forthcoming generation of home owners reaching an inflection point within the globally dependent market - where the nations’ artificial abundance of affordable food, water, shelter, healthcare, and education, has been a product of international trade, dependent on finite energy resources and a fallacy of [inter]national credit.
For this generation, perpetuating the cycle of suburban home ownership is neither economically viable, nor ecologically sustainable. Accessibility to affordable food, water, shelter, healthcare, and education is an extinct possibility, and leasing strategies flirting with indentured servitude to student loans, car payments, and government bailouts, the temporary reality.
The subjects’ battle cry: We can’t buy, so we occupy!
Where
The subject temporarily infiltrates subdivided suburban homes, yards, and various public spaces in the U.S. that have been overlooked [as sites for permanent occupation] by local zoning protocols. The size of the occupation varies at any point in time, as territories of legislative conflict reevaluate outdated policies, and a real-time map of occupation zones is updated on the internet.
How
The real-time map is updated by the organization, Occupy! The organization posts available [wanted] spaces for occupation, and hosts a social networking platform so one can actively choose their neighbors.
Living in closer proximity to their neighbors, with an awareness of each other’s skills and interests, community resources are pooled together, informal economies develop, and a local bartering system of goods and services becomes the primary mode of exchange.
What
The digital platform for community amenities depends on the shifting zonings for occupation. The personal is spatial. In a state of flux, communities are retrofitted, recycled, downsized, re-built, evicted, and infiltrated. In the process of repurposing the excess of the suburban landscape, shifting territories become the evening news, and spatial data mining, a new discipline in marketing research.
Synthesis
As suburban homes are deconstructed, sprawl contracts in occupation zones. The small zones necessitate a consolidated design, facilitating the emergence of ‘plazas.’ Where [now] deconstructed homes once stood, zones for public forums (assemblies, schools, workshops) manifest themselves. As zones of occupation swell with the highly-educated, and the technically skilled, peoples-collective universities begin to form between adjacent occupations; creating a society built upon education as a right, and social duty, instead of a for-profit mandate. Education as Sport.
