Lifehouse

Mixing clear-eyed, unwavering analysis with deep compassion, Lifehouse offers something much more sustaining than hope: traction – Jenny Odell, author of Saving Time
When three emergencies – climate, political and social - build together into the storm of our present we need to start thinking from the ground-up. In this we have no better guide than AG. Lifehouse constructs a much needed, hands-on strategy for urban care. Read it and start planning. – Eyal Weizman, author of Hollowland
A succinct, unflinching assessment of the urgent conditions unfolding around us, and a nuanced, practical analysis of why and how we must take up immediate, local, collective direct action. – Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid
Anyone interested in collective survival will benefit from Greenfield’s examinations of episodes of transformative communal care from New Orleans and NYC, Rojava, municipalist Spain, Greek solidarity clinics, and the Black Panthers’ survival programs. That he then knots the threads of permanent disaster and local response into a clear-eyed proposal for enduring networks of mutual support networks is something like hope-in-action-refreshing, provocative, and within our reach.’ – Erin Kissane, co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project
Knowing we can’t rely upon governments, corporations or elites to protect us from the ongoing disasters we now face, above all climate change, Adam Greenfeld movingly celebrates the grass-roots mutual aid and caring collectivities that have sustained people through past calamities. Aware that such self-organised, compassionate caring is more needed than ever today, Greenfield’s vivid, erudite and persuasive prose outlines the many ways in which people can, and for their own survival must, work together confronting the challenging goal of creating local autonomous communities, or Lifehouses, now necessary for enduring the storms ahead. An inspiring text in pessimistic times. – Lynne Segal, author of Lean on Me: A Radical Politics of Care
Greenfield explains how people, with their inherent adaptability, should reorganise and self-manage to cope with changing conditions and a harsher world with less room for everyone. * Protect Earth *
[Greenfield] arguments are not presented as stemming from an ideological attachment to anarchism but from cold-eyed pragmatism: he is not asking whether the state should ideally provide for people but whether ‘it is likely to’. – Hannah Proctor * Tribune *

Adam Greenfield is a global leader in the theory and practice of design for networked cities and citizens. Formerly Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user-interface design, Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities research center of the London School of Economics, and an instructor in urban design at both New York University and the Bartlett, University College London, his books include Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (2017), Against the Smart City (2013) and Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (2006).

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