For all the utopi­an hope that may have attend­ed their arrival, I think by now it’s clear that all too many exist­ing cowork­ing and “mak­er” spaces orbit ven­ture-financed tech­nol­o­gy start­up cul­ture too close­ly, bad­ly under­ful­fill­ing their poten­tial and repro­duc­ing con­di­tions I have no inter­est in perpetuating.”

Though for myself I tend to believe that all things have recourse to a broad­er per­for­ma­tive reper­toire than that set of rela­tions cur­rent­ly enact­ed, I take Anil’s (and Harman’s, and more dis­tant­ly Latour’s) point: we have to actu­al­ly do the work of forg­ing some link­age between things before we can know whether that par­tic­u­lar link­age was in fact pos­si­ble. And that work is an invest­ment, is nev­er accom­plished with­out some cost.”

Very good Green­field post on var­i­ous spaces which point towards ways of using spaces for ways of liv­ing and work­ing that are social­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly more just.

(via What I’m work­ing on late­ly: Prac­tices of the min­i­mum viable utopia (long) | Speed­bird)

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Kars Alfrink

Kars is a designer, researcher and educator focused on emerging technologies, social progress and the built environment.