Things fall apart

1) Design’s strong relationship to the consumer-led marketplace has increasingly come to define designers’ role and potential; 2) the imperative to think and design in ever shorter horizons of time (time = money) and produce quick results encourages the de-contextualization of problems (all stakeholders are not served, social and environmental... See more

Collectively, they lack the gravity necessary to reestablish a sense of responsibility for the people and places around us.

Oppression and injustice are human creations and phenomena, built into our current economic system, and therefore can be undone.

Oppression (e.g. racism, colonialism, class oppression, patriarchy, and homophobia) is more than just the sum of individual prejudices. Its patterns are systemic and therefore self-sustaining without dramatic interruption.

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According to the Behavioural Insights Team in a report commissioned by the GLA’s Violence Reduction Unit, the strongest predictor of crime in London is income deprivation, with 80 per cent of recorded crimes in London occurring in the most income-deprived areas.

The painful reality is that the internet somehow makes it easier to find friends who live halfway across the world than to connect with the people who live down the street.

Governments know that building public infrastructure makes the value of the nearby land go up, and that the extra value goes directly to private landowners. In fact, they’ve even write reports on it — a TfL study looked at eight new infrastructure projects (including Crossrail and Crossrail 2) and their effect on nearby house prices. They found... See more

I realized that this was probably amongst the biggest challenges to helping US neighborhoods come together: most people don’t have good reasons to meet their neighbors.

“... careerism tends to undermine democracy by divorcing knowledge from practical experience, devaluing the kind of knowledge that is gained from that experience, and generating social conditions in which ordinary people are not expected to know anything at all. The reign of specialized expertise … is the antithesis of democracy.”

- Christopher... See more

many of us have retreated so far into our private lives and feel such a lack of agency that membership is the exception rather than the rule.