alternatives

Publication

Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance–Feminist Finance Syllabus

The Feminist Finance Syllabus ponders how to embrace alternative values in economies by focusing on locality, cooperation, and caring. Feminist Finance Syllabus is a supplement to the Feminist Finance Zine titled Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance. It is a result of the Twitter conversations that took place during three launch events of the zine between […]
Publication

Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance–Feminist Finance Zine

The Feminist Finance Zine is a diverse collection of voices introducing you to those ideas about finance that lie outside of our current economic paradigm. It invites you to think about how, individually and together, we could put them into practice. Today we live in a world that is dominated by an economic system that […]
Article: Critical Imagination

The Other City Map

Urban spaces are usually identified through the borders and boundaries drawn on a geographical map. City lines, streets and corridors are often worked out in great detail. Today, however, another city has emerged, which cannot be detected directly from physical characteristics, with borders that are no longer easy to identify – a computational city. Cities […]
Article: Critical Imagination

From Exclusion to Autonomy: Publishing as a Spatializing Act

Why we should publish even more. The current and potential role of publishingPublishing, understood as a process of ‘making a public’1 that informs a ‘capacity to act’,2 has the potential to develop as an institutionalizing means, an interface for connecting people with different backgrounds, and as a way to relate with each other. It can […]
Article: The Unmasters

Play and Imagination Against Debt

We spoke about debt and imagination to Steyn Bergs and Cassie Thornton during Moneylab #3 – Failing Better? in two separate conversations, addressing a set of the same questions from two different perspectives. The final format of this interview as a conversation has a comparative purpose and should not be read as an actual record of […]
Publication
MoneyLab#3 Failing Better program booklet

Moneylab #3 Failing Better

A series of double interviews on financial surveillance, platform cooperativism and distributed ownership, perceptions of value, debt, and playfulness. Conducted in the framework of the Moneylab #3 conference, this series of double interviews brought together six speakers to discuss a number of issues connected to the conference topic. Under the title “Failing Better”, Moneylab #3 […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
Ethical Autonomous Vehicles by Matthieu Cherubini - Amateur Cities

Ethical Autonomous Vehicles

We tend to assume that humans are able to respond wisely in dynamically changing conditions. That a driver could make a choice whether to kill one person to save five other lives, when he finds himself in an infamous trolley dilemma, but how would a machine make such a moral decision? Driverless vehicles might prioritize […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Alberto Vanolo - Amateur Cities- All Cities are Beautiful

Smart City or The serial reproduction of an urban vision

A couple of months ago I bought a brand new video game console, Sony’s well known PS4. Despite being almost 40, I enjoy video games very much, and I also think that they are relevant cultural products to be carefully considered in the social sciences (I often use such an argument in order to justify […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Amateur Cities

On Amateurs

The word amateur has two meanings. One refers to the etymological origin of the word and is derived from French – amateur ‘lover of’ or from Latin – amator ‘lover’. Both come from the verb amare ‘to love’. According to this definition an amateur is a person that engages in a pursuit on an unpaid […]
Research

Feminist Economies Collective

We create contexts to break the crisis of imagination in capitalist realism. Together with others, we imagine futures, in which shared values are no longer primarily appropriated for profit and accumulation of wealth but open up new perspectives on economic realities. Through this process, we build fragments of new worlds based on feminist values, facilitating […]
Article: Critical Imagination

The City as Advertising

Anyone interested in getting a first-hand experience of the dynamics behind the transformation of global cities, should pay a visit to one of the biggest real estate exhibitions in the world – the MIPIM in Cannes. Every year, this event gathers ‘the most influential international property players’ for four days of ‘networking, learning and transaction’, […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Microbial Money – Stock Analysis

The current finance and banking system is often considered unchangeable and uncontrollable. It is often mystified and presented as having a life on its own. Could other ways of looking at finance help us see the flaws that rule it, independently of the form it takes? What if we imagined money as living organisms? What […]
Article: The Unmasters

Towards Collective Subjectivity

We spoke to Alex Foti and Trebor Scholz during Moneylab #3 – Failing Better? in two separate conversations, addressing a set of the same questions from two different perspectives. The final format of this interview as a conversation has a comparative purpose and should not be read as an actual record of a conversation. CA: Can […]
Research

UrgentCity: Towards a New Vocabulary of Terms

Exploring the role of language in contemporary urban questions. UrgentCity: Towards a New Vocabulary of Terms is a research project and a program of activities, which investigates the challenges present in communication and collaboration between disciplines involved in city-making. We start from the premise that the language we use does not only describe our reality […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Feature Image: Kevin Dooley, Paper Money, Extreme Macro, CC BY 2.0

The Four Faces of Financialization: Cities as a Site of Struggle

In spite of describing an important set of social and economic transformations, the word financialization has become used so frequently and in so many contradictory ways, that it risks becoming as fragile and confusing as other recent buzz-words like globalization, neoliberalism and gentrification. Yet the forces at work behind the term are real and have […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
very large bike

Very Large Bike (VLB), United Micro Kingdoms

What if we started to modify our bodies to make them fitter and more suitable for the environment we are living in rather than modifying the environment? The VLB project by Dunne and Raby depicts a fictive scenario for a society that abandons the use of technology and concentrates on using science to maximize their […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Superstudio - Continuous Monument

Continuous Monuments and Imaginable Alternatives

In 1969, Superstudio, a radical Italian design group, made a proposal for what they called the ‘Continuous Monument’. It was a homogenous block of architecture that would encircle the earth depicting the global and total dimension of design and architecture of that time. We currently live in the time of a similar monument that harvests […]