B2. Social Ecology

Confronted to the devastating impacts of a changing climate and the ruthless abuses by the agro-business and big industry, peasants and citizens around the world have seen their right to access, use and manage freshwater under increasing threats and pressure. The struggle for water is amplifying globally, and a new chapter of this conflict was recently written in France.

From the 16th to the 21th of July 2024, 30 000 people gathered in the region of Poitou-Charentes to protest against the grabbing of water by the agro-business. Organized by more than 120 organisations, associations, trade unions and collectives including Les Soulèvements de la Terre (Earth Uprisings) and Bassines Non Merci (BNM), an entire camp was installed to host the thousands of people that responded to the international call to mobilise. After months of preparation, the Village de l’Eau was born.

For years, associations, collectives and habitants from the region have protested against the mega-basins (mégabassines in French). These huge basins of water, up to 18 hectares in size, are built to pump and store groundwater from the underlying aquifers during winter so that farmers can use it in summer to irrigate their crop. While many mega-basins have already been built, hundreds are still in the pipeline around the country.

Why are these projects crystallising all the tensions around water? To start with, they disrupt the water cycle by preventing the underground water from replenishing local rivers and lakes, leading to disastrous impacts on local fauna and flora. They also enable a massive privatisation of this critical common resource, since only 6% farmers will ultimately be able to use the water stored in the reservoirs. Plus, the water will mostly be used to irrigate intensive, production-driven monocultures destined to be exported, a very profitable and emblematic technology designed by and for the agro-business to save their obsolete, profit-driven agricultural model.

In March 2023, following to call from Les Soulèvements de la Terre, thousands of protesters targeted the mega-basin of Sainte-Soline to participate in a mass sabotage action. The repression was severe: armed with “weapons of war” (yes, literally), the police launched more than 5000 grenades against the protesters, injuring 200 people, including 40 severely. Two comrades ended up in coma.

This time, the strategy of the movement has changed. The approach was focused on care for the protesters and using less confrontational tactics. A care base was set up with multiple components (medication, psycho-emotional support, legal team, etc.). While some people feared that the trauma of the repression of Sainte-Soline will reduce the mobilization, day after day, the camp kept welcoming more and more people.

This shift was reflected in the festival-style atmosphere of the Village de l’Eau. The site hosted giant marquees, stalls, a ‘mega-canteen’, a bar, camping areas, and a space for children. There were also many discussions, conference, ‘round tables’, training sessions and naturalist walks in the area.

In parallel, the organizers had announced plans for two major actions: Friday at the nearby site of a future mega-basin, and Saturday 20 outside the agro-industrial terminal of the port of La Rochelle. On Friday, despite the bans and last-minute changes in the itinerary, thousands converged towards Terrena, one of the mega-cooperatives responsible for building the mega-basins. All was going well, until the police decided to burn down the field where the demonstrators were standing. On another site, the parallel deployment of a convoy of 600 bicycles experimented with new forms of naturalistic disarmament: using ingenious systems attached to kites, kilos of duckweed was thrown into the reservoir from the air.

On Saturday, the day began with a surprise blockade of the port of La Pallice and the grain trading company Soufflet, another major promoter of the mega-basins, by a convoy of farmers’ tractors. This successful appearance once again demonstrated the farmers’ commitment to the anti-basin campaign. The mobilisation then continued in the town, with more than 10,000 people making their way towards the port, joined by catamarans and kayaks. Although the two processions that set off from the town centre did not make it to the port because of the aggressive police presence, the agro-industrial terminal’s activities were brought to a halt and those responsible for the land and water grab were clearly named. The day ended with a mythical collective swim in a farandole on a beach in La Rochelle.

Back to the Village, at night, a grand finale party followed the declarations of the many internationalists that came to support the cause. Delegates from Rojava, Mexico, Spain, Chili, Palestine, Kanakye, and many more were present to stress that the fight to defend water is not just a local issue but a global one. The struggle is necessarily internationalist and requires the full solidarity of all towards the movements that, despite the repression, are continuing to resist.

Following the closure of the Village de l’Eau, the organisers, the farmers, trade unionists, activists and residents of the areas, reiterated their demand adopt a moratorium on the mega-basins, so that the projects can be frozen and democratically re-discussed in order to find a way out of this crisis. They warned that the festive and determined mobilisations will continue … until this is achieved.

Some useful resources to find more information (both in French and in English):

• Soulévement de la Terre (Event page): https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/en-eu/blog/19-20-juillet–mobilisation-internationale-stop-me
• Program of the event (English) https://soulevements.cdn.prismic.io/soulevements/ZnqNM5bWFbowe1Jd_Call-1.pdf
• Partager C’est Sympa (Youtube recap): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YYiGpZ-UC

The post Report from the International Mobilization against Mega-Basins, July 2024 appeared first on Transnational Institute of Social Ecology.

Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.
~Matthew Desmond[1]

The issue of housing is of fundamental importance that has a direct connection, among other basic rights, to democratic participation. Despite that (or because of it) it is being contested by capitalist forces worldwide.  Capitalist forces, being on the offensive of submitting everything to the doctrine of profit-making, are in the process of also shifting the use of urban space from one serving communal needs, to one generating profits.

This results in the expulsion of urban residents (via rising rent prices etc.) away from whole sections of cities, so that space is made for profiteering. A phenomenon that can be observed in many cities around the world. One stark example is the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, where over 100,000 people live in occupied buildings, because of the housing crisis.[2]

Kasa Invisível, a house squatted by an autonomous and horizontal anticapitalist collective, since 22 march 2013, located in the downtown of Belo Horizonte. It serves as a social center, as well as a housing squat.

As Peter Marcuse suggests, “neither cities nor places in them are unordered, unplanned; the question is only whose order, whose planning, for what purpose?”[3] In this sense, the current housing crisis is a product of structural adjustments of a system that favors certain social roles and behaviors over others. It is through the enforcement of scarcity over certain resources, which are often more than enough to satisfy the needs of the people,[4] that capitalism prompts societies to embark on wasteful consumerist lifestyles. As Samuel Alexander and Alex Baumann write:

The huge cost of land and housing has significant implications, affecting what we do for work, how much we work, our need for a car, and a range of other consumer habits. Our economy has developed in such perverse ways (particularly when it comes to land cost) that we are often locked into high-impact consumerist lifestyles.[5]

In other words, people are pressured to lead a passive type of life, where there is barely any time left outside of the work-consumption-sleep cycle. If someone dares to drift away from it, they run the risk of being deprived of vital resources for recreation. Once without them, people become marginalized, with different systemic obstacles and conservative prejudices standing on their way to go out of this marginalization.

People who are subjected to the stress of homelessness may have previous mental illness exacerbated, as well as have their mental state burdened by anxiety, fear, depression, sleeplessness, and substance use.[6] Homelessness thus sickens human beings, slowly crippling them in multiple levels. But despite that, we have seen many times that even under such violent conditions human beings are still capable to self-organize and fight to reclaim urban space for their recreational needs. This comes to show that no matter how grim a given condition my get, there is always potential for radical change, as long as people work collectively.

A tent is set up as a part of the Dignity Village homeless encampment in East Oakland, Calif., on Dec. 5, 2018. (Photo by Aric Crabb/Digital First Media/Bay Area News via Getty Images)

The absence of a right to housing should be viewed as an act of violence, as yet another means of keeping people engaged in passive consumerist lifestyle.

But a real democracy, one that is based on direct popular participation rather than on elections of representatives once every four years, requires social and individual autonomous activity. Political theorist and researcher Katy Wells underline the connection between housing and autonomy:

Individuals require somewhere they can sleep, prepare food, use the facilities of a bathroom, and be at leisure. Some of these are pre-requisites for basic health, and basic health is a pre-requisite for autonomy. Being able to relax and be at leisure is also a prerequisite of autonomous activity since otherwise we can never replenish our mental and physical resources.[7] 

This relation is also highlited by classical philosophers like Aristotle, according to whom:

The objective of work is usually to sustain our lives biologically, an objective we share with other animals. But the objective of leisure can and should be to sustain other aspects of our lives which make us uniquely human: our souls, our minds, our personal and civic relationships.[8]

In a truly democratic environment – one where everyone share power on equal basis – we can suggest that every member of the community will also have its personal space, where to be able to retreat from the public sphere and recreate. For a healthy civic life to be established, one cannot exist solely in the public sphere – i.e. in the agora – where it is exposed to encounter every possible member of the community. While stimulating, the debates and encounters produced in the public sphere need to be followed by citizens retreating to a personal sphere – i.e. oikos – where they can reflect on their own, or with their closest circle of people, on social matters and life in general. Without this symbiotic relationship between public and personal spheres, popular participation decays.

One example in history that points toward the relation between popular reclamation of power and right to housing is the Paris Commune, when the inhabitants of the city claimed for themselves the role of real citizens that directly participate in the management of their city through a network of revolutionary councils and sectional assemblies. In this revolutionary environment the rebellious Parisians decided, on 29 of March 1871, to suspend payment of rent. On 25 of April, the Commune also made the decision to requisition empty housing for the victims of bombing by the troops of Versailles[9], since by mid-April, the French army had began a bombardment of Paris.

The celebration of the election of the Commune, 28 March 1871

In the more recent past, during the 1970s, a civil war broke in Lebanon. Due to severe capitalist crisis, the grassroots rebelled against the ruling elite, in an attempt to radically restructure Lebanese society. This uprising saw the emergence of people’s committees that undertook the management of cities, towns and villages. Sources refer that the inhabitants of the slums and refugee camps surrounding the capital city of Beirut have taken control of their own communities, and that government authorities were unable to enter the ‘belt of poverty’ for several months.[10] With the inhabitants reclaiming their control over their habitat, they refused to pay for rent or electricity. Instead, they give money over to the committees that administer the areas so that basic services can be provided.

An assembly of Lebanese high school students after completing a march on March 27, 1974. The student movement played major role in the popular mobilizations and practices of self-management in Lebanon in the 1960s and 1970s.

In both cases, as well as in other historic moments, we see the implementation policies indicate that with the radical and equal redistribution of power also goes similar redistribution of urban space.

Nowadays the struggles for participation and space remain tightly interlinked. Initiatives for the Right to Housing and municipalist movements all can be viewed as different parts of the popular claim to a right to the city. Housing must be taken away from bureaucratic management (which by its nature tends to benefit the ruling oligarchies), and instead placed under the control of the collective citizenry (whose everyday life directly depends on). As 20th-century philosopher Harry Overstreet suggests:

Recreation is not a secondary concern for a democracy. It is a primary concern, for the kind of recreation a people make for themselves determines the kind of people they become and the kind of society they build.[11]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/13/we-must-separate-the-idea-of-house-from-home-the-case-for-drastic-action-on-shelter

[2] Baruq. Casa encantada: A Portrait of the Fight for Housing in Belo Horizonte (Seditionist Distribution, 2024) p11.

[3] Peter Marcuse. ‘Not chaos but walls: postmodernism and the partitioned city’, in Postmodern Cities and Space. (Oxford: Blackwel, 1995), p244.

[4] https://www.housingevolutions.eu/project/the-empty-homes-initiative-tackling-irelands-housing-crisis/

[5] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-03-03/access-to-land-plus-a-participation-income-could-change-the-world/

[6] https://www.homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/topics/mental-health#:~:text=The%20stress%20of%20experiencing%20homelessness,%2C%20sleeplessness%2C%20and%20substance%20use.

[7] Katy Wells (2019). ‘The Right to Housing’ in Political Studies, 67 (2), pp406-421.

[8] https://philosophybreak.com/articles/aristotle-on-why-leisure-defines-us-more-than-work/

[9] https://www.cadtm.org/The-Paris-Commune-of-1871-banks-and-debt#the_commune_s_positive_measures_dealing_with_rent_and_other_debts

[10] Georges Mehrabian. A Revolution Derailed: Lebanon in the 1960s and 1970s (Athens & Lebanon: Diethnes Vima & Dar Al Mousawar Al Arabi, 2023), p192.

[11] Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Recreation Act of 1962: Hearings Before the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1962), p32.

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Backerkit’s Comictopia 2024 launches today, July 18 at 10 Pacific Daylight Time, which means there’s only a few hours left before you can pre-order Android Press’s solarpunk graphic novel, Anticipation of Hollowness, with all kinds of extra perks attached. The original story for this graphic novel was written by Renan Bernardo.

You can get the graphic novel in a variety of formats including PDF, EPUB, paperback, and hardcover. The bonus perks that come with various tiers include bookmarks, a Demand Utopia sticker, discount codes for the Android Press online bookstore, and more! We’ve also got all kinds of add-ons, bonus achievement perks, and other surprises up our sleeves for the campaign that you won’t want to miss.

Click Here to Learn more about the graphic novel and Backer Perks

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The mind.
The mind?
Well, we can’t quite live without it.

Despite all (and oftentimes very persuasive) evidence to the contrary, our very existence relies on brain activity. On our behalf but without our assistance, the brain controls functions that are both necessary and involuntary—such as respiration and heart rate.

This is true for other animals, but not for all
animals.

Jellyfish don’t have brains. They live without any central nerve system, as do leeches. Instead of a brain or central nerve system, the neural networks of jellyfish and leeches are distributed throughout their body.

But perhaps the brain is not what we’re talking
about when we talk about the mind.

The mind is associated with facilities much more complex, much more nuanced, than stimulus and response.

The mind is linked to an ability to reason.

The mind is something we use, something we have control over.

It is our problem-solving instrument.

Again, though, this is also true for other animals, as they solve problems in order to access food, or to find shelter, or to protect themselves.

Crows, for example, make tools. They turn small twigs into rustic dinnerware, using them to dig small bugs out of tree bark.

Yet, it’s unlikely that we’d consider the mind of the crow.

So, again, it seems that the mind, the way we talk of it, might mean more still.

More than a switchboard.
More than an instrument.

It’s almost as if the mind—through what it is along with what does—somehow takes on a life of its own.

The life of the mind, perhaps.

“I think, therefore I am.”

He thought it.
He wrote it.
And so Rene Descartes was.

Descartes is dead now, and while it’s reasonable to assume he is therefore no longer thinking, it’s like, somehow, Descartes still . . . in a way . . . is.

Descartes is dead, but his thoughts took on a life of their own.
They’re alive and well and have made a mess of us.

Because in elevating the mind, Descartes amputated it.
From the body.
From the heart.
From the other.

For centuries, “rationality” has been used to protect, legitimize, and defend abuse, oppression, murder, genocide.

The mind has planned, executed, and rationalized atrocities that the body & the heart could never
stand for.

The mind can be heartless.

An octopus has three hearts.
One heart pumps blood throughout the octopus’s body. The other two pump blood to its gills.
Like all of the octopus’s organs, the three hearts are contained in the animal’s gigantic (relatively speaking) head.

An octopus also has nine brains.

One has to wonder what so many brains, and so many hearts, make possible.
One has to wonder what happens when those brains communicate with those hearts.

One has to wonder, further, what’s possible when the division between head and heart, the separation between thought and feeling, no longer makes sense, biologically.

But something tells us, somehow, that all of us here, we already know this.
We already know that the separation of thought and feeling never made sense.
We know this and we feel this.

We feel love for our fellow humans.
We feel hate for injustices.

We stand and march and fight in solidarity.

We sing and laugh and dance.
Or cry and scream and spit.

We write and talk and debate.

And even when we’re still working out the details, we never give up hope.
Our relentless hope is what makes us revolutionaries.
Hope is where revolutions are born.

And because there is nothing “rational” about hope, one must inevitably wonder what role the rational mind plays in our dreams of revolution.

Though perhaps a more useful question is one of need:
What is needed to put the mind at the service of the revolution?

And to that question, let us propose an answer:
What is needed to put the mind at the service of the revolution is Reconciliation.

The heart must call the mind back home, and the mind must take root right beside it.

Here.

The post Revolution & Reconciliation: The mind, the heart and the octopus appeared first on Transnational Institute of Social Ecology.

The proliferation of decayed factories, military installations, rural villages or transportation networks is often attributed to the force of creative destruction under capitalism, the endogenous process that ‘incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one’ (Schumpeter, 1942). Marxist thinkers focused on the relevance of creative destruction for critical urban geography and the study of urbanization (Harvey, 2008). Urbanization exemplifies how capitalism provides both the means of production of an urban architecture and social organization fit-for-purpose, as well as the conditions for its subsequent abandonment and programmed decay through social disintegration and urban exodus. Where this ‘accelerated archaeology’ captures essential characteristics of capitalism, ruins capture as material symbols the urban decay and programmed obsolescence inherent to capitalist development (Stallabrass, 1996).

Cities like Detroit or Glasgow, with histories characterized by rapid cycles of industrialization and abandonment, of development and depopulation, are privileged sites of investigation of ruins. The semantic used to describe these places in the literature and the media perpetuates this symbolism, Detroit becoming ‘the monstrous city’ haunted by ghosts and zombies (Draus & Roddy 2016). The cultural corollary of this lens on ruins is the emphasis on the dystopian representations in cinema, literature, music and arts. To the image of the photographic portfolio of Camilo Jose Vergara, this ‘dark side’ becomes their dominant aspect in the popular imaginary, which results in their association with poverty, violence and neglect, up to post-apocalyptic and post-human narratives of the future in science-fiction (Dobraszczyk, 2017)⁠

However, Henri Lefebvre reminds us in his writings on the right to the city that ‘the most important thing is to have multiple readings of the city’ (Lefebvre, 1996). If we were to consider the ruins of our cityscapes, could another narrative of their emergence and of their societal functions be proposed, and what would this new story tell us about the potential afterlives of ruined space?

The essay will explore how social ecology, a critical social theory developed by the life-long radical activist and political theorist Murray Bookchin, can offer an alternative lecture of ruins. Social ecology considers the on-going ecological devastation to be the consequence of social problems, and proposes a model for future societies rooted in mutual aid, diversity and freedom. Tracing the roots of the multidimensional crisis back to modes of organization structured around hierarchy and domination, from patriarchy and class struggle to speciesism, it advocates for a radical transformation of society around humanist, ecological and democratic lines (Biehl, 2015).

This brief overview of the social ecology of ruins will focus on three aspects of the rich body of literature of this theory. First, social ecology is rooted in a radical critic of capitalism and urbanization that influences how we frame the production and meaning of ruined space. Second, its ecological humanism, working towards a reconciliation of nature and society, will propose alternative meanings and roles of ruins as urban materialities. Lastly, we will explore how the afterlives of ruins can become the material repositories of its political project, communalism, allowing emancipatory practices to emerge in the shell of the past.

Ruination as erosion of citizenship

First, how can the social ecology critic of urbanization generates an alternative definition and reading of the emergence of ruins in cityscapes? In Urbanization without Cities, Murray Bookchin argues that the trends of rapid urbanization should not be taken as a mere growth of cities, or a change in degree, but rather as a transformation in kind of the urban sphere. Urbanization is diametrically opposed to citification, or the process of building ‘communities of the heart’ where, through collective empowerment and moral associations, inhabitants of the city become active and engaged in public life and develop a sense of citizenship rooted in shared ideological concern (Bookchin, 1992). The historical metamorphosis of human-scaled cities into industrial towns and ultimately financial megalopolis, to use Mumford’s terminology, has precisely destroyed the material grounds for rich and dynamic civic life, with devastating political and psychological effects on individuals who become mere taxpayers and consumers rather than active citizens.

The consequences of the process for a working definition of ruins in general are important. Ruins are defined and imagined as buildings or infrastructure that were built, used and subsequently abandoned or neglected, left to linger and decay; leaving what Edensor (2001)⁠ calls a locus horribilus that becomes an authentic allegory of destruction for Walter Benjamin (Stead 2003)⁠. Yet, from a social ecology perspective, it can be argued that they do not become ruins after they fall into misuse, but instead are raised as ruins as soon as they are planned when they do not intend to meaningfully contribute to the civic lives of citizens but instead generates an isolating sprawl, a view shared by Peter Calthorpe in his talk on building better cities (Calthorpe, 2017).

 
Photo 1: Unfinished building in Sandyford, near Dublin, by Crispin Rodwell/Bloomberg

Indeed, if the purpose of the urban materiality is to support active public life, and urbanization stands in absolute opposition to this original purpose, then it can only be deduced that the constructions erected by the forces of profit, capital and money are, even before their construction, useless and emptied of their historical purpose, in a metaphorically ruined state. The status of ‘ruins in reverse’ is expanded beyond unfinished architecture (DeSilvey & Edensor, 2012)

Therefore, urbanization in social ecology bears more resemblance with the process of ruination itself than with the mere development of the urban over the rural, as “city space with its human propinquity, distinctive neighbourhoods, and humanly scaled politics […] is being absorbed by urbanization, with its smothering traits of anonymity, homogeneization, and institutional gigantism” (Bookchin, 1992). The mechanism of urban planning, described by James C. Scott in his analysis of the high-modernist city, demonstrates how huge, hierarchical and centralized cities were raised through systematic demolition, standardization, rationalization, and taylorization, as observed in the writings and architectural achievements of Le Corbusier (Scott, 1998). This complete mechanization leaves a city devoid of life and civic engagement, in a mist the architectural symbols of the forces of state planning and market expansion.

The hidden potentialities of ruins

Reconciliation of nature and society through interstitial ecologies

Yet, are we not taking the risk of limiting our comprehension of ruins when approaching them from such a socio-economic critic of capitalism and urbanization? The philosophical outlook of social ecology, following a rich dialectical tradition from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, isa humanist and ecological outlook that can inverse the recurrent lecture of ruins as dark, violent and threatening spaces. Developed in The Philosophy of Social Ecology, this eco-humanist philosophychallenges the historical divide between nature and society, both its Hobbesian and Rousseauistforms, in order to conceptualize society, or ‘second nature’, as an organic emergence from the environment, or ‘first nature’ (Bookchin, 1994). This developmental approach focuses on their co-evolution, adaptation and interdependence seeing nature as a ground for ethics.

Applied to the materiality of ruins, they shift from being the mere left-overs of the capitalist mega-machine to become the precursors of a reconciliation between nature and society. Indeed, ruins are sites with their own ‘interstitial ecologies’ where the wide variety of organisms, from trees, bacteria, mosses, grasses, birds and scavengers, re-vegetate and recolonize a space once appropriated by humans. These sites become the geographies where new forms of competition, mutualism, and symbiosis emerge at the liminal space between the anthropogenic and the biotic realms, challenging constructed dichotomies : ‘[s]uch spaces are perhaps best understood as ‘ecological cofabrications’, where a unique ‘politics of conviviality’ accommodates both human and non-human agency’ (Desilvey & Edensor 2012)⁠.

 
Photo 2: Shot of a vegetated attraction park in Austria, by Stefan Baumann.

In that sense, urban wastelands and abandoned factories transform into what ecologists call ‘novel ecosystems’, and what social ecologists would call, ‘novel ecocommunities’. Ruins hence are seen as liminal sites for such a re-harmonization advocated by social ecologists, echoing similar calls from radical thinkers, such as the ‘ecological sensibility’ of Herbert Marcuse and the ‘renewal of life’ of Lewis Mumford (Marcuse, 1969; Morris, 2017). Thinking of ruins as lived spaces with more-than-human geographies opens up new ways of conceiving the afterlife of ruins and its ecological components, be they plants, scavengers, or city dwellers.

New sensibilities and imaginaries in ruined spaces

Despite this potential, the current ruin imaginary is rooted in decay and decline, making evident the effects of capitalism, but also distancing itself from the people living and experiencing the place. Ruin imaginary focused on derelict infrastructure and architecture, less so on the people, can create demoralization, embarrassment and disempowerment (Apel, 2015). Yet, the dialectical thinking of social ecology encourages us to imagine not merely what is but also what ought to be in a democratic and ecological society. What universe of possibles can we imagine for ruins?

As vegetation and animals create new forms of life where they were once eliminated, ruins further provide a space for rupture with the conventional, with the expected, with the conform, and where the normative ideas embodied in the design of the city indeed break down. This lived absence of formal settings or of codified rules in ruins is the opportunity to experience what is beyond the reality of urban life, both materially and affectively. This allows ruined spaces to accommodate and encourage alternative narratives about the concrete, the memories, and about the marginal in the urban fabric, away from the visions of planners, promoters and decision-makers.

Photo 3: The HAUS, abandoned bank in Berlin that the collective Die Dixons and 165 artists took over to create a living experience through arts from a variety of styles and disciplines(photo credits: kersavond on urbanpresents.net

Taking advantage of the ruins liminality, collectives of artists and activists develop a vision of what society could be, could look like, could be lived and experienced. Ruins seenas sites for transgressive, communal arts create opportunities for decentralizing, democratization and engaging communities (Krause, 2011). The politicization of arts in ruins further occur through what Anja Kanngieser refers to as performative encounter, or a collective and creative articulation ‘dedicated to activating new relations between people, and is affirmative of autonomous and convivial ways of living and being’ (Kanngieser 2012).⁠ Performative encounters reflects how experimentation, this expression of novelty and creativity, shapes and is shaped by the alterity of ruins. By expanding their field of possibles, encounters around marginal materiality can create networks and collaborations where alternative imaginaries and sensibilities can spring and flourish.

Communalist practice in the ruins

Aware of the latent potentialities of these ruined spaces, we will now interrogate the ways in which their afterlives can be used and shaped by the communal practices advocated by social ecologists. Communalism is a living solution to the multidimensional crisis that seek to challenge the state and the market by advocating for direct democracy at the municipal level. Inspired by a rich tradition of libertarian socialism and eco-anarchism, it bears special interest for what Bookchin called in The Ecology of Freedom, the ‘forms of freedom’, the instances where human societies have emancipated themselves from systems of control through mutual aid and reciprocity (Bookchin, 2005). While communal institutions and practices are diverse, exploring them provides insights on the possibility of using the afterlives of ruined space to promote social change. Inspired by an organic thinking of materiality and a vision of potentiality of urban fabric, so-called ruins shift from being a waste to a resource to be used and lived in creative ways ranging from political resistance to community building and urban regeneration.

Resistance and the right to housing

First, abandoned blocks, derelict buildings and empty flats have notoriously been occupied and used as an act of political resistance to the housing crisis caused by speculative commodification. The squatting movements all over the world testify to the potential of empty buildings to recover from the status of ruin and adopt a new envelope as homes, refuges and camps. Talking about the Berlin occupation-based movements of the 1960’s, Alex Vasudevan explores how these oppositional strategies have effectively attempted to form an “alternative public sphere and a renewed right to urban life”, in the words of Rene Lefebvre (Vasudevan, 2017). The characteristic modes of self-management, or autogestion, challenges the hierarchies and discriminations in the housing sectorthrough the creation of radically autonomous spaces where conventional norms are disrupted and new ones can be created around collective and common property.

 
Photo 4: K77 after the fall of the Berlin wall which precipitated a wave of squatting in East Berlin, by Michael Schroedter

This alternative habitus made possible by occupation of abandoned or empty buildings produces a common field where co-operative living, political commitments and emotional attachments all intersect. The transgressive re-appropriation of ruins constitutes grounds for communal practices through solidarity and collective self-determination.

Kastanienalle 77, or K77, in East Berlin.exemplifies how this progressive transition from squat to communal housing project evolves, and how ‘architectural experimentation come to play in the performance of alternative political practices’ (Vasudevan, 2017). The fall of the Berlin Wall precipitated a wave of squatting in East Berlin from which K77 springs, an abandoned complex of three houses and three interior courtyards that hosted more than 100 persons since its creation. In the words of German artist Joseph Beuys, K77 is the fruit of an effort to build a ‘social sculpture’ in a common space for ‘non-speculative, self-defined, communal life, work, culture’. K77 developed and evolved into an ‘architectural laboratory for user participation and self-organisation’ hosting a non-profit cinema, a ceramics workshop, studio space and a homeopathic clinic (Vasudevan 2017)

Community building and empowerment

What starts within the ruins through squatting can further flourish when they are seen as shared resource for the local community. Then, the derelict land and space can be re-appropriated, re-used and re-infused with social and ecological activities that can strengthen and support strong community bonds in a deprived neighbourhood or village subjected to ruination. Through a process of education and mutual aid, collective activities and projects in the ruins contribute to the empowerment of local communities both materially and socially.

The types of transgressive encounters in what can be qualified as ‘void’ spaces, where void is taken “as a locus for the reconstruction of subjectivities, where the suspension of inherited determinations calls for the practice of choice”, are all testimonies of the emancipatory potential of ruins (Sebregondi, 2017). As opposed to a ‘neoliberal citizenship’, where individuals are reduced to mere constituents and consumers, communalism in the marginal and ruined spaces could provide opportunities to forge a revived sense of citizenship through participation (Brown, 2017). The creation of ‘informal alternative learning spaces’ further echoes the importance of paideia in social ecology, or the collective education of members of the city (Haworth & Elmore, 2017). The Do It Yourself (DIY) culture springing in a wide variety of cities, such as community gardens in Glasgow,demonstrates how ruins can be active agents of community empowerment and social revival (Crossman, 2016).

A short digression away from urban centres to the countryside might further help understand this process, where it is rural exodus rather than urban exodus that is the motor of ruination. The disenfranchised youth of crisis-ridden countries effectively re-colonize abandoned villages in the mountains to develop a materially self-sufficient and politically horizontal community lifestyle. The eco-villages, or eco-communes, of Lakabe or Matavenero in Spain and Torri Superiore in Italian Alps are all examples of how ruins were re-infused with life and creativity.

 
Photo 5: Panoramic view of Torri Superiore, in Italian Alps, a previously abandoned village restored in 1989 by a local association and now operating as a cultural center (by Ecovillaggio Torri Superiore)

Space and urban regeneration

Going further down the rabbit hole, we start to see how ruins framed under the communalist lens can participate in the re-organisation of the spatial politics of cities and paradoxically become the material basis for urban regeneration. The transgressive nature of ruins can participate in the formulation of a new culture where open public space becomes the space of self-determination and where “a politic of possibility” can evolve (Springer, 2013).

Through the emergence of counter- and sub-cultures, the decomposers, or scavengers, of ruins, transform these spaces into laboratories and play-grounds where the post-capitalist and post-industrial life can be invented and grown. A practical experimentalism infuses the ruins, giving birth to food cooperatives, electronic DIY laboratories, artistic performances and the likes. Through communalist practice and appropriation, ruins are reshaped into convivial and playful social environment, much like New York’s neighbourhoods were envisaged by Janes Jacobs.

Of particular relevance in a context of refugee crisis, the neighbourhood of Exarchiaexemplifies this potential of the built environment in the centre of Athens. This historically anarchist space of resistance is using several empty and abandoned buildings of the neighbourhood to build a culture of solidarity where more than 3000 refugees are now hosted. The derelict City Plaza Hotel is well known for being occupied by refugees and has been reconnected to water and electricity, has a cafeteria, language classes and a medical clinic. Yet beyond this one squat, it is a whole neighbourhood of political and communal spirit (Baboulias, 2014). An empty lot that was once meant to be turned in a parking lot has been brought under communal control and transformed into a green oasis by activists. This cradle of alternative lifestyles resists to the Greek crisis through a civic spirit and solidarity using empty buildings are material grounds for their development.

Photo 6: The Navarinou Park in Exarchia, Athens, was vacant until local activists took it over to create a greenspace (photo by Jan)

Conclusion

Schönle noted in his account of Russian approach to destruction and decay that “[s]omehow we cannot leave ruins alone and let them simply exist in their mute materiality. We need to make them speak and militate for our theories” (2006). Taking the risk of excessive abstraction and polarization on a subject filled by tensions and ambiguities that prevent any fixed interpretation, the essay briefly explored how social ecology can provide alternatives readings of ruins, of their meanings and stories, of their ecologies and functions in potential futures.

The critic of urbanization, focused on the decline of civic life in modern societies, challenged the definition of ruins in an urban fabric where the historical purpose of buildings is undermined by the forces of capitalism. Yet through an eco-humanist outlook, these spaces can become privileged sites for the re-harmonization of nature and society where new sensibilities and narratives can emerge through transgressive encounters. Ruins are then seen as grounds where communal life can emerge, from squatting in abandoned buildings and renovating a derelict village to creating a culture of solidarity and self-management in a neighbourhood.

Thinking organically about ruins complements the narratives focusing on their destructive symbolism and their potential for ‘profane illumination’ and proposes an account of ruins as material grounds for community building and emancipation. Witnessing such a dialectic between ideology and materiality mediated by human agency, the ideas and imaginaries that we collectively choose to foster and actualize will determine whether or not the afterlife of the ruins that populate our landscapes will be one of entropic decay, communal revival, or anything in between.

 
Photo 7: Abandoned amusement park in Lemery, Philippines (by Fantasy Worl) .

Let’s revive the ruins!

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