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Social Housing – Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice

‘Social Housing – Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice’ examines ongoing transformations in social housing and asks how these transformations are reflected in the aspirations and practices of artists.

Editors: Andrea Phillips and Fulya Erdemci

Housing provides essential shelter, but also gives form to the social. It represents and embodies the materiality of civic politics and thus demonstrates the uneven nature of spatial justice at local and global scale. For many years artists have contributed to the design and organization of structures of living together, often with ambivalent effect. Whilst many have imagined – and attempted to implement – radical new forms of social housing, as alternatives to both privatization and state provision, they have also ushered in waves of gentrification, thus contributing significantly to a story of capitalization now dominant within urban infrastructures. Social Housing – Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice questions the politics of urban practice from a variety of geopolitical and disciplinary viewpoints, from liberal private initiatives to the Occupy movement, from Almere to Ramallah, mixing artistic and architectural contributions with those of sociologists, urban historians, philosophers, and activists

‘Social Housing – Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice’ is the second volume in the ‘Actors, Agents and Attendants’ series of publications and symposia initiated by SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain to investigate the role of cultural practice in the organization of the public domain.

All text and image via SKOR.

Book-Text-Read-Zines · Human-ities · Philosophy

Addicts, Mythmakers and Philosophers: Alan Brody explains Plato’s/Socrates’ understanding of habitually bad behavior.

Thad held up his right hand and asked “See this?” He showed me gnarled and maimed fingers. Thad told me that while he was flying his plane into Turkey, the Turkish air force forced him to land, having gotten wind that he was running drugs. They jailed him, and in an attempt to extract a confession, his jailers broke his fingers. He didn’t confess.

Thad bribed his way out of jail. Eventually he came to the drug treatment center where I was working, to get help with his drinking problem. (Thad and other patient names are pseudonyms.) After discussing addiction as involving compulsive behavior, we concluded that Thad was suffering from alcoholism. Knowing he would be better off not drinking, Thad committed himself to abstinence. He told me that he didn’t need to go to Alcoholics Anonymous for support, explaining that if he could resist caving in from torture he could certainly resist whatever discomfort he would experience from not drinking. Thad thought that being able to follow through with his resolve was simply a matter of having the ability to resist succumbing to how bad it would feel to not drink.

Excerpt of a text written by Alan Brody at Philosophy Now. Continue HERE

Human-ities

Why Smart People Are Stupid by Jonah Lehrer

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)

For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman, the late Amos Tversky, and others, including Shane Frederick (who developed the bat-and-ball question), demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

Excerpt of an article written by Jonah Lehrer, at the New Yorker. Continue HERE