Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire

(Paperback)

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We are living through a long emergency - a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars and other climate-driven disasters. Beyond Hope explores the idea of local power as a response to climate-driven disasters. From the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-recovery effort in 2012, and the neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that sustained many during COVID lockdowns, to the large-scale, self-organised polities of municipalist Spain and Kurdish Rojava, the author uses examples of disaster recovery efforts, mutual aid groups and self-organised polities to argue that local power can be a means of developing individual and collective power and a way to thrive in the face of catastrophe. The book suggests that rethinking local power can be a bulwark against despair and help communities come together in a coherent way of life.

Author Bio

Adam Greenfield is a global leader in the theory and practice of design for networked cities and citizens. Formerly Nokia's head of design direction for service and user-interface design, Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities research center of the London School of Economics, and an instructor in urban design at both New York University and the Bartlett, University College London, his books include Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (2017), Against the Smart City (2013) and Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (2006).