We Believe That: Housing, and the cultural construct of the home as we know it, must be dismantled; Housing is a tool to drive the political agenda of capitalism; Housing is a device for driving the capitalistic agendas of private shareholders; Housing is the city, and the city is housing; Housing defines and upholds biased systems of social structures that no longer serve the needs of large swaths of the population; Housing is an apparatus of exclusion, and it defines who can and who cannot operate within its established structure; Housing and labor are inextricably intertwined; Housing perpetuates outdated and monofunctional ideas of living, working, and sharing; Housing is in a state of heightened precarity; Housing needs to change.
This course will focus on collective research ruminating around topics related to the socio-political, cultural, financial, and environmental entanglements of collective living. The goal is to counteract pervasive myths of housing provision and urban production through alternative forms of urban living and new ways of city-making. The course will be a combination of lectures, student-led reading discussions, screening sessions followed by related conversations and interviews led by students, research presentations and reviews, and will culminate in a proactive investigation into housing alternatives and urban/nonurban futures.