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Almost everything you consume, from your weekly supermarket trip to the presents you order online, arrives by cargo ship. Shipping is the engine of the world economy, transporting eleven billion tonnes of goods each year. Despite the clear environmental crisis, shipping emissions have doubled since 1990 to more than one billion tonnes of CO2 – more than aviation, more than all of Germany, or even France, Britain, and Italy combined. As the shipping industry is forecast to grow threefold by 2050, full decarbonisation is urgent to limit catastrophic climate change. To understand whether there are any realistic alternatives to the polluting status quo of the container shipping industry, in 2020, Christiaan De Beukelaer spent 150 days as part of a sailing crew aboard the Avontuur, a century-old two-masted schooner fitted for cargo. This book recounts both this personal odyssey and the journey the shipping industry is embarking on to cut its carbon emissions. It shows that the Avontuur’s mission remains as crucial as ever: the shipping industry needs to cut its use of fossil fuels as soon as possible. Otherwise, we will face excessive global warming and the dire outcomes that will bring. The book explores our path to an uncertain future. It argues that shipping symbolises the kind of economy we’ve built: a gargantuan global machine that delivers the goods at an enormous environmental cost. Merely eliminating carbon emissions or improving efficiency won’t solve the underlying issue. If we can’t make shipping truly sustainable, we can’t solve the climate crisis.
emancipation Space and prefigurative politics By focusing on space as potentiality, and by acknowledging the capacity to think and act through space as a crucial human capacity, we can reformulate the problem of prefiguration and prefigurative politics. The simple and historically most enduring way to conceive of prefigurative politics is as those practices in which means reflect (mirror, look like) the ends. In prefigurative politics, visions of a different society are supposed to shape struggles to establish such a society according to the same values that support these
retrain the internalised habits of mind and action that they have acquired as participants in a system of domination, and (b) collectives establish modes of living-together based on a shared moral commitment to mutual respect and egalitarian reciprocity. A characteristic feature of prefigurative politics is its refusal to separate ends from means in the pursuit of just social relations: the only means by which such relations can be established are those that are compatible with the end of egalitarian respect. There are numerous historical examples of prefigurative
also involved in the east coast peace movement. It was this interaction between Food Not Bombs and the anti-nuke movement that helped redefine contemporary American anarchism. Within the anti-nuke movements, anarchist politics merged with the praxis and politics of radical Quakers, leading to the development of a strongly democratic and prefigurative politics, which as we shall see, became central to the politics of Food Not Bombs (Epstein, 1991). In working with the east coast anti-nuke movement, the group helped organize both the June 12, 1982, “March for Nuclear
of how to get from the here of struggle to the there of free society continues to present us with a perplexing dilemma, because as Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin explain in their book Prefigurative Politics , it is not a question of whether political means and ends should be linked, because ‘they already are ’. 71 Namazzi argues that the reason why so many
This book explores contemporary urban experiences connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. Part of a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and the politics of urban commons, it uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity is emerging today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality. In such a world, people experience the potentialities of emancipation activated by concrete forms of space commoning. By focusing on concrete collective experiences of urban space appropriation and participatory design experiments this book traces differing, but potentially compatible, trajectories through which common space (or space-as-commons) becomes an important factor in social change. In the everydayness of self-organized neighborhoods, in the struggles for justice in occupied public spaces, in the emergence of “territories in resistance,” and in dissident artistic practices of collaborative creation, collective inventiveness produces fragments of an emancipated society.
threat was alarming, it was nothing like the harassment and surveillance faced by the activists that this book is going to detail. My experience working with Food Not Bombs is not just a story of individual transformation but instead a story of collective resistance to unjust institutions. We collectively strove to create a space of compassion and care, one guided by direct democracy, social empowerment, and nonviolence. By embodying the political reality we sought to live in, we engaged in a prefigurative politics that was possibly the most powerful form of propaganda
-first century is, admittedly, a daunting task not reducible to glib appeals to what Srnicek and Williams ( 2016 ) refer to as ‘folk politics’. They define folk politics as ‘a set of strategic assumptions that threaten to debilitate the left, rendering it unable to scale up, create lasting change or expand beyond particular interests’ ( 2016 : 9–10). One of the key features embedded in leftist folk politics, Srnicek and Williams assert, is a pronounced tendency towards ‘prefigurative politics’: a kind of performative anticipation of direct democracy, where the desired
attitude contradicts the forms of prefigurative politics discussed in chapter 3, whereby environmentalists seek to act as they would were they already living their ideal. Thus not only is cyberspace a terrain contested by activists and their adversaries, but CMC use raises areas of contention between environmentalists’ principles and their practice. Temporary space of resistance Due to the struggle over cyberspace, it may provide only a temporary space of resistance. Environmentalists may be able to secure a corner of cyberspace free from corporatisation and state
Precarious objects is a book about activism and design. The context is the changes in work and employment from permanent to precarious arrangements in the twenty-first century in Italy. The book presents design interventions that address precarity as a defuturing force affecting political, social and material conditions. Precarious objects shows how design objects, called here ‘orientation devices’, recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life. Three microhistories illustrate activist repertoires that bring into play design, and design practices that are grounded in activism. While the vitality, experimental nature and traffic between theory and praxis of social movements in Italy have consistently attracted the interest of activists, students and researchers in diverse fields, there exists little in the area of design research. This is a study of design activism at the intersection of design theory and cultural research for researchers and students interested in design studies, cultural studies, social movements and Italian studies.