Embedded autonomies projecting an American middle-Class polis

Abstract

What possible response to the last forty years of depressed wages can the American middle-class have? Along with long established tactics on the consumption side of the production equation -- namely collective housing and collective purchasing -- a new form of economic autonomy is emerging from within the very tool-kit of Neoliberalism. Due to its vastly smaller scale and increased productivity, minimal environmental impact, and rapidly decreasing costs, automation technologies provide opportunity for collective ownership of joint factories. Here, the vast array of skilled middle-class workers can converge to share a base system of advanced production, consequently renewing their economic competitiveness. While individually the three forms of collective action might only require a diffuse spatialization, or no collocation whatsoever, the combination of all three collective strategies within the same spatial container suggests a potentially new form of living, one which goes beyond the simple abutting of live/work spaces, to the definition of a total life-world. To mediate this complexity I have appropriated a subtle archi-tectonic device, the plenum, as the infrastructure that simultaneously buffers and connects the two typically disparate worlds of material work and social re-production. The plenum does this by providing a flexible super-structure for services, people, and material to pass through, for program to attach to and utilize for its own specificity, and as a zone of mediation which allows spaces of industry and living to collide. With the collective control over these new spaces of both simple reproduction and extended production, founded on the appropriation of advanced forms of automated production, my thesis proposes the return to older modes of communal living and resilience through co-production and co-habitation, and hence the rebirth of the collective life-world. This design project is a first step in envisioning a new, American middle-class polis, defined here as the prior definition of a social and political form of existence. It harkens back to the very origin of the American mythology of self-sufficiency, to the Mayflower Compact, which set up a self-governance which understood that this self-sufficiency was not possible at the scale of the individual, but only at the scale of the community.