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About the Book:
At first glance, contemporary popular culture, filled with bleak images of the future, seems to have given up on the possibility of positive collective change. Below the surface, however, alternative culture is rife with artist-led projects, activist movements, and subcultural communities of interest that seek to spark the collective imagination and to encourage hunger for alternatives. More playfully self-conscious than past utopian movements, today’s are often whimsical or ironic, but are still entirely earnest. Artists invite us to re-author city maps, or archive individual ideas for the future, while maker collectives urge us to rethink our relationship to consumer goods. All seem to have grown out of a similar do-it-yourself ethos and alternative culture. One of the central conflicts informing these case studies is that while it remains immensely difficult to envision anything outside of the current system of consumer capitalism, there is nevertheless a powerful desire to take it apart in piecemeal ways. We see the longing for new social and political narratives, new forms of communion and sociability, and new imaginings of the possible, longings that are currently unmet by mainstream culture, but that are taking expression in myriad ways at the local level. Taken as a whole, this collection examines what our grand ideals and playful daydreams tell us about ourselves.
Contributions include:
"Creative Play and Collective Imagination" by Amber Day "Opening up Utopia" by Stephen Duncombe "Civic Imagination and A Useless Map" by Catherine D'Ignazio "Implausible Futures for Unpopular Places" by Rob Walker "Repair Events and the Fixer Movements: Fixing the World One Repair at a Time" by Lorenzo Giannini "Our Knowledge is our Market: Consuming the DIY World" by Jeremy Hunsinger "DIY Radio Utopia: What is So Funny About the Tragedy of the Commons" by Linda Doyle and Jessica Foley "Remaking Street Corners as “Bureaux”: DIY Youth Spaces and Shifting Urban Ontologies in Guinea" by Clovis Bergere "Whose City? Art and Public Space in Providence" by Martha Kuhlman "Livestream Production and Livestream Community in the Black Lives Matter Movement" by Chenjerai Kumanyika "Making Do and Mending - Domestic Television in The Age of Austerity: Kirstie Allsopp’s Kirstie’sHomemade Home" by Deborah Philips "Everyday Utopias, Technological Dystopias, and the Failed Occupation of the Global Modern: Dwell Magazine Meets Unhappy Hipsters" by Joan Faber McAlister and Giorgia Aiello "'Change Your Underwear, Change the World:' Entrepreneurial Activism and the Fate of Utopias in an Era of Ethical Capital" by Lisa Daily
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