I was just looking in my copy of Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde. It’s one of the Studio’s favorite books! Here’s a little quote from it.

“Beware the social system that cannot laugh at itself, that responds to those who do not know their place by building a string of prisons.”

Bite Size Life

With the foreclosure crisis now in full swing, there are almost as many opinions about placing blame as there are folks losing homes. While the folks getting the biggest heaps of blame (and losing their homes) are poor and working class, both the right and the left are also figuring out the multiple ways that shady loans and sketchy banking practices deserve blame as well. We agree wholeheartedly, but we also know that as long as The American Dream is to own your own house, folks will struggle and strive (and get taken advantage of) to do just that. We say, let’s get more imaginative with the dream!

If a big part of the American Dream is owning a house, let’s rethink ownership and let’s reimagine the house. What if what you owned was a super-fly bedroom+ unit, one that could be yours for more like the entry cost of renting an apartment? What if what you shared were spacious kitchens and well-cleaned bathrooms? What if instead of owning that big screen TV—or even the room you watched it in—you checked out your favorite show at the nearby multiplex, for free? If the American Dream includes health and happiness (as well as home ownership) what if the local healer got to live in his room for free?

Or if we wanted to shake up the Dream even more, what if the Dream was to live in as many different homes as possible? Renting would clearly be the move. Or if it was to live as close as possible to the ones we love, sharing parts of our living spaces might be seen as living richly. We think testing some uncoupling of the bed + bath + kitchen = home could be as useful as the uncoupling of ownership + home = dream. And we’re ready to get our there and do some uncoupling…before home + dream = nightmare!

Our first Idea of the Week post is in Youth Urbanism. To get a sense of how we think about urbanism please read this story about Orange New Jersey featuring our favorites! The Fullilove’s and the urbanist Michel Cantal Dupart.

Youth Urbanism

We came up with this term as we thought about the question: How do we—as folk who care about civil society and young people—think about the ways in which cities impact youth? And how do we think about how young people impact cities? It came from a long-term conversation we’ve been having with our colleagues about how we work on population-wide concerns, particularly for youth. Cities tend to be constructed from the perspective of adults, and youth tend to get a bad rap in and from cities. Young people function ideologically as “matter out of place” in many cities, to quote Mary Douglas. Their presence is often reduced to nuisance, and their activities and habits of congregations in cities are suspect to adults. We think that the ways in which youth then become situated and create places for themselves in cities, places from the margins, leads to population-wide problems for youth.

If what we just said in any way rings true to you, and your work in any way intersects with youth and/or cities, we ask you this question: How are youth affected by places that see them as a detriment, a detractor to that place’s imagined set of user experiences? We all know when we aren’t wanted; what happens when this attitude is carried out structurally in real space and time?

Now turn that on its head! If cities were imagined to help youth have a generally good experience of being young and for youth to contribute to everyone’s experience of the city, how would cities look, feel and function? What would need to be different for design to include youth from the get-go? What would be the end result? We think it would be cities that were more interesting for all of us!