Who is gonna live in the best houses?

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

Given that ideas of ownership and property would be different in a post-revolutionary society I imagine that there might be a movement towards more communal living - especially amongst those who would benefit most from it (i.e young families and the elderly) That said, I imagine housing would run the gamit from large communal structures all the way down to smaller and comparitively isolated dwellings according, of course, to people's needs (in other words, for evey group willing to live with tens or hundreds of people in fairly close community there are going to be some who prefer smaller living groups or even living alone.)

Beyond that (and even that is hypothetical) I think it's hard to predict how housing/architecture and all that interlinked gubbins will go, and I imagine that it's yet another thing that will only begin to be properly figured out as the revolution begins and develops. However, I do think that a lot of what's been suggested in this thread would likely seem viable - especially the occupation and remodelling of existing disused properties.

[Skyhilist]

Some other people in this thread have mentioned that everyone should be able to have the house they want, even if it means more really upscale homes bein built. Personally, that seems like a really bad idea. We already have enough housing for everybody, even if everyone can't live in their dream home. With a current ecological crisis, the last thing that we should be doing is gearing ourselves towards the consumption of more resources and further expansion into the natural world. For that reason, building millions of new upscale houses to meet people's desires is not a real solution.

I have my own thoughts about this but I think that my own ideas on how it should be done are less important than noting that more consumption and expansion is NOT how it should be done. Again, we have a ton of perfectly viable empty houses already.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Some other people in this thread have mentioned that everyone should be able to have the house they want, even if it means more really upscale homes bein built. Personally, that seems like a really bad idea. We already have enough housing for everybody, even if everyone can't live in their dream home. With a current ecological crisis, the last thing that we should be doing is gearing ourselves towards the consumption of more resources and further expansion into the natural world. For that reason, building millions of new upscale houses to meet people's desires is not a real solution.

I have my own thoughts about this but I think that my own ideas on how it should be done are less important than noting that more consumption and expansion is NOT how it should be done. Again, we have a ton of perfectly viable empty houses already.

Well I think once the market is not the determining thing, what's valued in a home and what's considered convenient or nice or luxurious would be completely different. I think it's most likely that people would want to just re-arrange what we already have as a first step just so that people aren't cramped together or homeless or living in unsafe or unhealthy places. But I also think that after some other basic things, housing and creating new communities would be a big priority for people. I also don't think that new communities can't be better and nicer for people AND less harmful, less inefficient, less resource-wasting, and communities less alienating. What's convinient or luxurious now is a mini-castle because most reproduction service is done privitly in autonomous homes or family units: most daily cooking, laundry, entertainment, recreation, and so on are done in the home and so the more means someone has, the better wages etc, the bigger the house with the large kitchen, the multiple garages, the entertainment center, the pool, the laundry room, the home office, etc. But this is only luxury in capitalism.

More people could have access to nicer and better and more well maintained things if a lot of this activity was made social rather than accomplished autonomously in induvidual homes. I mean think about how in suburbs every family is in their own house turning on their own ovens to cook relativly small meals, watering and mowing induvidual lawns, etc. Today the rich hire people to do this, the less rich do it themselves, and many people just have to do without. But it could also be accomplished more communally, with common kitchens which would allow people to have better prepared food more easily with less energy and labor wasted and then induvidual homes wouldn't need massive kitchens, but just maybe a small set up for when you want to make something yourself or whatnot. Transportation in another big thing in the US which would require structural changes but I think could be done in ways that both decrease the need for autos while increasing our individual geographic mobility and ease of travel. Many workers have cars and they use it to run errands and go to work and otherwise it's a big hunk of steel sitting on the road, requiring maintenance and cleaning and a garage and so on. It's basically a necessity for suburban type development, but reorganization of how we set up communities could mean better transportation, more ease for daily mobility and so on without every family either having to buy cars or be stuck at home.

[ckaihatsu]

I agree that, with the revolutionizing of production, daily social habits and lifestyles could be profoundly affected. The current ethos is one of go-out-into-the-world-and-get-it-and-bring-it-back-to-your-place-for-the-enjoyment-of-you-and-yours-only, and it's incontestably wasteful and duplicates much effort on the part of everyone.

Post-revolution we'd undoubtedly see *far more* in the way of resources (and technology) being made available, and it would also all be done with a *communal* ethos at heart. One step that could *only* be done under communism would be a price-free worldwide domain of objects that can always be identified and tracked -- thus facilitating sharing and reuse.

[P]ost-capitalist social relations + industrial and digital technology = worldwide primitive communism on steroids, basically. If we care to posit any kind of anthropological ideal, meaning how most people would *want* to live, free of wage slavery and private ownership, we might wind up dispensing with domestication and even fixed locations *altogether*, in favor of a pure GPS-based sense of dynamic spatial arrangements, for everyone and everything.

A simple RFID-type chip in the body of the pine unit would give the object a permanent digital identity, linked to a database for all purposes of tracking and history.

So, in brief, we can always use the answer of 'stores' to ease our discussions with others, but we should ourselves consider how people might realistically deal with the production process, the natural or urban environment, and personal lifestyles along the way, using available technologies. If the (Calvinist) work ethic is an anachronistic relic imposed on us from centuries ago, how might we disentangle ourselves from that legacy and realize a mass productivity that meshes into more-individually-intentional kinds of lives and lifestyles -- ?

[Regicollis]

The question of housing under socialism can be separated into two. First how to distribute the existing housing and then how to build new housing.

Regarding the first I think the only reasonable system would be one of needs-based waiting lists or of lottery. A large family should be first in line to a large home, a person in a wheelchair should be first in line to a ground-level home etc. I think there would be a system where you signed up for the homes you wanted to live in.

The larger mansions could be converted to multi-family homes as has already happened many places when maids became too expensive. The more culturally or architecturally significant homes should be converted to public purposes like museums, schools, hotels etc.

As for how to construct housing post-revolution the goal should be to provide all with adequate housing of good quality according to their own preferences. Some people prefer to live in the middle of a city with access to all the facilities that give while other people prefer the peace and quiet of the countryside. Providing housing for different kinds of personal tastes should be perfectly possible.

I also hope that we will start to build neighbourhoods instead of just building housing. To reduce needless consumption of resources and to provide pleasant surroundings for the citizens many different kinds of functions should be built within the same neighbourhood. Within a few city blocks one should not only find housing but also entertainment, shopping, light industry and offices. Architecturally new developments should be inspired by the kinds of homes and the kinds of cityscapes people like to live in.

The old city cores of Europe is a good example of how to build nice cityscapes that people like to stay in. Variation in architectural styles and shapes, crooked streets that are not too heavily trafficed, shops and restaurants on the first floor and offices and apartments above, scales that are not so large they become intimidating and nice squares and parks here and there to provide centres for socialising in the public space and a mixture of home sizes. I hope these elements will be part of future city construction after the revolution.

[Rss]

What do you people think of arcologies?

[Jimmie Higgins]

What do you people think of arcologies?

I think there's some technocratic baggage connected with some of these specific ideas, but in general I don't see an issue with them if people think that that would be the best way to organize a larg-ish community. I certaintly wouldn't want it to be a sort of bureaucratic dictate about how best to live.

But whatever the specific form of communities, I think the basic idea of an arcology in the sense of crating communities that both cater to human wants and comfort and ease while also fitting into the environment and having a more balanced relationship with natural space would probably be something that people would support and want to do.

Aside from Las Vegas or Dubai however, there's currently no realistic way for them to happen under capitalism (maybe state-capitalism, maybe China will build luxury ones) which is the main reason the sort of engineer-utopia versions today will probably remain fantasy blueprints. It's too great of an investment and too slow of a return outside of resorts for the super-rich like in Dubai.

[ckaihatsu]

Not to belabor the point, but I really think that a socialist revolution would even throw domestication itself into disarray -- consider that it was *objective conditions* that steered previously-nomadic cultures into static living arrangements, and led to the development of agriculture, of course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolith...ral_transition

---

This [Neolithic] revolution consisted in the development of the domestication of plants and animals and the development of new sedentary lifestyles which allowed economies of scale and productive surpluses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization

Given that humanity is now readily able to realize economies of scale and productive surpluses through *industrial*-based production, it really wouldn't matter much exactly *who* would be pulling the levers and clicking the icons to make various processes and sub-processes kick into action -- and the non-logistical remainder would be a matter of collectivist politics and social coordination.

Without the fetters of the financial superstructure and private property accumulations, humanity would finally be free to always have surpluses of *whatever* at its disposal, in *any* location, by mass-communally -- but flexibly -- tending to various industrial productive processes on a roughly as-needed basis, without concern as to geography.

In other words, *everywhere* would be 'home' because there would no longer be an objective (economic) need for family-type 'homesteads'. I'd imagine that most people's living and lifestyles would be far more fluid in such a wide-open world.

[Marshal of the People]

To ensure equality we would demolish all houses and replace them all with standardised apartment blocks.

[Sinister Intents]

To ensure equality we would demolish all houses and replace them all with standardised apartment blocks.

Ummm, I don't think a lot of homes will needed to be demolished, rather fixed up and improved, my home needs fixing up because we have several problems with our house I witnessed get built when I was eight, essentially my parents and a few kind local people helped build my house, but they guy who put our plumbing did it completely wrong, and our roof leaks.

[Skyhilist]

Well I think once the market is not the determining thing, what's valued in a home and what's considered convenient or nice or luxurious would be completely different. I think it's most likely that people would want to just re-arrange what we already have as a first step just so that people aren't cramped together or homeless or living in unsafe or unhealthy places. But I also think that after some other basic things, housing and creating new communities would be a big priority for people. I also don't think that new communities can't be better and nicer for people AND less harmful, less inefficient, less resource-wasting, and communities less alienating. What's convinient or luxurious now is a mini-castle because most reproduction service is done privitly in autonomous homes or family units: most daily cooking, laundry, entertainment, recreation, and so on are done in the home and so the more means someone has, the better wages etc, the bigger the house with the large kitchen, the multiple garages, the entertainment center, the pool, the laundry room, the home office, etc. But this is only luxury in capitalism.

More people could have access to nicer and better and more well maintained things if a lot of this activity was made social rather than accomplished autonomously in induvidual homes. I mean think about how in suburbs every family is in their own house turning on their own ovens to cook relativly small meals, watering and mowing induvidual lawns, etc. Today the rich hire people to do this, the less rich do it themselves, and many people just have to do without. But it could also be accomplished more communally, with common kitchens which would allow people to have better prepared food more easily with less energy and labor wasted and then induvidual homes wouldn't need massive kitchens, but just maybe a small set up for when you want to make something yourself or whatnot. Transportation in another big thing in the US which would require structural changes but I think could be done in ways that both decrease the need for autos while increasing our individual geographic mobility and ease of travel. Many workers have cars and they use it to run errands and go to work and otherwise it's a big hunk of steel sitting on the road, requiring maintenance and cleaning and a garage and so on. It's basically a necessity for suburban type development, but reorganization of how we set up communities could mean better transportation, more ease for daily mobility and so on without every family either having to buy cars or be stuck at home.

Yeah I don't have a problem with anything you're saying necessarily, I was mostly just responding to people who seemed to imply that we should just build more houses if people weren't happy with the houses already in existed and desired something more. If that wouldn't be the case, then great.

Also, you brought up transportation - I think a high-speed public transit monorail system going between major cities would be pretty cool for that personally. Then people would only need to rely on slower-speed and less energy efficient cars to go shorter distances.