Architecture and Anarchism: Building without Authority

This book showcases 60 anarchist architecture projects from around the world, including playgrounds, community centers, and housing developments. These projects are motivated by the core values of autonomy, voluntary association, mutual aid, and self-organization, and aim to create more inclusive and diverse communities. The book argues that anarchist architecture can offer a powerful way to reconceptualize architecture as an emancipatory, inclusive, ecological, and egalitarian practice.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 05 August 2021
Publisher: Paul Holberton Publishing

This groundbreaking new book presents 60 projects - past and present, real and imagined - of anarchist architecture. From junk playgrounds to Extinction Rebellion in the UK, from Christiania to the Calais Jungle in Europe, and from Dignity Village to Slab City in the USA - all are motivated by the core values of autonomy, voluntary association, mutual aid, and self-organization. Taken as a whole, they are meant as an inspiration to build less uniformly, more inclusively, and more freely.

Architecture and Anarchism documents and illustrates 60 projects, past and present, that key into a libertarian ethos and desire for diverse self-organized ways of building. They are what this book calls an anarchist architecture, that is, forms of design and building that embrace the core values of traditional anarchist political theory since its divergence from the mainstream of socialist politics in the 19th century. These are autonomy, voluntary association, mutual aid, and self-organization through direct democracy. As the book shows, there are a vast range of architectural projects that can be seen to reflect some or all of these values, whether they are acknowledged as specifically anarchist or otherwise.

Anarchist values are evident in projects that grow out of romantic notions of escape - from isolated cabins to intentional communities. Yet, in contrast, they also manifest in direct action - occupations or protests that produce micro-countercommunities. Artists also produce anarchist architecture - intimations of much freer forms of building cut loose from the demands of moneyed clients; so do architects and planners who want to involve users in a process normally restricted to an elite few. Others also imagine new social realities through speculative proposals. Finally, build.

Weight: 1170g
Dimension: 228 x 264 x 29 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781913645175