Reclaiming the Habitat: Food, Fire and Affordance in Designing and Living the Urban

Abstract

This essay is a critical and radical proposition to reclaim habitats of life, investigating ecological and pedagogical models of critical and spatial design practices. We examine these in relation to commons which we associate to urbanism and life. We do so via politics of food, fire, and affordance, which we explore as agents sha** the assemblage of sapiens life through design, and reposition as cues for methods of thinking, learning, designing, and constructing (conditions of life). The vilification of fire (when associated to fear) and food (when associated to desire) has a tremendous effect on how we think of and practice life, and presents ramifications to how we design, make, and consume objects and environments. We must affirm such phenomena as part of advanced capitalist networks and societies, and reconsider commoning and its affinity with social capital in practice. We attempt in response to propose ecologies and pedagogies of food and fire (as methods for urban commoning) in urban design practice, promoting larval affordances between bodies, buildings, and the commons as urban conflict. We approach conflict as affordance and the collective sha** agent allowing public sharing to form through dynamic and non-stagnant networks and patterns. As with urban commoning practices, these propositions may diverge from dominant institutions and can open up to opportunities that allow us to rethink life and live differently. The proposal will therefore offer a space for theorization, interrogating contemporary citizenship in learning to design for and by such experiences and events, and highlight pathologies of urban living.