Experiences - Markets

by John Manoochehri

Built of Experiences

The urban lifestyle of today is built from stuff - and this is why it cannot survive. Tomorrow's urban lifestyle will be built from experiences. 90% of the time spent in the urban space is about negotiating dead matter. Walls, roads, machines, products, buildings, rubbish. Somewhere in this there is useful experience, and sometimes desirable experience. Mostly though the city is a sullen creature, hunched and unyielding. Blank face. Places that are for nobody in particular, houses crammed with consumer goods no-one is using or looking after. The age of producing stuff and hoping for the experience is ending. The waste of resources, space, time, of life, energy and hope, is far too great. Now design is working back from the experience and slotting in only the stuff that matters. Places that work and grow with the people living around them. Buildings, with ventilation and lighting so sensitive, they almost breathe and see, with roots in the local, physical economy. Homes free of cluttter, and lifestyles serviced by a products on demand not in-your-face. The face of emerging urbanism is the interface. Press play to begin.

Free Markets to Farmers Markets

Once upon a time the market was a social stage in a physical space: walk there, live and breathe the culture you belong to. An expression of freedom and choice, particularity and presence. Somehow the market then became an antisocial abstraction. A global contraption, soulless and placeless, twisting everyone and everything across the world into a tornado of uncontrolled consumption. Freedom is what we give away to the free market, not what we get back from it. The time is coming - has come - to put markets back on the map...literally. Farmers and producers with faces are to be welcomed in the heart of public spaces, not hidden away and exploited by the supply system. Rebuild the local economy around true exchange, and investment in each other: real markets, where the man-in-the middle between you and the producer... is just your neighbour, chatting in the queue. Power to the people, means giving power to producers, and places to people. Set the markets free.