development

The Garden of Babylon: Nature, a Revolutionary Force – Bernard Charbonneau

Bernard Charbonneau’s The Garden of Babylon (1969) is not only an impassioned, deeply personal and nostalgic manifesto on behalf of nature, traditional farming and rural culture—which are being destroyed by industrial and urban expansion and by government policies supposedly designed to save them but which in fact only promote financial interests and mass tourism—but also a revolutionary polemic on behalf of human freedom, whose indivisible unity with nature was ambiguously reflected in the “feeling of nature” that arose during the 18th century: “it was no mere coincidence that the century that discovered nature was also the century of the individual and his freedom”.

The Commoner #10: The Carnival of Values and the Exchange Value of Carnivals

Issue 10 of The Commoner magazine

Now that it’s undeniable: Gentrification in Hamilton

A text from Hamilton, Ontario, discussing the state of play with gentrification in 2015, as well as the role of art and progressive urban planning in contributing to "regeneration". The tensions discussed in this text would later lead to the Locke Street affair of 2018.

Corsair Writings - Pier Paolo Pasolini

A collection of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial articles and interviews from 1973-1975 on the “anthropological revolution” that transformed Italy during the 1960s and early 1970s, with its “development without progress”, “consumerist hedonism”, “false tolerance”, mass culture, impoverishment of language, neurosis, destruction of traditional peasant cultures (“cultural genocide”), “strategy of tension”, and phony anti-fascism, signaling the decline of the old fascism and the rise of a new, “permissive” fascism, a “Power without a face” that is the “worst kind of totalitarianism”.

When the barbarians invade the periphery: the commercialization and destruction of the Catalonian Pyrenees – Miguel Amorós

A 2018 diatribe against tourism, as an industry that is wrecking the natural environment and the social fabric of rural areas, and particularly as it has capitalized on the recent craze for “adventure sports”, which manifest the “primordial capitalist mentality”, “the taste for competition, for overcoming obstacles, for demonstrating endurance, for the cult of hard work, for risk-taking, for exhibitionism”, echoing Günther Anders’ reflections on this new kind of leisure that is exploited for profit and becomes just another variety of “work” for people who are plagued by neuroses generated in the claustrophobic cities and are incapable of the tranquil repose that our ancestors valued.

The whole world is like a nowhere land called Alicante – Miguel Amorós

A brief, and idiosyncratic, social and economic history of the medium-sized Valencian city of Alicante since the Spanish Civil War, denouncing the negative impact of chaotic development, venal and corrupt politicians, unbridled consumerism, the role played by the automobile in social atomization, the destruction of old working class neighborhoods, real estate speculation, the cynical exploitation of local cultural traditions, the noxious effects of an economy based on tourism, the ruin of traditional agriculture, and the proliferation of hideous skyscrapers in a nauseating panorama of trivialization and degradation that is typical of so many other cities all over the world.

The pitfalls of the social economy – Miguel Amorós

The text of a 2017 presentation examining the significance of the “third sector” or “social economy”, the non-profit community development and assistance sector, its origins as a replacement for faltering government aid programs for excluded sectors of the population, its diversification and increasing economic impact on job creation, service provision and housing, its association with the “civil society” movement, its avoidance of conflict with state and private power and its reliance on parliamentary procedures and negotiations, its ideological smokescreens, and the rise of the “new commons” ideology as a delusional strategy for non-confrontational withdrawal from the system.