Yavor Tarinski

Only by shifting decision-making power away from bureaucratic institutions (like parliaments) and mechanisms (like the profit-driven capitalist market) towards grassroots participatory organs (such as popular assemblies and councils of delegates) that a new, much more sustainable, ecological, and democratic future can emerge.

The absence of a right to housing should be viewed as an act of violence, as yet another means of keeping people engaged in a passive consumerist lifestyle.

Ultimately, the question of democratic and ecological cities is a deeply political one, as it requires the collective deliberation of the future we want.

According to the underlying form of social organization, architecture can promote individualist lifestyles, servitude, submission, or it can encourage communal solidarity, freedom, and dignity.

As philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis underlines, the equality among citizens of Ancient Athens was not based on the granting of equal passive ‘rights’, but active general participation in public affairs.

Although homogeneity has been advanced by a societal system that presents itself as the only one possible and a product of a determinist evolutionary process, it can still be reversed so that diversity can flourish once again.