SI(GH)TE 92I

Based upon principles of usufruct (housing and facilities for use, not proprietary ownership) and cooperation around labor, an eco-community is a form of “intentional community” that specifically values trust, direct democracy, and is shaped around serving social-ecological balance. Ideally, it is also grounded in values of service, and uses surpluses generated to serve other groups of people with shared values and intentions.

In layman’s terms: It is a community with no bosses or landlords, where people are able to sustain themselves through cooperative labor that acknowledges the limits of the “environment,” and serve other communities attempting the same (wherever possible).

As developments unfold, what you will see here are blueprints for a particular arrangement of materials derived from the earth within physical space.

While the arrangement is cool (if we don’t say so ourselves), and is designed to accommodate a particular kind of social relations between people, the arrangement is, in fact, not the social relations themselves…

Social relations are the emotional and psychological connections between human beings that shape how they relate to one another around all sorts of things, but especially matters related to survival and pleasure. Social relations are fluid and ever-changing among groups of people, especially the bigger these “groups” are or become.

Spark: SITE 92I is a project aimed at cultivating social relations that are directly democratic, cooperative, and liberatory (as opposed to hierarchical, authoritarian, and/or exploitative). It is a project that aims to be one eco-communal node in a global, distributed network of nodes that are able to join both social and material forces in order to introduce new systems defined by their social values, building enough capacity to invite more poor and working-class people into a parallel way of living that frees them of the oppression most of us face under the dominant ways of our world today.

The long-term intention for Spark is to create seed funds for new social groups wishing to build new eco-communal “nodes” within this territory and elsewhere that can federate with ours, and under very specific values.

SITE 92I is produced through a federation of worker cooperatives within the arts, design, and technology — 400,000,000 — and in collaboration with Eolith, a spatial research, design, and consultancy think tank.