A distinct visual genre has emerged of digitally realised interiors and architectural spaces emblematic in their dreamlike, surreal, and imagined condition, exemplified by digital practitioners including Charlotte Tayler, Andrés Reisinger, and Six N. Five. These virtual spaces, which have predominantly been circulated and popularised via image-based social media platforms, contribute to a stratum of images of the interior, or more precisely, the ‘interior-as-image’. As such, their consumption via the digital screen agitates an uncertain condition between imagined and real. Indeed, some of these designs have become emergent into the actual, transitioning from imaginings for the digital screen into inhabitable interior spaces, to further trouble the uncertainties of virtual and real, digital and physical. This emergent category of interior-as-image can potentially be located under cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreality’, a hyperreal visuality that eliminates the difference between image and reality. With the replacement of reality with the sign/image, signification is suspended for the interior-as-image. However, these digitally rendered interiors are not absent of potential meaning and external reference despite the immediacy of their activation and engagement. Through their instrumentalisation as Non-Fungible Token (NFT) artefacts and unique, commodified digital objects, these uncertain interiors are entangled with energy-hungry machine processes in their production. In the contemporary era of climate crisis and the critique of progressive modernity, where the capacity to envision a sustainable future is itself challenging, this category of digital artefact has the potential to intensify a precarious and uncertain time to come. Moreover, the infrastructural condition(ing) of the circulation and consumption of the interior-as-image via social media platforms has the potential to encode an ‘algorithmic anxiety’, a doubling of embedded uncertainty. This text-based essay proposes to define and contextualise this particular category of digital interioras-image, designating its critical and contemporary mode of uncertainty. In addition to establishing its artefactual status as a discrete yet materially entangled digital object, the potential significance for the discipline of interior design will be questioned. In investigating a number of spatial projects for which the digital image is a primary mode of engagement, this essay reflects on the intersection of the virtual and physical for interior design, and deliberates on the potential of imaginaries of virtual worlds for unlocking new interior materialities.
Johan Colding, Stephan Barthel, Robert Ljung, Felix Eriksson · 5 authors
Climate change and the coupled loss of ecosystem services pose major collective action problems in that all individuals would benefit from better cooperation to address these problems but conflicting interests and/or incomplete knowledge discourage joint action. Adopting an inductive and multi‐layered approach, drawing upon the authors’ previous research on urban commons, we here summarize key insights on environmentally oriented urban commons and elaborate on what role they have in instigating climate‐proofing activities in urban areas. We deal with three types of urban commons, i.e., “urban green commons,” “coworking spaces,” and “community climate commons.” We describe how allotment gardens, community gardens, and other types of urban green commons contribute to environmental learning that may boost understanding of environmental issues and which constitute important learning arenas for climate‐change mitigation and adaptation. We also deal with the newly emerging phenomenon of coworking spaces that share many essential institutional attributes of urban commons and which can work for climate‐change mitigation through the benefits provided by a sharing economy and through reduction of domestic transportation and commuting distance. Community climate commons represent commons where local communities can mobilize together to create shared low‐carbon assets and which hold the potential to empower certain segments and civil society groups so that they can have greater influence and ownership of the transformation of reaching net‐zero carbon goals. We conclude this article by identifying some critical determinants for the up‐scaling of environmentally oriented urban commons.
Artisans had autonomously decided the work processes and the wages in the traditional craft production, and their workshops was the basic unit of artisans' community. Between 1780 and 1820, however, the craft economy was radically transformed. The major impetus for change came from expanding markets. Recent work by a number of labor historians has shown that metropolitan industrialization did not proceed directly from craft to factory production in a single bound, but rather followed a more uneven course. Production was expanded in the antebellum decades through the reorganization of work and the division of labor rather than through the adoption of new machinery and methods of production. The high point of artisan protest, at least in New York and Philadelphia, was reached in the 1820s and 1830s with the formation of three successive workingmen's organizations: the Working Men's political parties of 1827-1831; the city-based General Trades' Unions of 1833-1839; and the Loco-foco Party in New York City of 1835-1837. Although none of these organizations lasted more than a few years, they have been viewed by many historians as the first signs of working-class consciousness in the United States. Artisans responded to metropolitan industrialization by calling into question existing economic and social relations and constructing in their stead a new, more class-conscious view of the world. Especially, the Working Men's parties and GTUs displayed a new level of collective identity or solidarity that enabled artisans to unite across the traditional boundaries of their trades. Thus, in the 1820s and 1830s, artisans' loyalties were no longer restricted to their craft, but increasingly were drawn along class lines, as artisans and employers began to organize across trades. Artisans drew on long-standing republican values to criticize the new economic order. Artisans extended the eighteenth-century assumptions to their own world, the world of work and production, and created their own variation on republican themes. Displaced artisans drew on republican notions of political rights and civic participation in order to protest the economic inequalities that accompanied industrialization. The major contribution of the republican tradition was that it provided displaced journeymen with a set of values and precepts with which to challenge the economic changes under way in the early nineteenth century. However, the principal social cleavage in the 1820s and 1830s was not yet between labor and capital, or workers and employers. Instead, skilled artisans considered themselves to be producers, allied with master craftsmen, small manufacturers, and farmers against the non-producing classes. Bankers, lawyers, merchants, and land speculators were the quintessential nonproducers. Producers were well aware that the world of work had changed dramatically in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. But producers did not understand such a change in the context of a struggle between capital and labor, but saw them in light of their established worldview. The division between producers and nonproducers undergirded antebellum social relations and political alliances as well. By 1870, workers' optimism about the possibility of sustaining a decentralized political economy based on the republical values had been considerably shaken. The process of industrialization in the United States shattered the producers' vision of regional economic growth, and as a consequence transformed workers' relationship to the state.