This is a revolutionary urbanist project oriented towards the Salt Lake valley with a focus on critique. Today’s metropolis has shown itself to be hostile to human life in unequal and disproportional ways, and the need for a different city has never been greater. If you are interested in this project or have any questions, reach out to me at deconstructsaltlake[at]riseup.net.
Apart from articles, I hope to publish photos and printable materials, all aimed at contributing to an understanding of the Salt Lake valley and the metropolis which has been constructed within it. There are many interconnected issues to explore, but some that I hope to explore here are gentrification, environmental (in)justice, safety, cars and the spaces made for them, the police, and of course, the way that all these things intersect with capitalism, the primary determining force in US society.
Reading recommendations:
Space and Geography
New Battlefields — Phil Neel (read it here)
Hinterlands — Phil Neel
Its Own Peculiar Decor — Chris Wright (read it here)
Situationist Theses on Traffic — Guy Debord (read it here)
Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism — Attila Kotanyi & Raoul Vaneigem (read it here)
Architecture and Planning
On Marxist Architecture — Hannes Meyer (read it here)
Passages from Why I Became an Architect — Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (read it here)
Socializing Care: Against Domestic Realism — CibCom Collective (read it here)
Soviet workers’ clubs in the 1920s — Several Authors (read it here)
The Itinerant Red Bauhaus, or the Third Emigration — Daniel Adolfo Talesnik (read it here)
Ecology and Capitalism
Capitalism and Ecology: From the decline of capital to the decline of the world — Paul Mattick (read it here)
A Sick Planet — Guy Debord (read it here)
The Destruction of Nature — Anton Pannekoek (read it here)
Between the Devil and the Green New Deal — Jasper Bernes (read it here)