A manifesto and guide for building mutual aid groups and reclaiming power in a time of perpetual crisis.
We are living through a Long Emergency: a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars and other climate-driven disasters. In “Lifehouse”, Adam Greenfield asks what might happen if the tactics and networks of care that spring up in response to these times might be brought together in a single, coherent way of life?
Using examples from the Black Panthers’ “survival programs,” the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort and the neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that sustained many during COVID lockdowns to the large-scale, self-organised polities of municipalist Spain and Kurdish Rojava, Greenfield argues for rethinking local power as a bulwark against despair — a way to discover and develop the individual and collective capacities that have gone underutilized during all the long years of late capitalism, and a means for thriving in the face of impending catastrophe.
"Mixing clear-eyed, unwavering analysis with deep compassion, Lifehouse offers something much more sustaining than hope: traction"
Jenny Odell, author of Saving Time,
"When three emergencies -- climate, political and social - build together into the storm of our present we need to start thinking from the ground-up. In this we have no better guide than AG. Lifehouse constructs a much needed, hands-on strategy for urban care. Read it and start planning."
Eyal Weizman, author of Hollowland,
"A succinct, unflinching assessment of the urgent conditions unfolding around us, and a nuanced, practical analysis of why and how we must take up immediate, local, collective direct action."
