Making space: Radical democracy in the megalopolis. An investigation into social ecology and the creation of participatory, self-designing and self-reliant neighbourhoods within major urban entities.

摘要

This study is an investigation into social ecology and the creation of self-designing and self-reliant neighbourhoods within major urban entities.;Despite the emergence of a world-wide 'environmental' awareness, major ecological crises continue to proliferate and cause profound human and natural misery across the globe. The paper proposes that if a genuinely ecological society is to be realized, the root causes of environmental degradation have to be identified as social problems. Ecologists have to name capitalism, hierarchy and domination as the prime forces pitting humanity against the natural world, and recognize that human social reconfiguration is necessary if we are to reestablish a harmonious relationship with the environment.;The domination of human by human necessarily results in the domination of nature by humans, and an ecological society has to reject centralized authoritarianism, the nation-state, and representative democracy in favour of a decentralized confederation of self-reliant, directly democratic communities.;The paper uses social ecology, identified as the fullest expression of anarchist theory to date, as a means for investigating the creation of community control, specifically within a megalopolitan context. Included is a broad review and synthesis of contemporary and historical literature in anarchism, urbanism, community development, planning, education and ecology. Anarchist history, self-determination movements, deschooling theory, community development tools, cooperative approaches and the example of my own neighbourhood are threaded together to present a fabric of specific proposals for the radical decentralization and democratization of urban neighbourhoods.;The central theme is that an ecological culture relies on cooperative community power, as existing between people, and that the linking of directly democratic local institutions holds the key to constructing self-reliant and participatory urban neighbourhoods. The space for an ecologically democratic culture exists in every neighbourhood, and its realization depends on the creation of local, egalitarian relationships.