Reading Material

Built Environment Vol. 38, No. 3, Co-Housing in the Making (2012): Sustainable Living and Co-Housing: Evidence from a Case Study of Eco-Villages

Sustainability 2010: Eco-Self-Build Housing Communities: Are They Feasible and Can They Lead to Sustainable and Low Carbon Lifestyles?

Creating a Life Together : Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities, Diana Leafe Christian 2003

Saving Space, Sharing Time: Integrated Infrastructures of Daily Life in Cohousing, Helen Jarvis 2011

Self-​Build Homes: Social Discourse, Experiences and Directions, Michaela Benson and Iqbal Hamiduddin, 2017

Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich
Chapter 4 - Recovery
Recovery
In this chapter Ivan Illich explains problems facing a common working-class people and explores potential solutions to those problems.
Starting off with a metaphor of a men who starts to use machines to easy his manual labour, the author aims to make a point that once we stop using certain skills we end up losing them.
The Demythologization of Science
This topic starts with a claim that better science makes better medicine but that only creates an illusion of better health.
Common people do not have the medical knowledge to help themselves, so they must trust a doctor to help them out. This means that the doctor can choose what treatment to administrate and people simply do not understand those treatments. People trust the medical treatment and doctors, so they stop caring about their own health as much, believing that they do not know what is best for them.
Similarly, when people are feed knowledge they can become less creative regarding morals and politics, because they do not have to think for themselves.
The ‘knowledge of the individual citizen’ means an opinion of the individual which is in fact subjective.
The ‘”knowledge” of science’ which in this case means data and facts is objective and can be further examined and improved.
Illich claims that the problem the ‘cognitive disorder’ is coursed by the illusion that the opinion of the individual is of less value then facts and data.
Illich moves on to discusses the information/data, where it comes from and how it is used. He believes that information comes from the interaction with the world and the world itself does not contain any information.
We can log information and knowledge in books and on the internet however the books and the internet do not become the information themselves. They are merely the record. This is a similar illusion which happens with our decision making, the data and information collected are not the decision, the decision is still to be made.
Becoming overconfident in science and data may lead to luck of own decision making and undermine one’s ability to make decisions. In conjunction with the Plow metaphor mentioned earlier once there is no need to use physical strength humans become weaker. Therefore, once all decisions are made using data and ‘science knowledge’ a person might lose their ability to make decisions based on their own knowledge.
Uniform systems such as a curriculum, court cases and therapy, where knowledge of science is entrusted to make decisions, allow people to miss out on their own decisions and that’s when they become ‘pawns in a world game operated by mega-machines’.
‘No longer can each person make his or her own contribution to the constant renewal of society’
Once people let the doctors and the politicians make the decisions for them, they renounce their right and ability to make those decisions themselves. Blindly following the ‘experts’ of the society. Loosing their trust in their own knowledge and beliefs in order to entrust the decisions in data they don’t fully understand.
Allowing and entrusting the experts to interpret the data means the ‘experts’ can create their own standards on important aspects on everyone’s lives such as health. They can create low standards on purpose to reduce the complaints.
Included in this chapter is an example of Nazi doctors who experimented on people to find out their limits, they worked out how long a person can endure torture. This is a very extreme example of ‘experts’ imposing limits on a person. When people trust the ‘experts’ to make decisions and set standards they can find that the limits are not always true. No one can predict how much a society, or a person can really tolerate or endure bouse it is all subjective.
The Rediscovery of Language
As experts much as engineers and scientists started to measure the productivity and quality of production systems in labs, they created a scale to which all production can be compared. This resulted in handmade products, such as preserves and self-build homes becoming a ‘second-rate’ product and many co-operations and mutually beneficial relations in society broke down.
Single mode of production can take over the market and force all competitors to use the same production methods, monopolising it, this can ruin the imagination and creativity in the said market.
Illich links the use of language in the industrial nations to the above-mentioned standards of labour.
The language in industry run countries such as England are possessive, this Illich claims is the effect of industrialisation.
The Recovery of Legal Procedure
This chapter shows how the legal system influences the output of industrial production. The legal system does not only set itself out to protect the interests of the wealthy and the powerful, but even certain laws and policies enacted by governments around the world protect large corporations to prevent them from going under. Judges and other high-ranking legal officials in theory should protect the rights of an individual impartial from the concepts of wealth and power as justice is a pure concept that does not take these factors into account. However, the judicial system usually protects the power and wealth of the corporation over the rights of the individual.
But moving away from the courts the policies enacted by governments aid the growth of corporations which in turn increase the industrial output, governments for example Ireland give specialists tax rates and exemptions to industries in zones called EZ’s ( economic zones). These zones highlight the governments preferential treatment of the industry over the individual.
Through revolution the author believes that the rights of the workers can be recovered from the industries. However, this can only be achieved by a revolution on a macro scale, only through numbers can the working class highlight and capitalize on the injustices and the mismanagement of laws that corporations have committed over the course of the industrialized age.