Rather than conceptualize the porch as a superadded element attached to a house, the porch is rescaled and foregrounded to shape housing. Indeed, the porch as infrastructure offers the capacity to create forms of alternative living distinguished by cooperativity, greater utility, and elevated social capital without compromising household autonomy and privacy. Cooperative lifestyles are being embraced again by populations of all income groups to counter the economic precarity, social isolation, and the care crises experienced among rich and poor, young and old, alike. Reframing the porch’s role takes on sociologist Ivan Illich’s challenge to reinvest a social dimension back into the tools of contemporary civilization. As argued in his now classic text, Tools for Conviviality, these tools include the building blocks of the built environment: schools, houses, healthcare facilities, cars, highways, etc. Tools, which, Illich argued, are shaped by industrial-era modes of production (and mindsets) characterized by a pathology of privacy and their ever increasing withdrawal from the social.
The hyper-porch offers new possibilities in conviviality that support greater utility and social forms without dictating social arrangements. It helps populations overcome nature and social deficits necessary in addressing climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. What new relationships, functions, and forms of life may emerge within a new metabolism stimulated through the hyper-porch?
Sponsor
The Weyerhaeuser Giving Fund/3x30 Sustainability Ambition
Client
Looking for Developer