Rebecca Ross and Ben Campkin are delighted to present Urban Pamphleteer #6: Open Source Housing Crisis as well as the new Urban Pamphleteer website on the 17th of November with a launch event at Central Saint Martins.

About Urban Pamphleteer #6

This issue interrogates new ways of approaching London’s rapidly escalating housing crisis, inspired by Stewart Brand’s 1968 Whole Earth Catalog, especially its subtitle Access to Tools. The notion of thinking in alternative, communal, tech savvy and creative yet practical (even if idealistic) ways about society’s problems seemed well matched to our contemporary urgent need to invent new ways to approach London’s rapidly escalating housing crisis and engage critically with its underlying logics.

Some have made a comparison between the broad ‘feeling’ of the present moment and that of the summer of 1968 and in one sense, this underlines our reference to ‘access to tools’ or shared hands-on tactics that can be deployed exibly at a variety of scales. However, in the context of a dizzying plethora of new communication channels and technologies, there are many questions that complicate this comparison that are explored throughout this issue.

Urban Pamphleteer #6 Open Source Housing Crisis