Property is the catalyst of a racialized system of perpetual displacement. It is a system that prioritizes and protects security, power and capital. It functions as an alienating framework of private ownership privileging the nuclear family as opposed to collective belonging. Techwood Homes is the country’s first public housing development and subsequently the first formalized segregation policy. Years of neglect required tenant-led organizing to ensure security, community support, and empowerment. The current luxury townhouse typology, individualized for the single “family,” moved even further away from the dense typology which supports social encounters and culture. These are our guiding questions for a world After-Property: Is it possible for stewardship to replace ownership? Can family expand to communal kinship? How can there be emplacement and embeddedness after the property? Living Network, imagines a world after property where the home is not subject to monetary obligations, but rather a network of relationships and responsibilities,- a model of collective stewardship that ensures security in place. It is a system of communal mutual aid to ensure embeddedness.
