Life After Property
The lines drawn on land to claim ownership and demarcate property have had widespread ramifications on forming divisions — between race, class, ecologies, and social groups, amongst others. In the United States, the commodification of land is now so deeply entrenched with economic and social policies that it often is used as a form of economic support in the wake of dwindling forms of social security. Not only does this amplify divisions between classes, these policies reify in formal decisions that reaffirm this status quo. Despite the pervasiveness of commodified private property models, these are relatively nascent when compared to the history of the city and how humans have lived. Life After Property examines how the territory, neighborhood, block, and home can be reclaimed for more collectivized ways of living and being. The five projects presented consider techniques such as resistance, decommodification, commoning, re-graining, and framing, to offer more equitable ways of distributing resources—forming solidarity, community control, and forms of care to combat precarity.
Life After Property contains design work by THE OPEN WORKSHOP completed between 2020 and 2023. The Open Workshop is a design-research practice operating at the nexus of architecture and urbanism. Founded by Neeraj Bhatia in 2013, the firm has been awarded The Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices Award (2024), Canadian Prix de Rome (2019), Emerging Leaders Award (Design Intelligence) (2017), and Architecture League Prize (2016). Their work has been commissioned by the Venice Biennale, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Seoul Biennale and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Neeraj is also an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts where he directs the urbanism research Lab, The Urban Works Agency.
