Back to Babel

Abstract

Particularly over the years 1980 and early 1990s, architects, engineers and technicians of various professional areas, we found ourselves at odds with a wide range of debates and speeches, meanings, practices and preachings, all from the action of the new social movements organized around housing production. Much of this movement was engaged in the construction of an alternative that politically allowed to conceive another way to produce the city and the home. We thought that self-management mechanisms applied in the production of projects and works, would allow the appearance of a form of autonomy which would launch - this we believed - a vertigo of libertarian actions that would pass beyond the restricted field of the immediate response to a material need: a decent place to live in.