'A certain kind of critique and struggle can be waged from within'. The usual rebuttal of design (and urban design in particular) to accusations of being either merely the department of cultural production that turns useful things into desired commodities or a top-down masterplanning imposition of value-making schemes also tends to freeze the critique in predictable anti-capitalist stances without seeking ways of negotiating differing, deviating visions of urban and cultural production pursued within the practice itself.
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Designing in and for a non- or post-capitalist world may thus have to address the system of design, but it may not be the single, revolutionary event that unhinges the established traditions and protocols but an ongoing, if increasingly impatient questioning of the roles and practices designers are assigned to.
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'Designers can make their biggest social and political impact by not designing.' 'If you are doing work that you feel conflicted about, don't kid yourself that some pro bono work or anonymous culture jamming will even the score. It doesn't, and stop pretending you're an artist, because you're not.'
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'The artisan' may qualify as 'a rather attractive concept for a post-capitalist subject - it certainly beats the bourgeois star artist or proletarianised designer as a away of organising creative activity'. The concept of artisan is at the same time 'doomed as an attempt to overcome capitalism, as it can so easily drawn back into capitalist process of accumulation and dispossession.
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Post-Fordist labour is always, also, hidden labour'.
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One should be aware of the misuses of terms such as 'participation' in urban government and design discourses.
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Who is invited to participate, and who is inviting them? ... An inherent right to participate cannot be taken for granted by the designer, much less the non-expert citizen. ... The communities addressed by designers should be conceived as assemblies where the most heterogeneous actors and constituencies gather who readiness and willingness to become subjects of interpolate
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Design can only be understood as an activity situated in an area where p'participation', 'if at all, is happening under the condition of competition and conflict. Instead of glossing over social , cultural and economic inequalities, design, in its microprocessual capacity to engage with the local and particular, is bent to acknowledge difference - not as distinction, but as struggle.
