Urban electives explore advanced topics in urban culture, politics, and ecologies. The content of the elective options varies from semester to semester.SECTION DESCRIPTION“The only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people. Only where men live so close together that the potentialities of action are always present can power remain with them....“
—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
 
Living Together is an act of political negotiation through the collective shaping everyday life. In recent years, communal living has gained widespread attention for its potential to address the affordability crisis in highly desirable urban centers. While media accounts of this domestic typology typically describe it for its economic efficiency—incorporating it into simplistic narratives about gentrification and rising rents—this ‘necessity-oriented’ explanation of communal residences misses the breadth of motivations and manifestations of intentional communities, from socio-political values to professional networking and life-style affinities. The notion of living together is not new to San Francisco. In fact, during the 1960s, San Francisco became a critical hub for the development of communes. The commune acted as a space for experimentation—of alternative politics, lifestyles, and an attempt to go beyond the nuclear family. These spaces sought to more precisely curate a way of living that existed outside of the system. Against this backdrop that has shaped the city, communal living is once again having a resurgence. Within a culture of the declining significance of the nuclear family, communal living has offered meaningful social units and institutions of care, culture, values, community and support. Not only has living together embraced a larger range of users, through sharing resources, these spaces inherently build a domestic commons and offer a higher quality of social life. In parallel, contemporary modes of communal living have expanded from communes to include new experiments in co-living, hacker hostels, timeshared spaces, etc. Forming Life In Common is a seminar that examines the histories and theories of how people have lived collectively—linking the physical form, underlying protocols of land tenure and ownership, and questions of governance. Centered on the political negotiations required to live together, the seminar will unpack how different experiments in commoning, sharing, caring, maintaining, and forming life together might provide lessons for a more collectivized future wherein precarious individuals find solidarity and power.
 
The seminar is structured as a part lecture/ reading seminar and part design workshop. The course will collaborate with the community group, “the Haight Street Commons”, a network of 75 communes in San Francisco to consider the design of a distributed urban commons. Through a series of engagements, students will develop alternative models of living, working and sharing. 

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