Lifehouse: how neighbourhoods can prepare for disaster

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Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to communications@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Mary Rowe: [00:00:02] Welcome to City Talk, the show about what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next for the places we live. I’m Mary Rowe and I lead the Canadian Urban Institute. [00:00:10][7.6]

Adam Greenfield: [00:00:13] There was a response to this infrastructural collapse, but the response did not come from government. It did not from the private sector. It did come from the philanthropic sector. It didn’t come from anything at all except for the city’s own people, spontaneously self-organized on their behalf. [00:00:31][18.7]

Mary Rowe: [00:00:37] I’m Mary Rowe from City Talk, thanks for joining us. The effects of climate change are almost impossible to not recognize in our daily lives now. Recently, we’ve been talking a lot about the devastation that can occur to cities, communities of all sizes, from wildfires, from smoke, from floods, and even in terms of just dealing with the threat of these events, how it uproots people to have to relocate, which has been happening repeatedly over the last several months, not just in Canada, but around the world. Even if you haven’t experienced these disasters up close, you may have had to change your plans to avoid a harmful smoke, let’s say, or a road that’s been blocked, or you probably know someone in your family or in your world that has been affected. Adam Greenfield expects the climate crisis to keep getting worse, the impacts of different kinds of weather events, but he also has hope for how communities can come together to anticipate and hopefully to address and deal with whatever presents itself. He believes that a new type of structure in every neighborhood could be created called a lifehouse, and he really is illustrating through tangible examples how a new kind of structure can emerge in a neighborhood that can perform a bunch of functions. It can be a place where you charge your phone, it can be place where maybe you recharge some appliance that you’re dependent on, like a CPAP machine or something like that. It’s a place that people gather, it’s really an organizing unit for mutual aid. And it can function during a time of emergency, but also when we’re not in an emergency. And he lays it all out in this book, and I am so pleased to have him come and speak with us. Adam Greenfield, welcome to City Talk. [00:02:11][93.9]

Adam Greenfield: [00:02:11] Thanks so much for having me. It’s a real opportunity and a pleasure and a privilege to speak to your audience. I’m very glad to be here with you today. [00:02:17][5.9]

Mary Rowe: [00:02:25] So let’s talk a bit about the general concept. How did you get to this? Maybe tell people where you live and what you do, other than write books, because I know you’re a busy guy. But just tell us how you ended up getting into this kind of groove, because you’re actually a, I wanted to call you a tech bro, but I bet you don’t like that moniker, but you do come from the tech world. You’ve been a critic, I think, of tech and the world of design. So I’m interested how you end it up here. So start with where you lived, and then, which we know, and then we’re going to talk about how you got these ideas. [00:02:54][29.2]

Adam Greenfield: [00:02:55] Okay. Well, let’s just clarify just from the very outset, for the avoidance of all confusion, I’m not any kind of a bro, let alone a tech bro. But we will get there. So yeah, I come to you today from London, England. And I’ve been living here for about 11 years now. And it is true that I come off the back of 15 or 20 years in the technology industry. But as you imply, sort of always at a distance from that industry and some of its commitments, I like to feel that in my work in technology, I was trying to actualize a deeper and an earlier current in the evolution of our thinking about the human interaction with information technology. And that current, I feel, by now has been just decisively pushed to the side. So even when I moved here, it didn’t feel like there was really any place left for me in technology and I even had there been, I was just not interested in it. I’d done everything I came to do and failed to do the rest. What did interest me and what eventually became the book that you hold in your hand is something that happened toward the end of the time that I lived in New York City. There was something in the fall of 2012 on the eastern seaboard of North America called Superstorm Sandy, and Superstorm Sand was at the time an unprecedented weather event, difficult to attribute in any way to anything but human effect on the atmosphere. It was the convergence of a large late season Atlantic hurricane with an existing and a loitering continental cold front. These two gigantic weather systems came together almost exactly over New York City and dumped just an absolutely torrential amount of rain, you know, the winds were higher than had generally been measured there. But really, they were also responsible, the storm system, the combined storm system was responsible for a storm surge that flooded the city of New York and just took it down to its knees. I mean, this was like the largest and most impactful weather event to have made landfall on New York City in living memory in the recorded history of meteorological records. And it was, you know, I think it’s not unreasonable to describe its effect as devastating. It took the infrastructures that support everyday life in a place like New York absolutely down to their knees and it left them there for days, weeks, and some of the worst affected neighborhoods for months. The astonishing thing from my perspective, and given everything that I had come to expect about things like this, was that there was a response to this infrastructural collapse, but the response did not come from government, it did not come from the private sector. It did not come from the philanthropic sector. It didn’t come from anything at all except for the city’s own people, spontaneously self-organized on their behalf. And what I saw and what I was eventually lucky enough to be able to participate in in a very small way was the almost instantaneous crystallization of a very, very sophisticated, very capable relief and recovery effort. That was explicitly organized on anarchist lines. It had come out of networks that had been established in the course of the previous Falls Occupy Wall Street protests and the occupation of Zuccotti Square in lower Manhattan. I was able to participate in this effort at one of the two relief and recovery hubs it had set up in disused or underutilized churches in Brooklyn. And over the course of the 12 days that I worked there, I learned that this was a not merely a more effective and a more efficient way of doing things, but there was also something deeply and profoundly affirmative about it. Working with Occupy Sandy made me feel like nothing else in my adult life had. It touched places in me that I didn’t ever have any reasonable expectation of having empowered or activated in my life. And so, after… the waters had receded and after the everyday infrastructure of New York City had been stood back up, I had time and space to reflect. And the question that I started from is, since Occupy Sandy worked so palpably well, so well indeed, that the city government, the state government, the federal government studied it to see if they could glean anything from it, if they can learn anything from it. It works so very well indeed. And question I asked myself as well. What if we organized more of everyday life more along these lines more of the time? What might that look and feel like? And particularly, as in the years since the climate crisis has really gathered force and really begun to affect more and more of our everyday lives, what if we devised our collective response to climate systems collapse, very much along the lines suggested by Occupy Sandy and by some of the movements and some of the experiences throughout our history that had led into Occupy Sandy. That’s the genesis of the book. [00:08:14][319.4]

Mary Rowe: [00:08:15] So let’s talk about the lifehouse concept, because I feel instinctively, I love the term, and I think instinctively when people hear it, they kind of have a little hint. But talk to me about what a lifehouse is. [00:08:29][14.0]

Adam Greenfield: [00:08:30] Well, in order to do that, I’m going to have to describe the church that was our first encounter with Occupy Sandy. You know, my partner and I actually were not in New York when the storm hit. We came back about 36 hours later and it took us a while. You know, we wanted to volunteer very badly and our first instinct at that point as kind of middle-class people was to call up the Red Cross. And the Red cross literally had no place for us. The Red Cross could not possibly have been less interested. They were about to let us go, just hang up the phone on us. And at the very last moment, the person I was talking to said, well, there’s this thing called Occupy Sandy out in Brooklyn. They’re out at Clinton Avenue. You might go have a look at them. So we did, we figured we didn’t have anything to lose. The subways were running. We got on the subway. We go out to Brooklyn, we come up above the ground and immediately there’s a line of postal service and UPS trucks stacked up in front of this church. And as we’re walking toward the church, we can kind of already feel the energy emanating from it. And I would say we didn’t get half of the way down the block from the subway stop to the church before somebody had greeted us. And I always make this point, greeted us with a smile, and a smile that was not a customer service smile. A smile that did not come out of a three-ring binder, right? This was not anybody’s protocol. It was a smile that came from somewhere that felt real. And literally, the very first interaction that my partner and I had with anybody from Occupy Sandy was being thanked. It was being thank for coming out. And in the book, I get into, you know, you don’t want to sugarcoat anything and you don’t wanna look at things through rose-colored glasses, but there were ways in which the personal interactions that people had were driven directly by the values that Occupies Sandy was organized around. And I felt that this is one of those ways. So we get to this church and there’s this human chain. That was passing packages, parcels off the back of a UPS truck into the pews of the church. The nave of the Church and the sanctuary where all the pewes were had been converted into what I thought was a really sophisticated picking, packing, and sorting logistical operation to pull things off the backs of trucks, sort them, turn them into bespoke aid packages, stage them, and get them back out again. So oddly enough, I guess we had come down with thoughts that I don’t know what we thought we would be doing when we got there, but literally the first thing that I wound up doing was helping to move packages in physically. And so that’s all I did for the next 12 days. My involvement with Occupy Sandy was nothing more or less than kind of being a human ball bearing and lubricating the passage of material into these pews and sorting them. And what I would say is that the conception of the lifehouse starts right there. This space that’s shared between a bunch of different functions. Its primary and most overt function is refuge, is offering people physical shelter, physical safety from the thing that’s come down upon them. But you know, the nature of Occupy Sandy meant that this was also a democratically run operation. It was run by assembly. It was run, you know, by direct, deliberative, participatory discourse, you know amongst the people doing the work. And so already that’s another layer on top of it. It’s a space of refuge that is run, organized and managed by the people who are doing the work themselves, democratically. And it occurs to me also that when you gather people in a space like that, there’s sort of a positive externality that emerges from that, if you will, like you have the opportunity to do other things together. You have the opportunity to offer people services that late capitalism is demonstrably failing to offer to people. You have opportunity to provide things like childcare, elder care, education, possibly even mental health counseling, possibly at the outside, even some kind of lightweight healthcare provision. You certainly have the opportunity to do collective meals. I mean, Occupy Sandy, this was collectively an operation that was putting out 70,000 hot meals a day. So you definitely have the opportunity to come together and break bread together and be a community together in that physical way. And then you have the chance to perform all of these very infrastructural services that are subject to attrition in the course of natural disasters or indeed man-made disasters. When the power goes down, as you say, you have an ability to have an electric generator there, hopefully a solar generator, so that you can recharge things like CPAP machines or, you know, other medical devices that people need. You can have what’s called a community microgrid around that, so you’re not merely generating energy for people there, but shedding it on the blocks around this site. You have what we call an agrovoltaic installation. So you are not merely, you now, doing solar power, but you’re growing food under that. Clearly, you’re never going to be able to grow enough food in a site like that to take care of all of people’s caloric needs. But you can supplement. Increasingly you can make for a more varied diet than might otherwise be possible. In short, you have this human nexus and you have a real site for a community to come together and to be aware of itself and to take care of itself. The immediate thing that occurred to me then, you know, because by the time I was writing this and putting these ideas together, I was living in the U.K. And in the U.K., there’s this really interesting thing that’s happened. This was, you now, across most of its history, it was a churched country. You know, at the heart of every community, there was a parish church. It was at the physical and the psychic heart of the community. This also happens to be a land in which the profession of Christian religion is evaporating. I mean, these sites are radically underutilized and falling into disrepair. So these two ideas come together. The idea of the kind of self-organized relief and recovery hub with all of these other assets and facets to it, and the existence, at least in the UK, of a significant amount of building stock that is wonderful. It is literally the most visible building, excuse me, in many villages. It’s at the center of concourse. It sort of the unconscious Schelling point, the unconscious note of communication and of coordination in these places. And it is crying out for use. It’s crying out the life of community to be ported back into it. I mean the idea the lifehouse both very concretely and somewhat metaphorically. It doesn’t need to all be in one structure, if at least the functions together, they’re sort of co-located and interwoven. That’s really what the lifehouse is to me. It doesn’t necessarily need to be under one roof. I think it benefits from being under one roof. But if it’s a cluster of functions in a town, a neighborhood, a village, I think you can get by with that as well. But that is the fundamental idea of it. [00:15:47][437.2]

Mary Rowe: [00:15:49] That’s fantastic. You know, I had never heard of Schelling point. I know who Thomas Schelling was. But the book talks about the Schelling point. Can you just tell people what the Schelling point is? [00:15:57][8.2]

Adam Greenfield: [00:15:58] Sure, yeah. It’s, as I say, a node of unconscious coordination. So if I told you, Mary, let’s meet next Thursday at noon in New York City, but I didn’t say anything more than that, where would you think to meet me? [00:16:11][13.8]

Mary Rowe: [00:16:12] Grand Central. [00:16:12][0.3]

Adam Greenfield: [00:16:13] Bingo. The clock in Grand Central. For people of our generation, at least, it is the Schelling point. I think that on a moment’s reflection, everybody listening will be able to say within their environ, you know, it’s gonna be a high school, you know, a mosque, a public square, something. There’s a place where people come together. What is the most obvious place to meet in times of trouble? And that ideally is where you would put the lifehouse or the lifehouse function. [00:16:42][29.2]

Mary Rowe: [00:16:43] So let’s talk about the mechanics of this because you and I are both fans of self-organization, but we also know that you do need resources and you need some kind of formalization, I guess, to allow these things to be sustainable. And you’ve done quite a bit of thinking about that in the book. So how do we, who would run them? Who would resource them? How do we get them to be sustainable? [00:17:06][22.4]

Adam Greenfield: [00:17:07] So the question I ask myself in my life always, and there is a bias in this and we can come back to that because I want to be very transparent about what my commitments are and what my biases are, but the question that I ask is what is the least amount of structure we can assert into a situation to generate order, spontaneous order. Because, you know, when you say formalization, I mean, I’m… ya know, we always say that anarchism is a thing that you do rather than a thing that you are, but I would answer to anarchist if I had to. And so my, you know, I have a bias against imposed order, top-down order, the order of the state. What I don’t have is a bias against structure. And I think in the public imagination, anarchism means, you 1890s Haymarket rioters kind of imagination, somebody in a pointy hat with a cherry bomb and flaming red eyes. And I actually think there are insurrectionary anarchists and then there’s the kind of anarchists who are like about meetings and about assemblies and about long, detailed, painstaking conversations about the disposition of resources. And this is how Occupy Sandy was organized. This is something that the state entities that studied Occupy Sandy really had a hard time with. They’re like, well, I need to talk to a leader. Ya know and I’m like, well there’s no boss here. We make decisions by consensus. And I can give you some examples of this in the way that Occupy Sandy approached the distribution of actual material aid. We’re used to the Red Cross. We are used to the idea that there is this entity that will help us. And the trouble is, is that the Red Cross has a very static, and if I may say, hierarchical approach to things. Occupy Sandy had a really different approach, and the approach was because we had the warm bodies that were able to do this, mind you, Occupy Sandy volunteers would go out to the hardest-hit neighborhoods. They wouldn’t be at some kind of centralized, predetermined site. They would go to the places that we knew to be hit. And then, instead of offering something that we thought might be useful, but maybe didn’t correspond to anybody’s actual needs or desires or situation, volunteers would engage people in conversation. And maybe that conversation at first wouldn’t even be about aid. Maybe it was just about, how are you doing? What’s going on out here? What was your experience like as a peer and an equal? Not as somebody you know that’s beneath you that you’re going to do them the great favor of helping from above. [00:19:53][166.1]

Mary Rowe: [00:19:55] That you’re serving, somehow. [00:19:56][0.3]

Adam Greenfield: [00:19:55] Yeah, exactly. I mean, there’s the savior complex doesn’t enter into it. You’re merely, you know, somebody who happens to be there having a conversation with somebody else who happens to be here. And, you it emerged quite often in the course of these conversations, naturally, as you’d expect, that people did have needs. And they did articulate those needs. And then what would happen is that they would bring an accounting of these needs back to me and back to the people who worked in the hub. And we would as best we were able together a package that corresponded to somebody’s actual articulated needs, which would then be brought back out to them. [00:20:28][32.9]

Mary Rowe: [00:20:29] But what I remember too, which I loved about Occupy Sandy, it’s a marrying of your previous life, that they went to Amazon and they took over the Amazon wedding registry. And instead of, as you say, dropping diapers, because we think you’re gonna need diapers, I’m assuming you fed into that system that then posted on Amazon, here’s what we need, you can purchase it on behalf. I loved that, inverting that. [00:20:53][25.0]

Adam Greenfield: [00:20:54] It was the wedding registry of Sandy and Sandy. It was brilliant. It was an absolute hack. Yeah. And I mean, let’s be clear. So the lacuna, there’s kind of a gap, you know, between what was and what could be. And part of that gap is that what Sandy achieved, and you know I’m the first one to admit this was frankly parasitic on the logistical capacities of late capitalism, right? That hack of the Amazon wedding registry was brilliant. But had Amazon not been there, it would not have worked. Had UPS not had access to its independent fuel stocks, those trucks would not been able to move through the city and able to deliver those parcels to 520 Clinton. So your question about sustainability, the ultimate answer in this sense doesn’t look like Occupy Sandy because my deep conviction is that in relatively short order we will not have the kind of access to things like Amazon and things like UPS that we do now, and that there will be a progressive process of attrition that unfolds across the experience of everyday life by way of which we’re just not going to have access to these things in quite the same way. Knock on wood, you know, but my sense is that these things do not, you know they’re not long for the world in their present robustness. [00:22:16][81.2]

Mary Rowe: [00:22:17] Right. [00:22:17][0.0]

Adam Greenfield: [00:22:17] And so you really begin to have to ask, okay, well, if you’re not going to be able to really cleverly draw on this wedding registry, where are you going to get the material resources that you need to take care of people? [00:22:28][10.9]

Mary Rowe: [00:22:29] So what do you think? [00:22:29][0.5]

Adam Greenfield: [00:22:30] So, you know, I don’t know to what degree you’re immersed in the discourse around degrowth. [00:22:34][3.8]

Mary Rowe: [00:22:35] Yeah, yeah. [00:22:35][0.3]

Adam Greenfield: [00:22:35] So I’ll just explain for your listeners who might not be familiar with the term. Degrowth is an emerging way of thinking about economics. And the fundamental idea of it is that we have- allowed to be coupled the idea of GDP growth and human thriving. And degrowth at its heart for me is merely a way of decoupling those things and saying that human thriving and the cause and the desire to live a life of genuine comfort and thriving has very, very little to do with material growth and the constant overproduction of things, the churn of our economy. Degrowth is a way of thinking about reusing the things that we already have, that already exist. I’m sure in every city in the developed world, there are a decent number of underutilized Peloton bikes that somebody bought for Christmas and has been hanging their clothing on. [00:23:36][60.4]

Mary Rowe: [00:23:37] During Covid and they’re sitting there. [00:23:37][0.0]

Adam Greenfield: [00:23:37] Sure, exactly. Every one of those bikes is an electric generator. Every single last one with a little bit of tinkering. When your power goes down, that bike is a power resource. So degrowth is ultimately a way of looking at human relations, but also material things and saying, what could we make of this that we haven’t had to before. [00:23:56][19.2]

Mary Rowe: [00:23:57] So, Adam, I have a very, very practical example of this. I had a knee injury this week and a couple weeks ago, and one of my neighbors brought me a gout stool. I didn’t have a gout, but I couldn’t bend my leg, which meant getting up and down very difficult. And she had it in her basement, and her mother had used it and she knew where it was. And as you’re suggesting, these kinds of local improvising, you know, what have we got? What, you know, our colleague Zeta Cobb always says, what do we love? What can we work with, what are the assets we’ve got? So if we go back, I’m just conscious of how we can sort of tie this in with the broader discussion. If we can find ways to relocalize, I think that’s what you’re suggesting, and to create the kinds of connections so that we find out what we have collectively. Is that also part of the lifehouse, is that it’ll morph into different things and it brings us together at a hyper local level to problem solve? Create opportunity? Is that part of the thesis? [00:24:55][58.6]

Adam Greenfield: [00:24:57] Yeah, very much so. I don’t think about problem solving because I don t believe in problems and solutions. I think that we’re actually very, very lucky in life if we are confronted with something as neatly bounded and discreet as a problem that we might actually be able to solve. What I’ve learned from Donella Meadows and the complexity theorists over the course of my encounter with them is that most of the issues that we contend with in life are actually in the nature of messes, and there’s nothing you can do with a mess but manage it. Right. With that said, you’re fundamentally exactly right about what my intent is. It is about as a political value, but also as a practical reality, bringing power back to the neighborhood, real dispositive power, over the distribution, the allocation of matter and energy and information. That’s exactly what it’s about. People always ask me, you know, when I do an event, they’ll raise their hand and literally I would say 50% of the time, the very first question I get asked is, okay, you’ve sold me on this. It’s great. I love the vision. We’re a very long way from that. How do I get started? And I say, look, it’s a cliche by now and I wish I knew who said this first because I would give them full credit for it. The most radical thing you can possibly do is knock on your neighbour’s door and learn their name. I mean, so many of us don’t even know our neighbor’s names. And so it begins. But frankly, the move toward the lifehouse begins with something that’s risky, with something that is awkward and makes you vulnerable, you know, psychologically and maybe depending on who you are and where you live, more than psychological. It is asking a lot of people to do this. But we’re lucky enough to live on a block where we have a robust WhatsApp group. And so from that WhatsApp group, I’ve built a map of every house on our block and the of people who live there. Are there kids who live there? Are there elderly folks who live there? Are there pets? Are their people who have special medical needs? You know, you begin to model what your capacities are and what skills you have access to. And you begin to take inventory of what material resources you have to work with. And these things together are the gestation of I mean, you know, the life house is already there an embryo, even if it isn’t there as a reality yet. [00:27:23][146.5]

Mary Rowe: [00:27:24] I mean, we all have to be a lifehouse. I guess that’s part of what you’re saying. And I appreciate so much the meat on the bones you’ve put here, the way you’ve framed what’s possible by looking at examples that we saw just organically develop in communities that had a sudden extraordinary event and rallied. And I think the questions that we all have now is can we sustain this when we’re outside of a crisis before the next one? And your WhatsApp group sounds to me like you’re laying down the kind of social infrastructure. So that if any kind of threat is to occur, you’re going to be better equipped to respond collectively. [00:27:58][34.3]

Adam Greenfield: [00:27:59] I think that’s exactly right. I mean, it starts in relation. You know, the thing that I always point out about Occupy Sandy, people were like, wow, this thing came out of nowhere. How is it that like, you know, 48 hours after landfall, you already had all these, you know, distribution centers and hubs and resources set up? And I’m like, no, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It was built atop a set of existing relations. And those relations had been forged in the heat of something pretty intense, you know, Occupy Wall Street, the occupation of Zuccotti Park. And then they went latent for almost a year. But they were able to be reactivated very quickly. And my argument to people, when I say the thing about going and knocking on your neighbor’s doors and learning their names, they’re like, yeah, but then what? I’m like, well, I think you’ll find that it’s much easier to go back to somebody if you need a pump to pump out your basement or if you to plug your CPAP machine in somewhere, whatever it should happen to be. [00:28:54][55.1]

Mary Rowe: [00:28:55] Or you need a gout stool. [00:28:56][0.9]

Adam Greenfield: [00:28:57] Or you needed a gouts stool. If you have these existing relations. So the fabric of relations is, I think, a genuinely radical thing to begin building. And again, communities are heterogeneous, communities are diverse, people are not necessarily psychically oriented toward the realities that we’re talking about. And what I say is, ultimately, that doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter If you have any questions or other problems, please post them in the comments section below. Doesn’t even matter if they’re, you know, given over to some kind of strange conspiracy theory about things. What matters is that the relation exists and that you can call upon it. Vulnerable people, people with, you, know, who are, for whatever reason, from a background that makes them feel unsafe about doing this, they’re like, well, I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that. I get that. I really do understand that. There is always, anytime you open a conduit, you know, energies can pass both ways through it. This is not a Pollyanna story, right? So it’s not, I don’t want to, you know, give the impression that, you now, it’s all like an Amish barn raising 24 by seven and that, everything is always golden and grand. Relation is hard work. Relation means communicating across profound difference. It means communicating across differences of class and ethnicity and background and culture and politics. It means, communicating across yawning gaps, sometimes of privilege. It means communicating ultimately with those who are different from one another and most of us are not trained in that and do not have much experience in that. [00:30:38][100.9]

Mary Rowe: [00:30:39] Yeah, on that on that challenging note, I just want to thank you for raising all these important questions and giving people a sense of possibility. And I think the reality that we’re facing, all the things that are out of our control, or sometimes feel like they’re out of control. I always say that when things go low, we go local, just to reattach ourselves to the people around us and to looking to our neighbors in place. So, and thank you, for joining City Talk. I’m just delighted that we had a chance to chat. [00:31:04][25.4]

Adam Greenfield: [00:31:05] You’re very welcome. And please, you know, if any of your listeners do pick up the book, if you read it, if you have further questions, you know, I guess you know how to find me. I’m very easy to find. And I do encourage people to reach out. [00:31:16][11.4]

Mary Rowe: [00:31:20] City Talk is a podcast from the Canadian Urban Institute produced by Antica Productions. Our producer is Kevin Sexton and our executive producers are Laura Regehr and Stuart Cox. If you’re enjoying this show, please give us a rating and review it in your podcast app. You can also follow CUI, the Urban Institute on YouTube and find a video version of this show and other content like it. I’m Mary Rowe, I happen to be the CEO of CUI. We’ll be back in two weeks for another episode of City Talk. What’s working, what’s not, and what needs to be next for the places we live in. [00:31:20][0.0]

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5 Key
Takeaways

1. The Lifehouse Concept Reimagines Local Resilience

Adam Greenfield introduced the lifehouse, a new kind of institution that acts as both a refuge in times of crisis and a vibrant community hub in everyday life. Drawing inspiration from the response to Superstorm Sandy, he described how ordinary people, not official agencies, organized sophisticated relief through shared space and self-organization. Lifehouses can provide power, shelter, services like childcare, and serve as logistical centres, designed to be adaptable and democratic—deeply embedded in neighbourhood culture and need.

2. Mutual Aid Is Powerful, But Needs Sustained Social Infrastructure

Greenfield argued that the most effective disaster response arises from pre-existing neighbourhood relationships and mutual aid, not top-down systems. His experience with Occupy Sandy showed how grassroots action can rapidly mobilize resources and support, outpacing formal agencies in both agility and compassion. Embedding this capability requires ongoing connections, such as local WhatsApp groups or neighbourhood mapping, that can “go latent” but spring to action in crisis.

3. Local Assets and Adaptation Over Dependence on External Systems

A key lesson from the Occupy Sandy effort was the limitation of relying on large institutions, logistics companies, and technology platforms, which may not be available in future disasters. Greenfield promoted a relocalization mindset, where neighbourhoods identify and repurpose their own underused resources—from electric bikes as generators to shared medical equipment—decreasing dependence on distant corporate supply chains.

4. Democratized, Participatory Organization Is Crucial

The lifehouse concept is rooted in anarchist principles of self-organization and democratic assembly rather than formal hierarchies. Greenfield described how consensus-based, peer-driven structures enable more responsive and relevant aid distribution, bypassing the paternalism and inflexibility of traditional aid organizations. This “structure without imposed order” can help communities tailor support to individuals’ real needs, treating people as equals rather than passive recipients.

5. Social Ties Are the Foundation of Community Preparedness

Greenfield emphasized that the most “radical” and impactful preparation for disaster is building real relationships with neighbours. Starting with something as simple as learning each other’s names and mapping local capacities creates the foundation for resilience. This “social infrastructure” allows communities to manage ongoing challenges (“messes,” not problems with neat solutions), bridging differences and enabling collective care—even before a crisis occurs.