Penser les Communs: Michel Bauwens à Berlin

Michel Bauwens interviews Nikos Salingaros

MB. The peer-to-peer relational dynamic represents the basic human freedom for humans to connect to each other and to engage in actions without permissions. It can flourish in global cyber-collectives, but also on a local scale, particularly in the interstices of the mainstream system, in places where control is the weakest. Because of this paradoxical effect, it is possible to consider slum dynamics as a peer-to-peer system, which is the point of view of new urbanists like Michael Mehaffy, Nikos Salingaros, and Prakash M. Apte. They are defending the collective intelligence and value creation that have been constructed organically by slum dwellers. Another aspect is worth mentioning.

Nikos Salingaros on Peer to Peer Urbanism

Interview with Michel Bauwens.

Q1: We've been covering some of your work on a new 'peer to peer' urbanism in our blog. Perhaps we can explore this connection further. First of all, do you agree with that assessment of your approach being in line with the peer to peer ethos. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to your current thinking and practice. Finally, could you also what you think of my characterization of your work as neotraditional. What I mean is that premodern and what I would call 'trans'modern thinking are both concerned with the primacy of value and the immaterial, and that freed from the modernist rejection of all things traditional, we can now have an open mind and freely draw from thousands of years of human experience.