Nowtopia identifies a new basis for a shared experience of class. Specifically, the exodus from wage labor on one side, and the embrace of meaningful, freely chosen and "free" (unpaid) work on the other. A product of three decades of decomposition of the working class, nowtopians are different from "drop-outs" in general, or surplus populations that constitute the necessary "outside" to capital, in their conscious withdrawal from capitalist culture and concerted rejection of the value form. In emergent convivial "nowtopian" communities, largely grounded in unpaid practical work which creatively meets needs such as transportation (the bicycling subculture), food (urban gardening/agriculture), and communication (open-source communities), we see a gradual reversal of the extreme atomization of modern life. While facing the threat of corruption via re-integration into the system, this constellation of practices, if taken together, is an elaborate, decentralized, uncoordinated collective research and development effort exploring a potentially post-capitalist, post-petroleum future.
This article surveys social movements in San Francisco that have resisted and blocked various development schemes from the 1960s to the beginning of the 21st century. Notable examples include fights against redevelopment in the Fillmore and South of Market, gentrification in the Mission District, the campaign to save the International Hotel, the fight against “Manhattanization” of San Francisco through high rises downtown, the rise of community-based nonprofit housing developers alongside the establishment of rent control, and the contentious battles over space during the dot-com boom and bust from 1999 to 2000.
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