13
In neighbors we trust - Commitment Pools
(solarpunknerdingclub.substack.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
13 points (93.3% liked)
Solarpunk Urbanism
3477 readers
1 users here now
A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
Checkout these related communities:
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
This reminded me of time-banks.
It was used a lot in South American cities, at some point during the economic crisis of 2008. In practice it was working like this: people would declare in a sort of ledger what they can do and for how many hours, as well as what they needed and for how many hours. Everybody's time was equaly valuable, no matter what they did.
It was going so well that they tried to accomodate stuff that would not fit in the time category, like renting a house. So they printed some sort of "contracts"/"money". Government and mafia, printed counterfit and the project never recovered since.
(It's been quite some time since I looked into this topic, so if I don't remember something accurately, please let me know)
There's many interesting examples linked on that wiki page, especially the Cincinnati Time Store (1827–1830).
Time banks have always sounded cool to me on the surface, maybe as a way to organize volunteering, but when it comes to it being a full replacement for money... I'm extremely disabled and have been since I was a child. I can do work (of any kind) for maybe an hour a day if I'm having some really good days. Where does someone like me fit into the system? Do I just... die?