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Middle – Mitigating the Meta-crisis of Polarisation, Nonunderstanding and Intolerance as Products of Underlying Differences

Part 2 Project 2021
André Backlund
Umeå University | Sweden
The meta-crisis reveals itself in all other crises, as an underlying layer of increasing polarisation and subsequent inability to understand individuals whose values clash against our own. We need to facilitate a middle.

Discussion has the potential to mitigate the meta-crisis. Currents forms of discussion as substantiated by the contemporary Western society do not give rise to perpetual discussion between individuals of different values. Instead favouring hivishness, constantly at risk of turning into echo chambers - the scourge of discussion.

Radical Middle sets up a series of archipelagos, extracting individuals from their echo chambers and plunging them into discussion. A model working against the otherwise segregating city is constructed by locating and reshuffling values in the spatial, using a three-point model relying on relationships between class status, apartment size and individual values. Having located values in the spatial, these are reshuffled into the Village. A collective perpetually working against echoes.

As above, so below, awkward and rupturing public moments occur. Hyper-populated conditions hijack our hivish instincts, forcing otherwise separated and echoing groups into discussion along soft, plinth-like transitions.

Perpetually occurring moments of discussion between individuals of different values leave behind a web of understanding spreading throughout society, mitigating the meta-crisis.

André Backlund

Tutor(s)



2021
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