Lifehouses in the Global East(s)

With his latest book Adam Greenfield does two important things. In its first part, he weaves together the threads of climate emergency, new municipalism, and social infrastructures, which, in the second part of the book, he supplements with a compelling call to action. These topics have lately gained a lot of currency within human geography. Greenfield's contribution thus lies not in novelty, but in skillfully juxtaposing them to offer a thought-provoking story about inequality, power, finality, care, and self-governance and suggesting what we can do in the face of climate catastrophe.

In this prefigurative act, he sketches a blueprint of a solution that could help us survive—the Lifehouses. They are imagined to be multi-purpose infrastructural neighborhood centers, powered with renewable energy, equipped to be as self-sufficient as possible, managed in non-hierarchical, direct democratic ways and, possibly, federated. The network of such places could not only support us every day and in the darkest of days but would also be a kernel of a post-capitalist future.

Greenfield's work is rich and multifarious, it touches upon numerous issues which merit commentary, e.g. feasibility and sustainability of radically democratic initiatives, hijacking the climate change discourse by the technocratic class, or the role of state in our demise or salvation. By necessity, I limit the review to few matters only. In what follows, I offer a post-socialist (Cima & Sovová, 2022) reading of Greenfield's book's two aspects. First, I use this perspective to comment on a pinch of salt spoiling this otherwise excellent contribution—the Western gaze. Then, still with the post-socialist lens, I reflect on the possibility of rethinking the state along new municipalist lines and involving it in enabling self-governance—a feat Greenfield, with good reasons, would probably see as unwise. To that end, I use the concept of subsidiarity, which is conspicuously absent in the book, but also in the broader literature of new municipalism and radical democracy.

The first matter which I would like to note is the book's orientation towards the Global North, even if the author considerately analyses other geographies. When I was reading it, the repeated use of “we” bothered me. For whom did the author write? On page 22, e.g. Greenfield remarked “(…) prolonged and cascading disruptions to the systems that undergird the material abundance we are used to.” (my emphasis)—but a question which hangs unanswered is “whose material abundance”? The author argues that the “old order” has been shattered and Hurricane Sandy made that acutely visible. It became difficult to deny the necessity to contend with the “end of the systems that have defined the ordinary through all our lives” (p.51), with the Long Emergency to use Greenfield's term. The author is by no means insensitive to the condition of the less fortunate, but it begs stressing that this order was a privilege enjoyed by few people in specific geographies and times—an order of abundance. For most people, the Long Emergencies of various sorts—natural disasters, wars, or poverty—have been the daily experience for extended periods of time. For example, the extreme weather caused by climate change has been ravaging places close to the equator for the better part of the last five decades. Here I will briefly discuss a Long Emergency of different sort, one of the post-socialist Global East(s) (Cima & Sovová, 2022), and dating back to the 1940s.

Post-socialist countries do now enjoy the aforementioned abundance, but empty store shelves of the 1980s, daily threats posed by the authoritarian Soviet regime, or scars of World War II which has traumatized these nations are a living memory (Bilewicz, 2024), they are marks of experiencing Long Emergencies. Greenfield is right in arguing that in moments of distress people are capable of incredible feats of solidarity and resourcefulness. The tragedies of war and real state oppression were met with bottom-up cooperation of e.g. Poles who not only created an underground state, judiciary system and universities, but also procured food which the state failed to provide. Finally, it gave birth to the Solidarity labor union and its democratic movement which toppled the Soviet regime.

But we need to be careful not to idealize such tragic moments. They may be conducive to a sense of community, but also to individualism, indifference, and violence resulting from the need of self-survival (Bilewicz, 2024). What is more, as any social arrangement, even the most generous acts of solidarity can turn. Poles welcomed, in a largely bottom-up, community-led way, over one million Ukrainian refugees since the Russian invasion started in 2022. But as the Long Emergency of the war and immigration became the new norm, that solidarity started to be tainted by acts of resentment and opportunism.

What I want to highlight here are two things. First, capitalist cornucopia is rather an exception than a rule. That it may be taken away by the climate-driven dismantling of supply chains and human settlements, that the state would not do much about it, and that people would need cope with it by themselves, for many will be a familiar situation. Second, dealing with the consequences of the Long Emergency can bring out the best of us, but it can also bring out the worst. With these remarks in mind I wonder how feasible is the idea of Lifehouses beyond the Global North?

The second element of the book which I would like to discuss, and with which I try to grapple in my own work, is the possibility of nurturing self-governance by the state, or at least their co-existence. The disavowal of the state by Greenfield is in many respects warranted. He argues that state institutions are anathema to radical democracy and self-governance and that Lifehouses can only succeed as communal, anarchist projects. This chimes with the broader literature of new municipalism and urban democracy (see, e.g. Beveridge & Koch, 2023). But while it seems to be the case in the Global North, I would argue that excluding the state, especially at the local level, from considerations of community-based self-governance is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In doing so, I echo the observation of Giovannini and Griggs (2024: 993) that marginalization of local government has discouraged inquiries into “its capabilities to lead processes of local democratic transformation and resistance.”

Here, again, I invoke the post-socialist experience. In a parallel to Greenfield's argument, faced with the (Long) Emergency of German oppression during World War II, and later the Soviet one, Polish democratic opposition contemplated a liberated state underpinned by municipalist and syndicalist ideas (Radomski, 2017) and “construed local governments to be a form of social selforganization oriented against the state, rather than (...) a public authority acting within state structures” (Regulski, 2003: 24). In this, the opposition, according to Andrew Arato (1981: 5), “aimed at creating a self-governing society without the repressive presence of the state or market.”

The key institutional component of Poland's transition to democracy was local self-government endowed with “general responsibility,” meaning that the scope of municipal activity “extends to all public matters not reserved in laws for other entities” (Regulski, 2003: 105). This design is undergird by the principle of subsidiarity, a “hierarchy-in-reverse, which prioritizes the proximity of the government to the citizen, denies any dependence between the types of government for they are only expected to support each other” (Cieślak, 2025: 14). While in Greenfield's narrative the scales of governance are vertical, in this set up, they are horizontal. This co-existence is not perfect and the further away we move from the reform which implemented it, the stronger the tension between self-government and the state, especially with right-wing parties in power. Institutions of self-government, while not ideal, serve Poles as an enabler of civic participation in the administration, a school of democracy, and a necessary barrier to the omnipotence of the state (Regulski, 2003). Lately, together with the central government, they are organizing the training of citizens in rapid responses to crisis situations, including potential Russian aggression.

I wonder how the ambiguous post-socialist legacy, both affective, comprising intergenerational trauma and distrust towards the state (Bilewicz, 2024), and material, such as state-supported urban allotment gardens which enable a degree of food self-provision, will influence this region's responses to the Long Emergency. How will the Lifehouses look here? Or maybe other self-governing institutions will be used?

Having recently taken part in a vote on a financially challenging climate-adaptation project of a housing cooperative founded in 1957, I am hopeful. Its result was 486 to 6 in favor of jointly shouldering this investment. Discussing the risks and voting together with my neighbors was joyful. Adam Greenfield is right—doing something with the consequences of the climate and economic perils in a self-organized way, together with our fellow sufferers (Rorty, 1989), provides glimmers of hope in the gloom of our late capitalist / post-socialist condition. In that moment we did not feel quite as powerless.