Upon seeing this part of UW's new and huge student housing project...
I thought of something Mike Davis said three or so years ago:
On November 6, 2008, the urbanist Mike Davis delivered a lecture at the University of Washington. (Read his books City of Quartz and Planet of Slums—they will make you a better person.) The lecture was about how humans had seriously fucked up the environment. But there was hope. What could save our world? "Just look around you," said Davis. "The University of Washington is a small utopian city that economizes on residential space, they are called dorms, within public environments for learning, research, performance, and even human reproduction. Its dense physical shell, which is situated on a modest but beautiful campus footprint with multiple public transit links, offers the potential to achieve radical per-capita reductions in energy use, waste, and carbon emissions that would be impossible within a sprawling suburb of the same population...Socialism is not something you go to; it's something that's always already there. This is the essence of my politics, urbanism, and sociobiology. This is exactly why I could never be a Leninist. The project of socialism should not be a road but a mirror.
