049: Every Neighborhood A University

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Inhabitants of other worlds looking down on our earth for the first time may very likely deduce that this planet is dominated by a civilization of cars, and we humans are just puddles of mud hidden inside. We live in a world turned upside-down—a utopia for automobiles, where instead of being communities built for freedom & flourishing, our cities are glittering monuments to petroleum, patriarchy, and profit. But buried under the grotesque mélange of cul-de-sacs, commodities, and mind-numbing commutes that define our suburban dystopias, rest designs for liberation hiding in plain sight. Where social reproduction is not subordinated to the production of profit. Where food, shelter, healthcare, and education are all decommodified. And where the unconditional and universal provision of these human rights is the non-negotiable foundation for institutionalizing freedom and unleashing human potential. In this episode, Matt & Jesse embark on a dialectical synthesis of ideas, weaving together the liberatory notions of a</span> <strong><em>Feminism for The 99%</em></strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">,</span> <strong><em>The Right to The City</em></strong><span style= "font-weight: 400;">, and</span> <strong><em>Free Housing For All</em></strong> <span style="font-weight: 400;">into a conception of</span> <strong><em>The City of The Golden Square</em></strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">—by imagining every neighborhood as a university. This inventive world-building exercise illuminates a mixtape for the future, conjoining the joyful & egalitarian features of neighborhoods with the noble & emancipatory potentialities of universities. Paradoxically, despite histories of racist, colonial, and capitalist violence, along with ongoing plunder by the corporate neoliberal state, both neighborhoods and universities still carry seeds of emancipation and together offer a coherent set of social and spatial paradigms that prefigure the shape of a better tomorrow. Thinking about neighborhoods b