Description

Rooms is a story of our transition from mobility to sedentary lifestyles and the cultural, political, and economic changes we've experienced. From the time of hunter-gatherers to slum dwellers in Manila we have a long history that can be understood in terms of freedom of movement. From creativity to commerce, our lives changed dramatically when we stopped moving. The sedentary population ballooned, leaving billions housed in slums and millions homeless.

Mobility runs deep in our evolutionary history. From our beginnings as a species our small bands were on the move. About 10,000 years ago Agriculture hobbled us. Over millennia, we gradually relinquished our traditional mobility by living in permanent rooms. For millennia our world has been constructed from rooms and each generation tells a story of their experience in the never-ending, unsuccessful struggle to escape. Roomsdescribe the processes that shaped and modified the necessity of personal movement to survive. Staying in a fixed place came with a number of costs. In psychological, political and social ways we have found ourselves paying a high rate interest imposed by a culture of room. This book is an exploration of the forces, processes, and methods in a newly constructed environment for a domesticated species of homo sapiens.