Rachel Patel

The House of Counter Cultures questions the future of local politics in a post-capitalist society asking if self-governed communities might be the future? The networked society and indeed the information age will allow new economic structures to proliferate, and its time we started to consider the post-capitalist ecologies that may prevail in the near future.

Positioned in an expectant flood plain, the new house of governance manifests itself as an algal pleasure garden. Using Cyanobacteria algae to cultivate blue petroleum - a wetland-made biodiesel, the House of Counter Cultures offers autonomy to its constituency. Pumping phosphates from the proposed Super-sewer and using Tower Hamlet’s stagnate canal networks as breeding pools.

In order to generate a new kind of political space, the House of Counter Cultures proposes a series of point interventions across Bromley-By-Bow, which will disrupt current metabolisms. A neocybernetic masterplan works with the existing community to plant seeds of feedback networks, which will alleviate the tensions of distrust brewed from the crisis of capitalism and disperse local policy decisions via the cloud networks.

The house of governance releases cultures into Limehouse Cut; cybernetic linked buoys then monitor algal blooms. The Bow lock site harvests premature algae and enhances growth through its instruments, which inform open space systems for informal civic use. Algal water is used as a cooling system for server farms, hosting the digital networks. Dense algae is then agitated below the debate chamber, where the digitally residing community can gather.