What Does Influencing Culture Entail?

Lilly Byrd
3 min readDec 19, 2020

This past class Precedent-Collage exercise and thinking about the Green New Deal has had me contemplating what kinds of social/cultural futures we may be looking at with climate change. I recently finished a cultural reconnaissance study of the community around a small river city, and culture is so hard to define when it is happenstance over short periods in a community. A good friend of mine used to be in fashion school and would tell me about her “fashion forecasting” class. I was super interested in the fact that this was even a course at the time, and have thought about for years how popular culture can be forecasted and we can use this for the greater good, rather than to sell people stuff, as our world so loves to do. I guess the first thing that comes to mind is Vanlife or the Tiny House Movement. Living in a van or tiny house became really romanticized in the past six years under this vagabond, digital nomad, free spirited lifestyle. Vans still guzzle gas, but often these are offgrid living units outfitted with solar, and using far fewer resources than a house or apartment. I wonder if these are baby steps in the right direction. (Of course, vanlife still relies on space to park and sometimes a gym membership to shower).

In Austin there’s a community that branched off of the nonprofit Mobile Loaves and Fishes called Community First! Village, and it’s basically a master planned community for the chronically homeless, and they provide small lots for Microhomes that the community and person receiving the home, helps build. There is also transitional RV space, community buildings and an outdoor theater where they have public movie nights. They also have garden space, and a small labyrinth. Because it is a non profit and requires a lot of land, it is quite a ways outside of Austin, but they community has a free shuttle for its residents. I think this is a really amazing idea, and I feel like it’s been successful and could serve as a small, micro-community justice model.

I’ve always wanted to start a tool-sharing coop or get a big piece of land for people to use as transitional living space to work on/live in their tiny homes or Van conversions. RV parks of course, are the existing versions this, but I imagine a specific form to it. I imagine a radial formation with a geodesic dom or Quonset hut type of communal building in the center. Have some residents live there transitionally while others rent the space for projects. Give it all the things a tiny home can’t have like a vegetable garden, a dog park and maybe a small pool to save energy on hot days. It’d be amazing for there to be a grassroots network of communities like this across the country so that people could move between them (maybe there are and I just don’t know it).

I made a simple idea a big part of my manifesto, and maybe it was a little too dreamy and lofty but it was the clothesline as a flag; Using the symbol of the clothesline to show pride in reducing unnecessary use, and living a simpler lifestyle. Not a groundbreaking idea, but it’s got me thinking a lot about identity’s role in recent/local micro culture (and fashion I guess), but just how we think of ourselves, who we aspire to be, and how we express that is really powerful and contagious. I want to contemplate on what makes this successful.

( — Just to add an example where local culture rejected what could have been a utopian idea, but the whole Lime / Bird electric scooter fad. I was not surprised to see people in Austin treat them like trash, since they appeared in hoards out of nowhere and had a very big-tech branding style in a city whose residents are a little quirky, but I was very surprised and disappointed that people were throwing them into the river and creeks and natural bodies of water. That made me sick. — Austin is a city that’s growing so quickly that it can hardly maintain the culture it once had, and because of this it’s hard to know where things are going and to forecast what makes people receptive to responsibly adapting to the changes that we will see with climate change in the next decades).

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