Public Luxury in practice
Phil Jones
30th April 2025
Introduction
Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek have done the most to offer a clear typography of what ‘public luxury’ might mean beyond simply reviving the public sector. In their book After Work, they include: 1) ‘infrastructural extravagance’ such as magnificent parks, museums and libraries available to all; 2) ‘the collectivisation of some domestic work’ such as cooking, cleaning, storage and child-rearing in shared facilities; 3) ‘the communal ownership of tools’ – particularly, expensive items such as automated vacuum cleaners.
Hester and Srnicek’s focus is largely urban and domestic space, but ‘public luxury’ can apply to a great many intangible elements of the public realm too. There are many other crucial categories that could be added to their typology, but here let’s focus on: 4) ‘aesthetic abundance’, the potential for enriching and expanding the field of sensory experience; and 5) ‘epistemic freedom’, the resources to think, interpret and, ultimately, read and write about the world.
The account that follows will embellish – and slightly adapt – Hester and Srnicek’s categories, as well as explore ‘aesthetic abundance’ and ‘epistemic freedom’, to paint a clearer picture of what public luxury looks like in practice.
1. Infrastructural extravagance
Infrastructural extravagance implies grand and abundant public spaces, welcoming and generous as much as they are awe-inspiring, balancing curiosity and comfort in equal measure. These spaces might include attractive parks, magnificent train stations and elegant public housing.
An example of the latter is the Smithson’s architectural developments from the fifties and sixties. As Owen Hatherley describes in Militant Modernism, ‘it would be dense, it would be urban, and while it would unashamedly house the poor, be part of the new Welfare State, it would be glamorous’. Robin Hood Gardens, a now internationally recognised exemplar of brutalist architecture, is a contender for the Smithsons’ fullest realisation of public chic. A vast concrete monolith built to be ‘as dramatic and obvious as an aqueduct’, the estate was meant to be unashamedly futuristic, with ‘streets in the sky’. Though now somewhat dilapidated and dispiriting, the development was originally built with the intention of social housing becoming the aesthetic vanguard in urban design. Inside, the accommodation is spacious and built to foster a sense of cosy privacy. But the building itself, composed of hundreds of densely packed flats, was designed to create a public culture of conviviality and neighbourhood care.
Such spaces may have multiple social functions: ‘social condensers’ that bring together, say, flats, workspaces, canteens, and gardens. An obvious example is the Barbican, a building whose interweaving layers of housing, walkways, cafes, pubs and various other social amenities are continual sources of surprise and curiosity. Following the words of one twentieth century architect the complex was designed to ‘have certain features that would stimulate the transition to a socially superior mode of life—stimulate, but not dictate.’ The point is not to just cram many different kinds of social amenities together for the sake of profit – for example, the ‘mixed use development’ so popular under neoliberalism – but rather to foster new kinds of collective living by meeting multiple social needs in novel and innovative ways.
2. Socialisation of reproductive labour
In Vienna after the first world war, the Social Democratic city council built huge numbers of architecturally ambitious housing schemes that were a deliberate attempt to reshape domestic life. These complexes were equipped with healthcare facilities, laundries, kindergartens, gyms, lecture halls, workshops, gardens and libraries. These design choices deliberately sought to reduce the burden of domestic labour done by women in the home (Hester and Srnicek). They were an attempt to reverse what the theorist Kathi Weeks calls ‘the privatisation of care’:
‘the enormous amount of time, skill and energy devoted to childcare, eldercare, the care of the ill, the care of the disabled, self-care and community care, without which the economic system would not exist, is provided mostly free of charge, disproportionally by women, in the moments left outside of income generating work.’
Vienna’s social housing did not include shared kitchens. But these have been a common feature of experimental architecture throughout modern history, from the Soviet Union to early twentieth century New York. These experiments represent efforts to foster ‘kitchenless’ living. Private kitchens, Hester and Snricek point out, not only perpetuate gender inequalities but are also unsustainable. Cooking in individual families tends to create large amounts of food waste.
Equally, as the previous blog post in this series demonstrated, there have been successful and durable experiments with communal eating both in Europe and more widely around the globe. From the UK’s wartime British Restaurant scheme to Mexico’s current Social Kitchen program. Thinking beyond these experiments, we can imagine a domestic world organised by the principle of public luxury in which every community has free or affordable restaurants, cooking facilities and pantries and dining space.
The point of making cooking a communal activity, however, is not to do away with private kitchens entirely – many people find cooking an enjoyable activity. Rather, the aim is to foster a diversity of approaches, to decentre the private kitchen, so that those who do not wish to cook can instead visit community diners or share cooking responsibilities with other people in a communal kitchen.
More ambitiously, we can imagine a regime where care is no longer privatised and no longer takes place exclusively in the home. Public luxury means a society in which care is abundant rather than scarce. This would mean that every community has access to long-term care centres, sufficient and affordable childcare, as well as mental health services including affordable psychotherapy.
3. Communal ownership of commodities
Public luxury also entails a shift in how we view and engage with household and everyday objects. In recent years, borrowing items rather than buying them has offered struggling households a way to save money. ‘Libraries of Things’ are emerging across the UK, which distribute to local communities common household objects such as drills and industrial cleaners as well as film projectors and PAs and speakers – expensive items that households might need every so often but not every day. The phenomenon might be interpreted simply as a response to austerity and the cost-of-living crisis. But it also contains the seed of a world beyond unsustainable private ownership.
Unlike in some countries in Europe the UK’s initiatives are not publicly run. Rather, the gap in public provision of shared commodities has been filled by social enterprises such as the Library of Things. Though these are private ventures that rent items to their members – often at a reasonably low cost – they nonetheless point the way to a form of public luxury that grants everyone access to up-to-date products that are affordable and well-made. They indicate a future of guaranteed use rather than exclusive ownership.
The point is not to stop people from owning things, but rather to decentre private ownership and individual consumption. There are plenty of objects that we use irregularly that would be better shared among communities than privately owned. These objects could be disseminated in every community by a local, publicly-run library of things. The kinds of everyday items that might be distributed include: vacuums, printers, clothes making equipment such as sewing machines, musical instruments, cooking equipment, bikes, DIY and gardening tools, nursery equipment such as baby-changing units, pushchairs, prams and baby clothes. The fact that all of these items can already be rented either through social enterprises or for-profit companies demonstrates that there is significant demand for this kind of service. Rather, services that loan such items should be publicly owned and communally run so that they are free at the point of access and accountable to the needs of local communities.
4. Aesthetic abundance
Aesthetic abundance means in the simplest sense that aesthetic experiences are central to social life, that the world is designed to inspire meaning, new ideas, feelings and bodily experiences. It is the idea that social life is structured by spaces and institutions that inspire experiences, say, of collective joy, intense curiosity or, even, bewilderment. Art galleries, music venues, theatres, museums and community art centres allow us to have beautiful, strange, unexpected sensory experiences in the company of other people.
At the end of the twentieth century, neoliberalism repositioned culture as a consumer market of individual entrepreneurs and solipsistic pleasure seekers, rather than a collective process of creating meaning. This ‘creative industry’ has further devolved into the hyper individualised world of apps and content creation, where Netflix replaces the cinema and theatre, YouTube replaces gig venues, online art markets erode the need for gallery space and Spotify destroys the livelihoods of musicians.
As a result, cinemas, art galleries and gig venues are increasingly disappearing from the cultural landscape. In the world of individualised content creation, rather than collective cultural production, we end up with Spotify’s fake AI-generated artists, Netflix mega-flops, and ‘airspace’ – the algorithmically generated feeling of ‘placelessness’ that characterises the decoration of cafes, shops and homes the world over. This is culture as anaesthetic rather than aesthetic experience.
We don’t have to look far to find a different vision of aesthetic life. Indeed, aesthetic abundance is hardly a fantasy. Rather, it formed a central part of the lost utopias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kristin Ross argues that the Paris Commune was organised to make aesthetic experience a central feature of social life. Art and beauty were for all, rather than the privileged few. Similarly, in his account of the 1960s’ counterculture, Mark Fisher asserts that ‘an unprecedented aestheticization of everyday life’ characterised social reality as a whole. In places like Haight Ashbury and Drop City, we find capsule utopias of realities where everyone has the time to engage in artistic pursuits.
The cultural theorist Justin O’ Connor describes this kind of luxury as ‘lux’ – the illumination of human creative potential. It is not simply about consumption for pleasure’s sake, but the enjoyment of exploring the many possibilities of artistic production and participation. Here, we should not limit our imaginative efforts to traditional institutions but include past (and failed) attempts at experimental community art. An interesting historical precedent is Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace. Inspired by the new campus universities opening in the 1960s, Littlewood wanted to bring culture to everyone across the UK. Ambitiously discursive, the idea was to link art, science and entertainment in a space that was open to all and free of charge. In Littlewood’s own words:
“Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see how other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune in to what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting – or just lie back and stare at the sky.”
5. Epistemic freedom
The 1962 Education Act in the UK established a mandate in which tuition fees for higher education were paid by local authorities. The policy applied to all age groups and people from all backgrounds, essentially opening up the world of higher education to a significantly higher proportion of the population. It gave a larger pool of people the collective capacity to interpret, think, read and write about the world free of charge.
This form of public luxury might best be referred to as epistemic freedom, a term that names both the institutions and resources that exist to improve the general intelligence of society, to facilitate the joy of learning and to give people the means to reflect on their place in the world. This is not merely about cerebral experiences but also bodily ones, such as learning new skills – not necessarily for the labor market but also for the sake of it – like sewing or learning to play a musical instrument. In many respects, epistemic freedom represents a form of mobility, to move between jobs, interests and pursuits with minimal inhibition. This kind of freedom is made possible by: libraries, museums, archives, Wikipedia, free broadband and public events among other institutions and resources.
The private market makes scarce the resources required to interpret, think, read and write about the world. In thrall to the doctrine of neoliberalism, successive UK government’s unleashed a wave of privatisation that has turned libraries, museums – and education more broadly – into commodities that are unavailable to large numbers of the population. Epistemic freedom is about removing artificial scarcity so that these resources are widely available.
But it is also about inspiring a more imaginative, sustainable and collective vision of public learning. Europe’s ambitious library facilities – namely, the Oodi library and Ghent’s De Krook library – exemplify the idea of epistemic freedom. Both libraries include a vast collection of books and reading materials alongside radio and music studios, maker rooms that include laser cutters, 3D printers, sewing machines and soldering equipment and a free legal and adult education advice centre. The next blog post will explore in greater detail the ways that libraries exemplify the kinds of freedom discussed here.
Phil Jones is a Senior Researcher at the Autonomy Institute, and a member of our UBS Hub.