Ecology of autarky: transformation is not in grand strategies but in daily tactics

Abstract: Autarchy, so often evoked in contexts of energy and geopolitical crises, has always coincided with architecture itself, up to the great processes of de-territorialisation and the construction of the distribution network in the Second Industrial Revolution. In this article, autarchy is investigated in its complex and remote roots, to be offered as a device for authentic ecological and social transformation. It is an antidote to a centralised, coercive and panoptic vision—the European Green Deal—which, by working with standards, ends up contradicting the very principles underlying ecology and the intrinsic value of heritage. Autarchy is in fact based on the principle of the singularity of the relationship between the subject and the territory and, precisely in this collusion, has constructed the specificity of places, in spite of the homogeneous and neutral space of the top-down vision of technological capitalism. The research is interested in making the home not the finished product of ecological capitalism, but the starting point, the activator of a new process of connivance between inhabitant and habitat in which the subject is called upon to realise himself as artifex, recovering skills that redeem him from the current diminutio of homo consumens. The status of homo faber is a way of defusing this process, an attempt to suspend the uniformity of capitalist technical thinking, now deeply absorbed as something natural. That suspension of the obvious is a form of self-sufficiency, of regaining singularity.