MANY

Start with problems. Problems are good. The collective city likes to multiply problems. It designs, not master plans, solutions and algorithms to eliminate problems, but rather organs of interplay to combine problems. Problems leaven and catalyze each other. Problems that politicians and markets leave in their wake are resources. When Urban spaces fail politically or financially, they become available for interplay. Shedding legal or econometric abstractions, they offer a parallel portfolio of heavy, physical, situated values embedded in spaces — proximities, dispositions and risks in a wetter, hotter world. Five protocols of interplay are considered here. They start with need, disaster, risk and overdevelopment as raw materials. MANY is an online platform to facilitate migration through an exchange of needs. It allows cities to attract a changing influx of talent matching their needs to the needs of mobile people for mutual benefit. Social Capital Credits allow communities to consider needs as currencies rather than deficits. Participatory Land Readjustment produces increased property value through spatial rearrangement. Two subtraction protocols demonstrate how to put the development machine into reverse in sensitive landscape and areasof climate risk.