The Baya Manifesto

We spend most of our time in our neighborhoods but we don't care about it enough.

We've offloaded collective agency to the governement/system and we're too focused on individual agency. By doing so, we've given up not only our power to change our neighborhoods but also we lack understanding of how our neighborhoods work and what does it need to thrive.

People should be able to understand what shapes their lives and neighborhoods and have the ability to change them for better. The knowledge and tools to do so should remain within reach, with the freedom to question, teach, repair and remake.

Systems built for scale often concentrate knowledge and agency. They flatten place into abstraction and make people consumers of tools they cannot inspect or adapt. Knowledge held in communities, practices and living environments is ignored, enclosed or lost.

We believe that hyperlocal knowledge has social and economic value because context determines what works. We need to surface more of it and make it actionable.

This knowledge becomes a commons through care. Documenting it with consent, attribution and context. Building on top of it for the public.

We must create more conditions to learn from elders, practitioners and one another and to share tools and space. Make room for slow craft, urgent responses, serious work and silly experiments.

Build small pieces of the future locally, test them in public, document what happens. Let the people involved shape what comes next.

Favour care over convenience. Embodiment over abstraction. Locality over universality. Commons over enclosure. Creation over consumption. Community over isolation. Distributed capability over concentrated expertise.

Let’s cook.