The title of this Guardian article on the city of Kingston (population: 23 000) in New York State is borderline clickbait. But after reading it, you do see their point.
“The streets of uptown are bustling with eateries and, of late, places to buy velvet halter dresses, vintage boleros, CBD tinctures, and LCD tea kettles with precision-pour spouts. But strolling by 10-year-old Half Moon Books, passersby might glimpse a different side of this city. The bookshop’s windows exclusively feature nonfiction on the end of the world as we know it. “I started out putting together a window of utopias,” says bookseller Jessica DuPont, “but somehow I ended up with the death throes of capitalism.”
And:
“From my vantage in the deep south, it looks as though, one mission at a time, Kingston is piecing together the infrastructure for a self-sufficient community – one that wants to survive the possibly impending systemic collapse we nervously joke about…”.
I’ve been to the Detroit that reporters have salivated over, gushing about how it’s “coming back”, and seen the reality: small corridors of development surrounded by a vast city in which you just feel plain unsafe on the street, even during the day. So is it mostly in the reporter’s mind here too?
“DuPont at Half Moon doesn’t believe the average Kingstonite is actively battening down the hatches for a societal implosion. “But,” she says, “I do think the economic pressures–especially skyrocketing housing costs–are causing people to look to new ways to network and support each other.”
What is interesting with Kingston in the context of the US is that back in 2010—following the 2008 recession—they started a festival called O+, a week-long extravaganza of street art, live music, and… free healthcare provided to the artists involved.
Other local initiatives include the Hudson Valley Farm Hub for pushing an ecologically resilient food system, and a system of bike trails going between local towns and local farms.
It’s a bottom-up solution that they hope will spread:
“The way you change a system nationally is you do thousands of local things, and eventually the system evolves,” says O+ executive director Joe Concra […] Every time I walk into the clinic, I think: ‘Oh yeah, it is possible to build a new system.’ I refuse to believe we can’t. So, we keep doing it.”
It’s a good bunch of actions to take even if Capitalism as we know it does not collapse like a house of cards and daily life becomes like Cormac McCarthy’s book, The Road. Which is probably sitting in the window of Kingston’s Half Moon bookstore as we speak.
[Photo credits: for the town photo: Chris Boswell/Alamy, and for the street art photo: O+]