{"title":"Simon Elmer","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the thought-provoking works of Simon Elmer, exploring themes of architecture, culture, and societal change. A compelling voice for understanding the world around us. Browse his insightful books today.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"road-to-fascism-book-simon-elmer-9781471601729","title":"The Road to Fascism","description":"With the lifting of the thousands of regulations by which our lives were ruled for two long years there has been an understandable desire to believe that the coronavirus 'crisis' is over and we will return to something like an albeit new normal. But as new crises have sprung up to take its place -- war in the Ukraine, the so-called 'cost of living crisis' and the return of the environmental crisis -- it's increasingly difficult not to look back on 'lockdown' as the first campaign in a war that has not been declared by any government but is no less real for that. The willingness of our governments to use the forces of the state against their own populations on the justification of protecting us from ourselves signals a new level of authoritarianism -- and something like the return of fascism -- to the governmental, juridical and cultural forms of the formerly neoliberal democracies of the West, and one of the aims of this book is to examine the validity of this thesis. Its purpose in doing so, however, is not to contribute to an academic debate about the meaning of the term 'fascism', but rather to interrogate how and why the general and widespread moral collapse in the West over the past two-and-a-half years has been effected with such rapidity and ease, and to examine to what ends that collapse is being used. The more deliberate is the immiseration of the populations of Western democracies, the clearer it becomes that the war started by COVID-19 is not between nation states but a civil war waged against our institutions of democratic governance and the division of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary. Insofar as these institutions and this division are being dismantled and replaced by the rule of international technocracies that, under the cloak of the 'pandemic', have assumed increasing power over our lives since March 2020, this war represents a revolution in Western capitalism from the neoliberalism under which we have lived for the past forty years. Where it is heading with ever greater speed and finality, and which The Road to Fascism sets out to demonstrate, is the new totalitarianism of the Global Biosecurity State.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49535532040465,"sku":"GOR012863432","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51327680676113,"sku":"CIN1471601722VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52750239629585,"sku":"NIN9781471601729","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1471601722.jpg?v=1750956382"},{"product_id":"virtue-and-terror-book-simon-elmer-9781470902032","title":"Virtue and Terror","description":"Originally appearing between April 2020 and October 2021, these articles are a record of how, with the collaboration of a terrorised and virtuous public, a threat to public health that never existed was turned into a 'crisis', and on the justification of combatting it the 'vaccination' programme was implemented, laying the foundations for the UK biosecurity state of today. Collected in two volumes, Virtue and Terror and The New Normal, their publication marks the third anniversary since the 'pandemic' was officially declared by the World Health Organization in March 2020. But they also serve a more immediate purpose. As evidence of the immense damage of both lockdown and the 'vaccines' to the UK population has become too overwhelming for all but the COVID-faithful to ignore, those who called loudest for their enforcement -- politicians, journalists and doctors -- have claimed not only that they did not know what the consequences would be but that nobody else knew either, and have made plaintive appeals for an 'amnesty' between the ruined, traumatised, injured and bereaved and those responsible for their suffering and loss. The data and analysis contained in these articles is a reminder that those who took the time to look knew almost from the start that the coronavirus 'crisis' was manufactured, that closing down the economy for two years would impoverish millions, that printing hundreds of billions of pounds to save it would lead to rampant inflation, that withdrawing medical diagnosis, care and treatment for two years would cause the deaths of tens of thousands of UK citizens, and that injecting experimental gene therapies into a terrorised public would kill thousands, injure millions, and have still unknown consequences for the health and lives of the British people. If the guilty are now protesting their ignorance, they are doing so to absolve themselves of responsibility for what they collaborated in doing, to deny culpability for the damage and deaths, and to avoid retribution from a public coming to the realisation that we have been the object of a campaign of impoverishment and genocide being waged against us by the UK state and its global partners. These volumes hold them to account.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50143738036497,"sku":"GOR013869843","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1470902036.jpg?v=1751434593"},{"product_id":"great-replacement-book-simon-elmer-9781300850328","title":"The Great Replacement","description":"The narrative of 'Stop the Boats' has divided the debate over UK immigration into 'racists' (who want to control immigration) and 'anti-racists' (who welcome all and any number of refugees). But while 110,000 illegal immigrants have entered the UK over the last three years, between 2021 and 2023 some 1.369 million immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent entered legally. If this rate of immigration continues -- and everything indicates that it will -- two questions arise: 1) How and where will the UK build a city the size of Glasgow every year to house them? And 2) given they're not all doctors, scientists and engineers, what have these immigrants been brought here to do? By analysing United Nations policy documents, this book shows that replacement immigration is a trillion-dollar industry, and its goals, as such, are not the sudden conversion of Western governments to the multiform benefits of 'diversity' but those being served by the capitalisation of both elites and immigrants to rearrange global supply chains, lower labour costs, and in doing so increase the profits of multinational corporations.The data compiled in this book has been published by the United Nations, the European Commission, the UK Government, the Ministry of Justice, the Office for National Statistics, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Social Mobility Commission, The House of Commons Library, the Resolution Foundation, Statista and other news publishers. In publishing it, the author intends to make known to the British public the official data about UK immigration. From this data, he draws tentative but logical conclusions that -- unlike the UK Government and mainstream media -- he invites the reader to interrogate and challenge. By providing the empirical data for debate on a topic of national concern, the aim of this book is to raise public awareness of the reality of replacement immigration, its policy origins, its corporate lobbying, its economic motivations, its ideological promotion, its political implementation, its legal enforcement, and of the impact it has already had and will have in the future. In doing so, the book aims to provide a discursive framework within which the people of Britain can discuss immigration free of the accusations of racism, dismissals as a conspiracy theorist, charges of hate speech or threats of arrest with which this much-needed debate has been silenced and criminalised in the UK today.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52522715742481,"sku":"GOR014549163","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52747887280401,"sku":"NIN9781300850328","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53156960043281,"sku":"GOR014786274","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781300850328.jpg?v=1760579024"},{"product_id":"housing-crisis-book-simon-elmer-9781300563310","title":"The Housing Crisis","description":"First published between 2015 and 2019 on the website of the London-based architectural practice, Architects for Social Housing, the articles collected in this book analyse the financing, legislation and policy behind the UK housing crisis, as well as the resistance to it. Their focus is the housing crisis in London, where wealth and poverty meet as nowhere else in the UK, and where the housing crisis is most acute; but beyond that they look at the whole of the UK, to which housing poverty, precarity and homelessness is being exported on the London model. This makes these articles relevant beyond the London context, and of use to those trying to understand the causes of the housing crisis in their own countries. The basic premise of this book is that the housing crisis is not a product of the failure of housing legislation and policy to house its citizens in safe, secure and affordable housing but, to the contrary, of the success of that legislation and policy in creating the conditions that produce the vast profits extracted from this crisis at every level of its production. The housing crisis, in other words, has been deliberately and carefully created. This book is about how and why.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52747952455953,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52747952619793,"sku":"NIN9781300563310","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781300563310.jpg?v=1763534579"},{"product_id":"architecture-is-always-political-book-simon-elmer-9781326998028","title":"Architecture is Always Political","description":"Written between 2016 and 2019, before the watershed of lockdown and the Great Reset into stakeholder capitalism it initiated, the articles collected in this book were originally published on the website of Architects for Social Housing (ASH), the London-based architectural practice. They were written, therefore, against the background of the crisis of housing affordability created by the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08 and the collusion of the architectural profession in how the financial institutions responsible for it turned what should have been their accountability and regulation into a financial stepping stone to where we are now. Many of these articles came out of the various practices of ASH in exposing and challenging this collusion, which gives this book a practical foundation in the relationship between finance capitalism, government housing policy and property development largely absent from academic studies based on other academic studies. So although its case studies look back 900 years to the origins of current land ownership in Britain and include some key moments and buildings in the history of modern architecture, the focus of this book is how the practice of architecture can move beyond the impasse at which it finds itself today, which begins with identifying what has produced it.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52748027691281,"sku":"NIN9781326998028","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53333405073681,"sku":"GOR014853722","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781326998028.jpg?v=1763535113"},{"product_id":"housing-crisis-book-simon-elmer-9781300572978","title":"The Housing Crisis","description":"First published between 2015 and 2019 on the website of Architects for Social Housing, the London-based architectural practice, the articles collected in this book analyse the financing, legislation and policy behind the UK housing crisis, as well as the resistance to it. Their focus is the housing crisis in London, where wealth and poverty meet as nowhere else in the UK, and where the housing crisis is most acute; but beyond that they look at the whole of the UK, to which housing poverty, precarity and homelessness is being exported on the London model. This makes these articles relevant beyond the London context, and of use to those trying to understand the causes of the housing crisis in their own countries. The basic premise of this book is that the housing crisis is not a product of the failure of housing legislation and policy to house its citizens in safe, secure and affordable housing but, to the contrary, of the success of that legislation and policy in creating the conditions that produce the vast profits extracted from this crisis at every level of its production. The housing crisis, in other words, has been deliberately and carefully created. This book is about how and why.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52766638965009,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52766639194385,"sku":"NIN9781300572978","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781300572978.jpg?v=1763654266"},{"product_id":"for-a-socialist-architecture-book-simon-elmer-9781008909540","title":"For a Socialist Architecture","description":"Over the summer of 2019, as part of a research fellowship, the UK practice Architects for Social Housing (ASH) took up a month's residency in Vancouver. Drawing on the past five years of practice working with residents of housing estates threatened with demolition, ASH presented their thoughts about the necessity and possibility of a socialist architecture under capitalism. To do so, they looked at the social, environmental, economic and political spheres of architecture, and how they can be reclaimed from the hegemony of neoliberalism in legislation, policy and practice.In a series of four lectures, ASH mapped out the development process from 1) strategy, legislation and policy, to 2) urban design, master-planning and brief development, to 3) project design and the planning process, to 4) procurement and construction, to 5) management and maintenance, and identified the moments of political agency at which the agents for a socialist architecture can intervene in and disrupt the capitalist structure and functioning of this process. In addition, ASH also identified moments that are outside this development process proper, but which can be brought to bear upon it, including the tasks of education, dissemination and agitation for change. In doing so, they have developed a framework for both individual and collective agency that extends far beyond the skills of an architect, and is not limited to either industry professionals or the layman's protest. ASH contends that all of us are potential agents for a socialist architecture; but to be called 'socialist' that agency must go beyond voting and protest -- both of which give legitimacy to the illusory 'freedom' of capitalist democracies -- to oppositional political practice.For this printed edition of the lectures, ASH has included two additional texts: an introduction, which was originally published in January 2020, following the UK general election; and a postscript, which looks at the ruinous impact of lockdown restrictions on UK housing and how we can respond.In publishing the expanded forms of these lectures, ASH aims to make their contents available not only to people who are threatened by the crisis of housing affordability in the UK, but also to policy-writers looking for alternatives to the selling off of public land and housing to private investors, as well as to architects looking for an alternative to the orthodoxies of contemporary architectural practice.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53391097430289,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53391098511633,"sku":"NIN9781008909540","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781008909540.jpg?v=1775683535"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-simon-elmer.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}