Chun Hin Alex Cheung + Thomas McCormick


The Anarcho-Ethical-Urban Hand Book is a pictorial manifesto of the people of Anarres, a desert planet in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Disposessed, documenting the ways in which people can cooperatively live together on a changing and brutal planet. With Urras as Anarres’ prosperous antithesis, this handbook attempts to represent an ideology and way of living that can be adopted by the people of Urras to help them transcend their oppressive hierarchical system. With limited access to water in an environment with minimal biodiversity, the people of Anarres must live without notions of ego in order to sustain society. While there is a growing movement on Urras to promote alternatives to the systems in place, an egalitarian guide may allow the people of Urras to truly realize the widespread change that can and must take place in a wasteful society. The handbook begins by documenting the human scale and its relationship to the larger urban development that takes place on Anarres. The handbook concludes by including a daily schedule of typical activities on Anarres, expressing the values in place that allow people to live in harmony together.