Origin : Middle English from Old French leisir, based on latin licere “be allowed”

Leisure:

Opportunity afforded by freedom from necessary occupations (late 14c.)

Today, leisure is the space in which people develop their lifestyle as well as order-dimensions for their everyday lifes. It’s the space in which they want to accomplish themselves.

Costly entertainments, such as the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end. The competitor with whom the entertainer wishes to institute a comparison is, by this method, made to serve as a means to the end. He consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is a witness to the consumption of that excess of good things which his host is unable to dispose of single-handed.

The importance of the public space is to refer among themselves the private spaces, while transforming them into collective patrimony. To give public urban character to the buildings and places that without it it would be only private, that is the function of the public space; to urbanise the private: that is to say, to turn it part of the public.

In the city of BEOT, public space is the stage through which citizens exhibit their leisure. Provided by the neighbourhoods, the vast array of such collective space is interwoven around the built mass, constituting the urban fabric.
The journey through this lattice of spaces is marked by the subjectivities and individual affordabilities of its dwellers.

Inside these urban exedras, enclosed by facades, the endless exchange between hosts and guests is performed.

The actual facade plane of the building is not to be read as the exterior of a building, but rather as the exterior facade enclosure of the public space.

The theory is a continuum model of leisure, with the criterion a condition Neulinger calls perceived freedom. This perceived freedom is a state of mind where one freely chooses to perform an activity—any activity—because one wants to do it.

Because environmental contingencies are associated with extrinsic moti­vation, perceived freedom may be more closely associated with intrinsic motivation.

Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will.

In the early days of the cosmic cycle there was no need of food or clothing, and no private property, family, government or laws. Then gradually the process of cosmic decay began its work, and mankind became earthbound, and felt the need of food and shelter. As men lost their primeval glory they entered into agreements with one another, accepting the institution of private property and the family. With this theft, murder, adultery, and other crime began, and so the people met together and decided to appoint one man from among them to maintain order in return for a share of the produce of their fields and herds. He was called "the Great Chosen One" (Mahasammata), and he received the title of raja because he pleased the people.

[The gentleman] should find some means of putting in evidence the leisure that is not spent in the sight of the spectators. This can be done only indirectly, through the exhibition of some tangible, lasting results of the leisure so spent. In the case of exploit it is similarly possible and usual to procure some tangible result that may serve for exhibition in the way of trophy or booty.

We have been expressly evolved by nature - with all our impulses and deepest instincts - for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.

Consumption in Linder's work contributes to a feeling of scarcity. [...] Members of the harried leisure class are constantly reminded that time is scarce. A feeling of time scarcity results in people's striving to increase the yield on time. [...] People will forsake developing their minds spiritually and culturally. Because religious and cultural activities are not amenable to either simultaneous or successive consumption, they will be regarded as unproductive pursuits.

[…] Yet will a few traces of old-time sin live on, to bid men tempt the sea in ships, girdle towns with walls, and cleave the earth with furrows. […] Next, when now the strength of years has made you a man, even the trader will quit the sea, nor will the ship of pine exchange wares; every land will bear all fruits. Earth will not suffer the harrow, nor the vine the pruning hook; the sturdy ploughman, too, will now loose his oxen from the yoke. No more will wool be taught to put on varied hues, but of himself the ram in the meadows will change his fleece, now to sweetly blushing purple, now to a saffron yellow; and scarlet shall clothe the grazing lambs at will.

Freedom is something which is constantly produced. Liberalism is not acceptance of freedom; it proposes to manufacture it constantly, to arouse it and produce it, with, of course, the system of constraints and the problems of cost raised by this production.

Through the interaction of our efforts to effect and control transfers among enclosures and our competition for network resources, we mutually construct and constrain one another’s realms of daily action. Within the relatively stable framework of our interconnecting, overlapping, sometimes shared transfer networks, our intricately interwoven demands and responses create fluctuating conditions of freedom and constraint.

Nature’s direct gift to him is plenty of leisure time. Before he can apply this leisure time productively for himself, a whole series of historical circumstances is required; before he spends it in surplus labour for others, compulsion is necessary.

Leisure has one and only criterion, and that is the condition of perceived freedom. To leisure implies being engaged in an activity as a free agent, and of one’s own choice.

With universal literacy, time can take on the character of an enclosed or pictorial space that can be divided and subdivided. It can be filled-in. "My schedule is filled up." It can be kept free: "I have a free week next month." And as Sebastian de Grazia has shown in of Time, Work and Leisure, all the free time in the world is not leisure, because leisure accepts neither the division of labor that constitutes "work," nor the divisions of time that create "full time" and free time." Leisure excludes times as a container.

And so here and ever since, an unnatural thing happened: Animal skin was put on our human skin. We feel (much) better that way. This desire to be shielded by something, a desire to own (to protect oneself through ownership), to protect oneself (not to be alone in this world, not to be naked), to not be so easily wounded, led to our losing our freedom and becoming dependent on things because we started to need them. This is beautifully captured in a quote from Rousseau: The savage breathes nothing but liberty and repose; he desires only to live and be at leisure; and the ataraxia of the Stoic does not approach his indifference for every other object. The citizen, on the contrary, toils, bestirs and torments himself without end, to obtain employments which are still more laborious; he labors on till his death, he even hastens it, in order to put himself in a condition to live, or renounces life to acquire immortality... For such in reality is the true cause of all those differences: the savage lives in himself; the man of society, always out of himself, cannot live but in the opinions of others, and it is, if I may say so, from their judgment alone that he derives the sentiment of his own existence. This was similar to Enkidu—he also lived like an animal; he lacked nothing. Shamhat awoke insufficiency within him. In the city he became a citizen; he tasted beer, which is unnatural, it is not found in the natural state of nature.

An activity gives pleasure insofar as it is congenial to the agent's natural capacities and inclinations...Leisure, play, and other things that go with rest, give pleasure; they relieve us of the distress that comes from overwork.

If the leisure that man has been promised by the machine counts for anything, it must count for the extension of the privilege of being an active political animal.

Music moves the passions; but poetry does so better, since its verses not only move the soul but impel men to every kind of virtue, deter them from vice, and are very efficacious in exercising and sharpening their minds.

Where does the city without gates begin? Probably inside the minds of returning vacationers, taking the form of that fleeting anxiety which grabs them when they think about all the unwanted mail and the possibility that their home has been broken into, their property stolen; and perhaps, also, in the desire to flee, to escape temporarily, from an oppressive technological environment in order to find oneself again, to pull oneself together. Then again, while spatial escape is still possible, temporal escape is not. Unless one considers the practice of laying off as an “exit door,” the ultimate form of paid vacation, running away in time is dependent upon a postindustrial illusion, the effects of which are beginning to make themselves felt.

We sought to build a new world, as though Our prolonged leisure was irksome to Us; rich in leisure, We sought leisure; and seeking leisure, We ceased to deserve it.

Ultimately, the door is what monitors vehicles and various vectors whose breaks of continuity compose less a space than a kind of countdown in which the urgency of work time plays the part of a time center, while unemployment and vacation time play the part of the periphery—the suburb of time: a clearing away of activities whereby everyone is exiled to a life of both privacy and deprivation.

There were many different reasons behind patrons’ longing for landscapes, some common to all, others quite specific to a certain patron. To some extent at its root was a new appreciation of life in the country, which is attested to from the mid sixteenth century on by the construction of many new villas. Perhaps this was dictated to some extent by the transformation of Rome into a veritable metropolis, even if this happened at a relatively slow pace. Nature, and by extension representations of nature, meant otium (leisure, as opposed to the negotium [business] of the city), relaxation and the desire for Horatian peacefulness.

The socialization of art represents the convergence of the forces of creation and production toward a goal of dynamic synthesis and technical metamorphosis: it is through such restructuring that man and reality find their true, modern face, that they become natural again, having overcome all alienation. Marcusian mythology is used to demonstrate that it is possible to achieve a vaguely defined “collective freedom” within the current relations of production, and not through their subversion.

Freedom comes not as a profit, but at a cost.

Another innovation is the community land trust, where a nonprofit organization buys land and sells homes based only on the cost of the structure, exclusive of the plots they sit on; buyers are restricted from making a big profit if they sell, which has the effect of keeping the affordability perpetual.

It has already been remarked that the term "leisure", as here used, does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is non-productive consumption of time. Time is consumed non-productively from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work.

The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production…Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature;…

Liberalism constructs its vision of the world on the basis of complex but articulate contradictions, mediated by the neutral instrumentality of the law. While the medieval city has been characterized as existing under a permanent state of siege, it also tended to mix what liberalism has posited as distinct spheres: the political (with its now diminished public life) and the economic (an increasingly far from equal realm of privatization).