Moving Beyond the Right to the City: Urban Commoning in Greece (original) (raw)

Modern social struggles erupt as urban phenomena with a strong spatial component. City dwellers may define their desire for full participation in the city’s socio-political life as a right to the city to be reclaimed against authorities, or they may dive right in and self-manage the urban space as a commons – or they may do both. The right to the city and the urban commons are not mutually exclusive strategies of contestation but rather two different vocabularies, which however lead to contrasting conceptions of the political. When a technical-juridical conception of rights becomes the centrepiece and horizon of progressive politics, the discourse of rights tends to ratify existing systems of domination by subordinating lived, contentious politics to impersonal juridical constructs. The commons is not an alternative to “rights talk”, but rather a way in which rights may be fleshed out, and tethered to contentious politics waged by concrete communities. These are some of the issues this text seeks to raise, exemplified in the context of Greek urban struggles over the past decade.