Space, Power and the Commons (original) (raw)
Related papers
Commons: Practices of Spaces and Social Change
2014
The debate about common pool resources and the commons is not new (as demonstrated not only by the very well-known researches by E.Ostrom but also an article of Ciriacy-Wantrupp and Bishop in 1975, however their role in today political context has changed and the topic is becoming more and more relevant. In fact in various European Countries several are the specific actions oriented to the protection and the care of the commons. However the political and juridical content remains to be defined, especially for its interaction with the concepts of public and private. In certain domains the political and theoretical thinking about the commons is stronger than in others, therefore the contribution they can offer to the debate is particularly interesting. In this perspective the study focuses on urban spaces and the role played by social movements in their definition. In fact no legislation in Europe recognizes the commons as a legal category and most of the social and political thinkin...
Urban Commons in the Neoliberal Global Order: Commoning as Counteraction
2016
The proposition of this paper presents Urban Commoning as a counteraction to the current global trend of capitalism and its neo-liberal urbanism. In the face of radical dispossession and marginalisation that is accompanying global urbanisation, we are experiencing the negative logic of 'privatisation' with its public appropriations of exclusionary and dispossessive 'fencing off' of 'new urban enclosures'. The resultant calls to replace the extractive and exclusionary logic of the city with a generative and inclusive ordering has been responded to in the notion of the commons and complementary practices of commoning as counter to this conflict. The urban commons is posited as a means of transforming the urban. By expanding the notion of the commons a new inclusiveness and normative approach can be established. However, in order to understand the commons as a possible just and inclusive urban order, we view it as inhabiting the intermediate space between imposed and popular change. We attempt to excavate from real life urban commons valuable lessons from their emergence, maintenance and transference; contributing toward a new urban episteme. These explorations are grounded in the case of Cape Town, South Africa and the experience of capitalism's different phases-early colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid-demonstrating consistently reproduced patterns of spatial segregation for the vast majority of its 'non-white' population. Urban commoning has historically existed in different forms but recently found renewed emergence in response to urban enclosuring. Located within this context and re-conceptualised through a more inclusive notion of the commons, this essay identifies background details of the empirical case by describing the legacy of capitalist exclusion and enclosures in Cape Town, followed by an account of historical commoning practices in the city. The essay concludes by locating some main findings from the real life cases of emergent communing, reflecting on the transformative potential of urban commons.
The commons: opening and enclosing non-commodified space
2006
Abstract This paper begins with a simple question—'how can you steal something that no one owns'? Though a simple question, the answer is complicated, for the stealing of 'things' owned by no one explains an important aspect of capitalism's insatiable appetite. Historically the conditions for industrialisation and market economies were created by capital through the colonisation of common lands and common modes of production—things that are shared but not owned. And this is an appetite that shows no sign of abating.
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021
Over the last decade, there has been an expansion of scholarly and activist engagement with the commons. This interest corresponds to a growing quest for alternatives to capitalism in view of ongoing socio-ecological crises. As neoliberal capitalism intensifies enclosure of the commons, local actions to reclaim old commons and invent new ones to counter these processes are also on the rise. However, there are diverse conceptions of the commons, and pitfalls in their reproduction and in mobilizing this vocabulary in the dominant neoliberal individualistic culture. Our understanding remains limited about how spaces for commons and commoning practices can be expanded, as well as about specific practices, relations and imaginaries that support commons and subjectivities of being-in-common. This Special Issue on the "Commons, Commoning and Cobecomings" seeks to deepen our understanding of 'actually-existing' and 'more-thanhuman' commons in the world, and how ways of relating to them open up possibilities of responding to current socioenvironmental challenges and generating beyond-capitalist ways of life. Exploring commoning experiences in diverse settings, the papers assembled in this Special Issue illustrate the role that commons and commoning practices play in reconfiguring human-nature relations. Thinking with these papers,
‘Designing’ commons: exploring interplays between commons, space and spatial design
URBAN DESIGN International, 2019
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the commons debate engaging with space and spatial design by analysing community-based design processes in two housing commons institutions in Brussels. Based on a literature review and an action research in a Community Land Trust housing project and a public space regeneration project in a housing cooperative, I argue that spatial designers can play an important role in commoning by empowering people to act outside dominant planning discourses and by spatially articulating the social, cultural and environmental role of dwelling space. However, there is need for public support and flexibility in the institutional frameworks of spatial design execution to create room for such engagement.
Ambivalence of the urban commons
In: The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics, ed. by Kevin Ward, Andrew E.G. Jonas, Byron Miller, David Wilson (Routledge), 2018
The aim of this text is to show how we should refute essentialistic understandings of the commons. The commons is rather a politically and discursively contested terrain within the intricate economies of exploitation and reinvention characterising global capitalism in the neoliberal era. Multiple uses of the commons can be recognised within this diversfied politics of the commons, revealing the ultimately ambivalent use of this notion: the commons is at one and the same time a space of resistance to neoliberal accumulation by dispossession and of experimentation with post-capitalist economic practices, but also a site of societal subsumption and commodification within the knowledge-intensive economies of biopolitical capitalism.