The Mixed Potential of Salvage Commoning: Crisis and Commoning Practices in Washington,DC and New York City

This paper considers how and to what ends commoning practices can take shape in direct response to the spectres and/or realities of eroding resources (we focus especially on public resources) within iterations of what we term “salvage commoning”. We show how, in such contexts, commoning practices may potentially alleviate but also potentially (re)produce inequities, exclusions, and resource retractions. To illustrate, we draw upon two examples: parent-teacher organisations in Washington, DC, and block associations in New York City. In both instances, people have cooperatively built new relations, coordinated voluntary labour, and stewarded resources in connection with specific commons (public schools and urban spaces) threatened by disinvestment and crisis. We show how troubling alignments and exclusions can emerge under these conditions, suggesting critical questions about the starkly mixed potential of salvage commoning—especially in the face of ongoing and emerging crises in which such orientations are likely to become increasingly prevalent.     

Beyond Tragedy: Differential Commoning in a Manufactured Housing Cooperative

Caught between the dual crises of declining economic opportunity and diminishing public assistance, people on the economic margins resist threats to their livelihoods by opting to share resources. The processes involved in managing these “commons” are often messy and paradoxical amid differing livelihood concerns and subject positions. Unevenness tends to emerge along new and existing lines of power. Rather than reducing such tendencies to a “tragedy” to be eliminated, I argue that grappling with uneven relations offers a more dynamic account of commoning: “differential commoning”. This paper takes as its example the residents of a “manufactured housing” community who organized as a cooperative in response to the threat of eviction. Their struggle to collectivize, I suggest, illustrates the need for a more situated conceptualization of commoning, rather than a concept defined within the rigidity of economic rationality or the homogeneity of some imagined community.     

Between Boundaries: From Commoning and Guerrilla Gardening to Community Land Trust Development in Liverpool

Emerging in the cracks of the ownership model are alternatives to state/market provision of affordable housing and public/private‐led regeneration of declining urban neighbourhoods, centred on commoning and collective dweller control. This paper explores how the community land trust model can become an effective institutional solution to urban decline in the context of private property relations. It explores a case study of a CLT campaign in Granby, a particularly deprived inner‐city neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. The campaign seeks to collectively acquire empty homes under conditions of austerity, which have opened up the space for grassroots experimentation with guerrilla gardening, proving important for the campaign in gaining political trust and financial support. This paper discusses the potential of the CLT model as a vehicle for democratic stewardship of place and unpacks the contradictions threatening to undermine its political legitimacy.     

Escape into the City: Everyday Practices of Commoning and the Production of Urban Space in Dublin

In Dublin there are many needs and desires which are not met, or excluded, by the pattern of high rent, the commodification of social/cultural life, and the regulation of public space. Against this dynamic, Dublin has seen a number of experiments in urban commoning: people collectively finding ways of opening up space in order to do what they want. This might be as simple as wanting a space to work, to make food or to show films. Rather than trying to change this situation by appealing to existing institutions, these new urban commons are characterized by particular groups of people devising practical ways of escaping the forms of “enclosure” which limit what can happen in the city. This article takes a “militant research” approach to explore the potentials and limitations of these experiments in urban production and organization.     

Food,faith and community: social well-being of Ghanaian migrants in the Netherlands

This article explores how Ghanaian migrants in the Netherlands enhance their gendered social well-being. We provide an in-depth view of gender-specific places and relations that shape the social well-being of migrants, focusing on place-based lived experiences, by conducting in-depth interviews and observations. Our results demonstrate that social well-being is enhanced by social networks, wherein the participants recreate feelings of self-esteem, belonging and recognition. Furthermore, the special meaning of food and faith also contributes to the social well-being of the participants. Food and faith serve as commemorations of traditions in their home country and alleviate the transition to new traditions in the host country. We also found that specific places, such as shops and churches, contribute to the social well-being of participants in the study. Men and women in our study use different strategies to construct their well-being, and they interpret places and social relations differently, but they all showed to be active agents in enhancing their social well-being. Our female participants in particular look for opportunities in the host country to independently enhance their social well-being, for instance through establishing their own small businesses and social groups. Through its focus on the social well-being of migrants, the study contributes to increase understanding between different cultural groups.     

Neglected dimensions of child well-being

Academic researchers on children should not ignore criteria for children's well-being. Starting from the observation that attempts at protection from harmful work has often damaged children's opportunities, the article argues that protection must be broader than simply protection from particular risks, and take in protection of opportunities. Moreover, researchers need to find ways to look beyond material and cognitive development to neglected areas of well-being sometimes referred to as ‘spiritual’.     

Culture,emotional transnationalism and mental distress: family relations and well-being among Taiwanese immigrant women

Immigrant women's vulnerability to mental distress has been recognized in the literature and yet the socio-cultural causes of their distress have rarely been explored. On the basis of a case study of Taiwanese immigrants residing in Chicago, this article illustrates the dynamic contexts within which Taiwanese immigrant women's distress is produced at home and explains the social and cultural factors that engender the women's distress. In this article I argue that Taiwanese immigrant women frequently shift back and forth between Taiwanese and American cultural norms in an effort to apply effective behavioral guidance and justifications to interactions with their spouses, children and in-laws. The term ‘emotional transnationalism’ is used to describe the psychological experience associated with transnational cultural practices. Distress is often generated as these women struggle with feelings of ambivalence and contradictions that confront them in their search for cultural identities. The severity of distress is largely determined by the power hierarchies between women and those with whom they interact. Married women's status as subordinate to their in-laws creates more negative experiences than any other status.     

A gendered practice of urban cultivation: performing power and well-being in M'Bour,Senegal

This article outlines how a theoretical approach that explores gender as ‘emplaced performance’ can improve the analytical value of gender by drawing attention to (1) the ways in which gender, as a socially and spatially contingent performance, is enrolled in the relationships that create the city, and (2) how the city, as a constantly evolving and dynamic field of interaction for economic, social, and political processes, (re)configures gender. Drawing on qualitative research carried out in M'Bour, Senegal, and through a case study of a form of urban cultivation called micro-gardening, this analysis explores gender as a socially and spatially contingent performance that produces, and is produced by, the city. The analysis brings together performativity studies with scholarship on place to fashion the analytical approach, and specifically draws attention to emplaced performances of well-being and power. Such an approach, because it draws attention to the contingent dimensions of gender, as well as the effects of gender on material worlds, has an improved analytical potential to inform locally relevant development interventions that recognize and consider the multiple ways in which men and women experience and create the city.     

Stigmatized ethnicity, public health, and globalization

The prejudicial linking of infection with ethnic minority status has a long-established history, but in some ways this association may have intensified under the contemporary circumstances of the "new public health" and globalization. This study analyzes this conflation of ethnicity and disease victimization by considering the stigmatization process that occurred during the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Toronto. The attribution of stigma during the SARS outbreak occurred in multiple and overlapping ways informed by: (i) the depiction of images of individuals donning respiratory masks; (ii) employment status in the health sector; and (iii) Asian-Canadian and Chinese-Canadian ethnicity. In turn, stigmatization during the SARS crisis facilitated a moral panic of sorts in which racism at a cultural level was expressed and rationalized on the basis of a rhetoric of the new public health and anti-globalization sentiments. With the former, an emphasis on individualized self-protection, in the health sense, justified the generalized avoidance of those stigmatized. In relation to the latter, in the post-9/11 era, avoidance of the stigmatized other was legitimized on the basis of perceiving the SARS threat as a consequence of the mixing of different people predicated by economic and cultural globalization.     

Creativity,health and arts advocacy

Creativity is popularly related to innovation and new ideas. This invention‐cognition view of creativity is too narrow a concept for artistic creativity. Artistic creation is also about reproducing traditions and emotional (“affective”) processes. Widespread use of the popular invention‐cognition view of creativity in arts advocacy obscures wider dimensions of artistic creativity. This article focuses attention on the affective dimension of artistic creation. It surveys “arts therapy” literature and investigates how lessons of this literature can be used to improve the persuasiveness of arts advocacy arguments that appeal to the concept of creativity.     

Decentralization, democratization, and health: the Philippine experiment

In 1991, the Philippines joined a growing list of countries that reformed health planning through decentralization. Reformers viewed decentralization as a tool that would solve multiple problems, leading to more meaningful democracy and more effective health planning. Today, nearly two decades after the passage of decentralization legislation, questions about the effectiveness of the reforms persist. Inadequate financing, inequity, and a lack of meaningful participation remain challenges, in many ways mirroring broader weaknesses of Philippine democracy. These concerns pose questions regarding the nature of contemporary decentralization, democratization, and health planning and whether these three strategies are indeed mutually enforcing.     

Cities without cavities: democracy, risk, and public health

This essay examines the history of fluoride debates in four Canadian cities. It argues that fluoride's opponents were primarily motivated by what they saw as the health and environmental risks of adding fluoride to the water supply. They also believed that fluoridating the public water supply was a fundamental violation of civil liberties. The fluoride debates have much to teach us about how people evaluate potential health risks and how they respond to state interventions in the field of public health.