Working with Strangers in Saturated Space: Reclaiming and Maintaining the Urban Commons

The commons is increasingly invoked as a way to envision new worlds. One strand of commons research focuses at the local scale, on small groups in “traditional”, mostly rural societies; this research asks how commons are maintained over time. Another strand focuses on the commons at a global scale; this is political research that asks how commons can be reclaimed from a capitalist landscape. Here, I bridge these two approaches by theorizing the commons as reclaimed and maintained in the context of the city, through examining the experiences of limited‐equity housing cooperatives in Washington, DC. I argue that the urban commons is marked by two distinct traits: it emerges in space that is saturated with people, competing uses, and financial investment; and it is constituted by the collective work of strangers. The challenges of reclaiming and maintaining an urban commons are substantial, but the need for them is urgent.     

Urban commons are more‐than‐property

Urban commons are characterised in the literature as collectively shared property in the city shaped by a context of scarce resources, population density, and the interaction of strangers. In the broader commons literature, commons appears as a verb, a noun, and a process made by practices of commoning—albeit still with a focus on property. In this paper, I argue that an understanding of urban commons as more‐than‐property is needed to recognise how present but elusive urban commons are. I use examples from interviews and observations conducted at a Women's Library to discuss how the access, use, benefit, care, responsibility, and ownership of this urban commons bring it into being through particular practices of commoning. By questioning current ways of defining urban commons, urban scholars gain a grounded understanding of the role of property, and other practices, in maintaining an urban commons over time.     

Autonomy,Erasure, and Persistence in the Urban Gardening Commons

Collective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal for decades. This article attends to the makeshift natures made by black migrants from Portugal's former colonies, and the racial urban geography thrown into relief by the differing fortunes of white Portuguese community gardening spaces. Conceptualising urban gardens as commons‐in‐the‐making, we explore subaltern urbanism and the emergence of autonomous gardening commons on the one hand, and the state erasure, overwriting or construction of top‐down commons on the other. While showing that urban gardening forges commons of varying persistence, we also demonstrate the ways through which the commons are always closely entwined with processes of enclosure. We further argue that urban gardening commons are divergent and cannot be judged against any abstract ideal of the commons. In conclusion, we suggest that urban gardening commons do not have a “common” in common.     

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.     

Urban community gardens,commons, and social reproduction: revisiting Silvia Federici’s Revolution at Point Zero

Abstract

Revolution at Point Zero gathers together some of the major works written by Silvia Federici from the 1970s through the 2000s. It offers a series of incisive analyses and is replete with insights on identifying lines of effective intervention to overcome capitalist relations, including housework, care work, and the commons. As Federici identifies urban community gardening as an important development in the struggle for the commons, and thereby a postcapitalist future, I briefly discuss two general concerns that suggest caution in making more of urban community gardens than they can deliver politically. One concern is over an uncertain relationship between community, social reproduction, and commons that infuses urban community gardens. The community in the urban community gardens can be reactionary and capitalism-friendly, so that commons may not necessarily come out of such projects. Urban gardening, since it is still largely women’s work, may also impede the collectivisation of social reproduction by adding yet another set of responsibilities expected to be taken up by women. Another regards pollution problems and their under-appreciated political reverberations. Urban gardeners may be exposed to greater concentrations of toxic substances, possibly like farmworkers or miners. These imply highly uneven social consequences, as women, people of colour, and the elderly are the main urban gardeners. The health effects of prolonged exposure could also lead to greater needs for care work, which is also still mostly carried out by women. Finally, gaining, not just enrolling technical expertise on environmental processes will help build more autonomous urban commons.     

Central Park against the streets: the enclosure of public space cultures in mid-nineteenth century New York

The industrialization of New York and its rise to economic dominance brought about a major restructuring of street life and unleashed an array of contradictory everyday urban cultures. In a still under-regulated environment, the commoning of public space became a key sociospatial capital that helped the working classes resolve their reproduction in a way the elite found disturbing and far removed from the civic order they were trying to instil. This article draws on recent theorizations of the commons/enclosure dialectic to develop a comparative analysis of the cultures of public space use vis-à-vis the practices prescribed by Central Park in its attempt to reform everyday spatialities. The park is understood here as an early episode in the project of imposing new social relations through the enclosure of public conduct—a first effort to tame the urban commons and prevent the subaltern appropriation of public space. Following a preliminary discussion of the economic and social determinants and configuration of the material cultures of public space use in Manhattan, the article studies the park's strategies as a special type of enclosure, consisting not of the usurping of common land for private profit but of the mobilization of public space to shift behaviors from one regime of publicity to another.     

Gatekeepers of the Urban Commons? Vigilant Citizenship and Neoliberal Space in Multiethnic Paris

This article draws from ethnographic research on a recently built park in one of Paris' predominately West African and Maghrebi districts. It demonstrates how urban design is used to “build‐in” neoliberal subjectivities to the city. This design approach appropriates a tradition of street democracy held by neighborhood associations and redirects their disproportionately middle class, French membership into managerial roles traditionally held by municipal agencies. This neoliberal political subjectivity, which I term vigilant citizenship, makes monitoring and controlling the social composition of the urban commons a form of civic engagement for middle class urbanites. In Paris, this vigilance is fueled by anxieties over the presence of West African and Maghrebi youth in public spaces. Activists do not passively adopt this neoliberal role; they strike a delicate balance as gatekeepers, weighing inclusion against an expectation to maintain a “successful” public space conforming to a republican model of citizenship.     

Commons and the construction of power in the early Middle Ages: tenth-century León and Castile

ABSTRACT

This article examines the role played by the control of common lands (commons) in the configuration of power in the northern Iberian Peninsula during the early Middle Ages. Although there were marked differences between them, the kings of León and the counts of Castile consolidated their power over local society by guaranteeing the defence and correct management of commons. Their example provides the basis for this study, which investigates whether these higher levels of commons protection and management could have been a way of building and consolidating power (whether as lords, royalty, counts, or in urban areas) during the Middle Ages.     

Pursuing Urban Commons: Politics and Alliances in Community Land Trust Activism in East London

Community land trust (CLT) practices contribute to analyses of the commons in both conceptual and on‐the‐ground ways. As collective action organizations, CLTs emphasize common land stewardship and resist traditional land speculation and development practices through the mitigation or halting of land value inflation. This paper traces the activist efforts of the East London CLT organization, one of Britain's first urban CLTs, in securing common land in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, and examines their navigation of political decisions and creation of alliances. Although this process has been challenging as a result of neoliberal governance and private development interests, the East London CLT's trajectory demonstrates the frustrations of activism within these contexts but also the small successes in the pursuit and establishment of urban commons.     

Migration,the Urban Periphery,and the Politics of Migrant Lives

This paper explores the politics of migration through a focus on labor migration regimes and the urban lives of migrants in the Seoul Metropolitan Region of South Korea. In particular, it draws attention to the ways in which migrant lives highlight the limits of the contemporary emphasis on control in migration management regimes. The paper contends that while migration management certainly reworks the socio‐legal status of migrants, the desire for control is often displaced in the everyday presence and practices of migrants as urban residents. In order to develop this argument I focus on the notion of the urban periphery as a spatio‐temporal configuration that manifests marginalization but is also potentially generative, innovative and destabilizing. The paper proceeds by exploring three dimensions of the periphery: (1) the mobile commons that emerges in everyday life; (2) the process of becoming undocumented and the subversion of control; and (3) the tactics of recognition that challenge the peripheral location of migrants. In each case the focus on the urban periphery draws attention to the importance of visibility and invisibility in migration, to the uneven spatio‐temporal configuration of migrant lives in the city, and to the ways in which migrant desires constitute a politics that exceeds what is normatively expected of them.     

对城市社会-生活空间的本体解构

根据国外著名学者的观点与权威性文献总结国外地理学社会论(学派)形成与发展的思维观,重点探讨城市社会-生活空间理论的思想与方法论,并力图用概念化结构模式(图)表示出来,作为理解城市社会-生活空间本体构成,以及进一步对其研究的解构理念。全文从地理学社会论创立解剖社会空间的思想观逻辑,预示城市社会-生活空间规律的研究代表了当今人文地理学前沿理论水平的重要方面。     

Children's imaginaries in the city: on things and materials

The article is an exploration of urban imaginaries emerging through a play with materials. Starting from a complex activist exercise for reimagining the space of a park in decay, whose protagonists are children, we propose a reflection on the productivity and resilience of matter. We argue that a new materialist sociology is one that takes disappearances seriously. Capitalism renders space abstract not only through flow and circulation, but also through stillness. We follow the curious disappearances and reappearances of the park in question, tracing the mutations of urban planning, of the juridical domain and of the everyday use of space. Finally, we analyse the making of a maquette of the park by a group of children and their alliances with activists. The maquette is a political ‘thing': it leads us away from an urban imaginary populated by discrete objects to an urban imaginary of depth and it reconcretises space.     

The Sound of Debate in Georgian England: Auralising the House of Commons

St Stephen's Chapel, Westminster became the first permanent home of the house of commons in 1548. The building had to be adapted to conform to its new use. Visual and architectural adaptations to the space have been discussed in detail, but the building's new role also required improvements to the working use of the space as a forum for public debate. In this essay, acoustic techniques are used to explore how speeches and debate would have sounded during the Georgian period and consider how St Stephen's was adapted for this new use. The results demonstrate that, despite these alterations, the 18th‐century house of commons was not ideally suited to speaking or listening to debate. The listening experience was not uniform across the chamber, and its former use as a medieval chapel may have influenced how well certain positions in the chamber would have experienced speech.     

Rethinking Land Struggle in the Postindustrial City

The racial and cultural politics of land and property are central to urban struggle, but have received relatively little attention in geography. This paper analyzes land struggles in Detroit where over 100,000 parcels of land are classified as “vacant”. Since 2010, planners and government officials have been developing controversial plans to ruralize Detroit's “vacant” neighborhoods as part of a program of fiscal austerity, reigniting old questions of racialized dispossession, sovereignty, and struggles for liberation. This paper analyzes these contentious politics by examining disputes over a white businessman's proposal to build the world's largest urban forest in the center of a Black majority city. I focus on how residents, urban farmers, and community activists resisted the project by making counterclaims to vacant land as an urban commons. They argued that the land is inhabited not empty and that it belonged to those who labored upon and suffered for it. Combining community‐based ethnography with insights from critical property theory, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, I argue that land struggles in Detroit are more than distributional conflicts over resources. They are inextricable from debates over notions of race, property, and citizenship that undergird modern liberal democracies and ongoing struggles for decolonization.     

Parliament as Viewed Through a Woman's Eyes: Gender and Space in the 19th‐Century Commons

The 19th‐century house of commons is traditionally viewed as a masculine space overlooking the presence of female tourists, waitresses, housekeepers, servants, spectators, and residents. This essay demonstrates that, even when formally excluded from the Commons, women were determined to colonize spaces to witness debates. In the pre‐1834 Commons they created their own observation gallery in an attic high above the chamber, peeping through a light fitting to listen to parliamentary sessions. After 1834, they were accommodated in their own galleries in the temporary and new house of commons, growing increasingly assertive and protective of their rights to attend debates and participate in parliamentary political culture. Far from being exclusively male, parliament was increasingly viewed through women's eyes.     

Grabbing the commons: Forest rights,capital and legal struggle in the Carpathian Mountains

In this paper we show that formalizing communal rights is a process riddled with struggles leading to a partial or total grabbing of commons. Drawing on long-term research and using interviews, surveys, and historical sources, we analyze struggles that emerged from processes of formalizing rights to commons, occurring one century apart in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. The first wave of formalization, initiated by the state in 1910, institutionalized a model of hybrid commons in which individual rights to communal forests and pastures were understood as inheritable and tradable shares. This generated never-ending contention and a vulnerability to capital, allowing timber companies to grab shares and dispossess rightsholders. The second formalization, post-1989, enabled local communities to regain rights to forests that had been nationalized by the state at the beginning of the socialist rule. However, this resurgence of mountain commons unleashed again a suite of legal struggles, bringing back to life previous vulnerabilities and dispossessions. We argue that the formalization of rights often does not bring clarity and security to commons rightsholders. Instead, it creates a suite of vulnerabilities, ambiguities, and complexity within regulatory texts, begetting the grabbing of the commons.     

城市系统演化的复杂性研究

城市演化是由复杂多样的动力和主体推动的,受全球、国家和地方尺度的多重影响,表现出复杂的演化规律和特征。笔者认为城市系统演化模式与过程的研究需要发展一个基于复杂性理论的跨学科的分析框架。本文首先提出一个城市系统演化的概念模型,然后运用层次理论分析了城市系统演化的复杂相互作用,论述了城市系统演化的组成异质性、时空复杂性、决策复杂性等复杂性表征,最后讨论了城市系统演化的各种复杂规律。     

Unearthing global natures: Outer space and scalar politics

During the 1960s, the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) worked to develop laws that would regulate activity in outer space. In the treaty that followed, outer space, a resource that encompassed Earth, was to remain outside of existing political borders, free from sovereign claims, and open to use by all states. Because of these stipulations, many have labeled outer space a “global commons” or “global resource.” In most academic analyses of global commons, these laws rejecting sovereign claims are treated as the de facto way that a resource that materially spanned all states would be governed. As debates in and outside of COPUOS indicate, however, the status of outer space as beyond states’ sovereign territorial jurisdiction was not given. Rather, as I demonstrate in this paper, the status of outer space and orbits as beyond sovereign territories is a result of political contestation over the understanding of physical properties of outer space and Earth. I trace the debate in the late 1960s and 1970s over the border between sovereign air space and “global” outer space. This was a debate over how outer space would be incorporated into political–economic relations. By using a production of nature approach that recognizes the importance of physical materialities and scalar politics, I demonstrate the constructedness of outer space as a “global” resource and how its construction as such furthered uneven political–economic processes. Such analysis illuminates how such socionatures beyond and across borders are produced to achieve particular political–economic outcomes.     

From the Mountains to the Sea—Ki Uta ki Tai: Ecological Enclosure,Interconnection, and Subjectivity in the Commons

This paper explores the ways in which the affective and material dimensions of the commons come together to produce commoner subjectivities. Threats of enclosure can draw attention to the ways in which subjectivity reproduction is dependent on an environment which enables embodied acts of care. Using the example of the East Otago Taiāpure and Waikouaiti Mātaitai, a form of customary fisheries management in New Zealand, this paper illustrates the limitations of the institutionalised commons in its capacity to create an effective caring and protective space. Historical colonial transformation of the landscape and contemporary industrial activities have resulted in an “ecological enclosure” of the area, threatening the health of the ecosystem and its ability to encourage Māori subjectivities, specifically, kaitiakitanga, a relational responsibility to care for the physical and social environment.     

中国城市人口集聚分布——基于空间效应的研究

城市人口集聚分布以及城市带的形成是一个空间现象,空间力量对其形成和演化具有重要影响。本文应用空间计量经济学与趋势面分析相结合方法,以617个县级以上城市1998年和2011年的城镇人口和经纬度坐标数据来研究中国城市人口空间集聚分布与趋势。研究发现,中国城市人口分布与其周围相邻城市的人口分布关系密切,并且其6阶空间自相关效应是最强的;同时地理位置对中国城市人口体系的空间分布和纵向形态形成具有显著影响。在空间自相关和空间位置相关的共同作用下,城市人口规模聚集区已在东部沿海地区形成。