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.     

凭湖而舞 东非大裂谷中的湖泊与动物

<正>不上升到万米高空,很难看到这条地球的"伤痕"——东非大裂谷。这条大裂谷是一座天然的储水库,集中了非洲30多个湖泊。其中,博戈尼亚湖(Lake Bogoria)、纳库鲁湖(Lake Nakuru)、埃尔门泰塔湖(Lake Elementaita)三个浅水盐湖,总面积达320.34平方千米,是大裂谷中湖泊价值的核心体现。这片区域是世界上鸟类种类非常丰富的地区之一,有13种鸟类是濒危物种。这里不仅是小火烈鸟最重要的觅食之所,也是白鹈鹕筑巢和繁殖基地,还生活着大量大型哺乳动物,如狮子、黑犀牛、长颈鹿、扭角林羚、狮子、猎豹、野狗等。基于这片区域具有为数不少的濒危物种,及对研究重大生态过程具有重要价值,2011年"肯尼亚东非大裂谷湖泊系统"被联合国教科文组织列入世界遗产名录。     

Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier

A generation of scholarship on the experiences of the frontier—spanning models of violent conflict to various kinds of intimacy—has been highly influential in building a nuanced picture of Australia's colonial race relations. Regionally-focused histories provide a valuable avenue for bringing these models of frontier historiography together within the same frame, because it is at the localised level of social relations that the cross-hatched intersections between violence and intimacy can emerge into clearest view. This article traces the threads of cross-cultural encounter on one Australian frontier to assess how violent conflict could arise as much from conditions of inter-connectedness and familiarity as from conditions of strangeness and fear, and to ask, under such conditions, what kinds of frontier violence drew the intervention of the law.     

Fighting or Dancing: Archaeology and Folklore Traces

The connections between archaeology and traditions or folklore may be thought of as a dance, in which archaeological traces complement or constitute elements of folklore, and traces of folklore complement and constitute archaeological interpretation. On the other hand, archaeology and folklore may engage in competition about the “true” past(s). In this paper I will explore the tensions between these perspectives, and the tensions between archaeology and many forms of folklore.