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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Borders and bureaucracies of EU mobile citizenship: Polish migrants and the personal identification number in Sweden

This article advances research into the workings and ‘workarounds’ of internal border technologies in migrants' lives. Through a focus on the specific example of tensions between EU mobile citizenship and the Swedish personal identification number, or personnummer, we enhance understandings of the bureaucratisation of state power and the enduring importance of discretion in computerised bureaucratic encounters. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Polish migrants living in Sweden, we analyse the centrality of this personnummer to our participants' working lives and general access to daily amenities and services. We reveal how and why it is so difficult to get this registration, even as EU citizens; explore how this relates to exploitative work practices; consider what happens, or cannot happen, when people are unable to obtain their personnummer and are effectively rendered undocumented; and focus on how these bureaucratic exclusions can nevertheless be managed and mediated. Ultimately we find that while this one example presents significant insights into the specificities of Swedish bordering practices – which go well beyond prevailing interests in welfare bordering – it also offers new insights into how contemporary digitised personal identification bureaucracies work in practice, and how fragile mobile EU citizenship has become.     

Rescaled “Rebel Cities”, Nationalization,and the Bourgeois Utopia: Dialectics Between Urban Social Movements and Regulation for Japan's Homeless

Urban social movements (USMs) and regulation have co‐evolved in Japan to deal with homelessness, spatializaing their politics on the national and subnational scales. The author first theorizes these USM–regulation relationships as scale‐oriented dialectics between two opposing forces—“commoning and othering”—both of which in my view are always internalized in today's “rebel cities” (Harvey 2012, Rebel Cities, Verso). Then, he analyzes two trajectories of USMs that attempted commoning—ie radical opening up of public goods/spaces within “zones of weakness” (Lefebvre 2009a )—against policing and workfare disciplines. The author detects “rescaling” dialectics in the case of Yokohama and “nationalizing” dialectics in the case of Tokyo. Lastly, through exploring and refreshing Engels's notion of the (petit‐)bourgeois utopia, the author concludes that our commoning projects and imaginaries are constrained by capitalist urban form that spatially others the homeless; but truly revolutionary moments of commoning emerge whenever people—even temporarily—conquer the fetishism of the public/private binary embedded in this urban form.     

The Digital Generation?: Children,ICT and the Everyday Nature of Social Exclusion

In this paper we explore the potentially inclusionary and exclusionary implications of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) for children through an examination of ICT policies and practices within UK schools. We begin by outlining the rhetoric of inclusion evident in UK government policy and by reflecting on how these discourses are mobilised in three case-study schools. We go on to consider issues of social exclusion, demonstrating that both material and social factors can prevent access to appropriate computer technology. In particular, we emphasise the importance of the way that children negotiate the meanings and use of computers through their everyday practices within the classroom. The paper concludes by arguing that only when we recognise that children's use of computers is about not only the broad-scale distribution of resources but also children's everyday social relations can we hope to institute policies that promote an inclusive 'information society'.     

Deep commoning: public folklore and environmental policy on a resource frontier

Abstract

This article explores the concept and practice of the commons as a holistic, multi-sectoral, cross-disciplinary framework for critical heritage work on resource frontiers. Drawing from my research on forest commoning in the Appalachian coalfields, I argue that land-based systems of commoning vital to communities in the path of resource extraction merit more attention from heritage workers. Commons tend to disappear through their atomization into siloed objects of study and stewardship. This disappearance, partly a function of reductionist, dualistic thinking, also signals a persistent colonialist myth of emptiness. I argue that the embodied, participatory field methods of public folklorists are particularly well-suited to the study and accreditation of land-based commons as heritage. Building on the idea of ‘deep ecology’, the notion of ‘deep commoning’ espouses our implication in worlds we bring into dialogue through the practice of public folklore as critical heritage work.     

Radical Environmentalism and “Commoning”: Synergies Between Ecosystem Regeneration and Social Governance at Tamera Ecovillage,Portugal

This article explores the scope and limitations of Radical Environmentalism as a source of practices of “commoning”. The application of the radical environmental “Healing Biotope” model in Tamera, an ecovillage located in southern Portugal, further expands the understanding of “commoning” as a social process, as well as of Radical Environmentalism as a cognitive framework. This article distinguishes between the technical and political dimensions of “commoning”. It also identifies two structuring dimensions of Radical Environmentalism, hereby called integrative rationality and the experiential action research and learning methodology. These dimensions support the technical aspect of “commoning” in Tamera by promoting epistemic and methodological coherence between social and environmental technologies. Despite their contested scientific validity, they contribute to the sustainability of the project by promoting synergies between ecological regeneration and social governance. However, they have limited capacity to address the political dimension of “commoning”, related with rank and socio‐economic inequalities among members.     

Negotiating Difference through Everyday Encounters: The Case of Sexual Orientation and Religion and Belief

Abstract: This paper argues for geographers to be more attentive to the potentially competing values, interests, and rights of the equality strands (race, gender, disability, religion and belief, sexual orientation, age). We focus on two that are most commonly assumed to experience tensions: religion/belief and sexual orientation. Drawing on focus groups with heterosexual Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus and lesbian and gay people of faith we explore the attitudes of heterosexual people of faith towards homosexuality. These findings suggest that tensions should be emerging between these groups in public space. However, we then demonstrate that these anticipated conflicts are not emerging because of the strategies people employ for separating their beliefs from their everyday conduct. In such ways, our findings demonstrate how the “what is” (ie personal experience) for both heterosexual and lesbian and gay people of faith is prioritised over theological or institutional perspectives of “what ought to be”.     

Use of E-procurement in Local Authorities' Purchasing and Its Effects on Local Economies: Evidence from Cumbria,UK

In the past decade, there has been an increasing interest shown by the Government and Local Authorities in issues concerning the implementation of new technologies and means of communication in the public administration. Several operations have been moved online, including some significant purchasing functions and procedures. Electronic procurement, or e-procurement, indicates the use of electronic tools or practices during each stage of the purchasing process. E-procurement is seen as a powerful instrument to achieve efficiency and cash savings. While e-procurement helps public sector bodies to achieve their budget targets, it also increases the level of competition among public sector suppliers. This may influence the level of economic activity generated at local levels and potentially reduce the level of business provided to local firms. In the worst case, this situation could produce a knock-on effect especially in peripheral and remote areas, where the public sector is often the major purchaser. This paper focuses on the significance of e-procuring and e-tendering practices among Local Authorities in Cumbria, North-West England. The paper explores how the tendency to use e-procurement may vary among public sector suppliers with regard to business characteristics such as size, headquarter location and sector of activities. In addition, the author investigates the suppliers' ability to deal with e-procurement practices and procedure, and examines how e-buying and e-tendering in the public sector affects Local Authorities' patterns of spend.     

Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE Through African Urbanism

Urban political ecology (UPE) has provided critical insights into the sociomaterial construction of urban environments, their unequal distribution of resources, and contestation over power and resources. Most of this work is rooted in Marxist urban geographical theory, which provides a useful but limited analysis. Such works typically begin with a historical‐materialist theory of power, then examine particular artifacts and infrastructure to provide a critique of society. We argue that there are multiple ways of expanding this framing, including through political ecology or wider currents of Marxism. Here, we demonstrate one possibility: starting from theory and empirics in the South, specifically, African urbanism. We show how African urbanism can inform UPE and the associated research methods, theory and practice to create a more situated UPE. We begin suggesting what a situated UPE might entail: starting with everyday practices, examining diffuse forms of power, and opening the scope for radical incrementalism. © 2013 The Author. Antipode © 2013 Antipode Foundation Ltd.     

Assemblage-democracy: Reconceptualising democracy through material resource governance

This article furthers political geographic thinking on democracy by generating and employing a conceptualisation of ‘assemblage-democracy’. Bringing an assemblage perspective to democratic thinking brings to the fore three key dimensions: the co-constitution of material and non-material connections; connectivity and associations, in particular engagement with multiple heterogeneous ‘minoritarian’ publics; and the (re)construction of spatial configurations such as scale. We employ these three dimensions of materiality, publics, and scale, in combination with the concept of (de)territorialisation to produce a geographic conceptualisation of democracy as emergent, precarious, and plural.We operationalise and refine the concept of assemblage-democracy through an empirical analysis of democratic experiments with energy resources. Specifically, we analyse negotiations involved in emergent democratic energy experiments through in-depth qualitative empirical study of community-owned energy projects in the UK, asking what kind of democracy emerges with new technologies and how? In answering this question, we demonstrate the fragile, contingent, and contested nature of democratic practices and connections produced in the (re)enactment of energy infrastructures. In doing so, this article also shows how an assemblage lens can offer a renewed understanding of how democratic politics is configured through material resource governance.     

Mineral commons: Collective claims to territory in the goldfields of Madagascar

This paper examines how artisanal miners in northern Madagascar have contested state-corporate authority and staked claims to subterranean territory through the production and maintenance of goldfields as mineral commons. Drawing on ethnographic evidence collected over 15 months of field-based research, as well as interviews and archival data, I elaborate how community members in the diggings of Betsiaka have used commoning to resist subsoil enclosure, engender local autonomy, and secure collectivized access to gold as a basis for extended social reproduction. Constructing Betsiaka's mineral commons has relied on three overlapping yet distinct components: (1) the materiality or geological character of deposits, mediated through local understandings of gold's occurrence and (in)exhaustibility; (2) the socio-historical construction of discourse around resource access; and (3) the political-economic organization and management of the goldfields via sedimented institutions of governance. The paper's arguments challenge assumptions across varying domains of commons scholarship that tend to exclude resources deemed “nonrenewable” from discussions of commons, demonstrating both that socio-natural particularities can render mineral deposits effectively “inexhaustible,” and that even subsoil resources perceived as finite can be managed by community members to facilitate collective access and broadly-shared benefit. They furthermore contribute to ongoing discussions regarding territorialization and governance in extractive landscapes, adding commons and commoning to the list of tactics and instruments used by mining communities to avoid dispossession, order activities, and sustain livelihoods. Recognizing mineral commons in Betsiaka and beyond thus has significant implications for enhancing our understanding of local mineral politics—and also for rethinking approaches to formalization and decentralization.     

World Class Aspirations,Urban Informality,and Poverty Politics: A North–South Comparison

Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Washington), we address the question of how a geographic relational poverty approach can help us understand, or at least expand ways of thinking about these processes by attending to urban informality and the politics of poverty. Informality, a pervasive feature of the global South and North, functions as a survival strategy whereby the monetarily poor can compensate for their lack of income through commoning. Market-driven, state underwritten urban development initiatives for housing those with wealth is limiting the conditions of possibility for the monetarily poor, and informality. This is compounded by emergent political discourses rendering informality as inappropriate, and the monetarily poor as undeserving of a right to the city. Yet long-standing more-than-capitalist and communal informal practices pursued by the urban poor remain effective and necessary survival strategies, supporting residents whose presence is necessary to the city and whose practices challenge capitalist norms.     

'Gendered Exclusions': women's fear of violence and changing relations to space

This paper examines how women's fear of violence is realised as spatial exclusions. Quantitative surveys on fear are used to show the number of women who are afraid, and the nature of the most frightening places. However, it is argued that quantitative surveys are of limited value in approaching the mental and social processes behind fear and in understanding the fear-related production of space. Qualitative research methods are used to explain the matter in more depth. It may be argued that fear is a consequence of women's unequal status, but it also contributes to perpetuating gendered inequalities. The paper reveals multiple experiences that change women's relations to space. Experiences and attempts at violence, and incidents of sexual harassment produce a space from which women are excluded on account of their gender. Social and emotional aspects, such as increased feelings of vulnerability, lack of social support, and a feeling of not having control over what is happening to oneself, have spatial consequences. These feelings often increase along with ageing, injuring, bereavement or moving to another place, as well as pregnancy and motherhood. I argue that the spatial exclusions in women's lives are a reflection of gendered power relations. Women's subjective feelings contribute to the intersubjective power-related process of producing space. Urban space is produced by gender relations, and reproduced in those everyday practices where women do not-or dare not-have a choice over their own spatial behaviour.     

What “Is” Territorial Cohesion? What Does It “Do”?: Essentialist Versus Pragmatic Approaches to Using Concepts

The question, “what is territorial cohesion” has reverberated through European spatial policy since the publication of the European Spatial Development Perspective in 1999. Over the last 10 years, the European Spatial Policy Observation Network (ESPON) has made many efforts to define and measure the concept of “territorial cohesion”. Many such attempts assume that a policy concept must be defined in order to be “operationalized”. Or, in other words, that we must determine what the concept is before we can determine what it can or should do. This paper challenges this assumption in two parts. In the first, I review a number of ESPON projects to show how complex and uncertain these essentialist definitions have become. In the second, I analyse a number of national, regional and local government responses to the 2008 Green paper. I show that, whilst a clear and coherent definition has not been established, this concept is already operationalized in different policy frameworks. Bringing this together, I argue that users of such concepts ought to approach the issue differently, through a pragmatic line of enquiry: one that asks what territorial cohesion does, what it might do and how it might affect what other concepts, practices and materials do.     

Doing gender and the GeoHumanities – celebrations and intoxications

Abstract

This paper celebrates Gender, Place and Culture’s 25th Anniversary by staging a dialogue of sorts between feminist, queer and trans knowledge projects and the interdisciplinary field of practice based GeoHumanities, in other words creative research practices such as film-making, theatre, creative writing or live art. In embracing the vibrancy of these fields together the paper addresses two much wider issues; firstly, the continued challenges that these knowledge projects face, especially in an era of post-truth and the undermining of expertise, which together risks a reactive retrenchment of academic practices. Secondly, within the GeoHumanities, feminist scholar-practitioners have been leading the way in evolving the critical-political dimensions of these interdisciplinary practices, but as they acknowledge, much more remains to be done to ensure that the critical potential of these doings is realised.

In short, this paper asks, what can/have GeoHumanities ‘doings’ contributed to the challenges of gender based knowledge projects, and further, how can/are the critical questions framed by these knowledge projects evolving GeoHumanities practices? Three large concerns frame discussion of possibilities for mutual learning and advancement; what forms of knowledge count; who can make and legitimate knowledge, and how we might build critical perspectives for the transformations claimed in the name of these practices? As such, the paper honours GPC’s quarter century through a forward looking celebration of exciting scholarly practices that remain committed to the foundational tenants of feminist, trans and queer knowledge projects: namely their ongoing critique and remaking of knowledge hierarchies, academic practices, and the political economies of the academy.