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.     

The Italian public sphere: a case of dramatized polarization

This contribution is organized along two main interpretive lines. First: the Italian public sphere is very polarized because of well-established historical attitudes, a crowded media market and new technologies that push towards segmentation of the audience. The arrival of Berlusconi has only reinforced the already existing polarization that goes well beyond the borders of partisanship involving the content of news, the structure and professionalism of news outlets and also the recipients that divide themselves along the lines of political attitudes. The second characteristic feature of the Italian public sphere involves the tendency towards dramatization, which is also produced by the sudden commercialization of the entire mass media system that started in 1980. This article's thesis is supported by examples of dramatization and extreme political discourse. The consequences that derive from this situation are discussed in the conclusion.     

What do divided cities have in common? An international comparison of income segregation

This paper provides a comparative assessment of income segregation in cities of 12 countries. We use spatial entropy indexes based on small‐scale gridded income data and consistent definition of city boundaries to ensure international comparability of our segregation measures. Results show considerable variation in the levels of income segregation across cities, even within countries, reflecting the diversity within urban systems. Larger, more affluent, productive, and more unequal cities tend to be more segregated. Urban form, demographic, and economic factors explain additional variation in segregation levels through the influence of high‐income households, who tend to be the most segregated. The positive association between productivity and segregation is mitigated in polycentric cities.     

Wood exploitation and food supply at the border of the Roman Empire: the case of the vicus of Thamusida – Sidi Ali ben Ahmed (Morocco)

This paper presents the results of inter-disciplinary work drawing on archaeobotanical and archaeometric studies to trace the agroforestry landscape and the supply economy at the vicus of Thamusida in north-west Morocco at the border of the Roman Empire. The available data indicate the self-sufficiency of the settlement in both forestry and agricultural products throughout the period investigated from the end of the 1st century BC to the beginning of the 4th century AD. Charcoal data testify to the presence of a Quercus suber forest in the close surroundings of the site and its exploitation for a variety of forestry products such as timber, fuelwood, cork, and probably also leaves and acorns to feed livestock. The overwhelming presence of Q. suber in the archaeological layer investigated clearly indicates that this forest was under human influence prior to Roman occupation and was already partially degraded. Charred seed and fruit remains suggest that the diet of both troops and civilians was mainly based on locally grown products and that all the inhabitants of the site had access to good cereals such as barley, naked wheats and pulses with large seeds such as horse bean and pea; quality fruits, such as olive and grape, were also produced locally for fresh consumption. Organic residue analyses of the contents of ceramic vessels and plastered vats allowed archaeobotanical data to be complemented, thereby shedding light on some of the imports at Thamusida. Despite the remote location of this settlement, imported goods such as oil and wine were transported here in amphorae from different parts of the Empire.     

Radiocarbon and U-series dating of the endemic deer Praemegaceros cazioti (Depéret) from “Grotta Juntu”, Sardinia

Radiocarbon and U-series methods (²³⁰Th/U and ²³¹Pa/²³⁵U) for absolute age determination have been applied to some fossil samples from Grotta Juntu, in North Eastern Sardinia (Italy). The remains belong to the endemic deer species Praemegaceros cazioti, which is here represented by an almost complete skeleton. The three dating methods lead to concordant ages of about 7500 years BP, indicating that the skeleton was maintained as closed system after burial. Taking into consideration these results, Praemegaceros cazioti from Grotta Juntu is now the youngest representative of this species in Sardinia.     

Seeing the churches like the state: taxes and wealth redistribution in late antique Italy

Two key economic questions tend to be asked about the transformation of the Roman world. First, how did Roman fiscal structures continue, disintegrate and transform? Second, how did emerging churches play a role in the redistribution of wealth through new administrative structures to create a new social system, what Ian Wood has called a ‘temple society’? These two processes – one focussing on the continuity or discontinuity of the Roman economic structures and the other on churches within that system – are usually examined separately or assumed to follow, what we call here, a ‘Gallic model’. In this article, we first demonstrate that Wood’s ‘temple society’ is far more complex in its emergence in Italy than in Gaul. Second, we argue that the churches of Italy remained embedded within late Roman fiscal structures, even as they transformed during late antiquity. Fiscal arrangements, examined through the churches of Rome and Ravenna, established churches as ever more central economic actors to the state fiscal system by 600 and shaped their long-term wealth redistribution process.     

TheConvergence of the Italian Regions and Unemployment: Theory and Evidence

We explore the links between the halt of the convergence process of Italian regions at the beginning of the 1970s and the increase in regional unemployment dispersion. We consider a neoclassical exogenous growth model with an imperfect labor market and show that during the transitional dynamics the imperfections of the labor market negatively influence the output growth rate. In particular, the model implies that centralized bargaining is likely to set a national minimum wage that is too high with respect to the labor productivity of the less developed regions, resulting in a negative impact on their per capita output growth. We test the implications of the model on a regional panel data set using the GMM framework. Both our market distortion measure and the unemployment rate are found to significantly lower the growth rate of per capita output.