The City as Commons: Common Space

By Stavros Stavrides

Ch 2: Expanding Commoning: in, against and beyond capitalism?

Common worlds may overspill enclosures

Through the process of normalization, domination crafts social worlds in which the different groups of the society find their place, where belonging becomes important in shaping social relations and in producing different forms of consent.

In contemporary capitalist societies, distinct social worlds can be established on various levels of social organization.

Urban enclavism, however, tends to become the prevailing mode of circumscribing a common world for people to recognize and, indeed, to 'inhibit', where, belonging crafts consent and consent crafts belonging.

Common worlds tend to be defined and reproduced as worlds with recognizable boundaries. Within the boundaries of common world, people accept and perform shared identities, shared habits and, often, shared values. Common worlds are not necessarily linked to practices which overspill the boundaries of a community, no matter how real or imagined this community may be. Common worlds may be crafted as homogenous and homogenizing structures of beliefs and habits.

The production of common world does not need to be the result of a homogenization process. If we understand a common world as the result of social relation, then common worlds not only may permit differences but are the means of establishing a common ground between them. It is this kind of common world that is being expressed in public space, if public space is understood not as the locus of nomination but as an always-contested area.

Commoning is not a process of production or appropriation of certain goods meant to be shared. Commoning is about complex and historically specific processes through which representations, practices and values intersect in circumscribing what is to be shared and how in a specific society.

Hardt and Negri propose that new forms of commons have emerged in contemporary capitalism: those especially connected to immaterial goods which can be shared as knowledge, information codes, but also affects and forms of social relationship. It becomes clear that these new potentially shared commons directly involve human relationships not simply as the means of producing commons but, essentially, as products of commoning themselves. \

Giving new form to the Marxian idea that capitalist society contains and produces relations that may undermine it, Hardt and Negri discover the constitutive contradiction that may lead to contemporary capitalism;s destruction. They try to locate in the dynamics of the multitude. The multitude is produced through commoning and produces various kinds of commons, the multitude may potentially consitute itself as a multiple political subjectivity that surpasses capitalism.

Commoning is not necessarily an anti- or post- capitalist process. Commoning may support the reproduction of existing communities and their struggle to defend their collective symbolic or legal ownership. This kind of ownership may have been the product of enclosure practices which limit access or define privileges of use, as in the case of common facilities and open space in a gated community, a private club. Commoning in general may create areas of conflict between different communities or societies.

Institutions of expanding commoning established in a stable and well-defined community may very well look like the dominant institutions in the ways they regulate people's rights and actions. However, explicitly differ from the dominant ones, with these 3 characters:

1. Establish the ground of comparisons between different subjects of action and between different practices. Institutions of this kind encourage differences to meet, to mutually expose themselves, and to create grounds of mutual awareness.

2. Differences are relative and relational, offering opportunities and tools for translating differences. The creation of common spaces involves practices of translation that build bridges between people with different backgrounds. Immigrant cultures contain important seeds of commoning which can be planted effectively in a new collectively cultivated ground.

3. Has a very deep roots in the history of human societies, which prevented or discouraged the accumulation of power, by sustaining mechanisms of control of any potential accumulation of power either by individuals or by specific groups. Sharing of power is the precondition of egalitarian sharing as its ultimate target. Egalitarian sharing needs to be able to include newcomers, has to be encouraged by an always-expanding network of self governance institutions.

Common space as threshold space

Is not public space nor private space, because it is not established by the authority and not controlled by specific individuals.

Common space can be considered as a relation between a social group and its effort to define a world that is shared between its members, completely separated from what is kept outside and the "outsiders". This is the kind of world in an urban enclave, as a gated community.  Common space may take the form of a meeting ground.

From city perspective, common spaces are the spatial nodes throug which the metropolis becomes again the site of politics. Gezi Park struggle, reclaiming Taksim.

Thresholds may appear as mere boundaries which separate an inside from outside.

Commoning is not anti-capitalist by essence but may activate and express attempts to go beyond capitalism.