Abstract
We have reached a high point in a struggle, at both ideological and practical levels, against the processes of enclosure and privatisation of public space and assets. The use of profit-as-motive in most spheres of human life, coupled with a reduction of the collective to the individual, has meant the shrivelling up of our lived, conceived and dreamt up common spaces. Perhaps, all points in history seem particularly critical. However, I write in the shadow of the tragedy at Grenfell Tower, in west London, that took place in the morning of the 14 June, where a conflagration erupted in a block of social housing leading to the tragic death of 71 residents. Thus, I cannot help relating the causes and motives of the tragedy and reactions in the aftermath to some wider themes, including how as a society, we choose to use and manage our collective resources, such as housing.
However, what I would like to focus on is the reaction within the community to the tragedy – an outpouring of activities reclaiming common spaces to be used for collective grieving, care-taking and healing – which the State and other larger organisations had not been able to provide. Rebecca Solnit (2010) wrote about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, observing the generosity and resilience of those affected, their ability to improvise another kind of society and demonstrate ‘how deeply most of us desire connection, participation, altruism and purposefulness’ (p. 306). These desires draw us to create commons.
At a time when the tragedy is so fresh, as I read and reflect on Common Space by Stavros Stavrides, it is impossible not to find in its pages relevance and connection to the present times. The examples Stavrides touches on are very different, of course. They are the spaces of a collective politics, now part of contemporary urban mythology – from the Occupy movement of half a decade ago along with the countless squares around the world occupied as part of collective commoning experiences, including Gezi Park, Tahrir, Syntagma, Navarinou and Puerta del Sol. Taken together, they seemed to usher in a new time of horizontal politics, of spatial occupations, of a protest through commoning and a reclaiming of the importance of the commons.
The threads of these movements are traced by Stavrides, in the opening chapters of the book, back to before the alter-global movements of the late 1990s of the World Social Forums, trade protests and movements, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and piqueteros in Argentina. They were, as de Angelis points out in the introduction, in their own way opening ‘cracks of hope’. The commoning practices can also be more mundane and located in the everyday, and it is where the book takes us – to the everyday spaces of commoning that emerges from these ‘cracks of hope’. They can occur in moments of great political upheaval and in disasters but also in the everyday practices of creative resistance.
The book therefore offers a timely and valuable introduction to the debates on the commons and commoning. More crucially, it locates the role that space has played in creating the necessary social relations which allows commoning to happen and how, in turn, these processes of commoning are affected by and shape the spaces they occur in. The book is divided into three sections – almost Lefebvrian in conception – where common space is a concrete product of political collective action; it is inhabited in, used and shaped, and dreamt of or envisaged. The first part of the book weaves selectively through the work of Foucault, Agamben, Deleuze, Schmitt, Rancière, Ostrom and Turner and uses these theorists to explore the way in which, particularly urban, common spaces are being created in resistance to the enclosure and privatisation of space. These occur as a form of networked spaces of exception, where commoning practices are developed within anti-capitalist struggles. With a positive view of the expanding commons and institutions of commoning Stavrides offers, with some examples, a vision of hope in the emerging communities of commoning practitioners – where are these to be found and how they may be expanding.
In the second part of the book, Stavrides offers some more empirical reflections on these questions drawing on research from the history of social housing in Athens and brings in a range of other historical social housing examples, from 1930s Red Vienna, Weimar Republic to the Soviet Union. Stavrides also touches on more modern examples of everyday commoning practices in the streets of Africa and South American cities. As an architect and activist, the central part of the book offers these more concrete examples and reflections on the spaces for commoning – not just as a physical notion, but also as a set of practices or institutions that evolve and develop out of social relations in that space. Hence, ‘space-as-commons is a set of social relations which potentially challenges the very foundations of ownership’ (p. 261).
The latter part of the book moves onto the more abstract and theoretical notions of how we envisage or create representations of the commons as practices and institutions of commoning. The starting point for the discussion is a collective memory and how spaces can be subverted or defaced, in order for a collective demand to be recognised and seen. This process is emphasised as part of the creation of common space. The carnivalesque can play an important role in creating new representations, as well as inhabitations of space. Also, the use of threshold spaces can be important. When we move from one predefined type of space to another, in that threshold or liminality a new form of common space emerges.
In the concluding section, some examples are explored of how representations of common space interact with practices of space-commoning. Navarinou Square, for example, in the neighbourhood of Exarchia in Athens, was occupied during 2008. People quickly discovered the difficulties and contradictions involved in the creation of autonomous spaces. Internally, there were the rules that people created to deal collectively with issues of equality, cleanliness or drug addicts. At the same time, the external image being created by the media tended to portray the collective efforts in a negative light, emphasising its exceptional character in violent and anomic terms. The tension played out here, as Stavrides points out, is between what autonomy and self-management can mean – either being completely cut off or being still radical and inventive without losing contact with the surrounding area.
Common Space would be usefully read in conjunction with Patterns of Commoning edited by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich. In a wide ranging collection of more than 50 short essays, published by the Commons Strategies Group, the book opens with reflections on the theory through which commoning is understood. The main body explores examples of commoning practices, including in commons that are long-lasting, neighbourhood-based, bio-cultural, arts and culture-based, collaborative technologies, exchange and credit instruments, tools and infrastructure to support commoning practices, as well as spaces of learning. The book ends with some critical reflections of the inner dynamics of commoning from the perspective of researchers and activists. Exploring the vast range of different forms of commoning practices shifts attention away from the spatial, which is Stavrides own forte, to the socio-technical endeavours of commoning practitioners from a wide variety of contexts.
Thus, Stavrides’ books trace two aspects involved in creating commons – the spaces of commoning and the practices involved – where collective rule-making and sharing take place in shaping the common space or shared resource. Stavrides points out that common space is often evanescent and temporary, depending more on the institutions built. To what extent can these institutions of commoning be understood as permanently transformative? When are the merely figurative and symbolic? The Bollier and Helfrich anthology offers many concrete examples as answers to these questions. Not only are alternatives plentiful, but for the Commons Strategies Group, the inner dynamics of commoning are to be understood contextually through the experiences of the people involved in creating their rules for commoning.
The Bollier and Helfrich present many useful ideas for planners to engage with. First, it would be heartening for more planners to absorb the ideas explored, specifically about the practices of commoning, to test them out and explore them. Stavrides points out that these ideas are not necessarily new, but the language and representations used are unfamiliar and are also in flux. Second, the meaning of community planning consultation and participation radically shifts when we consider the practices of commoning, including their materiality or resources involved, as well as their spatial context. Third, the involvement of citizens has to shift radically towards forms of collective ownership and management, and along with that so does our understanding of what can be created, built and planned collectively. For local governments, this means engaging with the potential for decentralised and community-led planning practices, whether through institutional support or through resource allocation – land, finance and governance advice. Of course, informality, spontaneity and creativity remain difficult to plan with and are part of the increasing understanding of complexity within the planning process. Many scholars and planning practitioners have acknowledged these deep contradictions. However, as Stavrides shows, there needs to be an ontological shift in our understanding of the relation between space and the collective.
Research can include looking at the practices of commoning that are widespread in many arenas of struggle, from housing and open spaces to energy, water and food provision, as indeed the main essays in Patterns of Commoning show. Stavrides also urges for continued research focussing on revealing ‘the complexities of the relation between rules imposed on spaces of urban renovation and practices, which transform, bend or defy the rules throughout periods of intense political or social struggles’. This is an encouragement, as is reading both books, to both scholars and activists in their work in the so-called ‘cracks of hope’, to create both the spaces and practices of understanding the commons and of developing commoning practices.