Commoning

For download is the abstract and intro to the text. If you have institutional access to CITY, you can access the full text here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13604813.2017.1374773

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This paper presents a sympathetic critique of a right to the city perspective that sets up a binary between city inhabitants who actively produce and appropriate city space for its use value as opposed to those who expropriate urban space for realizing exchange value. It suggests that this tends to gloss over the actual divisions among users of city space and their complicity with forces of capital and the state that constitute real limits for the urban revolution that the right to the city envisions. It then argues that an analytics of contested place-making, including practices of commoning, can both include the central conflict that is important to the rights to the city perspective and overcome the limitations of a rights framework

The proposal delves into the heterogeneity of households and proves the multiplicity of domestic meanings with the aim of producing useful and operative knowledge related to a wide range of issues affecting communities and urban systems. It emerges as an invitation to reflect on how we might otherwise imagine and inhabit our inherited domestic spaces, and how we come together beyond the effects of this global crisis, when new forms of solidarity and care should arise and be exercised. It might then be possible to overcome social constraints and rediscover neglected relational needs and values, envisioning other forms of urban coexistence.



Essay | expanding design practices | No Density | Politics and economics

Key words: Activism, Alternative Domesticity, City of Commons, Collective Awareness, Participation, Social Dynamics

This chapter contributes to building a diverse, non-capitalocentric economic vocabulary by making visible concrete entrepreneurial practices that are involved in fighting criminal economies. Although they do not fit into the dominant representation of the "Economy", that is, as including all those "productive" activities that result in waged labour for a capitalist firm, both mafia and anti-mafia represent one of the many ways people organise to survive. After introducing some of the fundamental characteristics of mafia enterprise, I delve into three prime strategies that are being effectively deployed to counter mafia enterprises in the Italian context. The themes I address are property, labour, and communication. The contribution seeks not to carry out detailed analyses, but rather to map out the core elements of these economies that may be of use to different contexts around the world in countering organized crime.

Published in Dacoromania Litteraria, no. 3, 2016: 10-44 http://www.dacoromanialitteraria.inst-puscariu.ro/ro/nr3.php

The article examines the concept of contemporary community as commoning, at the intersection of action, performance or participatory art, place, site-specific, and (post)digital poetry. This involves a brief review of traditional avant-gardes, 20th century engaged art, and recent political-art movements.  In the process of this analysis, the participatory emerges as a subtler, more nuanced, and less predictable phenomenon than usually accepted. Also, performative subjectivity is traced as either the source of anticommunal community (in French theory), or mere Christian-capitalist construct (in communist philosophy). Agamben’s theory of the coming community is therefore examined as possible response to both these stances, with its relevance to contemporary movements, including post-Occupy. Commoning—paralleled to placing in poetry—turns out to be of critical importance in present-day community especially with correlatives such as displacement and undecidablility. Place, space, and map(ping) are therefore radically redefined in the context, and contemporary poetry appears to be indissolubly related to the process: the poem of place is the place, and poetry becomes the site of the com(mon)ing community. Site (and discourse)-specificity in poetry occasions a shift in focus to digital space, its sonic economy, and the communities and floating locations/sites thereof. Site and discourse fluidity have brought about a paradigm in which the poem and its related apps tend to expand and turn into digital space itself, while in more recent postdigital evolutions, a new political concern for the ‘real’ reshape community, site, and performance/participatory art or poetry in a continuous interactivity and interdependence.

Keywords: community, commoning, participatory art, performance studies, poetry of place, site-specificity, digital space, digital humanities, e-literature, the postdigital, GSI, NLP.

Uploaded is the title page of the article. The complete article can be found here: https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/focaal/2018/81/focaal.2018.issue-81.xml
If you do not have institutional access, you can contact me for a postprint of the text.

In response to the theme section on commoning in the December 2017 issue of Focaal, this article raises further questions for discussion and proposes an analytics of the commons that grasps it through the lens of property regimes. The key question concerns how we might best envision the relation of the commons/ commoning to the state, capitalism, and commonality in a way that does justice to both a broadly Leftist politics of the commons and an analysis of really existing commons that might deviate from this ideal. The conceptual lens of property regimes proposed here focuses empirical attention on relations of production and the organization of membership and ownership in the commons without including a particular politics into the definition as such.

《反造再起》為「反造系列」第二輯，以「城市共生」為主軸，分為〔關懷弱勢：人生百味、萬華協力〕〔老城再生與活化：台中中區再生、高雄哈瑪星〕〔聯合公民社會和公部門資源：Open Green〕〔人群關係的再造：古風小白屋、南機拌飯〕〔用其他方式重組社區關係：玖樓共生公寓、燦爛時光書店、都農網、還我特色公園行動聯盟〕五大方向，收錄十二個經典案例。各案例之間並非獨自發展，而是可資相互參照，彼此交疊。在實踐上這些案例也相互協力和串連，有的已經發展出社會企業甚至商業化的運作方式。

「共生」指的是一群市民對於城市空間與發展的重新想像，當他們在經營共生實驗的同時，也同時在創造一個新的城市。相較於容易落入事業導向或物質環境改造的「地方創生」，「城市共生」的核心在於社會與社群關係的建構與資源的再生產，提供合作的機會與地方活化的基礎。

《反造再起》（第二輯）不同於《反造城市》（第一輯），在抗爭、游擊與開創之餘，嘗試進一步用「城市共生」的觀點，強調市民之間的協力、合作甚至跨域，與公部門的串連，進而發展自我治理的機制，創造城市生產與生活多元的新可能性，是對日益私有化、商品化、財團化、全球化，以及政府無所作為的應對之道。

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.

My thesis is a call for the need of an intersectional awareness in the field of the commons, or the common or commoning. For that reason, I focus on a rather undertheorized subfield, the feminist commons because I deem that it promotes a more intersectional perspective than the male-dominated commons. My main effort concentrates to argue for the potentialities of an intersection between the commons and (feminist) decolonial project. Notions such as coloniality of power, the principle of intersectionality and the ethos of decoloniality help me to build my argument step by step. The thesis does not provide answers rather it poses questions and tries to open space for a fruitful experimentation.
Keywords :
feminist commons, the commons, common, commoning, decoloniality, intersectionality, decolonial ethos, decolonial feminist commons

In 1970, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City hosted the exhibition Haus-Rucker-Co LIVE!, a mid-career retro- spective of the Viennese architectural collective. Most historians have studied the range of design works created by the trio—and featured in the exhibition—alongside contemporaneous archi- tects’ concerns with sci-fi fantasy; temporary, inflatable structures; and countercultural liberation. While not ignoring the emancipa- tory potential of these works, this essay focuses primarily on the set of performative actions Haus-Rucker-Co staged within the museum during the run of the exhibition, including: their decision to live within the museum galleries, the hosting of weekly meals in the exhibition space, and the ritual devouring of a scale model of the museum made out of cake. Taken together, these acts foreground a sense of sociality and community that counters the museum’s standard emphasis on individualized aes- thetic absorption.

Eine relationale raumtypologische Definition von Spatial Commons als reproduktive Raumsysteme eines inklusiven und selbstbestimmten Stadtraumgebrauchs – in Abgrenzung zu Separate Spaces als abschöpfende Raumsysteme eines exklusiven und fremdbestimmten Stadraumgebrauchs – mittels kollektiv erstellter Kartierungen von Orten, Prozessen und Regelwerken des Gemeinschaffens in Freiräumen, Gewerberäumen und Wohnräumen in Berlin.

This paper draws attention to the somewhat neglected domains of affects, emotions, and subjectivity in the study of the commons. The paper argues that a focus on affective and communicative relations among humans and between humans and more-than-humans can enrich our understanding of the practices of commoning and the processes of becoming a commoner. Using the case of community forestry initiatives in Odisha, India, it illustrates how rural people become commoners through the embodied practices of caring for the forests as a shared common. The paper uses this empirical example and conceptual resources from affect theory and relational ontology to think about the commons as affective socio-nature entanglements and as a nurturing ground for subjectivity. It discusses the implications of attention on the commons and the practices of commoning for enabling the emergence of other-than-capitalist subjectivities.

This thesis is a material-discursive investigation of how practices of curating and commons are posthuman today. Recognising how contemporary forms of curating and commons are part of computational cultures and how they are influenced by mass participation in socio-technological networks, the thesis examines how users (including curators), machines and software stimulate new forms of curating and commons. Its main focus is on how these practices influence the field of computation by becoming active within it.

This article documents and juxtaposes two side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on refugee health, housing, and living conditions in Greece. First is the intensification of state-led practices of what is increasingly known as “campisation,” hyper-isolation, and ultimately the stigmatisation of refugee populations. Second is the intensification of refugee-led “commoning” practices of self- and community care and the creation of “caringscapes” inside and outside the camps, which has produced new sociospatial connections that have challenged isolation. Documenting these interrelated processes side by side, we draw attention to two important insights. First is that the proliferation of caringscapes acts as an important, but ultimately insufficient, antidote against increased exclusion marginalisation and stigmatisation of refugees. Second is that new ethics and new forms of collective care that have emerged alongside repeated mantras about individual responsibility and social distancing can become levers to imagine a less individualistic, less divisive, and less isolated world.

This article focuses on the entanglement of trajectories of transnational education/work and religious conversion among Chinese overseas students who move to the UK before returning to China. In contrast to the existing literature on returnees where the gaze is only turned on highly prestigious schemes/trajectories of return, we look at those who become involved with Christian evangelical congregations and bible reading groups in response to a general state of disillusion with social beliefs of global competition and success. By drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in London and Beijing, we engage with literature on lived religion, migration and the care of the self through a sociolinguistic lens. We take pressures for successful return as a technology of hope that shaped our participants' experiences of Christian conversion, and examine religious practices as support-based subject-transformation projects whereby our participants regulate their and others' practices and feelings through daily semiotic activities as they operate within global spaces of higher education and the labour market. In so doing, we detail a complex interplay of self-transformation experiences, collective practices of refusal, and capitalist logics of market expansion.

Keywords: Success; return; hope; Christian conversion; subjectivation; labour; China.

Full paper can be viewed here: http://www.isea-archives.org/docs/2017/proceedings/ISEA2017_Proceedings.pdf

Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is an encompassing term, which  refers  to  the  licenses  associated  with  making  the  source  code  that is the instructions and language per se, which define how software works  and  is  made  available  for  others  to  read,  modify  and  share.  Providing a brief history of FLOSS, this paper presents a hypothetical situation,  whereby  elements  of  FLOSS  are  applied  to  reimagining  institutional  change  within  the  context  of  a  contemporary  arts  venue  and organisation. Framed as an artistic intervention, the art institution’s structure and its existing forms are considered as the living materiality of the practice. The paper presents a set of processes, defined as ‘Acts of  Transition’,  whereby  the  values  of  Free  Libre  and  Open  Source  are  collaboratively  explored  with  the  institution’s  staff  and  executed  together,  across  and  within  the  organisation’s  teams.  As  ‘Acts  of Transition’ they aim to support more commons-based peer-production processes, by reimagining the arts organisation as an open source civic organisation.

Keywords
Free  Libre  Software,  Open  Source  Software,  New  Art  Practices,  Art  Institution, Commons-Based Peer-Production

Commons and commoning have become points of departure for the development of new radical literatures that seek to enhance societal transformations. Hence, the issue of their expansion has often been framed in opposition to the expansion of capital and thus acquires a highly symbolic and political value. Nevertheless, these recent theoretical endeavors often hold a quite normative stance, as they actually explore the issue of how the commons should expand rather than of how they actually do it. In addition, while social movements are often being seen as favorable conditions for the development of the new commons, there is a lack of empirically-based studies that try to analyze the relationship between these two poles of societal transformation. This paper tries to develop an analytical theoretical framework for explaining how commons expand and multiply within crisis and how this expansion does relate to social movements. The analysis draws on thinkers such as Ostrom, Stavridis, De Angelis, Hardt & Negri, and Harvey. Despite its theoretical focus, the paper is informed by a systematic collection of empirical evidence from Greece; a country that has witnessed both the emergence of enduring social movements and an exponential growth of commoning projects during the last decade.

This thesis examines the urban collective ecological food initiatives that have been increasing in number with considerable momentum in the last three years. It is based on fieldwork of one and a half years that consists of participant observation and in-depth interviews with prosumers and producers/producer organizations in the network of these initiatives. This research focuses on “new-generation” consumer food cooperatives and identifies their differences from other alternatives as follows: 1) the alternative and ecological production, consumption, and distribution relations of food they attempt to develop 2) the horizontal and participatory organizational models they try to build. It indicates their concrete transformative practices and direct trust-based relations with small farmers and producer organizations. This dissertation suggests that they have potential to bring positive outcomes for food sovereignty in today’s pressuring corporate food regime, if they expand cooperation with various actors to impact on the state’s agrifood policies. Their consideration of food and seeds as comprising of socio-economic, ecological, and political relations and their definition of healthy food as a necessity for all, build their commoning politics of food, which also contribute to the opening of an alternative public space for citizens to engage in the emerging struggle of food sovereignty in Turkey. This study also examines alternative municipal agri-food projects. It suggests that local governments also have potential for contributing to alternative agri-food relations if they support ecological production and solidarity for diverse actors, including prosumer initiatives, in the organization of production, distribution, and consumption of food with a food sovereignty perspective.

This article seeks to contribute to the elaboration of an analytically solid definition of the commons that can be used to identify organised practices with social transformative potential and aimed at increasing socio-ecological sustainability. I draw on the analysis of political economist Massimo De Angelis who reworks the notion of the commons in line with its growing centrality in the practices and discourses of contemporary social movements. Through the notion of modes of valuation, I expand on his definition of the commons as socio-ecological systems based on alternative value practices. I apply this framework to the analysis of the permaculture movement as a «new materialist movement» grounded on alternative value practices and «multispecies commoning». I discuss the results of a research project on the diffusion of permaculture in Italy to show how the subversive idea of redesigning the subsistence sphere in accordance with principles of earth care, people care and fair share is translated into a variety of «pericapitalist» socio-economic initiatives resting on alternative value practices. I conclude by advocating the adoption of the commons framework to increase the permaculture movement’s reflexivity on some of the internal and external challenges it faces.

Guy Standing, a Professorial Research Associate at the London University who has written extensively about migration, development economics, and labor markets, is probably best known for his two books The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) and Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (2017). While the two books are united by an interest in how work is becoming increasingly more unstable and insecure, and how increasing levels of poverty and inequality can be overcome, his newest book Plunder
of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (published 2019 by Pelican Books), blends seamlessly into his previous oeuvre by exploring the potential of the commons and commoning as an antidote against the erosion of society. Specifically, the book takes a close look at the
Magna Carta, and especially at the lesser known Charter of the Forest, to recover a historical sensitivity for how citizens in Britain were granted the right to access and use common land, forests and water to lead a self-defined and dignified life.

In recent years, urban informality has been the subject of renewed attention in urban studies, sociology and political economy. Following postcolonial theory (McFarlane, 2008, Robinson, 2002), we seek to surpass modernist dichotomies such as formal/informal and centre/periphery, as they re-produce a “colonial paternalism”. Thus, we move beyond binaries between culturally and economically powerful global cities (of the North) and problematic mega-cities (of the South) and we challenge understandings of informality as uncontrolled and dangerous, as the “Other” of the urban development.
Our approach adds to the discussion around the socio-spatial relations and the power configurations in the production of the urban space, but does so by linking urban informality to the production of the common space in crisis-stricken cities. Following autonomous Marxists analysis (Caffentzis, 2010, Hardt and Negri, 2009), conceptualizing the commons involves three things at the same time: common pool resource, community and commoning. Urban commons don’t exist per se but they are making in times of social struggles and they are constituted through the social process of commoning. So, we understand informality as a way of urban development and urban politics that embodies varying degrees of power and exclusion, incorporating the possibility of challenging the existing power configurations. Hence, our approach calls for a broad, intersectional analysis of the common space and conceive the latter in a Lefebvrian (1974) trialectic conceptualization as perceived-conceived-lived space.
Based on this theoretical background, we seek to advance an aggregate understanding of the dialect relation between formality/informality in the production of the emancipatory common space in Greece in the midst of the ongoing crisis. The neoliberal urban restructuring is justified through a discourse of formalization of the spontaneous and unorganized development of Southern Europe’s cities. Nevertheless, the new enclosures does not lie only on formal practices but also on informal ones, related to the fields of race, class and gender. Within this context, state plays a crucial role as it has the power to determine what is formal and what is informal and overall which kinds of informality could thrive, for how and where, and which will disappear. In other words, it has the power to (re-)construct categories of legitimate and illegitimate citizens, of deserving and undeserving ones.
In particular, formal and informal enclosures emerge as an everyday experience of the urban inhabitants in Greek cities and include housing commodification, land grabbing, precarization of labour, various privatizations, gentrification processes and criminalization of certain population groups (such as sex workers, immigrants, squatters and homeless). Yet, the neoliberal city is a highly contested urbanity and the neoliberal urban restructuring does not remain uncontested. Through this reading, we explore the diverse forms of formality/informality and their degree and type of legitimacy, elaborating on these urban practices and processes that challenge the existing power relations and produce the emancipatory common space.

This essay establishes silence as an ethical-political response to the Anthropocene. Silence is key to the making of commons, which frames the reinvention of ways of living and relating as a necessary response to the Anthropocene moment. Drawing from and intervening in autonomist Marxist debates on communicative labor, recent interdisciplinary work on Anthropocene ecologies, and writing on the violences of ongoing colonialism, the essay shows how silence in its diverse forms can be used to expand what commons might mean and what they might come to do in the present era. Mindful of the ambivalences of silence, it contends that the tensions inherent to its politics foster the suspension of assertions on how the world is, or how it should be. In this way, silence is argued as crucial to making spaces in which the proliferation of different ways of being can occur and from within which resistance against forms of cognitive capitalism, neo/colonialism, and the ecological destruction of the earth can take place.

In this chapter, I will first introduce the concept of commons as a historical and contemporary phenomenon. Then I will analyse the importance of the commons in Marx’s thinking on ecology, and the dynamic role that the commons has in the understanding of class struggle in capitalism. Third, I will analyse the possibilities of the process of commonification departing from the foundations of the Nordic welfare state model. In the two concluding sections, I will map the political possibilities for an eco-socialist transformation strategy through promotion of the commons.

Our neoliberal capitalist times are marked by a crisis of
reproduction not only of production, as the very basis on
which things and life are produced is now under threat. 1
We are convinced that many citizens like us would like to
become active with this essential reproductive work, and
determine themselves the changes they want to see.

What is this learning that gives us agency to cope, resist
and change current conditions? How can we ‘make other
worlds possible’ from wherever we are and whatever our
position: as practitioners, activists, artists, researchers,
students and ordinary citizens? How do we prepare
ourselves for this sustained reproductive work, both at a
local and global scale?

At a time when most of us feel and fear a global political and
environmental crisis, we argue for the necessity of learning
to act.

Abstract
The subjects of this paper are the ‘Little Mesters’ of Sheffield, UK. The ‘Mesters are self-employed master craftspeople whose day-to-day work is dependent on repairing, recycling, and maintenance, in ways that are intertwined with the urban fabric, flows of goods, and collaborative manufacturing spanning generations. This long-established, yet fragile web of mutuality and reciprocal practices of repair by highly-skilled workers is under threat from enclosure, and yet, I argue, simultaneously offers possibilities for reclaiming the commons. Through collaborative mapping and activist work with a campaign group over eight years, I examine an instance of existential threat to a factory, Portland Works, home to Little Mesters. Through strategies of distributed design prompted by this threat, cultures and practices of repair have been harnessed, and repair has become politicised, dispersed and future-orientated, prefiguring the post-capitalist city. The enclosure of commons is particularly spatial and material, and therefore disruptive of certain more egalitarian forms of relating and organising; politically, economically, pedagogically and ecologically. I argue that practices of repair found in this instance offer possibilities to address such ruptures, through the ethical decisions they prompt, the assemblages they generate, or gestures of care they manifest. Repair is often conceptualised temporally, as an activity that returns something to a former state, yet I wish to assert its spatial and material agencies; as productive of spaces and relations, dependent on them, and potentially restorative of them. In doing so I claim its value to support the reclaiming of common failures, amplification of existing instances of commoning, and the development of heterogeneous networks of commoners.

Commons, Repair, Little Mesters, Distributed Design, Prefiguration, Commoning

The article explores the critical, performative, and everyday spatial practices of commoning vis-à-vis the normalising order of the metropolis, capitalist-state governance, and urban development patterns. Through this broader lens, drawing on my participatory action research with Prinzessinnengarten Kreuzberg and the corresponding Commons Evening School, I explore the struggle to secure the future of the urban garden in, against, and beyond the instrumentalisation of temporary-use.

pubblicato in Aa.Vv. (2016) Commons/Comune: geografie, luoghi, spazi, città. Società di studi geografici. Memorie geografiche, nuova serie, Vol. 14. Intervenendo ora [dicembre 2015], qui [Italia, Roma], ad un convegno* sui Commons, non posso che iniziare da un sentimento, breve e acuto come la puntura di un insetto: mai come adesso si sta producendo discorso attorno ai beni comuni, adesso che le lotte, sotto attacco dopo una stagione di grande espansione, sono costrette in una posizione difensiva. Cercherò qui di ripercorrere il lessico per come è stato elaborato, decostruito e ricombinato all'interno di un dibattito polifonico, in particolare nell'esperienza dell'occupazione del Teatro Valle a Roma e nelle occupazioni culturali fiorite un po' ovunque a partire dal 2011. Proprio perchè lo spazio politico è quello che più rende evidente la qualità performativa del linguaggio, può essere interessante seguire il filo di un fare nel mentre prova a ridisegnare le parole, risignificarle, ri-appropriarsene in uno lancio creativo, inventivo. Ad occuparle, come si fa con gli spazi, e abitarle. Un'attività fatta di momenti di autoformazione, seminari, progettazione artistica, produzione teorica, sperimentazione a cui hanno partecipato ricercatrici|tori (alcun* dei quali compaiono nelle note), attiviste|i e artiste|i. Quelle che riporterò di seguito sono solo alcune tracce di questo lavoro (che rimane, ancora oggi) collettivo che mi sembra possano essere ancora utili al lavoro politico attuale e a nutrirne l'immaginazione.

The transformation of human settlements over time can
affect the relationship between communities and
commons when, for example, social geographies
change from rural to urban, or from traditional systems
of management to modern bureaucratic systems.
Communities that were dependent on particular
commons could become less dependent, or abandon
those commons. New communities of interest might
emerge. Examining the transformation of a lake in
Bangalore, this paper argues that in the community
struggle towards creating and claiming commons,
claiming the sphere of planning is fundamental. Further,
the making or unmaking of the commons involves the
making or unmaking of communities and vice versa. In
the case of the Rajapalaya Lake studied here, this
occurred and occurs at the interface where democratic
struggles and bureaucratic systems meet.

The arrival of migrants on Italian coasts following the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 has led to a multiplication of housing struggles. These struggles are widespread across the country and focus on the occupation of abandoned buildings and their transformation into collective housing spaces to provide an alternative to the formal reception system. This article will focus on the housing struggles in Rome, as the place with the highest number of occupations and the longest tradition of campaigns for the right to housing of migrants in the country. These struggles are the outcome of the encounter of recently arrived migrants with local solidarity movements and build on existing occupation movements and housing struggles. The article explores how the mobilizations over the right to housing intersect with issues such as the social appropriation of urban commons, the regeneration from below of unused areas, freedom of movement, and the contesta-tion of Italian government policies on the relocation of migrants and refugees. The paper argues that housing struggles not only appropriate and regenerate urban commons, but also challenge the reception governance of migration and the policies of border control.

International Workshop, “Everyday Practices of Solidarity. Relational Learning under Conditions of Multiple Crises”. Hamburg, September 19th till 22nd, 2018, Department of History and Theory of the City, HafenCity University Hamburg.
https://www.hcu-hamburg.de/en/bachelor/urban-planning/arbeitsgebiete/monika-grubbauer/archive/daad-workshop/

In the summer of 2014 Xenia Motel in the vicinity of Heraklion -the capital city of Crete- was another example of public space to be privatized through the mechanism of the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (HRADF). The HRADF is a societe anonyme incorporated under Law 3986/2011 (GG A’ 152/01.07.2011) which takes under its control specific public properties and generates underpriced profit from their privatization for the repayment of the Greek state debt.
Xenia Motel is a derelict tourist unit, constructed in 1963 under the national tourism program of XENIA Hotels [1950-1974] of the Greek National Tourism Organization (GNTO). It is an officially designated modern monument [Law 3028/2002] designed by the architect Aris Konstantinidis, which held a remarkable place throughout the years in the collective memory of the everyday life near the Cretan sea.
This privatization issue provoked a huge discussion among the people of the wider region about the potential consequences of that state plan to their lives and about them willing to take action to protect the area of Xenia. Thus, a multidisciplinary collective was created. Its main target was to prevent the privatization process through habitation actions on the unit.
The ways of claiming and supporting these purposes eventually included:
• Public presentations for the counter-information in the privatization schedule (political narratives, indistinct areas in law, etc.).
• Research studies in groups within different fields of interests (history of the local area, building restoration possibilities, citizens aspects of claiming their neighborhood, organization plans from relevant struggles, etc.).
• Making an international call for participation of architectural and art proposals for the re-habitation of the unit.
• Guided tours, in the field.
• Organizing a public discussion in the area, with members of relevant international collectives for claiming public spaces (ZAD, No TAV, Skouries struggles, Anti vAPE).
My participation in the collective’s actions -as one of the main members- was mainly in the architectural field. The research of restoration possibilities and the potentials of such spaces to be reused in the new framework of the public emancipation practices.
The project of Xenia stopped rapidly when the Greek bailout referendum of 2015 erupted.
The main question for us to ask is for what reasons do most of the participants remember the Xenia project, even though most of expectations were never fulfilled.

Keywords: HRADF, privatization, public-space, Xenia Hotels, collective, habitation-practices, ZAD, No-TAV, Skouries, Anti- vAPE.
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Wie produzieren wir ein Kunstwerk als Prozess, situativ, ortsbezogen und ohne die Einbringung von Material? mit der Wasserinitiative Waldeck-Frankenberg und dem Künstler*innen Kollektiv nachbars garten (Leipzig). Seit Anfang 2020 arbeiten die Mediator:innen in Kassel der Neuen Auftraggeber arbeiten eng mit der Wasserinitiative,  dem Künstler:innen-Kollektiv nachbars garten aus Leipzig an der Entwicklung und Realisation des künstlerischen Entwurfs "Zeichen Setzen". Es entstehen skulpturale Setzungen in unterschiedlichen Medien (Wasser, Wiese, Putz, Beton, Holz, Stein): ein Kunstwerk, das im Einklang mit den Erzählungen und Bedürfnissen sich erweiternder Kreise von Auftraggeber:innen wachsen kann. Aus dem Auftrag für das Kunstwerk: "Die Wasserinitiative Waldeck-Frankenberg wünscht sich ein Kunstwerk, "das den Instinkt zu beschützen weckt in den Menschen der Region Waldeck-Frankenberg, für das Gut Wasser als Quelle des Lebens."

https://neueauftraggeber.de/de/projekte/es-geht-ums-wasser

Τα τελευταία χρόνια η συζήτηση σχετικά με τα αστικά κοινά και τις νέες περιφράξεις έχει γίνει ιδιαίτερα δημοφιλής μεταξύ μελετητών του χώρου όπως οι Harvey, Chatterton, Hodkinson, Vasudevan καθώς και κοινωνικών κινημάτων πόλης, ωστόσο έως τώρα λίγες είναι οι προσπάθειες που επιδιώκουν να συνδέσουν τα κοινά με την κρίση.

Narratives that dominate contemporary life make it easier to imagine the end of the world, even the end of capitalism, than the end of growth. How do we begin to think of other ways forward? By observing and appreciating what already exists. People in every part of the world inherit, adapt, and invent alternatives to predominant economic models and mindsets. Many draw on long-evolving traditions that celebrate living simply in solidarity with others. Here we build a case for degrowth from the ground up, learning from people who embody and perform everyday common senses in the spirit of degrowth. This differs from global programs to curb biodiversity loss and climate change, but we do not see them as mutually exclusive. Without the daily exercise of sharing food, homes, neighborhoods, and thoughtful conversation, we humans cannot develop the capacities to make and carry out international climate treaties and Green New Deals.

The complexity of the contemporary urban scenario, now in constant revolution, callsfor new forms of governance: able to combine the stances of institutional actors, civilsociety and the entrepreneurial world; commoning, born as a form of bottom-up re-appropriation of neglected spaces, has now become a multi-scalar, shared practice,which inspired the approach of the OBRAS project analysed here. In the first sectionthe literary review frames the research context, with reference to urban commoningpractices for the re-activation of places, and its relation with urban governance; in thesecond section, the methodology and physical context of the workshops, Bolognaand Bogotá, are introduced. The methodology and results of the project are presentedin the third section: the multi-scalar, cross-cutting and shared practices adopted andthe meta-project solutions produced. The fourth section summarizes the OBRAS ex-perience, with results, limits and future developments of the project

Enclosure movements on the commons continue without slowing down especially in the developing countries; as well as the grassroots movements against them. Enclosure movements frequently contain several foreign investments and appropriations to other uses on natural resources and/or assets such as pastures, forests, rivers, agricultural lands and seashores, which are crucial income sources for rural households. Among other factors, the shortcomings in the common management processes, cooperatives and self-organization capacity of the stakeholders ease the enclosure process. The study investigates the environmental movements as commoning practices in Turkey in the last decade through media analysis and surveys. The study aims to constitute a scientific basis to enhance the EIA processes in order to encourage proactive responses to environmental crises, prevent enclosure movements on the commons and maintain the local sustainable development. Hence, firstly the environmental movements in Turkey are spatialized by GIS analyst tools to constitute an environmental inventory including time, types, frequency and location of the movements; secondly, an online survey is conducted with the environmental NGOs; thirdly, two possible scenarios are suggested through a triple-scale scoring system; and finally, several recommendations are proposed in order to sustain the commons.

This article examines the emergence of a grass-root movement that brings back the past in order to prefigure communalist practices in the Basque Country. The movement comprises both the platform of Biltzarre and the Basque Cultural Instinct Team. Their proposal implies an invitation to consider a concrete 'social myth' that brings forward the sovereign agency of an ancient socioeconomic cultural model (medieval Basque direct democracy) into contemporary anti-capitalist struggles. Although those practices have mostly withered away, they may still function as a source of inspiration for revolutionary purposes. Crucially, such experience helps us to overcome the 'leftist melancholy' pointed out by Enzo Traverso, in which social movements seem to start always from the scratch. The article stresses the importance of engaging with economic democracy debates critically, thus questioning the role prices and technology have in sharing economy and commoning models, and problematizes the limits they may have in global capitalism.

To cite this article: Xabier Renteria-Uriarte & Jon Las Heras (2021) Prefiguring communalism and economic democracy in the Basque Country, Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2020.1863542

In this paper the authors study the farmers and consumers association Campi Aperti in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, an important example of organizational innovation in which small scale farmers and consumers collectively self-organise their own markets and participatory guarantee systems, in the context of a highly intensive agro-industrial area.  Our analysis uses three interconnected frames: food sovereignty, agroecology and the commons. In the first frame we narrate the political and economic emergence of food sovereignty within the global peasant movement La Via Campesina and situate the case of Campi Aperti as a unique driver of food sovereignty within the global North. In the second frame, we note that the latest agro-ecological thinking is highlighting the importance of decentralised food systems operated by network of consumers and farmers. Lastly, we conceptualise Campi Aperti as a commons system and discuss its organizational features as a value production system centered on different values than those of the corporate world. Unlike impersonal market transactions in which dog eats dog, we uncover a participatory knowledge process attempting to balance different needs, that of farmers income, and that of accessible high quality food at affordable prices, and that of preserving and enhancing ecological processes.  In this balancing act, producers and co-producers highjack the Marxian “value form” and inject it with values outside mere economic logic. We conclude with the observation that the transformative force for the realization of food sovereignty is obtained through the political and economic autonomy developed through the commons. This paper is based on producers interviews, visit to markets and assemblies of producers and consumers in Campi Aperti, and have used archival data provided by Campi Aperti’s website.