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- Convenors:
-
Christoph Brumann
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle)
Philipp Demgenski (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Zhejiang University)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Transfers:
- Closed for transfers
Short Abstract:
While commoning is a major buzzword in urban activism, social scientific research on cities has been slow to follow. We invite ethnographic and theoretical explorations on the nature, significance and discursive affordances of the commons in contemporary urban politics, economies and everyday life.
Long Abstract:
Classical social scientific studies of the commons often refer to rural or placeless phenomena, such as pastures, fisheries or scientific knowledge, whereas cities rarely feature. At the same time, ‘commoning’ has become a buzzword in recent urban activism and political mobilisation. This workshop aims to fill the empirical and reflective gap between these two strands, exploring the potential of commons and collective goods for understanding urban processes and realities, and vice versa. Most analyses so far focus on the appropriation of urban spaces for progressive politics and realising the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre), such as in square occupations, urban gardening on vacant lots, or squatting (Susser & Tonnelat, Stavrides). But streets, squares, sidewalks and public buildings are a commons for multiple everyday purposes too (Low, Kim, Wildner), starting from visual enjoyment (Brumann), even when gendered, racialised or class-based exclusion may interfere. Public housing and the sharing economy of food banks and car, tool and clothing exchanges have been discussed as yet another example (Kalb, Nonini), and some argue that street life and urban atmospheres are the quintessential case – one that defies standard expectations of ‘tragedy’ (Hardin) since increased use of the city vibe can augment the resource (Kornberger & Borch, Foster, Harvey). We invite ethnographic explorations and theoretical reflections on the place of the commons in contemporary cities and on its potential to transform urban economies, politics and ways of life, and we encourage precision as to who actually benefits from practices and discourses of urban commoning today.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
I focus on the AKP’s (Justice and Development Party) municipal services for women in lower- and middle-class neighborhoods in Ankara. I aim to indicate how AKP changed women's lives. The lower classes have historically and spatially gained opportunities that they never had.
Contribution long abstract:
In this presentation, I focus on the AKP’s (Justice and Development Party) municipal services for women in lower- and middle-class neighborhoods in Ankara. I will speak against the argument claiming that the party deceives the poor, asking following questions: How did the AKP change women’s lives? Why did women living in the peripheries of the city continue to support AKP? I argue that the lower classes have historically (I mean their personal history) and spatially gained opportunities that they never had. My study based on understanding two municipal community services for women governed by AKP: Mamak and Altındağ. Following my fieldwork conducted in 2018, I question how the activities of these municipalities governed by AKP are now more centralized and systematized, both spatially and institutionally, on the basis of the cultural centers established in each neighborhood. I aim to focus on the relationship of lower-class women with politics, the experiences of those living in slums, and what party politics brings to the lives of these women.
The widespread formation of community centers as safe spaces offered women new possibilities in employment, network and solidarity building, and to obtain new skills through courses. I aim to explore how the community centers served to facilitate women’s agency as social, political and economic actors. My aim is to understand how the party has evolved in the process of establishing its relationship with the women living in the peripheries of the city, and how women experience and make sense of these processes.
Contribution short abstract:
The study examines giving benches in Tel Aviv’s urban renewal context. Focusing on middle-class neighborhoods, I ask how these informal acts of decluttering represent a form of street commoning. The study analyzes material and affective responses, including shame, embarrassment, and eco-irritation.
Contribution long abstract:
In recent years, Tel Aviv has experienced urban renewal driven by a real estate boom fueled by high-tech money. Interestingly, at the same time, "giving benches" and "pavement free stores" began appearing in upper middle-class neighborhoods. This trend can partly be attributed to global shifts in domestic design, Covid-19 community initiatives, and grassroots efforts supporting IDF soldiers amidst the Gaza war. However, much of the "selling" and "shopping" remains informal, driven by a desire to declutter or discard unwanted possessions.
While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact relationship between large-scale urban renewal and individual acts of decluttering the streets with unwanted objects, my focus is different. I will examine the social practice of pavement "free store" shopping and selling among middle-class Tel Avivians. Assuming that giving benches are part of a broader social and economic exchange, I ask: what kind of social practice does this street commoning represent, and what are its material and affective characteristics?
Drawing on ongoing urban ethnography, I will explore the details of this increasingly common practice, examining the meanings attached to it by passersby, "sellers," "shoppers," and city wardens. I will focus on the various affective responses associated with free street shopping, including shame, embarrassment, and disgust, as well as "eco-critical" emotions like "eco-irritation."
Contribution short abstract:
We explore Barcelona’s "Restarters" communities and "Libraries of Tools" as urban commons facing ecosocial crises. Through qualitative methods, we examine their community dynamics, sustainability practices, and the multiple challenges hindering their potential for transformative urban transitions.
Contribution long abstract:
While cities operate as core sites of capitalistic reproduction and frenzied waste cycles, urban commoning is often presented as a potential solution to these dynamics and other ecosocial damages. In this presentation, we focus on two grassroots initiatives within the urban movement of repair (electronics) and reuse (lending objects) in Barcelona: the “Restarters” communities and the “Libraries of Tools”. Using participant observation, interviews, and focus groups with users, volunteers, and employees, our analysis highlights the tensions these collective projects face in creating, maintaining, and scaling solutions for sustainable and inclusive urban transitions from below; that is, for commoning their activity and effects. The initial findings reveal some organizational difficulties and structural barriers, such as their voluntaristic character, precarity, niche environmentalism, age gaps, ethnic exclusions, traditional gender roles, or planned obsolescence, individualism and consumerism. As a result, these initiatives often struggle to establish a lasting presence in their neighborhoods and to ensure their continuity. Despite these challenges, they try to resist capitalist and accumulation logics, fostering collective ownership and countering the effects of the throw-away culture. In this sense, they enhance a sense of community and local belonging and serve as symbolic and practical urban spaces of prefigurative politics from the present: one of solidarity and mutual aid where we renew our relationship with objects, material culture and imaginaries, and with our common ecosocial goods and damages. This paper calls for nuanced discussions on the uneven distribution of benefits/challenges within these urban sustainability practices.
Contribution short abstract:
The practice of digital nomadism reveals cities as particular sort of commons that could be appropriated by a mobile group of people who assume less attachment to physical places but bring value increase and damage of the commons at the same time with the participation of the state and the market.
Contribution long abstract:
This talk investigates a more nuanced practice of urban commoning in its value variation and beneficiary groups in the context of globalization and mobility, especially concerning the practice of digital nomadism. Commons have been identified as various material or immaterial resources which can be subtractive or nonsubtractive (Hardins, 1968; Ostrom, 1990; Hess and Ostrom, 2007; Feinberg et al., 2021) and the new commons situated in urban settings mostly assume that they are local resources shared by citizens (Wagenaar and Bartels, 2024). However, the practice of digital nomadism reveals cities as particular sort of commons that could be appropriated by a mobile group of people who assume less attachment to physical places but bring value increase and damage of the commons at the same time. This anthropological research-in-progress reveals that the digital nomad community characterized by freedom, self-organization, reciprocity and sharing present how these thriving urban commons around the world bring different values to various beneficiary groups with the intervention of the state and the market. This practice, on the one hand, shrinks the value of the urban commons by encroaching on the social space of the locals and, on the other hand, realizes an increase in the value of the local commons by upgrading the public facilities. Moreover, this practice not only demonstrates the great potential of individuals leveraging the state and the market to create urban commons, but also reveals the realistic role of state governance and the market capitalism in increasing and decreasing the value of the commons.
Contribution short abstract:
This study examines how highly skilled migrants in Sendai, Japan, create and contest urban commons through their practices of integration. Using ethnographic methods, it shows how migrants transform public spaces and challenge traditional social structures while building significant local ties.
Contribution long abstract:
This paper examines how international migrants in Sendai, Japan, representative of a more peripheral mid-sized urban setting, are actively engaged in creating, negotiating and contesting urban commons as they integrate into their host community. By mapping their everyday practices, interactions and placemaking strategies, I show that these professionals and students are challenging the notion of urban commons in a city characterised by hierarchical social structures.
Using qualitative ethnographic and participatory sensory methods with both migrants and the host community, the study provides a nuanced understanding of how localised ties are formed and maintained in an environment traditionally resistant to foreign integration. These migrants navigate institutional barriers and use shared urban resources and social infrastructures to create a sense of place and belonging. In the process, they transform public spaces, community centres and cultural venues into dynamic commons, challenging perceptions of the city as a purely administrative or economic entity.
The research highlights the role of these migrants in reimagining and contesting urban commons, contributing to the discourse on urban life, migration and the right to the city in Japan's urban milieu. Their engagement with urban commons reveals the dynamic nature of social infrastructure in mediating integration processes. This study advances urban anthropological theory by reconceptualising urban commons as sites of negotiation between established social orders and emerging transnational practices, and offers insights into how mid-sized Japanese cities are affected by migration.
Contribution short abstract:
How do Mexican return migrants navigate Mexico City's overwhelming urban complexity? This paper examines three commons that function as social infrastructure and the extent to which they serve as spaces of orientation, interaction and mutual support in a city marked by socio-spatial fragmentation.
Contribution long abstract:
Mexico City, with its diverse economic possibilities, vibrant cultural scene and educational offerings, continues to attract migrants from across Mexico and abroad. Among these are Mexican return migrants who, after living abroad, move to the thriving capital of their home country. However, the very scale and versatility that make the city appealing also pose significant challenges. Everyday life is characterised by socio-spatial disparities, reflected in restricted access to urban commons, especially for those who live in the deprived peripheries. Furthermore, due to their formal membership in Mexican society, returnees' need for inclusion infrastructure is likely to be overlooked, often leading to disorientation and social isolation. Building on one-year ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores three rare examples of social infrastructure that return migrants use to find their way around in Mexico City's fragmented landscape: a central neighbourhood, a community house and a community organisation. I focus on the latter as a place for social encounters providing not only practical support and information, but creating a community of shared experience, which is shaped and maintained collectively. I argue that relational urban commons serve as crucial mediating spaces in a city marked by extreme spatial inequality, stimulating interaction between returnees and non-migrants, while also critically examining their limitations and questioning the extent to which their role as social infrastructure might be more aspirational than actual. This paper contributes to understanding the complex role of social infrastructures in fostering vital points of intersection and, thereby, enacting practices of commoning within highly segregated urban contexts.
Contribution short abstract:
Through ethnographic fieldwork in Göttingen, this paper examines how utopian notions of inclusion and solidarity in housing commons (fail to) handle racial differences and inequalities in the context of increased migration in European cities today.
Contribution long abstract:
The 1960s was a generative moment for the political cultures on the left in Germany. Among the varied currents of left-wing politics that emphasised new expressions of radicalism, squatting emerged in the succeeding decades as a new frontier of protest against capitalist city-making. Originally addressing the questions of social housing in the cities, some of these surviving squats have evolved as housing commons that, although marginally, dot many German cities to this day.
Housing commons conceive themselves as utopian sites of mutual care and solidarity-based living that the capitalist regime of commodity, property and money discourages and endangers. As an intellectual tradition, kommonismus (commonism) emphasises commoning as a political practice against contemporary capitalism, and commons as underpinning values of inclusion, care, and collective disposition.
But how do such utopian projects and the abstract notions of freedom and solidarity fare when confronted with difference? With the case of Göttingen, this paper examines this question ethnographically in the context of increased racial difference and migrant organising in German cities, and their engagement and/or confrontation with housing commons which were earlier practised solely among White German residents. Through participant observation and focused-group interviews among housing commons and migrant political groups in Göttingen, this paper examines how utopian notions of care and solidarity conceived in contexts of racial homogeneity handle racial differences. With this case study, the paper aims to highlight the limits of utopian notions of political community in delivering racial justice; it foregrounds the embeddedness of utopian practice in imperial political economy.
Contribution short abstract:
Qhatu is an Aymara form of market present in El Alto, Bolivia. More than a commercial space, it is a practice of commoning that promotes reciprocity, cooperation, and sovereignty. This ethnographic study explores its role in the urban economy, collective well-being, and reconfiguration of the city.
Contribution long abstract:
This presentation explores the Qhatu, an Aymara term that designates both a small stall in public space and the collection of several such stalls that make up a market. Spread out in squares and streets, they are a widespread form of organisation among traders in El Alto, Bolivia's largest Indigenous city. More than just a commercial space, the Qhatu is a place where the private and the public coexist, where families consolidate their commercial relations and knowledge, while also serving as a practice of commoning where reciprocity and mutual cooperation are deployed.
Based on ethnographic research, this study examines how Aymara traders engage in shared decision-making, space allocation, and collective strategies to secure their spaces vis-à-vis official city institutions. The Qhatu raises several important elements for the study of urban Indigenous economies, not only as a family economic practice but also as an arena where traders reinforce social ties and express their logics of collective well-being or Suma Qamaña. It also reflects on its political dimension, as principles such as sovereignty and social, economic, and political positioning are exercised there, reconfiguring the city on their terms and contesting modernising forms of urban planning in the Global South.