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.