Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the refusal of help to customers operating a toll machine at a rest area. It focuses on the social and administrative unravelling of roads and service areas to question the interpersonal relations at a social transport infrastructure.

Paper long abstract:

In 2019, Bulgaria introduced a digital toll system for first- and second-class roads. When I conducted participant research at a rest stop near the Bulgarian-Romanian border at the turn of 2019/ 2020, many drivers still seemed unsure of how to use the designated toll machine set up at the service area. Some did not have a credit card; others were overwhelmed with language settings and terms of conditions. In most situations, the drivers expected me to help them. But that is exactly what I was advised not to do. Later, when COVID-19 started to spread in Europe, the toll machine was moved from inside the shop to outside. Everyone seemed happy to further reduce their support for the purchase of vignettes.

Taking the vignette order as a starting point, this contribution explores why petrol station employees denied this specific road- and traffic-related assistance to motorists. Conceptualising service areas as a social transport infrastructure linking the hinterland to the road network in a socially meaningful way, I analyse the refusal of assistance as boundary work necessary to delineate duties and responsibilities in a relationship of tension amidst a state agency and customers. A key aspect is that digital devices appear to reinforce the dominance of state agencies over the road network, while authority and control remain contested in this specific, postsocialist context. Finally, I argue, the toll decouples service stations from the road network and calls into question the sociality of petrol stations by altering workers' individual empathy and solidarity.

Paper short abstract:

The paper analyzes two modes of commoning by looking at mobility activism. First, how activists make infrastructures legible thereby forming a collective that is able to criticize them. Second, how space is commoned when temporary interventions in city space prefigure a more just city.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores activism in Berlin advocating a turnaround in mobility policies (Verkehrswende) and calling for urban mobility infrastructure establishing more social, areal, and environmental justice. By pursuing their moral ideals and advocating new ways of mobility in the city activists develop drafts of a better, more just city and new ways of inhabiting the city itself including its' infrastructures. Against this backdrop the paper will present modes of commoning used by Berlin activists.

Mode 1: Making mobility infrastructure legible

Demonstrations organized as joint cycle tours through the city (including inputs about stages of infrastructural development) aim at making participants knowledgeable about city planning processes, rendering administrative and juridical obstacles in the built environment visible thereby making infrastructures legible and forming a collective that is able to read and subsequently criticize obsolete and inadequate infrastructures. The common perception of an abruptly ending bike lane may shift in the course of such a demonstration from a mere nuisance to administrative incapacity to plan across governmental zones.

Mode 2: Prefiguring of a better City

Temporary interventions in urban environments concentrate at repurposing public streets mostly used by cars, converting them in street fairs, public play grounds or an open city parliament, thereby commoning space. Following commons theorist Stavros Stavrides, the paper will analyze how temporarily-commoned space is not only a concrete product of activism but one of the crucial means to "explore the emancipating potentialities of sharing" (Stavrides 2016: 7).

Paper short abstract:

This paper describes a political campaign by private ferry associations in Finland. By describing their demand for the nationalisation of their ferry operations, this paper analyses the conflicting relationships among a Nordic welfare state, private infrastructure, and solidarity between citizens.

Paper long abstract:

When states intervene in the formation and maintenance of infrastructure, a distinction between the private and public domains of the infrastructure is created. When it comes to transportation, it is the collective need of the people that determines the public/private nature of a service. In political decisions, the collective need for a specific mode of transportation must be compared with other collective needs. For example, if one road is deemed to be public, other roads with similar geographical articulations should also be publicly maintained. If public infrastructure invokes comparison, how does the comparison create solidarities among people in need of transportation and, inevitably, discrepancies among them?

This paper describes a political campaign by private ferry associations in Finland. Although most maritime traffic is free for passengers and operated by local governments in Finland, there remain 14 private ferries operated by groups of locals across the country. Recently, these groups have collectively demanded the nationalisation of their ferry operations based on the egalitarianism of social democracy. How are their sociotechnical articulations of private ferry routes woven into each of their rationales for nationalisation? By describing the socio-economic environments of each ferry route and the public social services provided/denied for those who live beyond the private ferry routes, this paper analyses the conflicting relationship between a Nordic welfare state, private infrastructure, and fragile solidarity based on ideals such as autonomy and citizenship.

Paper short abstract:

Limitation of capitalist principles and ethics have long been an issue for self-organized enterprises. Oscillating between the common and the market infrastructure, as a contested terrain, constitutes a critical factor for the viability and potential of self-management initiatives.

Paper long abstract:

Limitation of capitalist principles and ethics have long been an issue for self-organized enterprises both in terms of practice and literature. Self-organized enterprises operate in capitalist environments, where needs and ideology delineate the means and methods of production for them. Even though capitalist modes of labour organization, administration and management are typically expelled from the workplace, issues of growth, investment, production and circulation are shaped by dominant forms of production. Nevertheless, communities of solidarity along with spatial and techno-material settings constitute the infrastructure of practices of commoning in endeavours of self-organization. We compare between the cases of factory occupation movement in Argentina and the occupation of the VIOME factory in Greece (2010), where a shift to self-organization emerged as answer to the mass unemployment following the Argentinian and Greek economic crises. In that vein, we focus on struggles revolving around the use and ownership of spatial-material infrastructure and the production of use-values highlighting the emancipatory potential of self-organization. Space and objects attain elevated symbolic statuses as a contested terrain, while at the same time material settings are physically transformed, following considerations of the collective’s participation in networks of distribution and solidarity. Finally, we focus on skills and competences as a critical factor that leads to material transformations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will address the intersections between precarious labour, popular urbanisation and collective politics in the city through the experience of garment sector workers in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will address the intersections between precarious labour, popular urbanisation and collective politics in the city through the experience of garment sector workers in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In the country, garment production takes place in medium-size sweatshops and small family sweatshops located in homes. Workers are mostly migrants and their work supplies both formal sector brands and informal markets. These sweatshops are located in shantytowns in the City of Buenos Aires and settlements created after land occupations in its peripheries. Drawing on over 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork together with workers that belong to the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy, I will address how the self-construction of neighbourhoods and residents’ struggles for material improvements and community infrastructures allowed for the consolidation of a vast sector of family sweatshops that fed the industry’s supply chain. On the other hand, and building on the notion of “people as infrastructure” put forward by Simone (2004), I want to understand how the struggles for the material aspects of popular urbanisation fuelled the development of a vibrant network of personal and political relationships that opened up possibilities for a political organisation through the development of an innovative trade union that addressed labour rights but also promoted demands for land ownership and the construction of urban infrastructure. This analysis seeks to call into question often assumed dichotomies between labour struggles and struggles for place and the right to the city, social movements advancing forms of commoning and labour movements centred on individual rights.