Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • About
  • Category
  • Title
  • Publication
  • Year
  • Cities
  • Urban commons
  • The Guardian
  • 2015
Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Urban commons

It has become fashionable to talk about the “urban commons”, and it’s clear why. What we traditionally conceive of as “the public” is in retreat – public services are at the mercy of austerity policies, public housing is being sold off and public space is increasingly no such thing. In a relentlessly neoliberal climate, the commons seems to offer an alternative to the battle between public and private. The idea of land or services that are commonly owned and managed speaks to a 21st-century sensibility of, to use some jargon, participative citizenship and peer-to-peer production. In theory, at least, the commons is full of radical potential.

Why is it, then, that every time the urban commons is mentioned it is in reference to a community garden? How is it that the pioneers of a new urban politics are always planting kale and rhubarb? Can commoning be scaled up to influence the workings of a metropolis – able to tackle questions of housing, energy use, food distribution and clean air? In other words, can the city be reimagined as a commons, or is commoning the realm of tiny acts of autarchy and resistance?

England has a particular history of commoning that is still written into the fabric of London. Wimbledon, Clapham, Ealing – they all have commons, where our forebears once had the right to graze their livestock. But the enclosures of the 18th century transferred the majority of common land into private hands, turning it into a marketable resource and creating a landless working class. And the problem of the commons today is that we still tend to think of them as a common resource, whether it be oceans and rivers or fish stocks.

This is a misunderstanding. Because we cannot have a common resource without a common strategy for managing it. Elinor Ostrom argued that the commons requires a set of rules. She won the Nobel prize in economics for proving that these resources need not succumb to the so-called “tragedy of the commons” (exploitation by someone taking more than their share) if a system of checks and balances prevails. And so, rather than a resource, the commons is a process, a set of social relations by which a group of people share responsibility for, yes, a garden or even the governance of their neighbourhood. As Peter Linebaugh has said, the commons is best understood as a verb.

The current popularity of the commons as an idea is partially driven by the internet and the fact that network tools make it so much more feasible for larger groups to self-organise. Open-source software, Wikipedia, the creative commons and social media make commoning possible while affirming the ethos of horizontal organisation. In urban terms, the fact that commoning most often takes the form of gardens in left-over plots or in the interstices is clearly because of the limited availability of land and because gardening presents a low barrier to entry compared to, say, construction. But even these garden initiatives are constantly under threat. In the late 1990s Mayor Giuliani tried to sell off more than 100 community gardens in New York. And in Berlin, there was a struggle recently to protect the allotment gardens on the abandoned airfield of Tempelhof from developers.

In fact, it is often in moments of crisis that the commons asserts itself. The protest movements that took over Tahrir Square in Cairo, Gezi Park in Istanbul and Zuccotti Park in New York transformed public space – state owned, with the exception of Zuccotti – into a temporary commons through mass self-organisation. Similarly, the economic crisis in Greece has led to a resurgence of commoning in Athens, where parks neglected by the municipality started to be maintained by resident groups. And one could cite numerous examples of commoning in the favelas of Brazil, where many communities take pride in co-creating and self-managing their environment.

The question is whether the commons, with its potent political dimension, can transcend extreme need and symbolic resistance on the one hand and harmless local initiatives on the other. And there are encouraging examples. One commons project that is beginning to achieve an ambitious scale and complexity is in Colombes, in the suburbs of Paris. Since 2012, the Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée has been developing what its co-director, Doina Petrescou, calls “a bottom-up strategy of resilient regeneration” – and it goes beyond your average urban agriculture initiative. It’s true that there is a micro-farm for collective use but that is only one of three hubs, the others being a mini recycling plant and cooperative eco-housing.

The project now has 400 citizens co-managing 5000m2 of land, producing food, energy and housing, while actively reducing waste and water usage. Already, by European standards, it is a fairly large-scale experiment in alternative urban living. But the aim is to add five more hubs over the next five years and to grow into a commons-based civic movement.

This is just one case study in how hundreds of ordinary citizens, not activists, can create an alternative urban economy. However, the question that always arises with the commons is, who is included? In contrast to public space, which is held by an authority for the benefit of all, commons can easily become enclaves. They tend to be determined by limited groups of stakeholders with a geographical attachment to a site. What happens when outsiders want to assert their right to that so-called commons?

Stavros Stavrides, a Greek academic specialising in spatial politics, is clear that for a commons to remain an open community it needs to be able to incorporate newcomers. “Commoning has to do with difference, not commonality, it should always be expanding those who can participate,” he said at a lecture in London last month.

The bigger that community gets, the more complex the social relations. But that is not necessarily an impediment. The greater challenge, it seems to me, is whether commons can be sustained without an undue burden on the community. One of the most inspiring community initiatives in recent years has been the Campo de Cebada in Madrid, an abandoned lot that a group of architects and local citizens reactivated into a public square and cultural space. But members of the collective, Zuloark, confessed recently that they are tired. So the system of commoning needs to be sustainable otherwise its idealistic potential falls foul of a romantic underestimation of what it takes.

And recent political discourse has routinely, even cynically, made that mistake. The Tories’ aborted Big Society agenda invoked a vague volunteerism to paper over local authority budget cuts. With UK employees working the longest hours in Europe, when are we supposed to serve our communities? For commons-style thinking to take hold, we would need to move beyond quaint notions of the gift economy and engage in systemic restructuring.

Stavrides argues that for commoning to become more mainstream would require new kinds of institutions, specifically political ones. Thus far, political inspiration has come from outside Europe: from the water commons system in Cochabamba, Bolivia, or the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, or most recently the Syrian Kurds in Kobane. But that may be changing. With the election of Ada Colau of the Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) movement as mayor of Barcelona last month, commons-based governance finally has a foothold in a major European city. If movements like Barcelona en Comú can even begin to institutionalise a participative politics, then the commons may begin to reshape our understanding of citizenship and sustainability – and move the conversation beyond gardening.

 

Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Category
  • Title
  • Publication
  • Year
  • Architecture Activist architects Al Jazeera 2014
  • Architecture Djenné’s mud mosque Icon 2010
  • Architecture Honeywell, I’m home! e-flux journal 2015
  • Architecture Maison Dom-ino Dezeen 2014
  • Architecture PREVI, Lima Domus 2011
  • Architecture Revolutionary housing in Argentina Domus 2011
  • Architecture Robin Hood Gardens SQM 2014
  • Architecture The Base, Chocó Nuevotopias 2013
  • Architecture The High Line Icon 2009
  • Architecture Walter Benjamin puts activists to shame? Here 2013
  • Cities Beirut Icon 2006
  • Cities DIY cities (the limitations) Uncube 2014
  • Cities Edge City (São Paulo) Strelka Press 2012
  • Cities How radical is Radical Urbanism? Catalogue 2015
  • Cities Istanbul Icon 2010
  • Cities Jenin Icon 2005
  • Cities Life on the edge Moscow Urban Forum 2013
  • Cities Seoul Condé Nast Traveller 2012
  • Cities Shenzhen Icon 2008
  • Cities Unreal estate (London) Domus 2012
  • Cities Urban commons The Guardian 2015
  • Design Adventure gear The Guardian 2010
  • Design Beneath the street, the wilderness: Occupy and Bear Grylls Here 2012
  • Design Craft fetishism The Guardian 2011
  • Design Craft fetishism: From objects to things Disegno 2012
  • Design Design and the Right Domus 2013
  • Design Design and violence Dezeen 2013
  • Design Dreaming of year zero Bio 50 2014
  • Design Fabbers, dabblers and microstars Icon 2009
  • Design London riots The Guardian 2011
  • Design Luxury watch culture The Guardian 2010
  • Design Milan’s PR economy The Guardian 2011
  • Design On William Gibson on design Dezeen 2014
  • Design Open design Dezeen 2014
  • Design Samsung vs Apple Domus 2013
  • Design The internet of broken things Dezeen 2014
  • Design The post-spectacular economy Van Abbemuseum 2011
  • Design Ultramundane Domus 2013
  • People Alejandro Aravena Icon 2009
  • People Do Ho Suh Icon 2008
  • People Enzo Mari Icon 2009
  • People Ettore Sottsass Icon 2007
  • People Francis Kere Icon 2010
  • People Richard Sapper Domus 2013
  • Reviews Cool Tools by Kevin Kelly Dezeen 2014
  • Reviews Hearts of the City by Herbert Muschamp Icon 2010
  • Reviews Latin America in Construction at MoMA Architectural Record 2015
  • Reviews Mad Max: Fury Road Dezeen 2015
  • Reviews Max Bill Icon 2010
  • Reviews Philips shaver Icon 2008
  • Reviews Postmodernism at the V&A The Guardian 2010
  • Reviews Rebel Cities by David Harvey Art Review 2012
  • Reviews The Craftsman by Richard Sennett Icon 2008
  • Reviews The Historical Museum, Sarajevo The Guardian 2011
  • Reviews Together by Richard Sennett Art Review 2012
Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Cities
  • Urban commons
  • The Guardian
  • 2015
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It has become fashionable to talk about the “urban commons”, and it’s clear why. What we traditionally conceive of as “the public” is in retreat – public services are at the mercy of austerity policies, public housing is being sold off and public space is increasingly no such thing. In a relentlessly neoliberal climate, the commons seems to offer an alternative to the battle between public and private. The idea of land or services that are commonly owned and managed speaks to a 21st-century sensibility of, to use some jargon, participative citizenship and peer-to-peer production. In theory, at least, the commons is full of radical potential.

Why is it, then, that every time the urban commons is mentioned it is in reference to a community garden? How is it that the pioneers of a new urban politics are always planting kale and rhubarb? Can commoning be scaled up to influence the workings of a metropolis – able to tackle questions of housing, energy use, food distribution and clean air? In other words, can the city be reimagined as a commons, or is commoning the realm of tiny acts of autarchy and resistance?

England has a particular history of commoning that is still written into the fabric of London. Wimbledon, Clapham, Ealing – they all have commons, where our forebears once had the right to graze their livestock. But the enclosures of the 18th century transferred the majority of common land into private hands, turning it into a marketable resource and creating a landless working class. And the problem of the commons today is that we still tend to think of them as a common resource, whether it be oceans and rivers or fish stocks.

This is a misunderstanding. Because we cannot have a common resource without a common strategy for managing it. Elinor Ostrom argued that the commons requires a set of rules. She won the Nobel prize in economics for proving that these resources need not succumb to the so-called “tragedy of the commons” (exploitation by someone taking more than their share) if a system of checks and balances prevails. And so, rather than a resource, the commons is a process, a set of social relations by which a group of people share responsibility for, yes, a garden or even the governance of their neighbourhood. As Peter Linebaugh has said, the commons is best understood as a verb.

The current popularity of the commons as an idea is partially driven by the internet and the fact that network tools make it so much more feasible for larger groups to self-organise. Open-source software, Wikipedia, the creative commons and social media make commoning possible while affirming the ethos of horizontal organisation. In urban terms, the fact that commoning most often takes the form of gardens in left-over plots or in the interstices is clearly because of the limited availability of land and because gardening presents a low barrier to entry compared to, say, construction. But even these garden initiatives are constantly under threat. In the late 1990s Mayor Giuliani tried to sell off more than 100 community gardens in New York. And in Berlin, there was a struggle recently to protect the allotment gardens on the abandoned airfield of Tempelhof from developers.

In fact, it is often in moments of crisis that the commons asserts itself. The protest movements that took over Tahrir Square in Cairo, Gezi Park in Istanbul and Zuccotti Park in New York transformed public space – state owned, with the exception of Zuccotti – into a temporary commons through mass self-organisation. Similarly, the economic crisis in Greece has led to a resurgence of commoning in Athens, where parks neglected by the municipality started to be maintained by resident groups. And one could cite numerous examples of commoning in the favelas of Brazil, where many communities take pride in co-creating and self-managing their environment.

The question is whether the commons, with its potent political dimension, can transcend extreme need and symbolic resistance on the one hand and harmless local initiatives on the other. And there are encouraging examples. One commons project that is beginning to achieve an ambitious scale and complexity is in Colombes, in the suburbs of Paris. Since 2012, the Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée has been developing what its co-director, Doina Petrescou, calls “a bottom-up strategy of resilient regeneration” – and it goes beyond your average urban agriculture initiative. It’s true that there is a micro-farm for collective use but that is only one of three hubs, the others being a mini recycling plant and cooperative eco-housing.

The project now has 400 citizens co-managing 5000m2 of land, producing food, energy and housing, while actively reducing waste and water usage. Already, by European standards, it is a fairly large-scale experiment in alternative urban living. But the aim is to add five more hubs over the next five years and to grow into a commons-based civic movement.

This is just one case study in how hundreds of ordinary citizens, not activists, can create an alternative urban economy. However, the question that always arises with the commons is, who is included? In contrast to public space, which is held by an authority for the benefit of all, commons can easily become enclaves. They tend to be determined by limited groups of stakeholders with a geographical attachment to a site. What happens when outsiders want to assert their right to that so-called commons?

Stavros Stavrides, a Greek academic specialising in spatial politics, is clear that for a commons to remain an open community it needs to be able to incorporate newcomers. “Commoning has to do with difference, not commonality, it should always be expanding those who can participate,” he said at a lecture in London last month.

The bigger that community gets, the more complex the social relations. But that is not necessarily an impediment. The greater challenge, it seems to me, is whether commons can be sustained without an undue burden on the community. One of the most inspiring community initiatives in recent years has been the Campo de Cebada in Madrid, an abandoned lot that a group of architects and local citizens reactivated into a public square and cultural space. But members of the collective, Zuloark, confessed recently that they are tired. So the system of commoning needs to be sustainable otherwise its idealistic potential falls foul of a romantic underestimation of what it takes.

And recent political discourse has routinely, even cynically, made that mistake. The Tories’ aborted Big Society agenda invoked a vague volunteerism to paper over local authority budget cuts. With UK employees working the longest hours in Europe, when are we supposed to serve our communities? For commons-style thinking to take hold, we would need to move beyond quaint notions of the gift economy and engage in systemic restructuring.

Stavrides argues that for commoning to become more mainstream would require new kinds of institutions, specifically political ones. Thus far, political inspiration has come from outside Europe: from the water commons system in Cochabamba, Bolivia, or the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, or most recently the Syrian Kurds in Kobane. But that may be changing. With the election of Ada Colau of the Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) movement as mayor of Barcelona last month, commons-based governance finally has a foothold in a major European city. If movements like Barcelona en Comú can even begin to institutionalise a participative politics, then the commons may begin to reshape our understanding of citizenship and sustainability – and move the conversation beyond gardening.

 

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