Commoning the City: Empirical Perspectives on Urban Ecology, Economics and Ethics

Description

This collection seeks to expand the limits of current debates about urban commoning practices that imply a radical will to establish collaborative and solidarity networks based on anti-capitalist principles of economics, ecology and ethics. The chapters in this volume draw on case studies in a diversity of urban contexts, ranging from Detroit, USA to Kyrenia, Cyprus – on urban gardening and land stewardship, collaborative housing experiments, alternative food networks, claims to urban leisure space, migrants’ appropriation of urban space and workers’ cooperatives/collectives. The analysis pursued by the eleven chapters opens new fields of research in front of us: the entanglements of racial capitalism with enclosures and of black geographies with the commons, the critical history of settler colonialism and indigenous commons, law as a force of enclosure and as a strategy of commoning, housing commons from the urban scale perspective, solidarity economies as labour commons, territoriality in the urban commons, the non-territoriality of mobile commons, the new materialist and post-humanist critique of the commons debate and feminist ethics of care. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of figures Acknowledgements List of contributors Introduction: towards an ethos for commoning the city Commoning urban nature Claims to urban land: beyond public and private property Responses to precarity Ethos of care: an emergent culture of commoning References PART 1: Commoning urban nature 1. Racial capitalism and a tentative commons: urban farming and claims to space in post-bankruptcy Detroit “New Detroit” Reproducing property disparity through the state Detroit’s “civic commons” Commons and land access Enclosure Black geographies Bibliography 2. The politics of food: commoning practices in alternative food networks in Istanbul Food communities in Istanbul AFN members as commoners Impact of commoning practices AFNs as open-ended processes of commoning References 3. Insurgent ecologies: rhetorics of resistance and aspiration in Yedikule, Istanbul’s ancient market garden (2014–2018) Walking among weeds Rupture of the market gardens Yedikule in motion: becoming an urban commons? A proletarian workplace Yedikule as urban commons: “the problem is not the gardens, but open space” A garden of world historical significance: fashioning a global commons Designing a public place within a conflict zone Do the gardeners speak? Remains of the day: reflections on a struggle A weedy hope Bibliography 4. “A revolution under our feet”: food sovereignty and the commons in the case of Campi Aperti Food sovereignty: concept and practice Campi Aperti Campi Aperti as a commons The governance structure in Campi Aperti Practicing food sovereignty with agro-ecological commons Bibliography PART 2: Claims to urban land: beyond public and private property 5. Urban commoning and the right not to be excluded The right not to be excluded Urban manifestations of the RN2BE Conclusion Bibliography 6. From graveyards to the “people’s gardens”: the making of public leisure space in Istanbul Taksim municipal garden From sprawling promenades to fenced-in gardens Taksim Republican Square and I˙nönü Esplanade (Gezi Park) Conclusion Bibliography 7. “Time to protect Kyrenia”: defending the right to landscape in northern Cyprus Situating Kyrenia in space and time The rule of decrees and tourism development in Kyrenia Commoning and the Kyrenian landscape Kyrenia initiative: contesting laws, reclaiming the landscape The Sea for Free movement: defending the right to leisure and landscape Conclusion Bibliography 8. A migrant’s tale of two cities: mobile commons and the alteration of urban space in Athens and Hamburg Engaging with the commons: from commoning praxes to mobile commons The mobile common space: characteristics and perspectives Athens and Hamburg: urban terrains of crises and commoning Commoning public space Commoning personal space Commoning social space Migrants’ commoning practices against the new enclosures: a reflection Bibliography PART 3: Responses to precarity 9. Contradictions of housing commons: between middle-class and anarchist models in Berlin Housing precarity and socioeconomic class responses Late urban neoliberalization in Berlin Urban commons Building group Bourgeois benevolence of privatized semi-open spaces Mietshäuser Syndikat Conclusion Bibliography 10. Precarious commons: an urban garden for uncertain times Commons, precarity, care Commons-as-activity Precarity and care Becoming garden ZEN: welfare at the edge Care is critical Collaborative care: fragile beginnings In lieu of a conclusion: uncertain futures Bibliography 11. Cooperative economies as commons: labour and production in solidarity Commoning in the enterprise: from resources to relations Animating labour as commons Building a commoning front Conclusion References Index