Urban Commons as Sites of Societal Subsumption and Commodification within Biopolitical Capitalism

* Article: Ambivalence of the urban commons. By Ugo Rossi and Theresa Enright. Essay for: The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 35-46, 2018.

URL = https://www.academia.edu/28286361/Ambivalence_of_the_urban_commons?

Description

"The aim of this text is to show how we should refute essentialistic understandings of the commons. The commons is rather a politically and discursively contested terrain within the intricate economies of exploitation and reinvention characterising global capitalism in the neoliberal era. Multiple uses of the commons can be recognised within this diversfied politics of the commons, revealing the ultimately ambivalent use of this notion: the commons is at one and the same time a space of resistance to neoliberal accumulation by dispossession and of experimentation with post-capitalist economic practices, but also a site of societal subsumption and commodification within the knowledge-intensive economies of biopolitical capitalism."