Political Dimension of the Urban Common

* Chapter: Bianchi I (2023). The everyday politics of the urban commons: ambivalent political possibilities in the dialectical, evolving and selective urban context. In Hamel and Domaradzka (eds.), Handbook of Urban Social Movement. Commissioned by Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 284-300.

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Contextual Quote

"The crucial nature of the social relationship between the group and the resource informs the political dimension of the commons (Bianchi, 2018b): the group does not simply act as a mere collective manager of the resource, but as a political actor that, by recognizing that the resource is crucial for its survival, demands that it not be used according to the economic logic of capitalism, i.e. a profit-making logic, that it not be governed according to capitalism’s preferred government system, i.e. representative democracy, and that it not be structured according to the capitalist mode of social relations, i.e. competitive social relations. The crucial nature of the social relationship thus pushes the group of people involved to develop a management model that operates according to the economic logic of use-value, to form a governing system based on direct democracy, and to foster social relations based on reciprocity."

- Iolanda Bianchi

Abstract

"This chapter explores the political dimension of the urban commons. These are self-governing practices that have mainly emerged thanks to the latest cycle of urban mobilisations. By acting according to the principle of use-value, reciprocity and participatory democracy, they build alternatives in the here and now: this is referred to as the everyday politics of the urban commons.

We discuss the main theories that have examined the everyday politics of the urban commons and their relationship with more contentious repertoires of collective action – including urban movements – through the theories developed by Marxist scholars and social movement studies.

We underline how both tend to side-line what the urban implies for the everyday politics of the urban commons. We suggest that it would be useful to develop a more accurate urban account of the everyday politics of the urban commons, to assess the results of the interplay between everyday and contentious repertoires of collective action, including urban movements. We thus analyse how three distinct urban processes –urban capital accumulation, urban social relations and urban power configurations– affect the everyday politics of the urban commons. We contend that these urban processes offer ambivalent political possibilities for urban commons, since the urban context embodies a dialectical, evolving and selective terrain for enacting their everyday politics. We conclude that this ambivalence must be taken into account when urban political scholars assess the outcomes of the interplay between urban commons and more contentious repertoires of collective action, including urban movements."

Excerpt

On the difference between urban commons and urban movements

Iolanda Bianchi:

"It is true that urban commons share some commonalities with urban movements, for instance their goals. However, in this chapter we prefer to maintain the analytical distinction between urban commons and urban movements, since we contend that everyday-oriented and claim-oriented politics do actually represent two differentiated modalities of collective action. In this way, in the light of the simultaneous proliferation of these practices in different urban European contexts (Cellamare, 2018), the revival of autonomist political theories that eschew state and party politics (Hardt and Negri, 2009; Holloway, 2010) and the re-emergence of the concept of commons that can bring such practices under the same analytical umbrella (Bianchi, 2018a), we follow the theoretical development of several authors that have begun to analyse these practices as a standalone phenomenon of collective action to be treated separately from urban movements (De Angelis, 2017; Varvarousis, Asara and Akbulut, 2021).

This analytical distinction, however, does not also have to be an empirical one. We are aware that contentious and everyday repertoires are strictly related to one another in the urban context and we will delve into the relationship between them empirically. What we cannot do is to assess their interrelated outcomes. Although the number of urban commons is on the rise in many European cities, such as Barcelona, Athens, Naples, Ghent, Rome, Istanbul, and Berlin, among others, they are projects that are still at an early stage in their development, and assessing the outcomes achieved by them and by related urban movements is a task that will have to be performed once they evolve and consolidate. The contribution of this chapter actually aims to better equip the scholars who will carry out this task, by providing them with a deeper knowledge of the political potentialities embodied in the urban commons.

From a theoretical and empirical perspective, two streams of literature are particularly relevant for understanding the everyday politics of the urban commons and their relationship with urban movements: Marxist analysis and social movement studies. Nevertheless, even though most Marxists and social movement scholars’ reflections on the commons are grounded in, or at least take their cue from, the urban context, both have a tendency to neglect the theoretical and empirical implications that the urban has for the urban commons. We thus argue that we need to develop a more accurate urban account of the urban commons, in order to better understand their everyday politics and assess the outcomes of their relationship with more contentious repertoires, including urban movements. We contend that the urban holds ambivalent possibilities for the everyday politics of the urban commons, since the urban sphere embodies a dialectical, evolving and selective terrain for enacting everyday politics."

Conclusions

"The urban terrain produces ambivalent possibilities for the everyday politics of the urban commons. This can be enhanced but also be threatened by the urban capital accumulation process and the development of its neoliberal variant, by the social relations that are sustained between the diverse subjectivities that elaborate the accumulation process in different ways, and by power configurations that do not fully coalesce in the local state but are primarily exercised through it. These ambivalent political possibilities are not mutually exclusive but are dialectical. As we have seen, the economic support that the local state can give to the urban commons allows them to increase their stability and impact but can at the same time also de-politicise them and diminish their radical claims. Diverse subjectivities can come across each other more easily in the urban environment, but they can also reject each other and give form to exclusionary urban commons. Moreover, these ambivalent political possibilities are not fixed in time but are constantly evolving. The effects of the neoliberal urban accumulation process can favour the development of urban commons in times of economic recession, for instance when real estate speculation comes to a halt and leaves urban voids that are re-appropriated by urban commons; but once such speculation starts up again, the urban commons find it difficult to survive because market actors reclaim those spaces in order to implement speculative projects. Furthermore, these ambivalent political possibilities do not affect all urban commons in a city in the same way, but are selective.

The effects of the urban neoliberal urban accumulation process may favour the development of urban commons that respond to immediate needs such as soup kitchens, time banks and migrantled housing squats, but some of these, such as migrant-led housing squats, may not be tolerated by the current power configuration and may not find a space to survive in the city. In other words, urban processes offer ambivalent political possibilities for developing the everyday politics of the urban commons, since the city embodies a dialectical, evolving and selective terrain for enacting them.

In this chapter we have delved into the political dimension of the urban commons. This is a repertoire of collective action that has developed especially during the latest cycle of urban mobilisations alongside more contentious repertoires, such as protests, demonstrations and occupations of squares that spread across many European cities, and that later evolved into the anti-austerity movement (Mayer, Thörn and Thörn, 2016). Unlike these contentious repertoires, the urban commons develop direct political actions rooted in everyday life: the everyday politics of the commons (Arampatzi, 2017; Roussos, 2019). Interest in this type of political action has increased over the last few decades among different groups, especially Marxist and social movement scholars. Both sets of scholars see the urban commons as practices of self-government in the city that, by acting according to the principle of use-value, reciprocity and participatory democracy, re- appropriate crucial (both immaterial and material) resources, services and facilities (De Angelis, 2017; Federici, 2018), in order to self-manage them and foster a more democratic, autonomous and de-commodified pattern of urban life.

Urban commons are a recent phenomenon of collective action that is situated in the process of evolution and continuity of the latest cycle of urban mobilisation; as such, they can be considered a possible breeding ground for the development and strengthening of urban movements and other more contentious repertoires of action. However, the effects and results of the everyday politics of the urban commons and its interplay with urban movements and contentious repertoires have still to be assessed by urban political scholars, since urban commons are still at an early stage in their development. In this chapter, we argue that when this assessment is carried out, it is especially important to consider how the urban context itself shapes the everyday politics of the urban commons, since this is an aspect that has been somewhat neglected by both Marxist and social movement scholars. Drawing on the different theoretical and empirical contributions of urban scholars – geographers, sociologists, political scientists, and planners – we have tried to illustrate the implications that the urban terrain has for the everyday politics of the urban commons.

We have conceptualised the urban as a specific scaling process which overlaps a series of other multi-scalar processes (Brenner, 2004). This is produced by and produces specific processes of capital accumulation, social relations, and power configurations, and we have tried to understand how these processes affect the everyday politics of the urban commons. We have shown how the neoliberal urban accumulation process, social relations among diverse subjectivities that take part in the capital accumulation process in different ways, and power configurations that do not fully coalesce in the local state but are primarily exercised through it offer ambivalent political possibilities for the everyday politics of the urban commons, potentially enhancing them but also sometimes threatening them. These ambivalent political possibilities are not mutually exclusive, but are situated in a terrain in which enhancing and threatening possibilities can sometimes be concomitant or consecutive, and can selectively affect the everyday politics of the many urban commons that exist in a city. It is in this sense that we argue that the urban represents a dialectical, evolving and selective terrain for enacting the everyday politics of the urban commons.

It will be the task of urban political scholars to take these ambivalent possibilities into consideration when they assess the results and achievements of the latest cycle of urban mobilisation of which both urban commons and urban movements are a part, and analyse how this ambivalence has affected the transformation and meaning of the urban context that both everyday and contentious repertoires strive to engender."

More information

• Bianchi, I. (2018b) ‘The post-political meaning of the concept of commons: the regulation of the

urban commons in Bologna’, Space and Polity, 22(3), pp. 287–306. doi: 10.1080/13562576.2018.1505492.