Urban Affairs and the Commons

• Special Issue: Review of Urban Affairs: The Commons. Economical and Political Weekly.

Editorial introduction via http://beta.epw.in/newsItem/comment/190743/

Description

"Framed by a concept note that sets out the significance of the notion of “commons” to urban processes, this set of five articles looks at urban commons in diverse contexts, from the Yamuna in Delhi, hunting, gathering and foraging livelihoods in Mumbai, water bodies in Hyderabad and Bangalore, to the cinema and how it may or may not be understood as commons."

Excerpts

Anant Maringanti:

"The case for re-envisioning the right to the city via the commons is compelling. Lefebvre’s vision of the right to the city is in a sense about a collective ideal, about shared resources and practices. Yet, the urban space that Lefebvre and much of the critical urban theory that follows Lefebvre’s lead theorise on is the capitalist urban space of north America and western Europe. In much of the world outside of these heartlands of capitalism, however, struggles against neo-liberal capitalism have been waged not in the cities but in the forests where corporate aggression takes the form of mining and intellectual property rights in biotechnology (Harvey 2004: 548). In these places it is not the right to the city but the right to the commons that has been invoked most effectively by indigenous communities.

In cities like those of India, an engagement between the right to the city and the right of commons – the right to oppose enclosure of shared resources in cities can open up several new possibilities for creating better cities. Materialising the right to the city as the right to the commons is however not an easy task. The informal mode of governance and planning described by Roy (2009) is in its concreteness, a battlefield in which the actors ­deploy social power through caste, gender and other privileges and occasionally employ brute physical aggression to resolve competing claims for shared use and appropriation of commons. Once appropriated (occupied in the case of land), ownership of these resources can be further legitimised through formal law. And as a matter of fact, the erosion of commons in cities is an indication of the consolidation of that power which is not merely capitalist but is marked by caste formations as well. What is the just and efficacious political praxis that produces commons in defence against unethical and exclusionary exploitation that facilitates an unjust order of accumulation and social oppression? What kind of praxis can facilitate appropriation that is ­sensitive to a new ethic of the commons and fosters the right to the city, with an Indian sensibility? Such a question assumes urgency at this juncture when rapid exclusionary urban growth threatens to create conditions that are unfavourable for everyone and it is increasingly becoming evident that there is no return to the Nehruvian socialist order with its characteristic ­binaries of public and private. What follows is a further exploration of the challenge of urban commons.

Debates on the commons have been, for the last 40 years, influenced by the Garrett Hardin’s famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, coincidentally first published in the same year in which Lefebvre proposed the right to the city (Hardin 1993). Hardin’s thesis, under the long Malthusian shadow claims that a resource which is not owned by anyone is likely to be over­exploited and destroyed as each of the users acts in a rational and self-serving manner. Such actors cannot see any point in limiting their use because, there is no guarantee that others will simultaneously limit their use contributing to a general sustenance of the pool. Hardin’s tragedy of the commons formulation has been refuted both conceptually and empirically by many scholars. For example, Roberts and Emel (1992) have demonstrated that the degradation of the resources can be explained better through uneven development theory. Bromley (1991) has shown that it is necessary to distinguish between commons, property and common property regimes. Dietz et al (2003) have shown that institutions of collective action matter to the way commons are governed.

Nevertheless, Hardin’s proposition has had a durable influence on the liberal governance. The liberal strategy to obviate Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” is to vest property rights for all resources in some agency. Notwithstanding their adversarial positions, advocates of privatisation and of the public sector both appear to converge on this strategy.

Our discussion of waterbodies in Hyderabad shows that the degradation of waterbodies is not dependent on whether formal ownership rests with the state or with private individuals. It has also shown that neither inclusive growth nor insurgent urbanism approaches to the right to the city can address the question of the commons. Any attempt to build a new framework then would have to recognise that commons are not natural objects existing a priori. The waterbodies of Hyderabad are produced over millennia by people who came together through shared meanings and practices of use and appropriation. Such practices which we may call “practices of commoning” draw on diverse sources, from the spiritual (shrines on the lake boundary) through the banal (cattle grazing and casual fishing, to the highly politically/religiously charged (religious processions for immersion of idols during festivals). Water­bodies bear the imprint of the exclusions and inclusions of past social relations – norms and hierarchies of use and appropriation. Exercising the right to the city as a right to the commons, therefore, involves a critical urban praxis that assembles actors who can construct new communities based on principles of collaboration and sharing that are at once aware of the inherited inequities and how the old inequities are incorporated into new dispensations of ­unequal power. In what follows, I suggest that collaborative knowledge production could be a tentative starting point for such an exercise.

One of the key insights that emerges from the experience of the lake protection groups in Hyderabad has to do with the governance of information and knowledge. Control over and ownership of information and data and the power to authenticate and adjudicate the legitimacy of the information is crucial to the reproduction of the informal idiom which makes construction of any meaningful community impossible. Each lake is the meeting point of a number of interest groups with competing interests, and yet none of these groups is compelled to engage with each other. Each operates through stealth, plays for time and manipulates information. Knowledge is guarded and traded in. Nothing illustrates this as sharply as the case of knowledge of FTL markings for lakes in Hyderabad. Among activists in Hyderabad, the FTL data of the lakes till date continues to be a source of mysti­fication as the government agencies responsible for lakes and lands surrounding them have neither released any data nor undertaken any exercise to fix the FTL of each of the lakes or explain to the public what it means. Yet, such data is known to be available in some government agency or the other, only to be revealed when it is tactically necessary to reveal it. This is not surprising because the FTL is key to determining the waterspread in the lake and thus marks the boundaries of the lake. Once revealed, it fixes the boundaries of the lake. However, this is not merely a question of factually ascertainable information from the government. It is also a matter of negotiation as there are multiple ways to arrive at the FTL and each of them is fraught with conflicts over boundaries and entitlements.

Given this scenario, waterbodies (and more generally all of urban space) are sites where multiple communities each with its own tacit knowledge and accumulated lived experience are at work. The first step, therefore, is to develop systems of collaboration where such complex repositories of information and knowledge can be brought together into conversation on a collaborative basis rather than on competitive basis. In other words, at least one point of departure towards the exercise of the right to the city as right to the commons is the creation of appropriate knowledges and development of practices and norms for sharing and reworking those knowledges. Research on the commons particularly in the context of their invocation as defence against corporate aggression has shown the importance of understanding and sustaining knowledge systems centred around the commons (Hess and Ostrom 2007; Escobar 1998).

Urban commons, however, are places and resources where knowledge is deeply riven with power struggles is privatised in the form of data and expert knowledge or is in the custodianship of unaccountable government agencies. Geographically, the challenge of sharing and collaborating is not easy, because of multiple layers of jurisdictions which do not coincide and stakeholder groups who are not necessarily living in close proximity. Given this complexity, information and insights are not amenable to research practices that are oriented towards a few experts working in isolation from the community. Rather, it is precisely through generation of knowledge that new communities must be constituted and the communities so constituted must generate information that is oriented towards a new ethic of commons. It is only through such critical knowledge that the right to the city can be claimed genuinely as a right to the commons, “as a precious human right”, against which there can be no estoppel. Such new vistas of research would have been inconceivable barely a decade ago. Yet with the availability of new communication ­technologies, online mapping services and social media application, a new window of opportunity may just be opening up. Whether practitioners, researchers, activists, technologists and policymakers are ready to seize it, is a question for practice rather than for theory." (http://beta.epw.in/newsItem/comment/190746/)

More Information

• Urban Commons