Bios of Speakers - List of Participants
September 27th & 28th,
2013, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Urban space is a commons: simultaneously a sphere of human
cooperation and negotiation and its product. Today, we need to understand urban
commoning,
the creation and maintenance of urban commons, as
a dialectical relationship between state and
capital (e.g. Hardt and Negri 2009). Rather
than positing commons as beyond state
and market (e.g. Helfrich 2012), this
conference asks how to move there. In particular, we wish to scrutinize how a
focus on commons might advance (or preempt) existing or emergent urban struggles.
Understanding
urban space as a commons means that the much sought-after productivity of the
city precedes rather than results from strategies of the state and
capital. It challenges assumptions of urbanization as capital-driven (e.g.
Harvey 2006). This idea resonates with a range of recent urban social movements, from
the Arab Spring and the occupy movement, to the
“Right to the City” alliance, and countless initiatives seeking
to “Reclaim the City”. Initiatives to create “commons”, such as networks of small entrepreneurs,
subcultural producers, initiatives offering direct services to the marginalized
and urban gardening, are welcomed and even facilitated by governments in order to (re-)valorize urban space and lessen the
impacts of economic restructuring. However, at the
same time, the creative and reproductive potential of the urban commons is
undermined by new attempts to exploit and control (i.e. enclose) them, which
are exacerbated by austerity politics.
In this context, this symposium seeks to explore the
role and position of commons in urban research and open the debate to
contributions from all disciplines. The conference is divided into 6 panels, as
follows:
- Agency of urban commons: What strategies, tools and methods do urban commons employ to reach their goals and meet their needs? What role do they play in subjectivity production, urban dwellers' empowerment and actual social and spatial change in the urban realm?
- Theorizing the transition: Commons within and against capitalism: How can commons be theorized as a social space that is simultaneously situated within as well as oriented against capitalist social relations? Does it even make sense to distinguish “urban” and “non-urban” commons?
- The city and the sovereign: How do “commons”-oriented initiatives navigate between cooptation and criminalization? How do the subjectivities that they engender relate to emergent forms of governance?
- Spatialization of the digital commons: How does urban space relate to the digital commons? In what ways can we see the struggles for digital commons connected to urban space? To what extent can we understand urban space as spatialized digital commons?
- Urban commons and public services: What are the political perspectives of introducing a commons perspective into (municipal) government? The concrete example to be discussed in this panel is recent initiatives to defend public real estate and infrastructure.
- Gentrification’s tragic pioneers: Victims of enclosure of the commons?: How do struggles to preserve urban commons against economic enclosures of the city (i.e. gentrification) differ from state attempts to foster dynamics of commons generation (as a basis for future exploitation)?
Registration
until 16 September 2013 at gsz.urbancommons@gmail.com.
Map: Address of Conference Venue: Mohrenstraße 41, 10117 Berlin
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