Course: Unit C: Questioning the Ambivalence of Urban Commons: A Comparative Investigation
The commons are a crucial terrain of socio-political and intellectual struggle in the current urban age. Commons are sites of experimentation of post-capitalist cooperative relations; or even sites where anti-capitalist practices of resistance take place (Enright and Rossi 2018). Collectively run
cultural spaces, urban farms, gardens, workshops, cooperative forms of housing, community land trusts, but also, broadly speaking, squat-occupied buildings and reclaimed pieces of leftover land: places which groups of people care for and use in a shared way through a variety of norms, and underpinned by a set of values. The act of commoning is therefore a chiefly political one, which allows to eschew the solely market-driven exchange value of urban land, housing and facilities. Instead of excluding others by the means of property, the commons endeavour to a reclaim a potentially inclusive use of goods.
The literature, however, remarks how the commons are characterised by a fundamental ambivalence, by a tension between openness and exclusion – and how the very notion of ‘commons’ is in conflict with the one of ‘public’. The Unit grounds in such debate, and wants to stimulate a reflection on the significance and challenges of producing and maintaining urban environments whose use and resources are shared amongst a group of people; whose access is (to some extent) open; whose ownership is apparently subtracted to the tyranny of urban capitalism.
Importantly, the Unit wants to question the role of such environments at multiple scales, understanding the commons as a complex assemblage of urban knowledge and resources.
What socio-spatial practices contribute to promote a common use of urban resources, in an open and inclusive fashion?
The Unit will revolve around this design research question, and around a dialogue between a South-
East Asian urbanism (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), analysed remotely, and a case study (tbc, given
current global circumstances) where students will be able to conduct research on primary sources – specific sessions will address the methodological and ethical challenges of doing field research, too.
In so doing, the Unit aims to reveal a comparative account of dissimilar trends of urbanisation, and to explore the agency of design in addressing situation of uneven power relations in different contexts. The Unit will expose students to an iterative design-based research methodology, requiring them to investigate the reality of the two cities as projects – i.e. bearing in mind a transformative endeavour. Students will map urban actors and analyse their discourses, to critically understand forms of control, management, and organisation of urban territories, to focus on individual and collective narratives of inhabitance and transformation, to analyse morphologically several grounds of investigation, to reflect on the aesthetic dimension of the production of commons in the two cities.
Phase 1 of the Unit will focus on a short-term remote investigation of the reality of Phnom Penh,
Cambodia. While the city is certainly scarred by socio-spatial exclusionary patterns – most visibly
evictions of informal populations from the city centre toward peripheral camp-like relocation sites – a refined investigation shows how practices of commoning do exist and contribute to open up, decommodify and repoliticise urban space.
Students will be asked to focus their analysis on informal settlements along railway tracks and river
banks, within dilapidated buildings, in periurban areas; and to question the exclusionary reality of
profit-driven developments and relocation sites.
What are the practices currently emancipating from a solely capital-driven production of urban realm? What socio-spatial strategies, at multiple scales, can we implement in order to empower such practices further?
In phase 2, the same questions will drive our investigation in the second case study, that will
be facilitated by a series of local partners sharing our same interests and endeavours. Against
the background of an increasingly exclusionary urban realm – with skyrocketing housing prices,
dilapidated transport infrastructures, high levels of unemployment and very slow investment patterns – the Unit will question commoning practices as being at the core of a potential open and inclusive idea of urbanity.