Overview

This Unit investigates the extent to which commons live (or survive) outside urban capitalism and neoliberal ideology, and question how commons might configure as alternative to the exclusionary patterns of the current, profit-driven, urban transformation, and as a possibility for enhancing a dimension of care in a post-pandemic urban realm. The Unit aims 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. Further, the Unit aspires to navigate the current (post-)pandemic urban landscape and understand how the Covid-19 outbreak has impacted – enhanced, accelerated or, conversely, put under threat and slowed down – the production of urban commons. Importantly, the Unit questions the role of such environments at multiple scales, understanding the commons as a complex assemblage of urban practices and tangible and intangible resources.

Approaches and Methods

The Unit adopts a comparative framework and supports students to adopt Design-Research methods to interrogate and explore this research topic between two different contexts. Students identify common patterns and trends of urban transformation across contexts, while learning through differences. Urban comparativism becomes therefore a pedagogical strategy to grasp the complexities of urban transformation across contexts, and how practices of commoning and, conversely, dynamics of urban injustices deploy in different contexts and at different scales. We further encourage students to design and experiment with space using the Participatory Action Research methods (Wakeford and Sanchez Rodriguez 2018) to engage with the communities and stakeholders.