PUBLIC SPACE AND ITS CHALLENGES. A PALIMPSEST FOR URBAN COMMONS

2019 ◽  
pp. 191-204
Author(s):  
Lidia Errante
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Commons

scholarly journals Simulation, Control and Desire. Urban Commons and Semi-Public Space Resilience in the Age of Augmented Transductive Territorial Production

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfredo Manfredini
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
External Control ◽  
The Public ◽  
Spatial Production ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Right ◽  
Urban Commons

Considering place-based participation a crucial factor for the development of sustainable and resilient cities in the post-digital turn age, this paper addresses the socio-spatial implications of the recent transformation of relationality networks. To understand the drivers of spatial claims emerged in conditions of digitally augmented spectacle and simulation, it focuses on changes occurring in key nodes of central urban public and semi-public spaces of rapidly developing cities. Firstly, it proposes a theoretical framework for the analysis of problems related to socio-spatial fragmentation, polarisation and segregation of urban commons subject to external control. Secondly, it discusses opportunities and criticalities emerging from a representational paradox depending on the ambivalence in the play of desire found in digitally augmented semi-public spaces. The discussion is structured to shed light on specific socio-spatial relational practices that counteract the dissipation of the “common worlds” caused by sustained processes of urban gentrification and homogenisation. The theoretical framework is developed from a comparative critical urbanism approach inspired by the right to the city and the right to difference, and elaborates on the discourse on sustainable development that informs the United Nations’ New Urban Agenda. The analysis focuses on how digitally augmented geographies reintroduce practices of participation and commoning that reassemble fragmented relational infrastructures and recombine translocal social, cultural and material elements. Empirical studies on the production of advanced simulative and transductive spatialities in places of enhanced consumption found in Auckland, New Zealand, ground the discussion. These provide evidence of the extent to which the agency of the augmented territorialisation forces reconstitutes inclusive and participatory systems of relationality. The concluding notes, speculating on the emancipatory potential found in these social laboratories, are a call for a radical redefinition of the approach to the problem of the urban commons. Such a change would improve the capacity of urbanism disciplines to adequately engage with the digital turn and efficaciously contribute to a maximally different spatial production that enhances and strengthens democracy and pluralism in the public sphere.

scholarly journals Transformative cities

Focaal ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (66) ◽  
pp. 105-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ida Susser ◽  
Stéphane Tonnelat
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Mass Communications ◽  
Service Workers ◽  
Cultural Workers ◽  
Community Activists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Urban Commons

Drawing on Lefebvre and others, this article considers contemporary urban social movements with a selective review of urban research and suggestions for future ethnographic, cultural, and sociological questions. Under a generalized post-Fordist regime of capital accumulation, cultural workers and laborers, service workers, and community activists have all participated in urban movements. We consider such collective action, generated in the crucible of urban life, as a reflection of three urban commons: labor, consumption, and public services; public space (including mass communications and the virtual); and art, including all forms of creative expression. We suggest that the three urban commons outlined here are not necessarily perceived everywhere, but as they momentarily come together in cities around the world, they give us a glimpse of a city built on the social needs of a population. That is the point when cities become transformative.

scholarly journals The Mobilization for Spatial Justice in Divided Societies: Urban Commons, Trust Reconstruction, and Socialist Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542110051
Author(s):  
Chiara Milan
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Community Ties ◽  
Post War ◽  
Urban Commons

The article contributes to the urban studies literature and the study of social movements in divided societies by disclosing the distinctive features and mobilizing potential that the notion of urban commons retains in a war-torn society with a socialist legacy. Specifically, it investigates how urban space and urban commons are reclaimed in a post-conflict and post-socialist country such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. By using Sarajevo as a case study, the article explores several grassroots initiatives undertaken by local urban activists to reappropriate cultural buildings and public space in the city. The study discloses that in a post-conflict and post-socialist society urban commons can bear a unifying potential as acts of commoning favor trust reconstruction processes and strengthen community ties. While the erosion of social ties and the legacy of the war might not encourage mobilization for the commons, the reference to socialist-era practices and language can represent a vantage point to advocate in favor of collective governance. Throughout their actions, urban activists instrumentally referred to the historical experience of socialism to develop a discourse that resonates with the domestic cultural environment. The article points also to a generational difference amongst activists in their references to Yugoslav state socialism. While long-time activists strove to critically reappraise it, the younger ones born in the immediate post-war period appear to hold a more superficial and ambivalent historical knowledge of the socialist heritage, to which they had only partial access and no lived experience.

scholarly journals Dismantling the advertising city: Subvertising and the urban commons to come

2020 ◽  
pp. 026377582094675 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Dekeyser
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Shared Value ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Urban Communication ◽  
Urban Regime ◽  
Spatial Management ◽  
To Come ◽  
Urban Commons

Subvertising, a portmanteau for ‘subverting advertising’, is the illicit practice of intervening into urban advertising space, from graffiti scribbles and removed adverts, to full-blown billboard takeovers and digitally hacked adverts. In this article, I draw from 24 months of ethnography with subvertisers to suggest that a particular ideal of public space, that of a ‘regime of order’, is folded into the hegemonic spatial management of urban communication by advertising actors. This ‘regime’ relies on separating worlds from common use, that is, on what Giorgio Agamben has phrased ‘consecration’. As an operation with capacities for ‘profanation’, subvertising makes visible the ‘natural’ appearance of this urban regime, and enacts highly temporary placeholder forms for the communicative commons to come. Contributing to debates on the geographies of public space and publicness, subvertisers show that the possibility of common use does not emerge from property rights, shared value-systems or a pre-determined scope of usage. Instead, common use emerges from the deactivation of the very notions of rights, laws, identity and ends. Here I trace subvertisers’ insistence on taking seriously the charge of openness, incompatibility, contestation, excess and the dysfunctional in urban expression as sources of inspiration and (self-)transformation.

scholarly journals Urban Commons and the Right to the City

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Keyword(s):  
Urban Communities ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Universal Access ◽  
City Space ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Right ◽  
Urban Commons ◽  
The City

In the increasing cosmopolitan condition of our cities inclusionary urban commons are becoming more and more relevant as civic institutions for encounter, dialogue and collaboration. Their non-commodifiable asset experiences increasing issues of social inclusion, participation, privatisation and universal access. The papers included in this issue of The Journal of Public Space are focused on the development of the commons’ capacity firstly to contingently relate and articulate heterogeneous values and paradigms, personalities, spheres of thought and material and intangible elements; secondly to sustain equity, diversity, belonging by transforming conflicts in productive associations that counter conditions of antagonism to set up critically engaged agonistic ones (Connolly, 1995; Mouffe, 1999, 2008). They include analytical studies, critical appraisals and creative propositions—part of which documenting the City Space Architecture’s event at Freespace, the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale—which address the power of the inclusionary urban commons to support the constitution of free, open and participatory networks that enhance social, cultural and material production of urban communities by reclaiming, defending, maintaining, and taking care of the “coming together of strangers who work collaboratively […] despite their differences” (Williams, 2018: 17).

Urban commons to private property: Gendered environments in Mumbai’s fisher communities

2020 ◽  
pp. 026377582096140
Author(s):  
Aparna Parikh
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Resource Availability ◽  
Service Sector ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Everyday Activities ◽  
Urban Commons ◽  
Land Water

The enclosure of urban ecological commons into private property has facilitated the growth of the neoliberal service sector in Mumbai, India. These changes are brought forth through a reworking of communally managed land into narrowly understood public space, which has paved the way for private development. At the helm of Mumbai’s urbanization is a power alliance between state and elite non-state actors across colonial and neoliberal regimes. The process has gravely impacted subsistence and livelihood activities of fisher communities residing in proximity to the development, disproportionately affecting fisherwomen. This paper centers fisherwomen’s urban worlds to analyze the uneven legibility of existing spatial patterns. Across various scales, the categorical and material reworking of land–water commons has reduced resource availability. Women bear a greater, although underrecognized, burden in maintaining lives and livelihoods within this changing landscape. The relative illegibility of fisherwomen’s spaces, however, allows some everyday activities to continue unnoticed despite ongoing processes of enclosure. My analysis of the enclosure of urban ecological commons and its gendered dimensions advances a dialogue between intersectional feminist and urban political ecology on colonial–neoliberal continuities, categorical exclusions in public–private binaries, and gendered urban environments.

The Prospect of Community-Led Place-Keeping as Urban Commons in Public Residential Estates in Singapore

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-138
Author(s):  
Srilalitha Gopalakrishnan ◽  
Keng Hua Chong
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Green Space ◽  
Community Gardens ◽  
Green Spaces ◽  
Space Management ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Urban Commons

Can place-keeping be considered as urban commons or occurring through the sharing of activities? If so, then specifically, how? This paper discusses long-term place-keeping of Singapore's neighbourhood green spaces as a shared practice, actively engaging citizens in shared responsibilities and collective efforts in transitioning a 'public' space to a 'common' space. We discuss community gardens as a shared urban space and examine two initiatives for neighbourhood green spaces characterized by active involvement of citizens in place-keeping: Community in Bloom (CIB) and Allotment Gardens (AG). Six case studies were examined to understand the current process of shared green space management. An integrated Policy Arrangement Approach (PAA) framework was adopted to analyse the governance arrangements and evaluate the spatial qualities of the community gardens (CIB and AG). Our analysis highlights the positive socio-economic impact of community-led green space management through effective shared place-keeping strategies. It emphasizes the need for an innovative participatory governance approach with a conscious balance between 'autonomy' and 'authority' as the key to long-term place-keeping. Localized community initiatives within a mosaic governance model with flexible partnerships between authorities and citizens would be a good starting point in facilitating shared governance of green spaces in Singapore's public residential estates.

scholarly journals Public Space and the New Urban Agenda

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Strong Notion ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Continuous Use ◽  
Urban Commons

<p>Cities that improve the quality of life for their citizens experience higher levels of prosperity; they are also likely to find themselves more advanced in terms of sustainability. Such cities strive towards social equity and gender equality by increasing access to the urban commons and public good, preventing private appropriation and expanding the scope for improved quality of life for all. Cities that have a strong notion of the ‘public’ demonstrate a commitment to an improved quality of life for their citizens by providing adequate street space, green areas, parks, recreation facilities and other public spaces.<br />Public spaces are a vital ingredient of successful cities. They help build a sense of community, civic identity and culture. Public spaces facilitate social capital, economic development and community revitalisation. The liveliness and continuous use of public space as a public good leads to urban environments that are well maintained, healthy and safe, making the city an attractive place in which to live and work.</p>

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