The elusive character of the urban commons

He starts his chapter in a quite epic way: “The city is the site where people of all sorts and classes mingle, however reluctantly and agonistically, to produce a common if perpetually changing and transitory life.”[1] So, this opening line, this common place contains already a glimpse of the mysterious character of the urban commons: this shared urban life is common but changing and transitory.

A crucial quote on the character of these urban commons is this one: “The common, even -and particularly- when it cannot be enclosed, can always be traded upon even though it is not in itself a commodity. The ambience and attractiveness of a city, for example, is a collective product of its citizens, but it is the tourist trade that commercially capitalizes upon that common to extract monopoly rents.

Through their daily activities and struggles, individuals and social groups create the social world of the city, and thereby create something common as a framework with in which all can dwell.”[2] So, the essence of the urban commons seems to be elusive: an ‘ambience’, an ‘attractiveness’.

In his view the urban commons is the quality of a neighbourhood that will be captured by the infamous process of gentrification, but is also constantly produced.  “The common is not, therefore, something that existed once upon a time that has since been lost, but something that is, like the urban commons, continuously being produced.

The problem is that it is just as continuously being enclosed and appropriated by capital in its commodified and monetized form, even as it is being continuously produced by collective labor.”[3] That is a hopeful message that nobody studying the common and/practice it, should forget. The commons are continuously destroyed, but also continuously produced.

Then he focusses on the appropriation of these mysterious urban commons: “The primary means by which it is appropriated in urban contexts is, of course, through the extraction of land and property rents. A community group that struggles to maintain ethnic diversity in its neighbourhood and protect against gentrification may suddenly find its property prices (and taxes) rising as real estate agents market the “character” of their neighborhood to the wealthy as multicultural, street-lively, and diverse.”[4]

So, the urban commons boils down to “character”, to the atmosphere the charm, le je ne sais quoi, that makes a neighbourhood lively, diverse and attractive. That what the author called a few pages earlier the ‘ambience’ and ‘attractiveness’. This selling of “character” is fatal for the neigbourhood in question.

You could go as far as to say that the urban commons only becomes palpable when it is captured or appropriated. Harvey again: “By the time the market has done its destructive work, not only have the original residents been dispossessed of that common which they had created (often being forced out by rising rents and property taxes), but the common itself becomes so debased as to be unrecognizable.

Neighborhood revitalization through gentrification in South Baltimore displaced a lively street life, where people sat on their stoops on warm summer nights and conversed with neighbors, with air- conditioned and burglar-proofed houses with a BMW parked out front and a rooftop deck, but with no one to be seen on the street.”[5]

A quite graphic and precise description of the by now well known process of gentrification. Harvey is quite clear about it: “It often means the death of a neighbourhood. Revitalization meant devitalization, according to local opinion.”[6]

Then Harvey generalizes: “This is the fate that again and again threatens places like Christiania in Copenhagen, the St. Pauli districts of Hamburg, or Willamsburg and DUMBO in New York City, and it was also what destroyed that city’s SoHo district.” The list is endless. Every city knows gentrified neighbourhoods.

As a true Marxist Havey has no mercy for the perpetrators of this ‘original’ or primitive aculumalation, this theft by appropriation. “Those who create an interesting and stimulating everyday neighborhood life lose it to the predatory practices of the real estate entrepreneurs, the financiers and upper class consumers bereft of any urban social imagination.”[7]

And he sees method in this madness: “The better the common qualities a social group creates, the more likely it is to be raided and appropriated by private profit-maximizing interests.”. And right he is. It is a shame really. He calls it “the true tragedy the urban commons”.[8]

The factory of Negri and Hardt

To point out how this mysterious character, attractiveness or ambience of the city quarter is produced, Harvey refers to Marx: “The collective labor that Marx envisaged was for the most part confined to the factory. What if we broaden that conception to think, as Hardt and Negri suggest, that it is the metropolis that now constitutes a vast common produced by the collective labor expended on and in the city?

The right to use that common must surely then be accorded to all those who have had a part in producing it. This is, of course, the basis for the claim to the right to the city on the part of the collective laborers who have made it. The struggle for the right to the city is against the powers of capital that ruthlessly feed upon and extract rents from the common life that others have produced.”[9]

Harvey refers to the book Commonwealth of Negri and Hardt.[10] As good operaists Negri and Hardt conceive indeed of the city as a factory, where the creative producers of the multitude produce the metropolis through their collective labor. But collective labor is a metaphor here, it is labor maybe, but not really collective.

It is just as well the Kantian ‘ungesellige Geselligkeit’ at work, the asocial sociability. It is because all city dwellers are pursuing their very own ambitions, that the neighborhood becomes what it is. The artists looking for cheep studio’s, the barista serving excellent coffee for being the place to be, the alternative fashion shop, the secondhand shop, the exotic restaurant with a touch.

So, this labor is anything but collective. Even the category of labor is disputable: it is often also by play, by free time, or else by civic action that a neighborhood becomes what it is, that is not labor, at least not in Arendtian terms. In any case, the urban commons is spontaneous, a constellation, an emergence of many individual often rather egotistic or a least calculated efforts.

So, the urban commons is more the product of spontaneous conviviality, of an unconscious collective. It may be ruled by the public authorities who can help a lot by making pedestrian zones and parks, but ambience and character is something that grows and is what cannot be produced top down.

But it is exactly that unconscious collective labor that gives the right to the city, according to Harvey reasoning (of course Marxist to the letter: the product of collective labor of the laborers in the factory should be theirs and not be appropriated by the capitalist). The idea of Lefebvre is in my opinion not a sort of reward for the contribution to the collective labor.

That would not be a right but a conditional transaction. In any case, the Marxist metaphor of the city as factory and the urban common as product of collective labor does not really help to explain the riddle of the urban commons.

The urban commons and the classic conceptions of the commons

So, we will have to dig further… How does the urban commons relate to the classic conceptions of the commons?[11] That begs explanation, for all his references to Hardin, Ostrom and Bookchin, Harvey does not show how the ‘urban commons’ as ambience, attractiveness and character, would really be a real commons, comparable to the fishing grounds, the alp meadows or the irrigation systems that Ostrom studies in her book Governing the commons, as examples of the commons.[12]

Or a political selforganising confederation as Bookchin’s blue print sketched it (and was realized in Rojava). In the case of the urban commons as evoked (rather than defined) by Harvey, there is not a community that comes together in a sort of cooperative to set rules and practices to govern a Common Pool Resource or CPR, as Ostrom calls it.

There is not a real community, a neighborhood of a city is an imagined community of mostly strangers, it does not set its own rules and does not have the say over a specific CPR. Calling this imagined community a multitude, as Negri and Hardt do, does not, unfortunately, solve the problem. So, in the strict economic sense the urban commons Harvey evokes are not a common, it seems.

The urban commons is not a legal commons either, a legal commons in the sense of Peter Linebaugh, like the charter of the forest.[13] Although some Neighboorhood contracts try to govern somehow the commons by making a legal framework that is both top down and bottom up, via participation.

But not all neighboorhoods with character are the product of that sort of participation and regulation. It is not a political common in the sense of people coming together and deciding to set up a praxis based on mutuality, what Dardot and Laval quite rightly declared to be the essence of the common and the basis of the political.[14]

Even if we try to go to a more concrete level and compare this concept of the urban commons to the sort of urban activism we have seen in recent decades, it is not easy to link those two phenomena. The very elusive character, this ambience, and the unconsciously built attractiveness of the urban commons is in strong contrast to the conscious cooperation of urban activists and the cooperative as form.

These are often more a practice of commoning, of getting together and doing something, often thery are also some sort of economic commons, like in urban farming or community gardens. Most of the time they have a strong element of the political conception of the commons, as praxis, as the making of a group with a specific goal and specific demands.

Even spontaneous entropic landscapes, building pits that become urban ponds, like Marais Wiels in Brussels[15] or Lago Bullicante in Rome[16] are somehow an urban ecology: soon after taking shape they came to be consciously defended and governed by a group of active neigboors, citizens organisations and afficionado’s.

La Communa and Toestand, both famous initiatives in Brussels, are organizing temporary occupations of vacant building, opening them up for several disenfranchised communities. There are tons of examples of this sort of activist urban commons, in cities all over Europe.

Maybe we should make a distinction between the concrete urban commons (of civic collective action) and the abstract urban commons of spontaneous, unplanned production of atmosphere.  In fact the common that is the character, ambience, attractivisness  of a neighboorhood (that is capitalized upon through gentrification) has more of what I called a philosophical commons[17]:  a sort of cultural urban ecology that is ‘sui generis’, a sort of natural symbiosis and social metabolism, that is not governed or conscious, but spontaneous, like natural growth…

Of course cooperatives like CLTs or a mushroom factory (in the cellars of an old Slaughterhouse, working with remnants of beerbrewing[18]), or NGO’s and cultural centers can hugely help to build a neigboorhood and the  legal ordering of commons by public authorities are crucial, think of pedestrians zones and the like, that are public but are places of commoning, but it is not the essence of the urban commons that is more like an incense, a perfume.

In short, the urban common is therefore a constellation of hybrids, with state, private initiatives and practices of commoning, like urban activism, in an often animated, but at best fertile dialectic.[19]

Postscript on the scale problem and rummaging in the margins

When I met an old friend – I hadn’t seen in years – who had been involved for a long time in Trage Wegen, “slow paths”, an organization opening up old, common walking paths in the fields of Flanders, and told him about my lecture in Linz on the commons, he had a few tough questions for me.

After two heavy beers he was frank and honest, almost harsh, as old pals can and in a sense should be towards each other. He asked: is all this not rummaging in the margins? ( ‘gemorrel in de marge’) he asked. Awtch. … It is true that in the light of the genocide in Gaza, the warmongering in Europe, the total madness in the US and the apparently forgotten but literally life threatening planetarian ecological crisis, this lecture will not save the world.

To put even more salt in the wound, he asked if I still believed in the commons movement? I replied that already in his book Rebel Cities, Harvey called scale the achilles heel of the commons, exactly in his chapter on the creation of the urban commons. Indeed, after say 25 years of ‘resurgence of the commons’.

If we take the year 2000 as date of the rediscovery of the commons –  it was indeed around that date that the otherglobalist movement and others rediscovered the concept of the commons and the practices of commoning – then we have to admit that all these nice, endearing initiatives did not make, from hindsight a quarter of a century later, the scale jump needed to really make a difference.

We agreed and had a very pleasant night with friends of him. But what do we take home? Maybe “rummaging in the margins” is not so bad as we think. It is exactly in the margins that new forms of interaction, of producing and dwelling, of ecology and circular economy are tested.

It is in other places, in places of otherness, what I call with Foucault heterotopias, that the ‘others’ find their place. The margins are to be defended as the breeding grounds for alternative lifestyles and alternative people, like my friend, like “Trage Wegen”, the slow paths, worth saving, worth opening up.[20]

Notes:

[1] David Harvey, Rebel Cities, From the right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Verso, London, New York, 2012, p. 67. For a general introduction to the resurgence of the commons, I would refer the reader to David Bollier, Think like a commoner. A short introduction to the life of the commons, Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2014 (second edition 2025).

[2] Ibidem, p.74.

[3] Ibid., p.77.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., p.78.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid. In reference to the famous, infamous article on the tragedy of the commons by Garret Hardin, inevitable reference in every discourse on the commons, who said that the commons, which he allegorically describes a meadow where people put their cattle, are always by necessity depleted, as everybody wants to place ever more cows. Like all scholars of the commons he rejects this allegory, for as Laval and Dardot pointed out: the meadow of Hardin is depleted exactly because it is not governed by a cooperative, and is therefore not a common, even the opposite of it. Pierre Dardot & Christian Laval, Commun. Essay sur la revolution au XXIe siècle, Paris, Editions La Découverte, 2014.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Havard University Press, London, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2011, p. 258-260.

[11]  To answer this question i will use ‘the four fundamental conceptions of the commons’ I have distinguished in my article of the same title: the philosophical, legal, economic and political commons. https://www.dewereldmorgen.be/community/the-four-fundamental-conceptions-of-the-commons/

[12] Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1990 (2015).

[13] Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto. Liberties and Commons for all, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008.

[14] Dardot and Laval, o.c., p. 455, passim.

[15] See: https://bruxelles.natagora.be/nos-actions/vigilance-et-reaction/dossier-marais-wiels/le-marais-wiels

[16] See: https://animaloci.org/lake-bullicante/

[17] in my already referenced text on the four fundamental conceptions of the commons.

[18] See: https://www.bioguide.be/producteurs/le-champignon-de-bruxelles

[19] See on this concept of hybridity of the commons in the reality, my ‘Political Postscript to the rediscovery of the conmmons’ in my book Ending the Anthropocene. Essays on Activism in the Age of Collapse, NAI010 Publishers, Rotterdam,2021, p92-97.

[20] The defense of heterotopias as disclosures of the common uncommon, I took up in a more strictly academic way elsewhere. See: Lieven De Cauter, ‘Other spaces for the Anthropocene. Heterotopia and the dis-closure of the (un)common’ in:  Simon Ferdinand, Irina Souch and Daan Wesselamn (eds), Heterotopia and Globalisation in the 21st Century, Routledge, London, 2020. (Together with all my other texts so far on the commons, also in my book Ending the Anthropocene. Essays on Activism in the Age of Collapse, NAI010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2021.) This experimenting in the margins is also the life work of the people who invited and welcomed me in Linz, Lorenzo Romito of Stalker, Giulia Mazzorin and Andrea Curtoni and of the people of the collective house of Willy*Fred, who hosted me. To all of them I dedicated this text in fond memory of my visit.