CFP: Urban commons: Moving beyond state and market
September 27th & 28th, 2013, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin,
Germany
Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies Urban Research Group
urbanresearchgroup.blogspot.de
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. We are particularly interested
in contributions that address the following six topics around which
the panels of the symposium will be based:
1. 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)?
2. 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?
3. “The city is our factory”: Immaterial labor and resistance in
Post-Fordism: What does resistance mean when the rise of the
creative class is premised upon the refusal of Fordist discipline
and the embrace of common resources is a central paradigm for urban
economic development?
4. 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?
5. 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.
6. 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?
Please send abstracts of 300-500 words to [log in to unmask]
by April 10th.
The deadline for finished papers is September 1st, 2013.
A publication of a symposium anthology is planned for summer 2014.