Commoning the City: The Right to not be Excluded

C.B. Macpherson characterized common property as the right to not be excluded from a valued resource. I put his account into conversation with a layered series of struggles in inner-city Vancouver, Canada, in order to make some more general conceptual claims regarding urban commoning. The right to not be excluded, I argue, points us to the centrality of property, broadly defined, to an adequate understanding of commons. It alerts us to the central relation between the exclusionary logic of private property and a common property right to not be excluded. The concept also provides an enriched ethic of human liberty that justifies non-exclusion as a right. In so doing, it reminds us that the experiential force of exclusion and the salience of the right to not be excluded are socially differentiated. Understood as a relation, it also alerts us to the need to attend to the practice of commoning, and resist a noun-centered view of ‘the commons’, with its resultant boundedness and fixity.

Nicholas Blomley is Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University. He has a longstanding interest in the geographical dimensions of law, particularly real property. He has recently completed a project on a treaty process in Canada involving the state and First Nations, and is currently a participant in a major initiative examining the liquidation of Japanese-Canadian property during World War II.
He is the author of several books including, most recently, a coedited volume entitled: The expanding legal spaces of law: a timely legal geography (Stanford UP).

The seminar language will be in English.

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SPACES IN COMMON, April 16th – June 11th 2016

Organizers: Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç (Istanbul University), Derya Özkan (LMU University of Munich)

"One vast reservoir of common wealth is the metropolis itself. The formation of modern cities, as urban and architectural historians explain, was closely linked to the development of industrial capital. The geographical concentration of workers, the proximity of resources and other industries, communication and transport systems, and the other characteristics of urban life are necessary elements for industrial production. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the growth of cities and the qualities of urban space were determined by the industrial factory, its needs, rhythms, and forms of social organization. Today we are witnessing a shift, however, from the industrial to the biopolitical metropolis. And in the biopolitical economy, there is an increasingly intense and direct relation between the production process and the common that constitutes the city. The city, of course, is not just a built environment consisting of buildings and streets and subways and parks and waste systems and communications cables but also a living dynamic of cultural practices, intellectual circuits, affective networks, and social institutions. These elements of the common contained in the city are not only the prerequisite for biopolitical production but also its result; the city is the source of the common and the receptacle into which it flows."
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (2011: 153-4)

This seminar series has been designed as a joint reflection process about the city, with a particular focus on the collectively produced and reproduced commons that sustain urban inhabitants’ livelihoods, affirming their communal instincts. We embrace the concept of “urban commons” for it offers an imagination of the city marked by social-spatial relations and practices, and allows us to think beyond the public-private and state-market dichotomies. Viewed as such, urban space is where cultures of commoning emerge through its active and creative residents’ quotidian practices, be they work, reproductive labor, or leisure and festivity. It is these practices that make our spaces in common.
Urban common spaces are constantly subject to enclosure for capitalist profit. As a generative force for accumulation, enclosure entails dispossession in various forms: expropriation, evacuation, denying public access to a once common space, loss of working conditions, etcetera. What equally deserves consideration is cultural enclosures that work to commodify the complex systems of local knowledge and to capitalize (on) collective experiences of meaning-making, a subject that has so far been less debated and undertheorized.
Keeping such processes in mind to re-examine, we would like to discuss the emerging practices of commoning in the city mainly through the case of Istanbul. We treasure these practices, for they imply a radical will to remake not only our city but also ourselves by way of reorganizing our living spaces, redefining forms of production and labor, developing new means of livelihood, and in turn cultivating a new ethos to teach us every day that we all inhabit a common ‘life-world’.
Urban commons are emancipatory to the extent that they challenge capitalist social relationships. It is particularly this aspect of urban commons, and of the commoning practices therein, that we intend to explore throughout these seminars. We would like to dwell on achievements as well as incomplete or conflicting processes and incompatibilities. Can the commons inform the way we imagine an emancipatory future in urban life? What can we learn from comparable practices happening elsewhere in the world? Are there any alternative conceptions to better capture the significance of commoning practices for urban culture? What are the ways for incorporating different sensibilities and perspectives (feminist perspective in particular) into our understanding of urban commons?

Spaces in Common, composed of six bi-weekly seminar talks that will run from April 16th to June 11th, 2016, has been planned as part the DFG Emmy Noether Research Project, “Changing Imaginations of Istanbul: From Oriental to the Cool City” hosted by the University of Munich, in collaboration with Ariel Sanat, SALT Galata, Studio-X Istanbul.

We have also organized four panels under the title of The Practices of Commoning in Istanbul (on April 30th at Studio-X İstanbul and on May 14th at SALT Galata), with parallel sub-themes to those of the seminar talks. With these panels, we hope to inquire into the possibilities of dialogue and solidarity between activists and theorists, as well as among the local initiatives themselves. It is our intention here to examine to what extent and in what ways the commons theory explains actual experiences of commoning in Istanbul on the one hand, and to search for ways of imagining new forms of production, consumption, exchange, and socialization, on the other.

SEMINARS (in English)

Saturday, April 16, 11:00-13:00, STUDIO-X
Commoning the City: The Right to not be Excluded
Nicholas Blomley

Friday, April 29, 18:00-21:00, STUDIO-X
Production in Common
Massimo de Angelis

Saturday, April 30, 16-18:00, STUDIO-X
Hands-On Urbanism: The Right To Green
Elke Krasny

**Saturday, May 14, 17-20:00, SALT Galata
Affective Labour in the City: From Dispossession to Commoning
Emma Dowling

Saturday, May 28, 17-19:00, ARIEL Sanat
Beyond the Creative City: Art, Politics and Public Life in the City of the 21st Century
Pascal Gielen

Saturday, June 11, 17-20:00, SALT Galata
Collective Production, Collective Ownership
Peter Linebaugh

PANELS: Practices of Commoning in Istanbul (in Turkish)

Saturday, April 30, STUDIO-X
11-13:00
Labor and Production in Solidarity
14-16:00
Horticulture, Food and Solidarity

Saturday, May 14, SALT Galata
11-13:00
Domestic and Affective Labor
14-16:00
Urban Common Property

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OTHER VENUES
ARIEL SANAT
Maçka Caddesi 24, Narmanlı Apt. Kat: 2, Nişantaşı 34367 Istanbul

SALT Galata
Bankalar Caddesi 11, Beyoğlu 34420 Istanbul