Forthcoming in

Jonas, A., Miller, B., Ward, K., Wilson, D. (eds.) Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics

Ambivalence of the urban commons

Theresa Enright

Ugo Rossi

Abstract

This chapter considers the concept of the commons from the perspective of critical urban

theory. In particular, it identifies two predominant approaches—neo-institutionalist and

neo-Marxist—used to understand the commons and their relation to contemporary

urban life. The chapter explores the political stakes of these approaches, particularly in

light of the current stage of what we define as late neoliberalism: a phase of neoliberalism

characterised by the tension between the fear of a permanent crisis (or secular

stagnation) and the search for a reinvention of capitalist narrative and culture. The

chapter questions to what extent the notion of the commons is a necessary addition to

established concepts of social justice and citizenship within the urban political lexicon.

Introduction

The notion of the commons or, as some authors put it, the common (singular) is at

the centre of recent debates concerned with how societies manage natural and human

resources. Specifically, the commons is conceived in contrast to the profit-driven

arrangements of marketisation and privatisation which are hegemonic within

contemporary neoliberalised societies. This chapter will interrogate the relevance of this

notion from the perspective of urban studies and critical theory, showing how its

different and even contrasting meanings are illustrative of the political, cultural, and

economic intrincacies of capitalist societies in (late) neoliberal times. Our analysis

considers the commons as a contested terrain in contemporary urban political economy:

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as a site of experimentation with post-capitalist cooperative relations; as a site of an anti-

capitalist practice of resistance; and/or as a site of capitalist re-appropriation. This

chapter will argue that the politics of the urban commons sheds light not only on

multiple and even competing understandings and uses of the notion of the common(s),

but also on the more general ambivalence of contemporary capitalism in its urban

manifestation (Virno 1996).

In conceptual terms, we identify two main approaches to the commons: 1) a neo-

institutionalist strand inspired by the seminal work of Elinor Ostrom, which has been

very influential within the public sphere and within mainstream collaborative economies;

2) a neo-Marxist strand, looking at the both the defense of the commons against iterated

proceses of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2003) and the production of

alternative communal economies outside of capitalism as such. Across each of these

formulations today’s capitalist city acts as an important mediator of economic, political,

social, and ecological dynamics. Notably, contemporary cities and the spaces within offer

a rich repertoire of practices illustrative of the co-existence of capitalist appropriations of

common goods, on the one hand, and commons-oriented grassroots initiatives, on the

other hand. Moreover, the interest in cities as privileged sites of the politics of the

common(s) stems from an idea of the urban as a source of a substiantially plural,

democratic, open, and collective way of “seeing” (Magnusson 2011) that dovetails with

the normative project of producing robust and just common life.

An analysis of the variegated politics of the commons reveals a stratification of city

life that enables us to better locate the urban political – that is, the city understood as an

ontological machine producing subjectivities and forms of life within biopolitical

capitalism – in what we call “the ambivalent spaces of late neoliberalism” (Enright and

Rossi, forthcoming), where the adjective ‘late’ refers to the crisis-prone character of

contemporary capitalism. In this context, we observe how anti-capitalist movements,

grassroots communities, and neo-capitalist forces differently commit to performing and

imagining new worlds, mobilising the idea of the commons. Through such an analysis a

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number of important questions and points of controversy come to the fore. Notably: What

is the commons? Is the commons a particular type of ‘thing’ or ‘good’ or is it a discourse,

a cultural dispositif that can be appropriated for different and even opposing purposes?

Is there one common or many commons? Through what institutional procedures are the

commons instituted? As a discursive formation increasingly appropriated by market

forces does the commons exhaust its more revolutionary meanings and interpretations?

This chapter elaborates these inquiries, drawing out their implications for

understanding spaces of urban politics as follows: in the first section, we will provide an

overview of the different theorisations of the commons; the second section looks at the

growing centrality of cities and the urban within current debates on the commons; the

third section looks more empirically at the urban commons, highlighting its ambivalent

uses within contemporary capitalist cities. We conclude with final remarks on the

commons as a crucial terrain of political and intellectual struggle in the current urban

age.

Theorising the common(s)

Within academic debates, the publication of Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the

Commons in 1990 sparked a renewed interest in the notion of common goods (Ostrom

1990). In this book, Ostrom criticised the individualistic understanding of common

property originally theorised by Garrett Hardin in his controversial essay The Tragedy of

the Commons, published in Science in 1968 (Hardin 1968). In particular, Ostrom

repudiated Hardin’s claims associating the failure of the commons and the degradation

of the environment with the fact that self-interested individuals inevitably compete for

collectively held scarce resources. Ostrom also critically engaged with Mancur Olson’s

utilitarian conception– spelled out in his influential The Logic of Collective Action (Olson

1965) – that in the absence of specific obligations rational and utility-maximizing

individuals tend not to pursue group interests. Against Hardin and Olson’s contention

that natural common property resources (CPR) such as land, air, and minerals cannot be

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effectively used and managed based on the fulfilment of social needs, Ostrom contends

that such resources are, in fact, often organised through networks of mutual aid and

solidarity and through non-market arrangements of democractic rule.

In explicit contrast to the individualistic understandings of CPR which had been

widely adopted as foundations for public policy, Ostrom centred her theorisation on

processes of self-organisation and self-governance in the management of a “natural or

man-made common-pool resource-system” (Ostrom 1990: 30), understanding them as an

alternative to both the market and the state. In her view, both ‘privatisers’ and

‘centralisers’ fail to take adequately into account the role of intangible institutions such

as networks of information and reciprocity, which characterise cooperative forms of

human interaction (Ostrom 1990). Ostrom explicitly positioned herself within the wider

neo-institutionalist interest in ideas of social capital, trustworthiness, and community

which had gained wide currency within the social sciences in the 1990s. In Ostrom’s

view, theories of social capital provide clues to what she defines “second-generation

theories of collective action” (Ostrom and Ahn 2003: 2), contesting the assumption in

both state- and market-centred policy prescriptions that rational, atomised, and selfish

individuals are best organised through impersonal and homogenous structures. On the

contrary, she argued that:

self-governing systems in any arena of social interactions tend to be more efficient

and stable not because of any magical effects of grassroots participation itself but

because of the social capital in the form of effective working rules those systems are

more likely to develop and preserve, the networks that the participants have

created, and the norms they have adopted (Ibid.: 11).

The award of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Elinor Ostrom in 2009 (shared

with Oscar Williamson, another prominent figure in neo-institutionalist economics)

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further increased the popularity of the concept of the commons and ushered it into the

social science mainstream.

A second influential contribution to the theorisation of the commons – or, in this

instance, the common − is found in Hardt and Negri’s (2009) Commonwealth. Their point

of departure is similar to that of Elinor Ostrom, namely the contestation of “the

seemingly exclusive alternative between the private and the public” and, as they

elaborate, the “equally pernicious political alternative between capitalism and socialism”

(Ibid.: ix). For Hardt and Negri, however, unlike Ostrom, the “political project of

instituting the common” cannot be contained within existing institutional apparatuses,

but is linked with the coming into being of a communist future (Ibid.). For these

thinkers, the common is not something to be inserted into liberal republican structures,

but is tied etymologically and historically to the political vocabulary of communism. As

they note, “what the private is to capitalism and what the public is to socialism, the

common is to communism” (Ibid.: 273).

The radical orientation of Hardt and Negri’s work is linked to their understanding

of the common as having a key function within capitalist accumulation. Whereas

Ostrom’s work emerged from the challenges of accounting for the role of civil-society

associations, local governments, and informal actors in resource management within a

post-Fordist and increasingly interdependent world, Hardt and Negri base their

understanding of the common on a heterodox Marxist interpretation of contemporary

knowledge-based capitalism. In doing so, these authors criticise any inert conception of

static common goods, arguing that contemporary capitalism relies on communal forms of

value production, namely on the exploitation of what they call “biopolitical labour”: the

vast array of knowledge, affects, and social relations that are external to capital but that

capital appropriates (Ibid: 133-142). In addition to the earth and natural common, then,

commonwealth also and even primarily refers to collectively produced and used human

resources such as ideas, language, information, and affects. For Hardt and Negri (Ibid.:

139), “this form of the common does not lend itself to a logic of scarcity as does the first.”

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The creation and management of the common – as an always excessive product – defines

accumulation processes and class struggle today. As such, the common is part of a new

political vocabulary appropriate to the decentred sovereignty of Empire and its plural

forms of multitudinous resistance.

In the strand of theorisation inspired by politically engaged Marxist positions, the

commons is understood primarily in relation to collective struggles. This stands in

marked contrast to the kinds of collaborative practices of maintenance found in the

institutionalist scholarship, which is influenced by the work of Elinor Ostrom. For their

part, feminists have offered a more radical version of the pragmatic understanding of the

commons offered by the institutionalists. For example, Silvia Federici draws attention on

issues relating to the reproduction of everyday life, customarily overlooked in major

strands of Marxist theory, looking at women’s efforts to collective reproductive labour as

a way to protect each other from poverty and the violence of both the state and men

(Federici 2010). In her study of a manufactured housing community, Elsa Noterman

(2016) has put forward the notion of “differential commoning,” where the recognition of

difference among members of communities managing collective resources is a way of

ensuring greater resilience for these communities.

Another important source of inspiration for radical feminist scholarship on

grassroots economic practices as privileged sites of the commons is Gibson-Graham’s

diverse economies research. In their work non-capitalist forms of subjectivity, practice,

and politics exist alongside and often in conjunction with dominant capitalist dynamics

(Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). Their project to chronicle and imagine economic

alternatives and experiments attempts to foment regimes of accumulation that entail

solidaristic modes of organising collective life: from cooperative enterprises to

environmental and agricultural organisations; and from local currencies and non-profits

to informal markets. In Gibson-Graham’s view, identifying alternative economies is part

of a post-capitalist project aimed at taking on the task of “how we might perform new

economic worlds, starting with an ontology of economic difference” (2006: 3).

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 The commons, however, is not a merely academic abstraction; it has been widely

used and discussed not only by institutionalist social scientists and radical scholars but

by social activists and political militants alike. Indeed, beyond academia, a significant

impetus for a return to the commons has arisen from movements themselves. As Silvia

Federici (2010) points out, the commons has taken on new life as a political concept at

least since the Zapatista uprisings in 1994 and has been elaborated more fully through

the new era of resistance against neoliberal practices around the world. From open

source software promotion, to landless peasants’ movements, to the conservation and

defense of natural resources, to anti-eviction campaigns, the commons fits a non-statist

model of contentious politics and struggle against what David Harvey (2003) calls

“accumulation by dispossession.”

Along these lines, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval also conceive the common –

like Hardt and Negri they favour the singular form – as an element of political praxis, and

as “a principle of action” (Dardot and Laval 2014: 168) emerging from social movements

resisting the neoliberalisation of contemporary societies. In their book Commun: essai sur

la revolution au XXIème siècle, Dardot and Laval build on their earlier analysis of

neoliberal governmentality (Dardot and Laval 2010) to elaborate an institutional

understanding of the common as a set of activities and liberation practices. For these

authors, the common cannot be conceived as a preexisting object or good, but is rather

the dynamic relationship between a thing (e.g. a resource, a place, a value) and its

communal institutions of management (Dardot and Laval 2014). The common in this

sense is fundamentally rooted in praxis: it is not a fixed entity but a political principle on

the basis of which we must construct collective goods, defend them, and extend them.

The common is thus a another name for the shared activity of coresponsibility,

reciprocity, solidarity, and democracy.

While the feminists draw attention on the differential situatedness of commoning

processes, radical historians suggest embracing a trans-historical perspective. In his

influential Magna Carta Manifesto, Peter Linebaugh (2008: 19) speaks of a “millennium of

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privatization, enclosure and utilitarianism,” in which the current phase of neoliberal

globalisation appears to be the culmination of capitalism’s historical tendency to treat

everything as a commodity. In doing so, Linebaugh reconnects the spirit of the Magna

Carta of 1215 to social struggles across the world spanning over a millennium: from the

neo-Zapatista insurgence in Chiapas in the mid-1990s claiming the rights of campesinos

to the Nigerian women seizing the Chevron Oil Terminal preventing them from obtaining

wood and water from the forest in 2003; from the native Americans dispossessed of their

common resources by the conservation movement of the 1880s to the national upsurge

of 1919-20 in India against the colonial government of Britain taking over the community

lands or to the campaigns contrasting the incessant enclosure movement in the Amazon

in Brazil from the 1960s until today..Like Harvey, Lineabugh and other libertarian

Marxists think that contemporary neoliberal capitalism has stabilised forms of

accumulation conventionally associated with the primitive stages of capitalist

development: land encroachment; extraction of natural resources (particularly gas and

petroleum products); and displacement of peasant populations. In this perspective, social

struggles, on the one hand, resist this perpetuation of primitive accumulation over time;

on the other hand, in their productive dimension, they constantly renew the sense of the

commons through the redefinition of norms, values, and measures of things being held

in common, thus re-creating an alternative realm in which material and social life can be

re-produced outside capital (De Angelis 2007). In transitional times like those following

the crisis of 2008, these processes can be understood as a “repair or replacement of

broken infrastructure” extending the limits of sociality beyond received modes of

belonging (Berlant 2016: 393).

This process of relentless (re)production of value around the commons is not

limited to anti-capitalist movements and grassroots communities of commoners, but has

reached also the dominant rationality of government: neoliberal regimes have started

recognising the economic value of the commons, allowing a re-appropriation of the

commons from within capitalism. In both its “roll back” and “roll out” forms (Peck and

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Tickell 2002) neoliberal reason entails not only the corporatisation of governance and the

privatisation of the public sector, but also a larger entrepreneurialisation of society and

the self (Gordon 1991) predicated on the increasingly unfettered liberalisation of

capitalist economies. In this context, the commons is mobilised as part of a new global

imaginary of enterprise society (Lazzarato 2009) in which everyone is being asked to

embark on purportedly community-oriented business experiments as a way to

compensate the shrinkage of labour markets and the impoverishment of the middle

class. The contemporary capitalist city is a key site for observing this multifaceted,

ultimately contradictory and ambivalent, mobilisation of the commons.

Urbanising the common(s)

As we have seen, the original formulation of the commons within the social

sciences has referred largely to non-urbanised environments: from Elinor Ostrom

famously basing her analysis on forest preservation and fisheries to critics of

neoliberalism focussing on acts of enclosure typically involving rural areas. Marx himself

– whose thoughts about property and common wealth are generally known for being city-

centred – was inspired by the rural phenomenon of woodstealing and its widespread

prosecution in Prussia and other pre-German states (Linebaugh 1976; Bensaïd, 2007).

Recent treatments of progressive commoning also frequently see the production of the

commons as a process of “rurbanization” (Federici 2010), through, for example, the

regeneration of swidden forests (Tsing 2005) or the planting of foodstuffs in abandoned

urban landscapes (Tornaghi 2014). Amanda Huron (2015) relates the implicit anti-urban

ideology within conceptualisations of the commons to the fact that urban environments

are conventionally regarded as places bringing strangers together, thus originating an

experience of fear and suspicion rather than of community and solidarity. In recent

times, this anti-urban prejudice has been fostered by resurrecting neo-ruralist ideologies

of authenticity that have gained new ground after the economic-cum-urban crisis of

2008. Despite this bias, recent years have seen a lively body of literature investigating

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the commons through urban lenses (Bresnihan and Byrne 2015; Kohn 2016; Noterman

2016). Why is this happening? And how might it help to reshape our thinking about

spaces of urban politics and the urban political?

Significantly, the crisis of 2008 and its aftermath have reignited interest in the

geographies of social justice and inequality, and in cities as strategic spaces to observe

the conflictual dynamics of capitalism, particularly those rooted in the financialised

housing market. This urban perspective, moreover, has opened new vantage points from

which to view struggles over the commons.

The recognition of the “urban roots” (Harvey 2012, chapter 2) of the crisis is the

most obvious response to this question, but there are two other sets of explanations for

this urbanisation of the commons. Firstly, and well before the housing and financial

crisis of 2008, general scholarship in human geography and other critical social sciences

had insisted on how neoliberalism should be understood as an inherently urban

phenomenon. This understanding is founded on Henri Lefebvre’s and David Harvey’s

analyses of the secondary circuit of real estate capital, which highlight how the

exploitation of the built environment, as well as the production of urban space more

generally, play central roles in the dynamics of capitalism. The appropriation of rent, in

other words, which is a major form of value production today, is fundamentally about the

creation and appropriation of the commons. Moreover, as a result of post-industrial

restructurings, cities have been at the forefront of the process of entrepreneurialisation

of societal governance, shedding light on the structural dimension of the privatisation of

collective-consumption goods, particularly of public services such as education, water

supply, transit, waste disposal. These privatisations have particularly intensified through

the recurring rounds of austerity urbanism (Peck 2012). In this perspective, urban

environments are viewed as contra-cyclical regulators of economic development in a

context of capitalism, particularly through the exploitation of the rent gap in the built

environment, the privatisation of public services, the expansion of consumerism and the

commodification of social relations. While Garrett Hardin conceived the act of enclosure

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and private management of common resources in a positive sense, on the contrary critics

of neoliberalism, and particularly of its urban form, see enclosure as instrumental in the

reproduction of capitalist forms of privatisation, leading to the dismantling of the welfare

state and the displacement and fragmentation of the working class (Jeffrey et al. 2012).

In this perspective, struggles over the commons are viewed as a response to the

processes of capitalist expansion, particularly within the framework of contemporary

“planetary urbanization” (Brenner and Schmid 2014). Within inner-city areas, protection

of the commons—to the point of forming defensive enclaves—is a means to escape the

commodification of society and the annihilation of social and civil rights (Bresnihan and

Byrne 2015). This is especially pertinent for low-income groups and racial minorities that

are disproportionately affected by neoliberal urbanisms.

Secondly, it is not only the relationship of mutual dependence between cities and

neoliberalism that requires attention to the urban manifestation of the commons. The

recent post-recession transition in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world

has seen cities becoming increasingly central to knowledge-intensive and tech-driven

capitalism. Urban economies are being deeply reshaped by the advent of a wide range of

experiential economies, in which conventional boundaries between production and

consumption, between labour time and living time, are increasingly blurred. As a result,

a significant part of today’s interest in the commons looks at these technology- and life-

oriented economies, particularly within the Global North but increasingly also in other

regions of the planet. In the heterodox Marxist perspective of Hardt and Negri, urban

environments – particularly in knowledge-intensive economies characterised by dense

relations of cooperation – provide capitalist production with an ‘artificial common’

created by affective labour (Hardt and Negri 2009: 153-154):

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

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 dynamic of cultural practices, intellectual circuits, affective networks, and social

institutions.

Thirdly, there is a resurging interest in cities as informal sites of institutional

experimentation, which has significant convergences with the notion of the commons.

This perspective is particularly associated with the work of urban scholars looking at the

social fabric of cities in the Global South (e.g. Robinson 2006; Roy 2009). In this

scholarship, the experience of urban informality, which was once merely associated with

a condition of exclusion, is also seen to be generative of mobile and provisional

infrastructures of collaboration (see also Simone 2004). In a more explicitly vitalist and

neo-humanist vein, marginalised urban environments are also celebrated as sites of

community and solidarity through the “making of micro-collectives of the poor around

shared infrastructures” (Amin 2014: 157). The same spaces stimulate the fantasies of a

wide range of actors such as civil-society organisations, government agencies,

multinationals, aming to exploit the commonwealth of knowledge and creativitiy attached

to the idea of the “entrepreneurial slum” (McFarlane 2012).

Thus, within dominant capitalist countries the crisis of the late 2000s and its

aftermath have particularly illuminated the dual role of cities as sites of capitalist

contradiction, due to the concentration of financialised real estate, and also as central

spaces within post-recession trajectories of austerity and economic regeneration. At the

same time, the increasingly more advanced globalisation of the urban phenomenon has

started provincialising conventional understandings of the commons as a Western

grassroots politics of experimentation, while it has attracted the attention of pro-market

forces interested in extracting the cognitive capital of socially dense urban spaces like the

slums of Southern megacities. It is no surprise, therefore, that in this historical

conjuncture cities have acquired a growing centrality within contemporary debates over

the commons. In brief, these different perspectives share an understanding of the urban

as a space where an affirmative production of the commons arises from affective

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relations of cooperation within a both capitalist and non-capitalist framework. While

critics of urban neoliberalism direct attention towards the dispossessing logic behind

extended forms of urbanisation such as the so-called ‘planetary urbanization,’ scholars

with a poststructuralist or postcolonial emphasis tend to highlight the production of

cooperative forms of life associated with different expressions of urban social practice.

The multiple valences of the commons

The original rehabilitation of the commons was premised on the idea that human

societies are institutionally dense environments in which relations of trustworthiness

and knowledge exchange allow the optimisation of ‘common-pool resources’ (Ostrom

1990). This view was particularly influential in the 1990s and the early 2000s within the

framework of communitarian and neo-institutionalist conceptualisations of associational

forms of economic governance drawing on social capital, trust, face-to-face interactions,

and other informal institutions and conventions (Cooke and Morgan 1998). In this

context, the rediscovery of the local scale reinvigorated longstanding ideals of associative

democracy, which advocate the centrality of self-governing associations performing

public functions as a response to the failure of both the state and the market (Hirst

1994). Anthony Giddens’s ‘Third Way’ and its adoption by the New Labour, asserting the

need to provide socially responsible answers to the challenges of the ‘new capitalism,’

constituted the mainstream version of a larger academic and political stream that sought

out a new route between the Keynesian social state and market-driven economic reform

(Giddens 1998).

Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize in 2009 as well as the financial crash of 2008 had the

combined effect of re-creating a legitimate discursive space for associationalist

tendencies that had been long present within public debates but had always remained

peripheral. An unintended outcome of this ascendancy was the fact that commons-

oriented initiatives started to be increasingly incorporated into mainstream urban

economic development. Even in the context of intensifying global capitalism, a wide range

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of community-based collaborative experiments such as housing cooperatives, citizens’

networks, solidarity purchase groups and other experiments of local community

management and co-ownership have persisted and even proliferated in recent times (see

especially Imbroscio 2010). In addition to the more traditional arena of the workplace,

housing and food are key sectors in which cooperative economies have taken shape. In

some cases, these experiments have become strongly institutionalised, such as the co-

housing projects adopted in Great Britain within the framework of the ‘sustainable

communities’ initiative embraced by the New Labour government since 2003 (Williams

2005). In other cases, co-housing projects have resulted from the collaboration between

different non-state actors, as has been observed in Tokyo, in Japan, where non-profit

organisations have established partnerships with real estate developers and other for-

profit housing firms (Fromm 2012). However, co-housing projects still arise from

genuinely citizen-led initiatives of cooperation beyond a market logic, some drawing

inspiration from the pioneering projects of collective housing in the Scandinavian

countries, and in Holland and Germany in the 1970s and the 1980s based on the

philosophy of self-work (Vestbro 2000). In recent years, projects of collective self-

organisation – variously called “purpose-built cohousing” (Jarvis 2011), “limited-equity

housing cooperatives” (Huron 2015), and the like – have acquired new significance

against the background of the housing crisis affecting cities in Europe and North

America. In the domain of food, Italy – which has been at the forefront in the Slow food

movement that has sparked critical consciousness about the risks associated with

mainstream food business at the global level – has seen the proliferation of self-organised

solidarity purchase groups in cities and towns across the country (Grasseni 2014).

These collaborative initiatives are intended to foster local social capital and civic

participation within close-knit social groups at the micro-scale of the neighbourhood.

However, there is often a characteristic ambivalence in these initiatives, particularly in

those taking place within affluent societal contexts. On the one hand, they are intended

to nurture a collaborative ethos within a revitalised civil society in which the ‘active

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citizen’ contributes to the regeneration of the sense of belonging to the urban community

through involvement in neighbourhood-based social projects (Amin 2005). On the other

hand, this active citizenship formally endorses diversity, but in reality encourages the

deployment of disciplinary measures aimed at monitoring the moral and physical

integrity of the members of the community (Raco 2007). Albeit rife with contradictions,

as they also nourished by a ‘genuine’ commitment to social interaction at the

neighbourhood level, these phenomena shed light on the increasingly moral

characterisation of urban government within advanced liberal societies. In this context,

classic goals of socio-economic emancipation and justice disappear from the official

urban-policy agenda and solidarity, reciprocity, and mutuality are replaced by facile

references to trust and mutual benefit. The institutionalist discourse around the

commons is deeply informed by this ‘moral turn’ that has characterised contemporary

cities and their public realms after the advent of neoliberal governmentalities.

The high-tech boom witnessed by several cities in the United Stated and across

the world in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis has capitalised on this moralisation of city

life and capitalist societies more generally. Technology-based, highly commodified

‘sharing economies’ have subsumed ideas of collaboration that were once a distinctive

trait of grassroots initiatives. Jeremy Rifkin, for example, a lauded business guru for his

visionary thinking on the third industrial revolution, has drawn on the work of Elinor

Ostrom prophesying the advent of a “zero marginal cost society” in which the

collaborative commons created within the Internet (e.g., Linux, Wikipedia, Napster,

Youtube) are presented as inspirational models for a larger re-configuration of social

relations based on gratuitous exchange (Rifkin 2014). Other examples of so-called social

enterprises (philanthropic or for-profit) mobilising a commons-oriented discourse can be

typically found in the privatised housing sector. In this highly exploited but also deeply

culturalised sector where new lifestyles are being experimented, not only traditional real-

estate developers but also technology companies have invested in recent years. Amongst

other Internet-based offerings, start-up technology companies have set up charming for-

15
profit co-living spaces in trendy neighbourhoods such as Williamsburg and Crown

Heights in Brooklyn, New York City, but also in less established areas like Spring Garden

in Philadelphia and North Acton in West London (Kaysen 2015; Kasperkevic 2016). One

of these companies explicitly appropriates the notion of the common in its brand,

promising to offer “shared housing for those who live life in common”

(https://www.hicommon.com/; see also Cutler 2015). The communication style of this

company closely reproduces that of Airbnb, a champion of the home sharing economy

that is being increasingly criticised within the wider public owing to its unfair trade

practices and its gentrification effects on urban environments—both of which contribute

to housing scarcity and unaffordability. Another company has recently launched a co-

living business called ‘The collective,’ headquartered in London, a city known for its

overheated housing market (https://www.thecollective.co.uk/). These technology-based

‘social enterprises’ which trade in the language of the collective provide a powerful

illustration of what Nicole Aschoff has recently termed the “new prophets of capital”: a

new generation of “elite storytellers” promoting “solutions to society’s problems that can

be found within the logic of existing profit-driven structures of production and

consumption” and that “reinforce the logic and structure of accumulation” (Aschoff 2015:

11-12).

The incorporation of communal forms of life within the hegemonic discourse on

capitalist innovation is symptomatic of the risk of normalisation threatening the

commons understood as a political ideal and a social practice. Far from being accidental,

this normalisation is inscribed within the general tendency of capitalism towards the real

subsumption of society, in Hardt and Negri’s terms, or the commodification of social

relations and the gentrification of the urban experience, in more classic Marxist terms.

Conclusion

This chapter started by offering an overview of the differentiated reception of the

concept of the commons, showing its multifaceted nature and its applicability to different

16
perspectives and modes of action. Eliner Ostrom’s take on the commons, building on a

neo-institutionalist framework of analysis, proves attentive to the ways in which

contemporary capitalism becomes embedded within collaborative social relations and

institutional arrangements. Marxist-oriented approaches interpret the politics of the

commons in either ‘negative’ or ‘affirmative’ ways: as a response to the colonizing logic of

dispossession prevailing in contemporary neoliberal globalisation; or as a post-capitalist

potential immanent in the biopolitical production of affects, knowledge and relationality

within the metropolis. Finally, feminist authors draw attention on practices of

commoning as a way of acknowledging the value of difference as a solution to the

‘tragedy of the commons,’ while urban scholars studying cities in the South invite to pay

attention to the production of mutable and provisional commons under socially thick

conditions of urban informality.

Against the background of this plurality of conceptual sensibilities, this chapter

has shown how we should refute essentialistic understandings of the commons. The

commons is rather a politically and discursively contested terrain within the intricate

economies of exploitation and reinvention characterising global capitalism in the

neoliberal era. Multiple uses of the commons can be recognised within this diversfied

politics of the commons, revealing the ultimately ambivalent use of this notion: the

commons is at one and the same time a space of resistance to neoliberal accumulation

by dispossession and of experimentation with post-capitalist economic practices, but also

a site of societal subsumption and commodification within the knowledge-intensive

economies of biopolitical capitalism.

In turning its attention to the city and to a number of issues inherently connected

to contemporary urbanism, the chapter furthermore considered what is distinctive about

the urban commons as well as the extent to which the urban context generates novel

questions of the commons. Through this it has shown that attempts to urbanise the

concept of the commons contribute to its ambiguity but also open up new ways of seeing

urban space and its associated politics. In particular debates and discussions of the

17
antagonisms inherent in the urban commons reflect and reveal the larger ambivalence of

contemporary global capitalism, where social relations of collaboration and even social

projects of post-capitalist transition are incessantly captured within profit-driven logics

of economic valorisation. This ambivalence, it is argued, is a crucial point of departure

for understanding the forms of life, rationalities, and political practices that comprise late

neoliberal societies.

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