Invited Panel at AHRA International Conference 2020: “Housing and the City”
Chair Doina Petrescu; Speakers: Doina Petrescu, Silviu Medesan, Alexandru Axinte, Katharina Moebus
Going beyond state and market, urban commons are an open system and space generator based on collaboration and solidarity, which can foster users’ emancipation against the dominant urban paradigm of enclavization. Furthermore, urban commons are an alternative proposition to the extractive capitalism of alienation and othering from both the urban and the natural world. From the urban commons perspective, sharing the city can foster potential emerging social models which are spatially performed and constantly experimented. The dismantling of the welfare state in the Western and Eastern parts of Europe was coupled with the advent of neoliberalism and its discontents, like the reduction of social housing stock, extreme privatization, rising rents, unemployment and sociocultural exclusion. Nevertheless, in order to be at home in this neoliberal city, people need a sense of ‘belonging’ expressed through a spatial practice which expands public and private space. Thus, the urban commons are not “an always delayed future nor a coming together in an idealist space”, but rather a practice of ‘becoming in common’ which can politically reclaim that what we call home: our neighbourhoods.
This panel’s presentations will address the shared question of how the emergence of urban commons in the collective housing estates can be supported through design practices. The speakers will introduce some concrete examples that illustrate new modes of producing commons in collective housing neighbourhoods by occupying the interstices and valorizing the remains of public assets to reinvent ways of living in common. Accounts on the multiple spatial manifestations of urban commons along the lines of: porous communities, co-producing knowledge, reclaiming, performing ecology and enacting struggle. Set in the context of collective housing neighborhoods of Eastern and Western Europe, the papers presented in this panel are sharing methodologies of feminist, practice-based and activist research. Through case study inquiry, the panel aims to situate the urban common narrative and practice, investigating the specificities and overlapping arising from different cultural, political and historical contexts and practices of Cluj and Bucharest in Romania, and Paris and Berlin in France and Germany.
AHRA2020 Book of Abstracts
Link to the recording will be soon available.