Common spaces as potential spaces of autonomy: learning from Athens

Stavros Stavrides School of Architecture

National Technical University of Athens

Societies in movement?

• A society in movement: “a fight to encode/decode flows, or social relations in movement” (Zibechi, Dispersing Power p.87)

• “Societies in movement, articulated from within quotidian patterns, open fissures in the mechanisms of domination, shed the fabric of social control, and disperse institutions…Expose social fault lines.” (p.11)

• In societies devastated by autocratic regimes and/or austerity policies forms of mutual support and solidarity develop between people in their everyday struggle for survival.

• Knowledges and skills developed through everyday collective experiences and struggles shape societies in movement.

“Tahrir had become a living and breathing microcosm of a civil sphere, the idealized world of dignity, equality and expanded solidarity” (Alexander, 2011: 56).

Rethinking the commons

• The common is not “a particular kind of thing” but “an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood” (Harvey 2012: 73).

• Comunalidad (commonality):“the juxtaposition of commons and polity” but also “a collection of practices formed as creative adaptations of old traditions to resist old and new colonialisms, and a mental space, a horizon of intelligibility: how you see and experience the world as a We”. (Esteva 2012).

• If commoning is based on practices which give form to sharing processes, then those practices are characterized both by the means they employ and by the subjects who participate in them. Commoning practices produce what is to be named valued, used and symbolized as common.

Institutions of commoning?

• We need to develop, through struggle, forms of threshold commons: Forms of commons which belong to everybody and nobody, forms of commons that are not identified with any existing stable and recognizable communities which claim their land, goods and arts as belonging to them and only to them.

• Emancipating processes of commoning invent institutions with a threshold character: Institutions open to negotiations, actively corroborating comparisons between always open identities and connected to collectively decided periodicities of action. Institutions which express and organize liminality: liminal practices corresponding to emerging liminal subjects of collective action (limen in Latin means threshold).

Institutions which sustain and expand commoning

• The sharing between equals and, at the same time, the opening of the circles of sharing towards “outsiders”, necessarily imply creating institutions that can manage difference and tolerate unpredictability.

• Establishing a process of comparability means creating opportunities of negotiation and exchanges between emerging collective identities

• Establishing a process of translatability means creating forms of communication and sharing between emerging collective identities.

• Institutions of expanding commoning need to be institutions that establish, above all, the form of sharing that makes possible and guarantees all other kinds of sharing: the sharing of power.

Commoning solidarity initiatives

• Neighborhood assemblies

• Everyday support for the victims of austerity (collective kitchens, self-managed medical centers)• Urban and peri-urban gardens• Social centers (initiatives connected to alternative culture, education,

leisure etc.)• Immigrant support initiatives (usually connected to social centers and to

everyday support initiatives focused on health, food and education)

Refugees in Athens. Initiatives of support create ad hoc common spaces (2015-6)

Common space

• Common space is a set of spatial relations produced by commoning practices.

• Spatial relations may be either organized as a closed system which explicitly defines shared space within a definite perimeter and which corresponds to a specific community of commoners, or they may take the form of an open network of passages through which emerging and always open communities of commoners communicate and exchange goods and ideas.

• Common space shaped through practices of selective exclusion ends up being a form of spatial enclosure (as f.e. the outdoor space of a gated community)

• Common space produced as an expanding network of passages explicitly expresses the power commoning has to create new forms of life-in-common and a culture of sharing.

Subjectivation

• Political subjectivation through commoning is characterized by the rise of new collective subjects which are inherently multiple and which escape from the dominant classifications of political action.

• Singularities are not dispersed and incompatible monads but emergent and open to transformation nodes in networks of cooperation and interaction.

• Commoning, i.e. practices of sharing and cooperation, potentially creates an overflowing from preexisting identities and a confluence of different actions and refusals.

• “The political process of subjectivation … continually creates ‘newcomers’ new subjects that enact the equal power of anyone and everyone…” (Rancière, 2010: 59)

Rethinking Prefiguration

• “‘Prefigurative politics’ refers to a political action, practice, movement, moment or development in which certain political ideals are experimentally actualised in the ‘here and now’, rather than hoped to be realised in a distant future” (Van de Sande 2013: 230)

• Collective initiatives explicitly oriented towards transforming crucial aspects of society today, in the present time directly affect the lives of those involved in them. At the same time, such expressions hint towards a rethinking of politics, towards a retesting of the rules of equality and justice in and through commoning practices.

Rethinking autonomy

• Spaces of potential autonomy will have to be porous and expanding. Thresholds to an emerging future of human emancipation.

• People who consider themselves as participants in this “autonomous world”, at war with the rest of society, tend to ignore that even the most egalitarian relations of sharing can reverse the meaning of commoning by erecting barriers of enclosure.

• Autonomy is a the multileveled and often contradictory process through which new forms of social organization emerge which neither depend on the State nor imitate the State’s organizational logic.