ABSTRACT

This collection seeks to expand the limits of current debates about urban commoning practices that imply a radical will to establish collaborative and solidarity networks based on anti-capitalist principles of economics, ecology and ethics.

The chapters in this volume draw on case studies in a diversity of urban contexts, ranging from Detroit, USA to Kyrenia, Cyprus – on urban gardening and land stewardship, collaborative housing experiments, alternative food networks, claims to urban leisure space, migrants’ appropriation of urban space and workers’ cooperatives/collectives. The analysis pursued by the eleven chapters opens new fields of research in front of us: the entanglements of racial capitalism with enclosures and of black geographies with the commons, the critical history of settler colonialism and indigenous commons, law as a force of enclosure and as a strategy of commoning, housing commons from the urban scale perspective, solidarity economies as labour commons, territoriality in the urban commons, the non-territoriality of mobile commons, the new materialist and post-humanist critique of the commons debate and feminist ethics of care.

chapter |21 pages

Introduction

Towards an ethos for commoning the city

part 1|63 pages

Commoning urban nature

chapter Chapter 1|12 pages

Racial capitalism and a tentative commons

Urban farming and claims to space in post-bankruptcy Detroit

chapter Chapter 2|14 pages

The politics of food

Commoning practices in alternative food networks in Istanbul 1

chapter Chapter 3|18 pages

Insurgent ecologies

Rhetorics of resistance and aspiration in Yedikule, Istanbul’s ancient market garden (2014–2018)

chapter Chapter 4|17 pages

“A revolution under our feet”

Food sovereignty and the commons in the case of Campi Aperti

part 2|69 pages

Claims to urban land

chapter Chapter 6|19 pages

From graveyards to the “people’s gardens”

The making of public leisure space in Istanbul

chapter Chapter 7|15 pages

“Time to protect Kyrenia”

Defending the right to landscape in northern Cyprus

chapter Chapter 8|18 pages

A migrant’s tale of two cities

Mobile commons and the alteration of urban space in Athens and Hamburg

part 3|50 pages

Responses to precarity

chapter 9|18 pages

Contradictions of housing commons

Between middle-class and anarchist models in Berlin

chapter 10|16 pages

Precarious commons

An urban garden for uncertain times

chapter 11|14 pages

Cooperative economies as commons

Labour and production in solidarity