ABSTRACT

The ongoing rapid transformation of our technological framework, the continuous growth of social inequalities and the ceaseless fragmentation of social and spatial fabrics of our constantly expanding cities are profoundly remodeling the way in which relational practices and infrastructures of urban communities spatialize. The mobile internet age has produced a reality-virtuality continuum that provides increasing freedom in space and time to the constituent components of relational life, which have been deterritorialized, mobilized, distributed and freed from their traditionally fixed geographical and chronological boundaries. To shed light on these novel and complex modes of sociospatial production, this chapter explores the transformations of the central nodes of commoning practices, the urban commons. Based on assemblage research methods, the study detects and analyzes the emerging forms of the commons’ metastable territorialization. I focus on the agency of three main technology-driven macrophenomena: networked translocalism, related to mobilization of people; multi-associative transduction, related to the mobilization of space; and counterhegemonic transculturalism, related to mobilization of ideas, beliefs, values and knowledge. I discuss the findings of a case study investigation in the Australasian New World urbanism to illuminate the multiple and indeterminate nature of these structured and structuring occurrences within an exemplar neoliberal mode of uneven urban development. Such occurrences indeed institute radical counterforces for the affirmation of equality and democratic pluralism by fostering difference, inclusion and social cohesion. I outline a design strategy for the formation of spatialities that foster antagonistic hegemonic discourses and address basic questions on the changing roles, missions and instruments of architects, urban designers and planners. I frame the emerging instances of commoning that take hold in the new ordinary within the discourse on the universal Right to the City to indicate their capacity to nourish a territorial production based on collaboration and commoning.