ABSTRACT
Over the past few years, a panoply of innovative activism, scholarship, and projects that focus on “the commons” have gained momentum. In these general theories of the commons, however, there seems to be little attention for the value of the city as a shared resource and as one of the main tangible forms in which the commons exist in society. In this chapter the concept of the commons is used as a crowbar to open a new historiography on the architecture of the city. It explores how conceptions of the commons have relentlessly been part and parcel of the development of the architecture of the city. Going beyond well-established understanding of the commons as collective ephemeral practices, it explores what the fundamental definitions and principles of the commons have to offer to our understanding of the development of urban space. In order to do so, the chapter approaches the commons from three angles, which are coined respectively “res communis,” “lex communis,” and “praxis communis.” These three angles are strongly intertwined and refer to some primary aspects of the urban commons.
