ABSTRACT
In recent years, through the theories and practices of the commons, a vocabulary that would otherwise seem unfamiliar to them has spread to social movements and practices of self-organisation: legal tools for collective management, the creative use of law, collaborative administration and governance. Is this yet another trap that assimilates antagonisms into the fabric of neo-liberalism, or is it a way of challenging it on its own ground by trying to hack its logics and devices? The real challenge posed by neo-liberalism is not an attempt to do away with the state, but its ability to re-functionalise it with a different logic, values and powers. The so-called “emerging urban commons” are governed with mutualistic and solidary new practices of citizenship that are then capable of reshaping governance, not by building archipelagos of autonomy, but by branching out into other networks that exploit the interstices offered by the new spaces of normative co-production between the public and private domains. This re-functionalisation of public and private powers to the logic of the commons is a strategy that we call the hacking method, that is, the emergence of a legal framework that is immanent in citizens’ collective action. As such, it is very different from a “defensive” use of the law. We will demonstrate how new legal institutions for commons can be informed by the “living history” of alternative land tenures from around the world. Their importance is the ability to question not only the right of use and property, but the relationships human beings conduct, both in human societies and especially with other living beings: their relationships of interdependence with the ecological and social ecosystems to which they belong. These are all political challenges to the proprietary paradigm which, before it is a legal form, is a political mindset.
