ABSTRACT
‘Is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and “felt the atmosphere”?’, asks Teresa Brennan (2004: 1) in the introduction to her book The Transmission of Affect. In recent years there has been a rising interest in the role of atmospheres in social life, not least in urban spaces. How are such collective moods produced, shared or dissolved? I am interested in this chapter in the often invisible norms, routines and competences that make it possible for people with different backgrounds to share the same spaces and create temporary forms of communalities. This dimension becomes important when discussing the making and maintenance of a specific kind of urban commons. Several authors have pointed to the problems of transplanting the concept of traditional commons into urban settings (Parker and Johansson, 2012; Hess, 2008; Bravo and Moor, 2008). The shift is easier when it is a question of pooling or sharing certain kinds of tangible resources, as in the cases of community gardens (Foster, 2011) or co-op housing estates (Rabinowitz, 2012). It becomes more of a challenge when analyzing other kinds of urban communalities, open spaces such as streets, parks and transit places, where people with very different backgrounds mingle (see the discussion in Susser and Tonnelat, 2013).
