Category: RUL week of events

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Municipalism and the Commons (RUL week of events)

Ana Méndez de Andés (University of Sheffield)

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Four years after the square occupations under the banner ‘Real Democracy Now’, citizen-based platforms presented to the Spanish local elections, and consolidated an institutional assault that won some of the most important cities – Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza or A Coruña – and dozens of smaller towns and villages. In their practice, Spanish municipalism appealed to the idea of thecommons to advance an institutional change towards radical democratic governance of collective resources. Thecommons were included in the name of some of the newly created local parties – such as Barcelona en Comú, meaning Barcelona in Common – and in public events, regulations and strategic plans, as well as in the rationale of the internal municipalist debates. This session presents a research on the effort to develop urban commoning processes in the so-called ‘cities of change’ and how the articulation of thecommons’ democratic ethos has shaped an alternative planning strategy situated in the middle of things: between social demands and state-driven programmes, political narrative and administrative normative, inside and outside public institutions. 

Ana Méndez de Andés is an architect and activist from Madrid (Spain). She was advisor to Madrid City Council as part of the municipalist platform Ahora Madrid and has coordinated the European Municipalist Network. Her research ‘Becoming-common of the public’ – documented in the Open Science Platform, under a Creative Commons license – holds an ESRC White Rose DTP award and has been supervised by Dr. Doina Petrescu (Sheffield School of Architecture) and Dr. Beth Perry (Urban Institute). She has co-authored the Urban Commons Handbook, the Municipalist Ecosystem and Urban Commoning in Europe maps, and co-edited the compilations Códigos Comunes Urbanos and Atlas del Cambio (in Spanish).

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Featured Latest from the Lab RUL talks RUL week of events

Housing as Commons (RUL week of events)

Experiences of the struggle for housing, ignited by the lack of social and affordable housing, have led to the establishing of shared and self-managed housing areas. In such a context, it becomes crucially important to re-think the need to define common urban worlds “from below”. Here, Penny Travlou and Stavros Stavridis trace contemporary practices of urban commoning through which people re-define housing economies. Connecting to a rich literature on the importance of commons and of practices of commoning for the creation of emancipated societies, the authors discuss whether housing struggles and co-habitation experiences may contribute in crucial ways to the development of a commoning culture. The authors explore a variety of urban contexts through global case studies from across the Global North and South, in search of concrete examples that illustrate the potentialities of urban commoning.

Dr Penny Travlou is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Geography and Theory at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh. Her research is interdisciplinary focusing on social justice, the commons, collaborative practices, emerging networks, feminist methodologies, critical landscape theory, epistemologies of the South and ethnography. 

She is also the Co-Director of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens, a non-profit independent research organisation that focuses on feminist and queer studies, participatory education and activism.

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Blog Featured Latest from the Lab RUL talks RUL week of events

For a liberatory politics of home (RUL week of events)

Professor Michele Lancione (University of Torino)

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In For a Liberatory Politics of Home, Michele Lancione questions accepted understandings of home and homelessness to offer a radical proposition: homelessness cannot be solved without dismantling current understandings of home. Conventionally, home is framed as a place of security and belonging, while its loss defines what it means to be homeless. On the basis of this binary, a whole industry of policy interventions, knowledge production, and organizing fails to provide solutions to homelessness but perpetuates violent and precarious forms of inhabitation. Drawing on his research and activism around housing in Europe, Lancione attends to the interlocking crises of home and homelessness by recentering the political charge of precarious dwelling. It is there, if often in unannounced ways, that a profound struggle for a differential kind of homing signals multiple possibilities to transcend the violences of home/homelessness. In advancing a new approach to work with the politics of inhabitation, Lancione provides a critique of current practices and offers a transformative vision for a renewed, liberatory politics of home.

Michele Lancione is Professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Polytechnic University of Turin and coeditor of Grammars of the Urban Ground, also published by Duke University Press, and Global Urbanism: Knowledge, Power and the City.

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