Can Shared Practices Build a New City?

Starting with a theoretical dialogue on the current "modus operandi" of the City through the prism of «new technologies», this paper discusses whether they are providing new «tropes» of social interaction and coexistence. Through the presentation of examples of socially driven operations in the Athenian Urban Grid (Hive Athens, Re-think Athens, Community based design networks), urban space is viewed as an on-going production of spatial relations, as a field of infinite transformations beyond design. The discussion focuses on the ability of new technologies to transform cities into “communication modes” incorporating issues beyond morphogenesis, identified in the decision-making process leading to it. Finally, it raises some questions on whether new technologies, as socially embedded processes, can be rendered as the backbone of the social structure; whether, they can transform the urban environment into a place of constant participatory actions, into unique civic laboratories, and thus innovate the term “hybrid city.

1990

A basic and recurring theme in architectural discourse – particularly since the advent of the modern city – is the issue of public space. The story is well known. The rise of the modern city is characterised by the disappearance of self-evident collective clusters (family, local community), which were part and parcel of more traditional and often agrarian societies. Other ‘light communities’ arise and insert themselves within the anonymous sphere of the modern city. Collective experience is transformed, though not suppressed, by the increasing importance of individuality. A new form of ‘collectivity’ arises, not defined by inevitability, but rather through self-chosen communities. Giving form to this new collective sphere is an important challenge for contemporary architecture. This OASE highlights the ‘old question’ of public space and the role of architecture within it. This is not without reason. In the past decade, remarkably negative opinions were voiced on the condition of pub...

Commoning the City, 2020

This collection seeks to expand the limits of current debates about urban com-moning practices that imply a radical will to establish collaborative and solidarity networks based on anti-capitalist principles of economics, ecology and ethics. The chapters in this volume draw on case studies in a diversity of urban contexts , ranging from Detroit, USA to Kyrenia, Cyprus-on urban gardening and land stewardship, collaborative housing experiments, alternative food networks , claims to urban leisure space, migrants' appropriation of urban space and workers' cooperatives/collectives. The analysis pursued by the eleven chapters opens new fields of research in front of us: the entanglements of racial capitalism with enclosures and of black geographies with the commons, the critical history of settler colonialism and indigenous commons, law as a force of enclosure and as a strategy of commoning, housing commons from the urban-scale perspective, solidarity economies as labour commons, territoriality in the urban commons, the non-territoriality of mobile commons, the new materialist and post-humanist critique of the commons debate and feminist ethics of care.

Urban Space and Everyday Adaptations: Rethinking commons, co-living, and activism for the Anthropocene City, 2022

This paper addresses Jem Bendell’s concept of “deep adaptation” in the Anthropocene through the lens of everyday urban practices in contemporary Northern Europe. It proposes that this “deep adaptation” should be defined less in relation to a socio-ecological “collapse” and more through everyday occurrences in present-day urban environments. Entering into a critical conversation with Bendell’s conceptual “4 Rs” framework, the paper draws on primary data from several cities in Sweden and Germany to show how, in practice, resilience can be found in the “quiet activism” of leisure gardeners; how ingrained notions of restricted land use may be relinquished through “commoning” urban space; how novel constellations of co-living restores old ideas of intragenerational urban cohabitation; and, finally, how a path to reconciliation may be articulated through an ontological shift away from an anthropocentric urban planning, towards one that recognises other-than-human beings as legitimate dwellers in the urban landscape. Accounting for urbanities of enmeshed societal, ecological, and spatial trajectories, the paper reveals an inhibiting anthropocentrism in Bendell’s framework and ultimately points to how his “creatively constructed hope” for the future may be found, not in an impending global collapse, but in everyday adaptations and embodied acts that stretch far beyond the human.

Housing Studies, 2018

Sociology Study, 2016

The paper aims at measuring the influence that the everyday theme has exercised in the formation of the idea of space that is permeating the thought of many contemporary urban planners. Through the investigation of two recent approaches, the Italian and the American ones, the complex relationships between daily practices and urban spaces, in the continuous redefinition of the concepts of public and private sphere, are described. In this context, the Everyday Urbanists' work had the merit to reveal and investigate the social possibilities offered by the patterns of everyday life. They were among the first to speak about a citizenship redefinition, process which has been increasingly debated by many scholars. Citizenship is thus turning to be less formal, while becoming more substantive and insurgent. The paper demonstrates that, according to this crucial change, new and meaningful relations between citizenship and planning can be established and that these are able to open planning practice up to the present ethnographical possibilities of the urban space, and to its tactical and polysemic dimensions.

2021

Urban scholars and policy-makers are still searching for innovative models that can allow symmetrical cooperation and partnerships between citizens, institutions and public authorities. In this book one can nd several approaches as how to grow coalitions, sometimes not more that rst steps in the right direction, others are more structured processes backed with nancial structures. This article explores possible models that allow for that active civic cooperation to be tranformed into sustainable collaborations. DESIGNING TOGETHER The creation and management of public spaces should go beyond consultation: people should not only be heard but also be allowed to co-create urban spaces. But how can citizens identify themselves with their city if they are alienated from its development and management? As previous chapters showed, an inclusive city starts with designing and developing from diversity. Including citizens in the city development process fosters a sense of belonging and a sense of ownership. Belongingness is key if we want citizens to care for their city the way they care for what they nd important in their daily lives.

The following article is translated from polish via ai. If there are any misunderstandings while reading the text, please contact the author. Polish version available on my page.

Public Culture

The concept of the city as a territorial and political form has long anchored social thought. By the twentieth century, the city figured prominently as a laboratory for testing modern techniques of governance. In the twenty-first century this discourse incarnates anew in visions of future mega-and smart cities. Then, as now, cities-as signs of the modern-are the elephants in a room full of adjacent concepts such as the state, the market, citizenship, collectivity, property, and care. This issue picks up a thread from the 1996 special issue and 1998 book of prizewinning essays on Cities and Citizenship (edited by James Holston and Arjun Appadurai). The contributors focused on the role of cities in the making of modern subjects by attending to associations between urbanism and modernity and thus with imperialism, colonialism, and extraction. Now, we reconfigure that line of inquiry to consider Urbanism beyond the City while bearing projections of the future in mind. The United Nations projects that by 2050, two-thirds of the global population will live in cities or other urban centers. But this new density will be greatest in a small number of countries, none which are in the Global North (United Nations 2018). Yet even as cities take unprecedented forms without discernible limits, spatial theorizing continues to invest in a particular concept of the city and to expand that concept's reach into other areas of study, planning, and investment (Amin 2013). Spatial professions capitalize on the city's capacity for generating complex intersections of social, economic, and political forces. Theorists attribute a capacity to distinguish among divergent possibilities mingling unpredictably to the urban apparatus (Martin 2017). Even critical methods remain attached to the idea that cities-whether as infrastructures, instruments, or morphologies-anchor a very particular sense of social life. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994: 4) noted, philosophy coincides with the "contribution of cities: the formation of societies of friends or equals but also the promotion of relationships of rivalry between and within them." We position the concept of the city by treating it as a "friend" accompanying us through the journey presented in this special issue.

The Urban Transcripts Journal, 2020

Over the past decades, intensified following the 2008 financial crisis, we have witnessed geographically and qualitatively diverse assaults on the “public” realm. These offensives have coincided with the contemporary entrenchment of neoliberal ideologies, political-economic processes, socialities and subjectivities, manifest across varying terrains: privatisations of previously state-owned and governed public goods; brutal austerity programs; the capture and capitalist instrumentalization of newly produced commonwealth, whether knowledge, information, or technologies; and the subsumption of “life itself” (Rossi, 2012: 351). As such, “micro-practices of bio-political exploitation” and “macro-practices of urban enclosure” work as processual reciprocals, producing enclosed subjects and spatialities which effectively immunise “the body politic from alternative forms of shared sociality” (Jeffery, McFarlane, and Vasudevan, 2011: 15; Massumi, 2009). In this context, the demand for “the right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1968) and the right to the space and time of collective life is becoming increasingly acute and variously articulated. This is a demand that has, in recent years, been developed and reinforced by the praxis of the urban common(s).