The Commons

Definition

The commons names a form of collective, non-privatized relation to shared resources — land, housing, public space, cultural life — held in common rather than converted into private property or financial asset. In this wiki the term is not yet a fully developed concept but a counter-concept: it is posed against the privatized, self-referential Architectural Object and the financialized Neoliberal Metropolis. Bismarck proposes to "disinvent the object" and defend "the commons of the city"; Kaika (via Goudsmit) holds that a building becomes a "truly public icon" only when it is "embedded in social and cultural urban life, engage[s] with the city around it, enhance[s] the urban commons and inspire[s] civic pride." The commons is thus defined negatively — as what financialisation encloses and privatizes — and normatively — as the social use and public embedding that the object forecloses. Its historical shadow is Enclosure: the original process by which common land was fenced off into private property, which the financialized conversion of "housing-as-social-right into housing-as-eternal-debt" repeats at the scale of the city.

Key Thinkers

• Pedro Levi Bismarck — "the commons of the city" as the counter to the architectural object; "disinventing the object" (after Manoel de Barros).
• Maria Kaika — the "urban commons" as the criterion of a truly public (non-"autistic") icon.
• Tim Gough — a Deleuzo-Guattarian route: architecture as "flows" conjugated to produce a "surplus value of a code" beyond capitalist surplus value, resisting capital's "false necessity."
• (Related, not yet paged: the commons tradition — Hardin, Ostrom, Federici, Caffentzis, Negri & Hardt — see log.)

Related Concepts

• Enclosure — the historical privatization of common land; the commons' constitutive opposite.
• Architectural Object — the privatized, self-referential building the commons is posed against.
• Neoliberal Metropolis — the financialized city that encloses the commons via rent and debt.
• Critical Architecture — the critical refusal of the privatized object and defense of the commons.
• Housing — the site where "housing-as-social-right" is converted into "housing-as-eternal-debt."
• Gentrification — the displacement of incumbent residents as a form of enclosure of the everyday commons.
• Everyday Life — the lived terrain the commons would re-embed in social use.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Architecture of the City (in the Age of its Financial Reproducibility) — "the commons of the city" and "disinventing the object."
• Who Wins and Who Loses in the Production of Cultural Iconic Architecture? — Kaika's "urban commons" as the criterion of the public icon.
• Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture — the "surplus value of a code" as a non-capitalist surplus.
• Autistic Architecture — the "autistic" icon as the negation of the urban commons.
• The Enigma of Capital — the "right to the city" and the class struggle over the built environment.

Open Questions

• Is "the commons of the city" a practicable program or an aspirational, resisting-critical posture (Bismarck's own open question)?
• Can the commons be operationalized architecturally without collapsing into the "public rhetorical form" Bismarck criticizes — or into the "social architecture" localism that Gribat & Meireis critique?
• Does Gough's "surplus value of a code" escape the "architectural Deleuzism" Spencer critiques, or does it re-aestheticize the commons as form?