ESSAY: Renegotiating the Urban Commons

Text by Francesca Ferguson, Photos by Andreas Gehrke
Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, 2009 (Photo © Andreas Gehrke)
We have to fight for our right to shared space, says uncube’s guest editor Francesca Ferguson, and architects and urban designers have a crucial role to play in the fragile balance between public and private.

Over the last six years, since the economic crisis of 2007-2008 and during which unemployment within the European Union has reached record levels, the realities of austerity urbanism shed a completely different light upon a spatial design practice that works within a wider context of limitations: making do with an alternative culture of self-management, of shared resources and of the sweat equity of unpaid, voluntary labour.

It is an interesting exercise to reverse the logic of economic growth; to assume that this is not something one can take for granted and to see how this alters our perceptions of sharing. Makeshift, expedient solutions that maximise limited available resources form the basis for the projects in this issue, focusing upon the shifting and reshaping of the urban commons.

There is a direct correlation between deep cutbacks in public services and welfare that are seen as commonly held rights, and the revival of interest amongst political scientists and urbanists in recent years in stretching the notion of commons. The commons were traditionally defined as spaces and resources – forests, rivers, grazing land, fisheries – that are shared by all. The term harks back to the early Middle Ages, and though it does not refer to publicly owned land it denotes land that is above all accessible. The enclosure of the commons by way of fences, walls and gates is an obvious and visible limitation of this accessibility. And of course this embraces the crucial issue of accessibility to the digital space of commons as well.

The concept of urban commons is now being imbued with a new dynamism, not least by the intense discourse that has followed the spectacular and large-scale demonstrations in urban centres throughout the world over the last three years – Athens, Istanbul, Sao Paolo, Cairo – that responded in varying degrees to threats to public services, and the very substance of democracy itself. The occupation of public spaces like Gezi Park in Istanbul, for example, drew attention to the fact that appropriating, reclaiming and redefining the commons lies at the heart of the democratic process. Common spaces – like democratic processes themselves – have to be constantly renegotiated. This renegotiation goes beyond space itself to embrace the design of social relations. Or, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (in their book Commonwealth, 2009, Belknap Press) see it, the act of commoning is a political process towards shared open access and democratic self-management.
Tempelhofer Feld, Berlin, 2010 (Photo © Andreas Gehrke)
Broad Channel, Queens, New York, 2009 (Photo © Andreas Gehrke)
In short – so the Marxist thinkers – it is the essence of the contemporary revolutionary project!

A citizen of London can test and perform the ancient commoners’ rights by re-igniting ancient customs - like driving sheep across London Bridge. Few may know of these rights, but our cities are punctuated with collective, ad hoc appropriations that reshape the urban landscape, and often outlast their temporary status. The bricoleur aspect of the Allmende gardens in Berlin’s Tempelhof, for example, has tested boundaries between privately shaped and publicly accessed space. Its makers and users have moved far beyond the time-honoured conventions of fenced in allotments in the process.
Such acts of commoning – however small in scale – help to reconfigure an urban ecosystem; that most fragile balance of public and private space that is so easily overturned by property and land speculation. The politics of the commons that Fran Tonkiss refers to in her interview is a creative act of civic empowerment: what may appear to be small-scale, improvised, appropriations of urban space should also be seen as generating alternative economies; micro-systems at a very local level that resist the profit motive and seek a more sustainable, resilient solution to community building. Atelier d’Architecture’s cycles of resilience; a design for a self-sufficient community in the district of Colombes, Paris that connects residents to a complex network of sharing, reusing, communal building and harvesting at local level is nothing short of a utopian project made real.

At the heart of these urban acts of sharing, redistributing and re-shaping available resources lies a far more fundamental rethinking of the economy of means. The civic economy proclaimed in a manifesto to new thinking by Indy Johar is a radical wake up call to architects and designers to respond to the realities of data-driven, open sourced and crowd-funded urbanism. The tools enabling co-design and participation are already transforming production processes in the product design world. We should also be rethinking the roles of the architect and urban designer as mediators, agents and shapers of these processes of commoning.

There are some signs that the social project of the 1960s is being revisited by a new generation of architects resisting the market logic of maximum profit per square metre. Beyond the dystopian realities of failed housing estates at a vast scale, Alison and Peter Smithson’s vision of “streets in the air” and communal spaces are being rethought and incorporated once again into residential buildings.

With such acts of spatial intelligence, this reshaping of the urban commons, Henri Lefebvre’s proclamation of the Right to the City becomes an imperative made tangible: namely the shared right to produce – to make and remake the city.
Incertitude, Pankow #01, 2013 (Photo © Andreas Gehrke)
Ostend, Frankfurt am Main, 2009 (Photo © Andreas Gehrke)
- Francesca Ferguson is a curator, journalist and critic based in Basel and Berlin. She founded urban drift in the 1990s, curates and produces travelling exhibitions, symposia and publications on contemporary architecture and design. Formerly director of the Swiss Architecture Museum, she is now initiating an architecture and urban design festival for Berlin. Her latest book “Make_Shift City” is newly launched by Jovis publishers.
  
  Make_Shift City
  Renegotiating the Urban Commons
  Editor: Francesca Ferguson, Urban Drift Projects (eds.)
  In cooperation with the Berlin Senate for Urban Development
  English/German
  256 Pages
  21 x 26 cm
  ISBN 978-3-86859-223-8
  
  www.jovis.de
  
  www.urbandrift.org
- The photographer Andreas Gehrke was born in Berlin in 1975. His career has bridged the gap between his art photography and commercial projects. Under the name “Noshe” he has been a regular contributor to the likes of Wallpaper and AD and shot buildings for publishers including Taschen and Hatje Cantz, whereas his alter ego Andreas Gehrke has exhibited his spare yet aura-laden landscapes and building portraits in galleries ranging from Pierogi in Leipzig to PS1 in New York. He is also founder of the photography publishing company Drittel Books.
  
  See uncube's interview with Andreas Gehrke here.
  
  www.andreasgehrke.de
  
  www.noshe.de
  
  www.drittelbooks.com
Cypress Hills Cemetry, Brooklyn, New York, 2009 (Photo © Andreas Gehrke)
Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, New York, 2010 (Photo © Andreas Gehrke)
About Francesca Ferguson

About ANDREAS GEHRKE