Abstract
While the commons and commoning are generally associated with community-based ecosystems at the localised scale of the neighbourhood, ambitious reinterpretations explore possibilities for scaling up commoning as a collaborative and sustainable form of urban governance engaging multiple stakeholders through the quintuple helix. Inspired by the City as Commons approach first imagined and formulated in Bologna, Italy, this paper presents original findings from a transdisciplinary action research project for studying and cultivating commoning-as-governance in a politically disaffected and economically marginalised inner-city neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. It examines the social relations (re)constituting an urban ecosystem for commoning and asks how such initiatives for designing collaborative programmes for transforming urban environments through public-common partnerships might work in contexts in which the material and affective resources for commoning have been exhausted by post-democratic privatisation and neoliberal austerity. Drawing on theories of radical democracy and post-politics, the City as Commons approach is critically evaluated and argued to be insufficient to the challenging task of engendering commoning in the disintegrating urban neighbourhoods that would arguably benefit most from such activities. The paper tells the story of how this transdisciplinary project ultimately failed in its aims and, through engagement with recent interventions on the politics of failure in the neoliberal university, reflects on the implications for future action research on commoning.
Highlights
Under the grip of neoliberal austerity, inequalities and socio-spatial polarisation have become deep-seated in the relatively wealthy cities of the global North (Davies, 2021)
We seek to fill a gap in current research on urban commoning by providing new insights into how specific qualities of urban ecosystems may variously help or hinder their endogenous development, and we argue that the “city as commons” approach (Foster and Iaione, 2016) potentially works best within an ecosystemic climate of trust, solidarity, and hope that is shared by all stakeholders
We sought to adapt Foster and Iaione’s (2016, 2019) set of democratic design principles for guiding the scaling-up of cooperative forms of commons governance to the city level—elaborated as the “co-city protocol” first experimented in Bologna—in ways which held in tension and attempted to avoid the contradictions of post-politicisation but at the same time retained the methodological spirit of the original: to purposively design a programme for transforming urban governance through principles and practices of commoning
Summary
Under the grip of neoliberal austerity, inequalities and socio-spatial polarisation have become deep-seated in the relatively wealthy cities of the global North (Davies, 2021). With the diminution of counterhegemonic challenges to the post-political neoliberal status quo wrought by the disillusionment and weakening of leftist parties and the labour movement, alternatives have been sought that focus on urban issues such as housing and neighbourhood organising, largely dominated by the politicised and ideologically-motivated urban middle classes seeking alliances with precarious groups (Beveridge and Koch, 2019) This approach bypasses formal representative structures, turning towards directly-democratic, localist innovations such as people’s assemblies, participatory budgeting and experiments in commoning. Bologna’s city-ascommons approach appears to limit scope for genuine political disagreement and promotes a consensus around the shared problem of “urban environmental decline” and superficial urban improvements that tend to favour middle class volunteerism over working class organisation (Bianchi, 2018)
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