Whose infrastructure, which commons? On the maintenance of an emergent health commons in the Netherlands

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how and by what means an emergent health commons is (re)produced in practice. Drawing on recent studies that consider the materiality of citizens’ struggles over the commons, it adopts a more-than-human approach to commoning. Employing ethnographic research on a communal healthcare cooperative in a region of the Netherlands that faces depopulation and institutional failure, I argue that the durability of an emergent health commons is a continuous and contested achievement involving infrastructuring. To articulate the ongoing infrastructural work needed to create and maintain the commons, I employ insights from Maintenance and Repair Studies that explore maintenance as a practice of material care. By exploring the care for infrastructure ethnographically, I specify which aspects of the community healthcare practice, precisely, are maintained in common, and for whom. My analysis reveals that commoning ‘opens up’ new ways of organizing health and existing in common, but may not always sustain radical openness when the social arrangements of the commons transform into steel and bricks. The maintainability of health in common, I suggest, hinges as much on nurturing ‘social’ bonds as on how such bonds are variously infrastructured.