Workshop? Settlement House? Laboratory?

Abstract

Everyday life in Żoliborz and the lifestyle shaped there direct my attention to the category of the common good understood not only traditionally, as the common wealth of the material world—the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty (the natural commons) but also, as defined by Hardt and Negri, ‘those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth’. Hence, moving away from economic issues and living conditions, but not abandoning them altogether, I examine the ‘results of social production’—namely, all these forms of cooperation, neighbourly assistance, new forms of sociability and spending free time, the emerging institutions bringing together the members of the cooperative and designating, to some extent, their modus vivendi. Therefore, I analyse the models of power structures and the urban culture produced on a housing estate, starting with a description of a very dense institutional network: a common room, a school, a nursery, vegetable gardens and green areas, playgrounds and reading rooms, and special interest clubs—spaces of self-education. To do this, I use the performative tools proposed by Richard Sennett and explore various forms of cooperation and being together. I describe some institutions using the metaphor of a workshop, others—the metaphor of the common room. These models, devised by Sennett, proved useful for the analysis of various forms of cooperation. Being together is, at times, the objective, but sometimes also a tool for achieving other political, economic or social goals. The category of rituals and the production of social habits turned out to be extremely important here, allowing me to describe the techniques associated with the forming of and experiencing collective identity.