cities

When people deliberately break the law to become squatters or take possession of public buildings, it is a pretty good sign that the market/state is failing to meet the public’s basic needs. This is the general scenario in many parts of Rome, reports Donatella Della Ratta of Al Jazeera, as various citizens’ movements take over theaters, public buildings and apartment buildings.  Squatting and illegal occupation are rampant. 

Much of the turmoil has resulted from budget cutbacks and the resulting failure of government to uphold its constitutional duty to provide adequate housing and meet other public needs.  Shady speculators then swarm into the picture to snap up buildings that the government is selling at rock-bottom prices in order to raise money. 

What’s a victimized public to do?  Defy the law and occupy what is theirs.  In Rome, former employees of the Teatro Valle, a grand public theater and former opera house, have taken over the premises since June 2011.  (Here is Della Ratta's November 2011 account of the Teatro Valle occupation.)  This act of defiance has now sparked many similar citizen takeovers around the city.  In one of the more notable occupations, citizens took over a government building used for motor vehicle registrations and drivers’ licensure.  As Della Ratta reports: 

“Scup (Sport e Cultura Popolare) as the place has been renamed, was occupied, cleaned up and brought back to life by a mixed group of young activists, sport instructors and some residents of the neighborhood.  They were outraged by the lack of public spaces for leisure and sport activities in an area that has become more and more gentrified while rental prices have soared.” 

A young activist, Carlo, explained:  “Occupying is an expression of public outrage.” 

As neoliberal policies put the squeeze on cities, what role can the commons play?  Some commoners in Greece decided to explore this issue by mapping the commons of Athens – and then this year, Istanbul.  The results are an inspiration and prototype for commoners in cities around the world.  The online maps and videos make visible the subjective, experiential commons that sustain people’s daily lives, giving a new twist to the official maps of a city.   

The “Mapping the Commons” project got its start when the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens commissioned the Spanish collective Hackitectura to convene an interdisciplinary group of artists, sociologists, scientists and researchers from universities in Athens.  Hackitectura is a group of architects and programmers that theorizes, and develops projects, that explore how space, electronic flows and social networks converge.  

The Athens project describes itself as “an open collaborative cartography of the contemporary metropolis based on the importance of the commons in times in of disaster capitalism.”  The project explicitly wanted to imagine a new Athens by seeing it through the lens of the commons.  As the organizers put it:  

We propose the hypothesis that a new [view of the] city will come out of the process, one where the many and multiple, often struggling against the state and capital, are continuously, and exuberantly, supporting and producing the commonwealth of its social life.

The workshop will develop collaborative mapping strategies, using free software participatory wiki-mapping tools.

Organizers noted, “Due to our tradition of the private and the public, of property and individualism, the commons are still hard to see for our late 20th century eyes. We propose, therefore, a search for the commons; a search that will take the form of a mapping process. We understand mapping, of course, as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, and as artists and social activists have been using it during the last decade, as a performance that can become a reflection, a work of art, a social action.”

Shareable.net has published a terrific interview with Marxist geographer David Harvey on the future of cities as a place for commoning.  It’s a timely conversation now that many people believe that cities, not nation-states, will be the focus for economic and political renewal. 

Harvey, the author of such insightful books as A Short Introduction to Neoliberalism, The Enigma of Capital and Rebel Cities, spoke with San Francisco activist Chris Carlsson, who is co-director of the multimedia history project Shaping San Francisco (a wiki-based digital archive at foundsf.org).  Carlsson is also a writer, publisher, editor, and community organizer.

Shareable publisher Neal Gorenflo introduces the interview by noting that so much of the conversation about renewing cities ignores a basic reality:  "The commons is the goose that lays the golden eggs. Without the commons, there is no market or future. If every resource is commodified, if every square inch of real estate is subjected to speculative forces, if every calorie of every urbanite is used to simply meet bread and board, then we seal off the future. Without commons, there’s no room for people to maneuver, there’s no space for change, and no space for life. The future is literally born out of commons."

Here are a few excerpts from Carlsson's interview with Harvey.  Consider these passages a tease designed to get you to wander over to Shareable to read the entire thing.

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of touring an incredibly vital cultural commons in the heart of Providence, Rhode Island.  My host was Bert Crenca, the artistic director of AS220.  Nearly everyone knows AS220 as one of the most happening places in the city.  It offers everything:  rehearsal spaces, poetry slams, live music, dance performances, figure drawing, affordable work studios, a print shop, specialized art equipment, cheap apartments for struggling artists, and more. 

What may be less appreciated is that AS220 is a self-sustaining creative commons (lower case).  While it has all sorts of interactions with the market, government and philanthropy, it is really an unheralded model of a commons for producing and enjoying the arts.  It is financially self-sustaining, independently managed, and grassroots-responsive.  It is dedicated to art made by and for the people.

The “AS” in AS220 stands for “Artists’ Space”; 220 was the initial address of the distressed building it originally occupied in 1985.  AS220 quickly outgrew that space and in 1992, with help from the mayor’s office and tax breaks normally used by commercial developers, acquired a 21,000 square-foot building in a blighted, drug-ridden part of town.  In 2006 and 2008, AS220 bought two additional buildings nearby that have allowed the sprawling Providence arts community to grow even more.  Now in its 27th year, AS220 has a budget of $2.8 million, 50 employees and hosts dozens of art projects in the three downtown buildings that it owns.

Calling AS220 a “nonprofit organization” fails to capture its real achievement or inner logic.  AS220 has been able to create its own commons for the arts largely because of its ingenuity in acquiring three downtown buildings.  This has allowed it to generate its own revenue streams that help it protect its autonomy and take greater risks.  AS220 rents out street-level spaces to restaurants and shops that share its funky, creative ethic, which in turn has enabled AS220 to leverage that money to develop a more diversified funding base:  membership fees to use studio equipment; fees for art classes; contract work for printing and computer animation; and of course the sale of artworks.  AS220 also rents out cheap studio space and artists’ apartments, covering its costs while advancing the arts. 

Leave it to the Dutch, who throw away only 3 percent of their municipal waste into landfills, to come up with a socially appealing innovation that does even more to reduce waste:  the neighborhood Repair Cafe!  As described in today’s NYT, volunteers with a talent for fixing things come together several times a month to repair anyone’s broken household items for free.  This includes lamps, irons, suitcases, toasters, coffee makers and even an electric organ on one occasion. 

What began in a theater foyer has now moved to a community center and spawned similar Repair Cafes throughout the Netherlands. The Repair Cafe helps fixers with time on their hands connect with people who don’t have much money or personal skills to repair their broken household items. The whole enterprise saves people money, builds community and reduces gratuitous consumption. 

Reporter Ilvy Nijokiktijien describes how the Repair Cafe idea got its start:

“In Europe, we throw out so many things,” said Martine Postma, a former journalist who came up with the concept after the birth of her second child led her to think more about the environment. “It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken. There are more and more people in the world, and we can’t keep handling things the way we do.

“I had the feeling I wanted to do something, not just write about it,” she said. But she was troubled by the question: “How do you try to do this as a normal person in your daily life?”

While Bradley L. Garrett may be an anthropologist by training, he prefers to call himself an “urban explorer” or better yet, a “place hacker.”  He recently came into public view after secretly climbing to the top of the Shard, the tallest building in Europe (1,061 feet/309.7 meters), in London.  He evaded security systems and at 2 am climbed to the top of the building, still under construction, earning a spectacular view over the twinkling London nightscape.

The night's adventure garnered wide media exposure for what is legally known as an act of trespassing. Garrett doesn’t consider this mere adventurism, although he concedes it is a thrill.  Rather, he sees himself as a thinking-man’s explorer of the meaning of urban ruins – derelict industrial sites, closed hospitals, abandoned military installations, sewer and drain networks, foreclosed estates, mines, and ruins of all sorts.  Garrett considers it ethnographic research into the physical detritus of modernity – and a statement about the scarcity of public spaces in cities for discovery, camaraderie and fun. 

As a video about place hacking notes, it’s all about the “psychogeography of place.”  It's about the desire to transcend the contrived, commercially constructed facade of the city to reach a rawer, more authentic sense of urban life.  And it’s about creating a community of fellow adventurers who share in discovering and investigating secret or derelict spaces.  Aficionados call such spaces T.O.A.D.S., “temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict spaces.” 

How might public policy help grow the commons?  San Francisco just took a major exploratory step by forming The Sharing Economy Working Group.  This new task force will be charged by Mayor Ed Lee with taking “a comprehensive look at the economic benefits, innovative companies and emerging policy issues around the growing 'sharing economy’.”  The task force will include numerous city departments, neighborhood and community statekholders, and sharing economy companies.

In announcing the new task force, Mayor Lee gave it a fairly conventional political gloss.  He said the sharing economy could “leverage technology and innovation to generate new jobs and income for San Franciscans in every neighborhood and at every income level.”  He also pledged that San Francisco would be “at the forefront of nurturing its growth [the sharing economy], modernizing our laws, and confronting emerging policy issues and concerns.”

Since San Francisco has been in the vanguard of many cultural trends, it is natural to speculate that new sorts of collective projects (car-sharing, open workspaces, tool sharing, etc.) and socially based business models and development policies may have a strong future.  The Bay Area has incubated such companies as Airbnb (a business version of CouchSurfing, i.e., room rentals for travelers in people's homes); Taskrabbit (a local task and errand service),Getaround (a P2P car-sharing and local rental service) and RelayRides (car rentals from people in your community). 

I am fascinated to watch the constructive ferment about the commons in Italy.  The most stunning sign of this trend (as mentioned in a previous blog post) was the voter referendum on water in June 2011 when Italians overwhelmingly rejected the privatization of their municipal water systems.  The vote was a stinging defeat for political elites and the media, and a surprising confirmation that the commons can be a template for shuffling the ideological deck.  Some 94% of voters, including the center/right, said that water should be controlled by the people, not profit-maximizing corporations.

This signal was apparently heard in Italian political culture.  Luigi de Magistris, a former prosecutor and member of the European Parliament,was elected mayor of Naples in May 2011 on a law and order platform.  He has now become a big-time champion of the commons.  As Anthony Quattrone of the Naples Politics blog puts it, Naples is now a hothouse of “participatory democracy, bottom-up initiatives, and social innovation.” 

De Magistris was an outsider to Neapolitan politics when he won the support of two minor parties for his quest for the mayoralty.  With support from both the far left and conservatives, he improbably defeated the businessman supported Prime Minister Berlusconi.  “Many citizens in Naples feel that the election of Luigi de Magistris is a last-ditch bid to save whatever is left of the glorious capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies,” Quattrone wrote.  “Neapolitan disenchantment with politics and total distrust of politicians started with the unification of Italy and has basically persisted to this day.”

The commons as a path forward?  De Magistris thinks so.  He has appointed an “Assessor of Commons” to reclaim public management of the city’s water services.  The Assessor is also charged with identifying new commons-based ways of providing services.  The Mayor has national political ambitions, and talks frankly of the commons as a framework for managing the people’s wealth.

As the Occupy Wall Street protesters contemplate “what next?” – and as they ponder how to combine a visionary agenda with achiveable, short-term political goals – I have suggestion. The Occupy forces in hundreds of cities should petition their local governments to acquire a new “top-level Internet domain” for their city, and to manage that patch of cyberspace as a local commons.

Even Internet sophisticates are not really tracking this issue, but the ownership and control of the new city TLDs could provide enormous new opportunities for citizens to transform their local political cultures, economies and everyday life.

Top-level domains, or TLDs, are the suffixes at the end of Internet addresses, as in .com, .org and .edu. The international body that manages TLDs is called ICANN, for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.  It recently approved a plan that will authorize cities to acquire their own TLDs, as in .nyc, .paris and .berlin. If properly constituted, the city TLDs could serve as “open greenfields for new local governance structures.”  Unfortunately, the new city TLDs are not likely to serve this role if traditional city governments simply sell off the TLDs to private interests.  Transformative governance will occur only if the TLDs are managed as digital commons accountable to city residents. (See my previous blog on this topic.)

There's some interesting stuff going on over at Shareable.net, the website-salon-activist venue that explores the outer frontiers of DIY, collaborative consumption, urban life, and the commons, all with an accent on innovations being pioneered by hackers, twenty-somethings and urban activists.

The website had a recent series on the history, growth and variety of crowdfunding projects, including a separate look at crowdfunding of social change. The site's tracking of new forms of collaborative consumption – tech-enabled forms of sharing, lending, bartering, and borrowing – is especially good. A classic example is AirBnB, a service that is the paid equivalent of Couchsurfing which lets people earn income by renting extra rooms in their homes to travelers.  Other examples include the operating system Ubuntu, ride-sharing, libraries and online reputation systems.

In a timely gambit planned months ago, Shareable is teaming up with the Parsons Desis Lab to host an event, Share New York, on Nov. 19-20, to discuss the challenges of making it in today's troubled economy. As the site bills it, “SHARE NY is designed to give you the tools, knowledge, and connections to help you create your own future – one that is more affordable, sustainable, and connected within a new economy that thrives on sharing.” The event hopes to bring together students, social innovators, designers, and entrepreneurs who have “created their own jobs and are pioneering new ways of working, living, and creating.”  More info here.