Mapping the Commons in Athens and Istanbul
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.”
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