Book-Chapter |

Urban Commons and the Production of Alternatives to the Neoliberal City

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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Due to copyright, it is prohibited to reproduce books’ content. This is just an excerpt of this chapter’s introduction. In order to get the book, please visit .

Introduction

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, most of the Western world started to suffer from a structural crisis. What seemed to be merely a financial problem soon started to impregnate all facets and actors of a society that heavily relies on consumption and loans to maintain its consumerist thirst. As a result, a context of growing inequalities accentuated by austerity policies – supposedly¹ aimed to mitigate the negative consequences of the crisis – started to shape. Within this scenario, cities have played a key role in favouring so.² First, because current crises are rooted into the processes of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004) resulting from recent urban governance policies more concerned by profit than social issues (Burkhalter and Castells 2009; Harvey 2012; Marcuse 2012; Marcuse et al. 2008; Sevilla-Buitrago 2015; Stiglitz 2011). As a result, cities (and everything that lies within – citizens and buildings included) have turned into trading goods aiming to attract foreign capital like investments or tourism.³ Second, because contemporary cities have slowly and imperceptibly turned to be socio-technological constructs aimed to reproduce a capitalist system that increases inequalities by means of domination and control, as argued by authors like Stavros Stavrides (2015) based on Foucault’s studies on biopolitics and disciplinary control (Foucault 1995; Foucault 2007; Foucault 2010).

If it was ever true, the ideal image of the city as the domestication of a world full of perils that provides shelter and protection with the adequate conditions for human reproduction and development is no longer valid. The following pages are inserted in the epistemological tradition that conceives the city as a synonym of conflict, mostly originated by class struggle (Aibar and Bijker 1997; Brenner, Marcuse, and Mayer 2012; Casellas 2006; Castells 1977; Harvey 1989; Lenin 1999; Sorando Ortín 2014). This conception implies that cities are much more than a sort of ideal scenario where life and class confrontation simply happen. On the contrary: cities are the physical dimension of a society (Castells 1983, 311) in which space is socially produced (Lipietz 1977; Marcuse 2011; Sevilla-Buitrago 2012, 39) in order to satisfy its interests and goals (Castells 1983, 312). Nevertheless, if cities have played such a key role in favouring crisis and inequalities, it can be argued that they can also be key in fighting their negative consequences. In other words: the solution should be found in the same place where the root of the problem lies. For this reason, the selection of cities as a context for studying social transformation is, hence, more than justified. Proof can be found in the notorious concentrations around the world that flourished following Arab Spring example, which shared similar patterns: the congregation of thousands of people around the main squares protesting against their governments and their unfair austerity measures. A notorious example was the Indignados Movement of 2011, a distributed movement that spread across the major cities of Spain⁴ against the political and financial model that originated the crisis, the social inequities, the privatisation of public services like health or education, and the political corruption that derived from it. This in turn sparked a series of debates, assemblies and discussions aimed to propose and demand new fairer alternatives.

15M Demonstration in Puerta del Sol, Madrid (May 15th, 2011). Credits: La información.

Despite the evidence that new city models for a new society are needed if we are to prevent repeating the same mistakes one and again, there is no consensus on how they should be in order to fight the scenario of austerity and economic recession previously described. Urban commons are one of the possible answers and models for producing such positive social transformation. In the following pages, we will develop what urban commons are from a theoretical standpoint.

Activists like Naomi Klein argue that crises have often been used by governments worldwide to justify highly unpopular measures that would have been fiercely opposed in other contexts (Klein 2008). ↩︎
For an interpretation of the imbrications between crises, cities and austerity policies, see Peck (2012) for the American context and Sevilla-Buitrago (2015a) for the European context. ↩︎
Check (González (2007), Griffiths (1998) for an explanation on this procedure, called urban marketing. ↩︎
Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza and Sevilla were just a few of the main capitals that held demonstrations on 15 May 2011 and in the following weeks which congregated thousands of people (The Barcelona encampment was the longest, which lasted 45 days in a row). More information about the cities that held 15M demonstrations, as well as their numbers and other references, can be found in the wiki created by the Indignados Movement: . ↩︎

Zaragoza Accesible: un caso práctico de integración de SIG con fines sociales en el currículo educativo del grado de arquitectura

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

MRSZ 2018: Mapa de Riesgo Social de Zaragoza. De técnica de gestión de poblaciones a praxis de consolidación de los comunes

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 22:08:41 +0100

Transparency project: The observer, observed... or the gestation of the documentation, dissemination and transparency programme

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The following text is an excerpt from the material we produced for the book accompanying the —a collaborative effort by Ethel Baraona, Pablo García Bachiller, and myself as members of the documentation, dissemination, and web transparency team. The aim of these texts was to explain our work while offering a different, more intimate perspective on another viewpoint: the one presented by the BEAU through its selection of projects.

Since its inception, BEAU has been a snapshot of Spanish architecture and urbanism generated in the course of the previous two years, viewed through the lens of an independent jury with alternating members who bring with them their particular vision of the moment. What is perhaps not so obvious is that it is also a reflection of its own time. The observer is also the observed object.

In recent years we have seen how the Internet and ICT has entered the day to day existence of most people in developed countries. Even websites that have been part of our daily lives for a relatively long time have had to evolve to survive: it is no longer enough to have something to say; is not enough to be a mere shop window. There is such an excess of information on the Internet that we have to provide something more if we do not want thecdocumentary noise to drown out our message. No wonder, then, that Web 2.0, a web that allows user participation, has evolved, giving rise to many social networks (so fashionable lately), blogs, etc., and a change in the way we communicate with our friends, acquaintances and professional contacts. New interaction channels like Twitter have changed not only where we tell something but also what, how and when we tell it. Recent social events in the world have shown that although this is just the beginning, social networking can and will continue to play an exponentially significant role in many fields that they were not even designed for, proving their astonishing capability for adaptation and evolution.

Some say that the current crisis is a crisis of values, more than an economic crisis. We have lost faith in banks, businesses … which is why we are beginning to call them to account. It is increasingly common for us to ask where a product comes from, by whom and how it was manufactured, what is done with its waste, before we decide to buy… and we want to know who is funded by our money when we open a bank account or buy certain products or services. No wonder, then, that the companies which inform us about this information in a clear, transparent way are beginning to stand out from those that do not, and are starting to be more successful.

All of this may have helped to promote current concepts like coworking, crowdfunding, crowdthinking, citizen participation … i.e., different models of participation and collaboration based on perfectly familiar concepts like teamwork, knowledge society and collective intelligence to achieve optimal results that overcome individual limitations.

In this context, it is not surprising that this year’s BEAU has drawn on all these parameters and conditions. Actually, it could not have been otherwise. The documentation, dissemination and transparency team, formed by Ethel Baraona, Pablo García Bachiller and myself, has collated some of these parameters and included them in this Biennial, establishing for the purpose common goals and a teamwork and consensus-based methodology that gives us a degree of freedom of movement while at the same time allowing each of us to develop themes which, due to affinity or knowledge, we can best handle to achieve the best possible results. All of this is part of an integrated, unitary project focused on defining the known ingredients in a new, unitary and coherent way, and generating an optimal response to the Directors’ commission. At the end of the day, that is essentially our job as architects. The following pages explain the three major pillars of the project. To make it easier to understand our work, each text focuses on a specific issue and is signed by the person who was responsible for its development, although the real process was slightly different, as these three types of action never remain in their pure state and are continuously intermingled, along with the work done by each one of us.

Carlos Cámara Menoyo Documentation, dissemination and transparency team coordinator