Session #143

– Workshop –

Who – The Urban Commons Research Collective – UCRC is a collective of scholars who aim to expand the understanding of urban commons and their radical potential to democratise access to resources through sharing and collaboration. The group understands the commons as open organisational systems for collective management that can promote sustainability and community well-being. Formed in 2018 at the Sheffield School of Architecture by Emre Akbil, Alex Axinte, Esra Can, Beatrice De Carli, Melissa Harrison, Ana Méndez de Andés, Katharina Moebus, Thomas Moore, Doina Petrescu, the collective has curated seminars, workshops and reading sessions involving academics and urban grassroots groups concerned with the city as a commons.

What – For this AHRA track, UCRC proposes a co-creation workshop to gather stories and practices of commoning found in diverse geographical and cultural contexts; to explore potential overlaps and mismatches between the English term ‘commons’ with the different expressions in different languages, and to map out the terms that are specific to each situation. We want to open the workshop to researchers and practitioners interested in exploring the different meanings of urban commons, the terms, practices, people and environments involved and how this gathering and exchanging of linguistic difference and experience can contribute to more careful ways of speaking and being in common.

This workshop is based on the experience of the UCRC, which is composed of people from seven countries, where only two of the ten members are native English speakers, and on the collaborative writing of the Urban Commons Handbook (Urban Commons Research Group, 2022), where cultural and linguistic translation played a crucial role. One of the ‘strands’ in the book looked at ‘Localities’ and how to “provide local practices with different positionings, concepts, and methodologies to challenge existing forms of separation and enclosure [and] to develop framings and representations that can both make visible and bring together different stories of commoning” (ibidem: 144-145).

Why – In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 71) argues that care matters in knowledge politics as a contribution to the ‘mattering of worlds’ where one of the deployments of this ‘mattering’ is the possibility of thinking-with. We follow this argument in the workshop with a proposal to think ‘in-common’ about the many translations and transformations of the urban commons. This workshop proposal comes from the acknowledgement that in contexts where the commons are contested, people gather and establish practices, have conversations and produce knowledge on their own terms. The workshop aims to act as a space of ‘mediation’, interested in experiences “endowed with the capacity to translate what they transport, to redefine it, redeploy it, and also to betray it” (Latour, 1993: 81).

UCRC members recognise themselves in the English term ‘commons’, but this recognition is only possible through a work of care: the always imperfect translation between cultural systems, languages, spaces of action, and epistemic environments. It also involves a translation between theory and practice, academy and activism, and social and academic institutionality. While our shared written work is produced in English, we carry out our research and practice in settings that use different languages and mobilise a diverse constellation of concepts that, taken together, greatly expand the meaning of ‘urban commons’. Exploring and expanding these constellations can contribute to a more diverse and translocal language around commoning, and, ultimately, the ways we think, speak, and act.

How – This two-hour workshop will investigate the terms and meanings associated with the idea of ‘urban commoning’ across different places, cultures and languages. It will address this task in two parts. In the first one, we will collect terms/words linked to situated experiences and create a constellation of terms and concepts related to situated stories of commoning. In the second, we will develop tentative definitions in English of terms that are not direct ‘translations’ but a situated description of the practices in an accessible, common/s language. The workshop’s outcomes will be incorporated as part of the collective construction of an online archive.

Join – The workshop is open to everyone who wishes to contribute to its aims of investigating terms, practices and meanings associated with ‘urban commoning’ across different localities. We welcome expressions of interest through the AHRA Conference platform. At the conference, we will accommodate everyone interested regardless of their contribution.

References

Bruno Latour (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

Urban Commons Archive (upcoming) https://sites.google.com/sheffield.ac.uk/urban-commons/urban-commons-archive

Urban Commons Research Group (2022) Urban Commons Handbook. Dpr-books.