The Commons

Definition

The commons names a form of collective, non-privatized relation to shared resources — land, housing, public space, cultural life — held in common rather than converted into private property or financial asset. In this wiki the term is not yet a fully developed concept but a counter-concept: it is posed against the privatized, self-referential Architectural Object and the financialized Neoliberal Metropolis. Bismarck proposes to "disinvent the object" and defend "the commons of the city"; Kaika (via Goudsmit) holds that a building becomes a "truly public icon" only when it is "embedded in social and cultural urban life, engage[s] with the city around it, enhance[s] the urban commons and inspire[s] civic pride." The commons is thus defined negatively — as what financialisation encloses and privatizes — and normatively — as the social use and public embedding that the object forecloses. Its historical shadow is Enclosure: the original process by which common land was fenced off into private property, which the financialized conversion of "housing-as-social-right into housing-as-eternal-debt" repeats at the scale of the city.

Key Thinkers

• Pedro Levi Bismarck — "the commons of the city" as the counter to the architectural object; "disinventing the object" (after Manoel de Barros).
• Maria Kaika — the "urban commons" as the criterion of a truly public (non-"autistic") icon.
• Tim Gough — a Deleuzo-Guattarian route: architecture as "flows" conjugated to produce a "surplus value of a code" beyond capitalist surplus value, resisting capital's "false necessity."
• (Related, not yet paged: the commons tradition — Hardin, Ostrom, Federici, Caffentzis, Negri & Hardt — see log.)

Related Concepts

• Enclosure — the historical privatization of common land; the commons' constitutive opposite.
• Architectural Object — the privatized, self-referential building the commons is posed against.
• Neoliberal Metropolis — the financialized city that encloses the commons via rent and debt.
• Critical Architecture — the critical refusal of the privatized object and defense of the commons.
• Housing — the site where "housing-as-social-right" is converted into "housing-as-eternal-debt."
• Gentrification — the displacement of incumbent residents as a form of enclosure of the everyday commons.
• Everyday Life — the lived terrain the commons would re-embed in social use.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Architecture of the City (in the Age of its Financial Reproducibility) — "the commons of the city" and "disinventing the object."
• Who Wins and Who Loses in the Production of Cultural Iconic Architecture? — Kaika's "urban commons" as the criterion of the public icon.
• Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture — the "surplus value of a code" as a non-capitalist surplus.
• Autistic Architecture — the "autistic" icon as the negation of the urban commons.
• The Enigma of Capital — the "right to the city" and the class struggle over the built environment.
• A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the domestic register of the commons: the colony's "common laundry, (taking the most trying part of domestic labor from each house)" (p. 48) with its central church, schoolroom and library — shared facilities grafted onto privatized family houses, the household's worst labor commoned while the dwelling stays private. The 1869 precedent for asking which functions of shelter must be held in common. See cooperative-housekeeping.
• Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the commons as the interior theory's diagnostic absence: interior designers "often overlook critical discussions about the sociopolitical issues occurring in the built environment" because "most interior spaces are private and not a part of the commons. Designers may feel that they are absolved from allegiance to meeting the collective demands of the public" — "this inattention to the concerns of urban society is a cavity in everyday design practice." The commons names exactly the allegiance the private interior's design quietly exempts itself from. See politicizing-the-interior.
• source-notes/solomon-2018-public-spheres-hong-kong

Open Questions

• Is "the commons of the city" a practicable program or an aspirational, resisting-critical posture (Bismarck's own open question)?
• Can the commons be operationalized architecturally without collapsing into the "public rhetorical form" Bismarck criticizes — or into the "social architecture" localism that Gribat & Meireis critique?
• Does Gough's "surplus value of a code" escape the "architectural Deleuzism" Spencer critiques, or does it re-aestheticize the commons as form?