1st Edition
Commoning the City Empirical Perspectives on Urban Ecology, Economics and Ethics
This collection seeks to expand the limits of current debates about urban commoning practices that imply a radical will to establish collaborative and solidarity networks based on anti-capitalist principles of economics, ecology and ethics.
The chapters in this volume draw on case studies in a diversity of urban contexts, ranging from Detroit, USA to Kyrenia, Cyprus – on urban gardening and land stewardship, collaborative housing experiments, alternative food networks, claims to urban leisure space, migrants’ appropriation of urban space and workers’ cooperatives/collectives. The analysis pursued by the eleven chapters opens new fields of research in front of us: the entanglements of racial capitalism with enclosures and of black geographies with the commons, the critical history of settler colonialism and indigenous commons, law as a force of enclosure and as a strategy of commoning, housing commons from the urban scale perspective, solidarity economies as labour commons, territoriality in the urban commons, the non-territoriality of mobile commons, the new materialist and post-humanist critique of the commons debate and feminist ethics of care.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
List of contributors
Introduction. Towards an Ethos for Commoning the City: An Introduction, Derya Özkan and Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç
PART 1. COMMONING URBAN NATURE
Chapter 1. Racial capitalism and a tentative commons. Urban farming and claims to space in post-bankruptcy Detroit, Rachael Baker
Chapter 2. The Politics of Food. Commoning Practices in Alternative Food Networks in Istanbul, Ayça Ince and Zeynep Kadirbeyoglu
Chapter 3. Insurgent Ecologies: Rhetorics of Resistance and Aspiration in Istanbul’s Ancient Market Gardens (2014-2018), Charles Zerner
Chapter 4. "A Revolution under our feet": Food Sovereignty and the Commons in the case of Campi Aperti, Massimo De Angelis and Dagmar Diesner
PART 2. CLAIMS TO URBAN LAND: BEYOND PUBLIC - PRIVATE PROPERTY
Chapter 5. Urban commoning and the right not to be excluded, Nicholas Blomley
Chapter 6. From graveyards to the ‘people’s gardens’: The making of public leisure space in Istanbul, Berin Golonu
Chapter 7. "Time to protect Kyrenia": defending the right to landscape in northern Cyprus, Ezgican Özdemir
Chapter 8. A migrant’s tale of two cities: Mobile Commons and the alteration of urban space in Athens and Hamburg, Martin Bak Jørgensen and Vasiliki Makrygianni
PART 3. RESPONSES TO PRECARITY
Chapter 9. Contradictions of housing commons: between middle class and anarchist models in Berlin, Kenton Card
Chapter 10. Precarious Commons. An Urban Garden for Uncertain Times, Elke Krasny
Chapter 11. Cooperative Economies as Commons: Labor and Production in Solidarity, Bengi Akbulut
Biography
Derya Özkan: Department of Cinema and Digital Media, Izmir University of Economics.
Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç: Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (2019–2020), Koç University and Department of Anthropology, Istanbul University.