Urban space and everyday life are permeated with asymmetrical, complex and contested relationships, which are indicative of and are intertwined with challenges of political representation, ecological and economic crises, social and cultural exclusion, as well as struggles in accessing healthcare, education and social services. Simultaneously they also channel hopes, needs and desires for collectively negotiated social orders.
According to Fraser (2022), the hierarchical division between the production as an expression of neoliberal, post-fordist and patriarchal society and the reproduction that is traditionally associated with care activities requires profound rethinking in terms of value extraction and value generation in the contemporary city. She highlights that the regime of neo-liberal capitalism extracts value from everyday life in a process of reconfiguration and commodification of social reproduction and its spatialization. To overcome this, a collaborative mindset is needed. Urban commons, in their multiple configurations, embrace projects and practices that inspire novel forms of spatial justice and inclusive society. They express the entanglements among spaces, communities, and governing models. The unceasing process of reconfiguration of the geography of people, activities and rules of self-organization, typical of the commoning process, is based on mutual recognition, shared values, openness, mutualism and care. The three items (commoning, community, space) are equally necessary to the creation of commons, moving towards enabling policies and enabling spaces.
Call for Papers
This call is edited by Chiara Belingardi (LaPEI - University of Florence), Gabriella Esposito De Vita, Stefania Ragozino (Institute for Research on Innovation and Services for Development - National Research Council of Italy), Tihomir Viderman (Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg), and is one of the outputs of the AESOP TG PSUC Conference Naples 2023 "Urban Conflicts and Peace: Everyday Politics of Commons" (https://aesop-planning.eu/tg-news/public-spaces-and-urban-cultures/aesop-tg-psuc-conference-naples-urban-conflicts-and-peace-everyday-politics-of-commons). It aims to collect theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that deal with the concepts of urban commons and care, with the focus on (but not restricted to) the following topics:
1. Production of commons - production of values;
2. Care as a social activity and public responsibility;
3. Everyday politics of urban commons;
4. Enabling spaces, enabling policies;
5. Conflict and resistance to urban extractivism;
6. Commons and (agro)ecologies for territorial regeneration;
7. Urban Commoning by care strategies;
8. Women and queer women for urban resistance.
Contributions have to be submitted by March, 31 2024 at the following link:
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/contesti/about/submissions
Contesti. Città, Territori, Progetti is the Journal of Regional and Urban Planning, studies and design of the Architecture Department of Florence University. It represents since many years a credited voice in the field of the urban and regional studies and of the related policies and practices of planning and design. Through its sections, Contesti accounts for a plurality of topics and studies, research/action, policies, planning and design experiences with the aim to render in reflexive and critical terms the multifaceted complexity of the transformative processes that affects built environment and human settlements.
