Description
Book SynopsisExperiences of the struggle for housing, ignited by the lack of social and affordable housing, have led to the establishing of shared and self-managed housing areas. In such a context, it becomes crucially important to re-think the need to define common urban worlds “from below". Here, Penny Travlou and Stavros Stavridis trace contemporary practices of urban commoning through which people re-define housing economies. Connecting to a rich literature on the importance of commons and of practices of commoning for the creation of emancipated societies, the authors discuss whether housing struggles and co-habitation experiences may contribute in crucial ways to the development of a commoning culture. The authors explore a variety of urban contexts through global case studies from across the Global North and South, in search of concrete examples that illustrate the potentialities of urban commoning.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Revisiting the housing question: The potentialities of urban commoning
Stavros Stavrides and Penny Travlou Part I Informal housing, infrastructures and commoning practices 1 Weaving commons in Salvador (Bahia, Brazil): Urgency, recognition, convergence
Ana Fernandes, Glória Cecília Figueiredo and Gabriela Leandro Pereira 2 Activists infrastructures and commoning ‘from below’: The case of Cheetah Camp, Mumbai
Lalitha Kamath and Purva Dewoolkar 3 Subaltern place as an infrastructure of consolidation: Settling an informal neighbourhood in Mumbai
Himanshu Burte 4 Commoning Aboriginal ethno-architecture: Indigenous housing experiences in Australia
Angus Cameron and Penny Travlou 5 Feeding together: The revolution starts in the kitchen
Marc Gavaldà and Claudio Cattaneo Part II Cooperatives, squats and housing struggles 6 Hybrid commons: Housing cooperatives in Zurich
Irina Davidovici 7 Urban commoning and popular power: The ‘autonomous neighbourhoods’ in Mexico City
Stavros Stavrides 8 Berlin and the city as commons
Mathias Heyden in conversation with Christian Hiller, Anh-Linh Ngo and Max Kaldenhoff 9 Refugee housing squats as shared heterotopias: The case of City Plaza Athens squat
Nikolas Kanavaris 10 The Dandara community-occupation: Destitution-constitution movements towards urban commons in Belo Horizonte (Brazil)
Lucia Capanema Alvares, João B. M. Tonucci Filho and Joviano Maia Mayer Part III In defence of the collective right to housing 11 Materializing the self-management: Tracking the
commons in Yugoslav housing economy
Jelica Jovanovic 12 A Greek activist’s reflections on the housing struggles and the movement against foreclosures in Athens
Tonia Katerini 13 The power of public participation: Socio-economic impacts of urban development on the local commons in Egypt
Mohamed Magdi Hagras 14 From social urbanism to strategies of collective action in Medellin
Penny Travlou in conversation with Catalina Ortiz and Harry Smith 15 Housing policy as a form of urban governance: The Barbican Estate and the enclosure of the urban commons
Ioanna Piniara Epilogue: Congregations: On the inhabitation of urban humans
AbduMaliq Simone Index
