Urban space and everyday life are permeated with asymmetrical, complex and contested relationships, which are indicative of and are intertwined with challenges of political repre-sentation, 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 expres-sion of neoliberal, post-fordist and patriarchal society and the reproduction that is tradi-tionally associated with care activities requires profound rethinking in terms of value extrac-tion and value generation in the contemporary city. She highlights that the regime ofneo-liberal capitalism extracts value from everyday life in a process of reconfiguration and com-modification of socialreproduction and its spatialization. “To overcome capitalism’s ten-dency to institute zero-sum games, which take awayfrom nature, public power, and social reproduction what they give to production” (ivi: 152), a collaborative mindset is needed. Urban commons, in their multiple configurations, embrace projects and practices that in-spire novel forms ofspatial justice and inclusive society.
For a long time ‘caring’ was considered an individual, private activity, mainly declined in a female free form (Patel, Moore 2017). Thanks to feminist scholars and debates, it became evident that it is also a political and social issue, for it is at the base of the reproduction of life. Therefore, it needs to be grasped as a public shared responsibility, to be supported by infrastructure and common actions, which can result in urban commons.
The scientific debate on urban commoning and spatial practices of and for care encourages reflecting on the strongconnection between the production of commons and the grassroot practices of social and socio-ecological reproduction.While social movements have been “casting a veneer of emancipatory charisma over the predatory political economy of neolib-eralism” (Fraser, 2022: 136), practices to answer basic human needs have been considered nurturing forces for the production of urban commons. Care Collective (2021) defines ‘commons’ as ‘infrastructure of care’, through which social bonds are established and strengthened. In fact, these collective care practices not only encompass ‘affective labour’ of social reproduction, but are also representative of broader resistance towards the liberation and re-appropriation of spaces. In terms of agro-ecological politics (Dehaene, Tornaghi 2021), this is reflected in the relationship between environment and society as developed by local communities. The result is an action aimed atreconfiguring dominant power relations and distributional patterns of goods and resources, as well as coping with the risks of the degeneration of the contemporary city and the associated environmental collapse.
The literature specifically speaks of ‘social reproduction of resistance in the city’, an often invisible and underestimated work that represents the fundamental glue for what Boler de-fines inclusive, lateral, non-hierarchical learning or even consciousness-raising public spaces (2014).
Urban Commons 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.
This call of CONTESTI aims to collect theoretical, methodological, and empirical contribu-tions that deal with the concepts of urban commons and care, with the focus on (but not restricted to) the following topics:
- Production of commons – production of values
- Care as a social activity and public responsibility
- Everyday politics of urban commons
- Enabling spaces, enabling policies
- Conflict and resistance to urban extractivism
- Commons and (agro)ecologies for territorial regeneration
- Urban Commoning by care strategies
- Women and queer women for urban
Deadline for submissions: March, 31 2024
Download the CALL FOR PAPERS: ENG
