Ana Méndez de Andés

Project title: 
Becoming-Common of the Public. Municipalist discourses, actors & strategies for commons-based governance of public spaces

Project outline: 
"Becoming-Common of the Public. Municipalist discourses, actors & strategies for commons-based governance of public spaces" is an activist-research project related to militant research projects on public space, urban processes and the commons, and the experience as an activist in the municipalist platform Ahora Madrid and a member of the militant-research collective Observatorio Metropolitano. The project is an inquiry into how social and institutional actors define the urban commons and their strategies to realise them in public spaces. 

In the last decades, commons have been a relevant political hypothesis for urban movements from the Right to the City to the copy-left culture. Lessons from traditional management of forests, fisheries or fields have merged with the production of knowledge sharing, open software or instances of care, to produce narratives and imaginary, as well as normative and practical know-how for emerging common practices around public spaces, urban gardens, housing cooperatives, time banks or social centres. Urban commons are situated between the materiality of the built environment and the immaterial organisation of social activities. Between 2015 and 2019, Spanish' Cities of Change' implemented public policies based on the commons in different fields and urban infrastructures, such as water, data sovereignty, social economy programs or cultural policies. These experiences show the commons hypothesis's potentials and limits and the need for new tools and theoretical frameworks.

The research will look at the actors and protocols involved in managing collective resources, the new institutional arrangements for social reproduction and the operational tools needed in the implementation of commons-based projects. It aims to define the operational tools needed to support self-managed projects, their experiences and knowledges, and identify the institutional transformations of public-estate institutions that produce public-common assemblages.

Primary supervisor: 
Professor Doina Petrescu

Co-supervisor: 
Professor Beth Perry (Urban Institute)

Date started: 01/10/2019