Common space: the city as commons

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Common SpaceThe City as CommonsBy Stavros StavridesZed Books LtdCopyright © 2016 Stavros StavridesAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-78360-328-2ContentsAcknowledgements, Foreword, Introduction, PART ONE Commoning space, 1 An urban archipelago of enclosures, 2 Expanding commoning: in, against and beyond capitalism?, PART TWO Inhabited common spaces, 3 Shared heterotopias: learning from the history of a social housing complex in Athens, 4 Housing and urban commoning, 5 Metropolitan streets as contested spaces, 6 Occupied squares, societies in movement, PART THREE Envisaged common spaces, 7 Practices of defacement: thresholds to rediscovered commons, 8 Thought-images and representations of the city as commons, 9 Representations of space and representations of emancipation, Conclusion: reinventing the city through commoning, Notes, Bibliography, Index, CHAPTER 1An urban archipelago of enclosuresThe contemporary metropolis and the normalization projectThe contemporary metropolis appears as a chaotic agglomeration of urban environments and flows. If Simmel's big city was already a real ordeal for the senses and a difficult place to live in, today's metropolises seem to have evolved to a paroxysmal accentuation and disarticulation of conflicting and overlapping urban rhythms. And if in modernist art's imaginary the big city could have been envisaged as the possible locus of a city-symphony (Stavrides 2013: 35), in today's metropolis only cacophony seems possible.What appears as an incoherent and fragmented locus of human activities is characterized, however, by forms of spatiotemporal ordering that are meant to be compatible with each other. The city must be controlled and shaped by dominant power relations if it is to remain a crucial means for society's reproduction. True, the city is not simply the result of spatiotemporal ordering, in the same way as the society is not simply the result of social ordering. Order, social or urban, is a project rather than an accomplished state. It is, however, important that we locate the mechanisms through which the project of urban ordering is being shaped and implemented if we want to find out against which forces that resist or overspill this ordering such mechanisms were crafted. Ordering mechanisms, thus, do not simply execute certain programmed functions but constitute complicated self-regulating systems that interact with urban reality and 'learn' from their mistakes. Urban ordering, the metropolis itself, is a process, is contested, much in the same way that dominant social relations need to be reproduced every day. Capitalism itself is a process rather than a form of social organization that repeats itself throughout its micro-history and its macro-history (Holloway 2002 and 2010).If urban ordering is an ongoing process, what is, then, the role of urban ordering mechanisms? And what exactly is urban order when we talk about the contemporary metropolis? We could say that urban order is the impossible limit towards which practices of spatial classification and hierarchization tend in order to ensure that the city produces those spatial relations that are necessary for capitalism's reproduction. It appears as obvious that ordering mechanisms are mechanisms of control: the city can indeed be depicted as a turmoil of activities and spaces that need to be controlled. Ordering mechanisms, however, are not meant only to tame a complicated and highly differentiated form of human habitat (perhaps the most complicated one in human history so far). A rhetoric that attempts to legitimize them presents them in this way. However, those mechanisms are, to use Foucault's bold term, mechanisms of social normalization. Foucault insists that normalization is not simply the result of the legal system: 'techniques of normalization develop from and below a system of law, in its margins and maybe even against it' (Foucault 2009: 56).In terms of urban or