In the 2010s, during my post as the editor-in-chief of the architecture magazine XXI, published in Turkey with an online version in Turkish and English, our editorial team decided to change the editorial line of XXI. We were more and more interested in socially engaged practices. This had already started before the Gezi protests in Istanbul, but its emergence and spatial reflection made us realise the urgency and relevancy of this editorial shift. We were looking at practices doing“good work” in and with disadvantaged communities. We were trying to make these projects more visible by covering them with the motivation of playing a role in redefining architecture’s relationship with the capital.
XXI started in 1999, and its heydays were during the 2000s when the starchitecture and construction boom in Turkey overlapped. I had been employed in 2004 as an editor. It was very easy to publish Zaha Hadid or Norman Foster through their PR agencies and press officers. It was an easy yet distant relationship we could form with these starchitects. Then the 2008 financial crisis happened. During my travels around Europe, I met and discussed with young offices in Greece, France, Germany, Croatia, etc. Their story was different from what was happening in Turkey, this was also the time when many well-known names in the architecture scene were coming to Turkey to deliver a lecture in the hope of getting a commission in return since Turkey was still having a construction boom during the late 2000s.
As the XXI team, we were no longer interested in the well-off, well-known architects’ projects mostly realised in China or Turkic countries with a design twist that was not relevant to its geography or its time. Six months after the Gezi protests in May 2013, I became the owner of the magazine I had been working for. With more freedom in the editorial choices and the fresh memory of the protest, we started to change the editorial line even more bluntly. Before, we were more focused on contemporary architecture in Turkey, with the motivation of distinguishing XXI from international magazines. However, the local architectural production was not getting better despite the huge amount of money flowing into the construction boom. What happened after the Gezi protests was also depressing, the police raided the camp in the park and the struggle was repressed with violence. The architectural scene, probably as in many other fields, was mainly attempting to go back to business as usual. Meanwhile in Barcelona Ada Colau was elected and experimenting with municipalism, pop-up urban parks were emerging in many parts of Europe, Athens was setting an example for solidarity with the migrants, spatial practices of squatting and temporary use were becoming playgrounds for young architects, Architecture for Humanity was becoming as famous as Rem Koolhaas. Architects were living and designing with communities, their relationship with the project site was changing, they were listening, they were taking time to design and redesign, their obsession about their creation to stay intact was being overthrown, appropriation was becoming a parameter in the design process.
So, we wanted to reflect that wave. At the time, we were mostly using the term“social architecture”. We did not have the budget to see all these projects so whenever we saw a project that would fit in our understanding of social architecture, we would contact the architects, receive project descriptions and images and cover the project in the magazine. In early 2015, we initiated an English website for the magazine. For that, I started to contact some socially engaged practices across Europe and conducted interviews with them. Yet all we were hearing were the stories of architects and their intentions. We did not know what was happening in real life, yet we were continuing to cover these social architectures. We did not know how to generate a critique of these practices.
At that time Otto Von Busch(2014-2020) was a columnist at the magazine and his main theme was social design. In his very inspiring articles, he was asking whether design can ever do good and whether we are rightly informed by hearing about social design only from the designers themselves. The all-well-intended motivations of designers in their engagement with the social structures were hopefully shifting power relations in the community but the designers were not explicit about the direction of this power shift. For example, when designers claimed to make a certain marginalised group visible, it was not clear whose visibility this new group was replacing or whether this was actually helping them for better living conditions or not. Otto’s critical questions also made me question the genuineness of our editorial line. We were publishing social architecture projects from around the globe, without stepping foot on these territories, or with no information from the local people experiencing these projects. Our information source was solely architects themselves, their perspective and their story were dominating the narrative. As a magazine, we were making a specific approach in architecture more visible, without knowledge of its effects on the local context socially, economically or environmentally. We did not have the financial means to pay external authors or photographers, to go and visit these spaces ourselves. The economic model of the magazine was sustainable and based on revenues from advertisements that paid our salaries, printing and distribution costs.
Also, the revenue gained from the sale of the magazine was declining more and more in the years, either due to a shift in purchasing habits or the existence of our freely accessible website, or both. With the launch of our English website, also as a way to escape from the suffocating political atmosphere in Turkey, I wanted to experiment to create an international online magazine. With all the critical questions, adapted from Otto’s articles, I soon realised that we need another kind of critique for social architecture. Writing a critique on a Zaha Hadid building and a pop-up urban park definitely needed different approaches. The promise of architecture was totally different in the two cases, so should be the critique. One important aspect of the critique is a coherency check. Is the project delivered according to the ideals of the architect and/or community? This question would only be answered with local knowledge but then how to gather that? Moreover, how could we scale up these local projects to trigger some real change? How would a pop-up urban park start a revolution? Or could it at all?
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work(2015) is one of the main reasons I decided to start this PhD. They introduced me to the concept of“folk politics”, a very relatable term for social architecture. Folk politics is the immediate response to a local condition that occurs spatially and temporarily. It covers almost all architecture of the commons projects. Some of them which gained legal status(such as Prinzessinnengarten) may be exempt from going under the umbrella of folk politics, yet still how long they will be able to survive against the forces of the state and market is debatable. For Srnicek and Williams, folk politics is inefficient in triggering a real change, the temporary and spatial interventions by these local communities do not scale up to generate a real change in the society. Following the many occupy movements disbanded either by police violence or by the dissolution of the communities, there had been an argument about these movements planting seeds. I found this argument naive, if not misleading. The question of social architecture leading the path to something more than folk politics, some fundamental change, became a concern.
I wanted to research how social architecture generated change, if there was any, even for its local communities. And I wanted to see whether the architects’ intentions that are being widely spread as project texts are being realised. Was social architecture keeping its promises? An underlying motivation was to open a new path of critique of these practices so that they would get better. Through this research, I was going to learn how to develop a new type of critique for social architecture. These were mainly the reasons why I started this PhD.
Enter: Commons
Shorter than a year into my PhD, I started to read more and more on the commons. It resonated very well with the ambitions of social architecture, which was always a difficult term. Was there any architecture at all that is not social? Common space, urban commons… These were also not so easy terms, yet they did not work well for me because I had the urge to focus on architecture. I had to focus on architecture because I wanted the profession of architecture to be explored, criticised and if possible altered, of course not by myself alone but collectively. I called it"commons architecture" for a long while. Despite the grammatical error, I liked how they defined each other by standing next to one another without a possessive nature. I didn't want to call it"architectural commons" or"architecture of the commons". For me, the commons and architecture shape each other and through this transaction, transmission, some form of a trans-mode"commons architecture" appears. But no one else took on the term"commons architecture" during this research, so in the end, I could no longer resist Lieven De Cauter’s insistence, left my grammatical error behind and opted for the"architecture of the commons".
For almost a decade, the potentials of the commons have been widely published, for the city, for natural resources, knowledge, the internet. It has been approached economically and legally, from an urban, architectural and design scale. Almost all the theories, starting from the depths of time before the enclosure of the commons to today in the 21st century, have some appealing ambiguity in them. The social relations between people in the commons, namely the act of commoning is crucial for the commons and yet equally unpredictable. Theoretically, any urban, economic or architectural scholar cannot draw a picture of what is expected to happen to these commons. There is evidently a vision, but it is foggy and dreamy still. There is the dream of a new world to come, yet how this new world would operate is an ongoing experiment carried out by dispersed communities across the globe.
I also did some commoning actions and joined some communities around the world to work towards a common goal, such as Civicwise and Wikitribune. I was never totally immersed in these communities, maybe more in Civicwise compared to Wikitribune. First, it was not realistic of me to take on more workload, since I was working full time and doing a PhD at the same time. Secondly, I preferred to keep a critical distance. It felt like if I started participatory action research, I would lose some of this critical lens. These experiences gave me some insight into the practical side of commoning. How hard it was to survive as a commons when all the market forces were working against you? How could an architect survive if she didn’t accept commercial commissions and only wanted to work with communities? Even the states in Europe have been in permanent austerity politics since the 1980s which meant that public commissions were also very low budget. So if an architect does not want to work for the private market but for the public could she even follow a commons approach, let alone do a proper participatory process? If yes, then how could these practices be shared with a wider audience? How could an architecture magazine based on the principles of the commons(beyond the market and the state) survive? Can the magazine, or a web platform better, become a commons itself? So, I started to steer my PhD towards these questions. The commons became an overall encompassing topic, making loops and three-dimensional spirals that contain everything either at the core or at its fringes. The plan was to make a research by design PhD, I would research the design of the web platform. A community of users around the globe was going to write critical pieces on the architecture of the commons, like Wikipedia but for architecture this time. The research was to be about the protocols of this commons and its sustainability.
This was the moment of convergence of some different happenings. Bitcoin was getting a lot of attention, changing the nature of the Internet as a network by introducing decentralised systems. The same technology behind Bitcoin could be implied in many other projects, giving a stamp of contribution to projects before being distributed to the next person. The collaborative editing tools were becoming more popular with Google Docs embedding the feature. Different contributors’ texts and their various versions in time could be monitored on the document easily. Decentralised autonomous organisations(DAOs) were becoming popular for some web-based projects, to be improved by distributed cooperative organisations(DisCO). These were coming along with protocols and platforms for collaboration on the web, allowing people to run projects together in a complex way, yet get the acknowledgement and remuneration for their work in a comparably egalitarian way.
Next to the virtual world, the actual world was learning about the Catalan Integral. Starting soon after the 2008 financial crisis, Catalan Integral had become a viable project in years, providing for many households via agriculture, manufacturing and logistics. The interviews with cooperative members and reports on its operation structure were being widely published, at least in the circles I follow. Some experiments for news-making were also on the fore, such as Wikitribune, Nwzer, Civil, and Sapien Network. Some of these were planning to share their revenues-via cryptocurrency- as calculated by the collaboration system of the platform. People would be collaboratively writing the news and would get paid for their work. None of these initiatives could actually be successful, nor did they trigger a change in media. In politics, post-truth started to take over the“establishment”. Fact-checking became a concern of some NGOs, always late to the party, way after the spread of the fake news, never really correcting the wrong information. At Wikitribune, at a point, fact-checking had become more common than news-making. So, in all these circumstances, I was dreaming of a web platform on the architecture of the commons, in which people from local communities would contribute to the critique of these projects. This dream proved to be unrealistic, following a series of experiences of commoning(Civicwise and Wikitribune) and a funding application(Erasmus+). I explain these in detail in the Intermezzo sections.
Positioning
This dissertation is a journey rather than a destination. We start with defining the architecture of the commons, in what it is but also in what it is not. Then we explore the potentials of the architecture of the commons in its performative character, rather than in its realisation. In part three, we critique the existing spheres of media, online communities and architectural education and discuss how the commons can provide a new way for the betterment of these spheres. In the last part, we unravel the common features of the architecture of the commons and knowledge commons in their relationship with power and critique and propose some tools for their critique and protocols in-becoming as a prefigurative practice. During this bumpy and joyful route of exploration, we followed some principles: critical distance, no co-option, staying with architecture.
One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that: to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are(already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities-as gifts.(Graeber, 2004, p.12)
I take Graber’s point as a critique of existing“viable alternatives.” This has been one of the underlying motivations for this PhD. Without a critique, the practices of the architecture of the commons is bound to dissolve and die. The voluntary, well-intended work of architects does not ensure that the project will result in the betterment of the social, economic and cultural circumstances of the community it is built for and with.
In order to save itself, capitalism could revert to a model of social democracy or to a Children of Men-like authoritarianism. Without a credible and coherent alternative to capitalism, capitalist realism will continue to rule the political-economic unconscious.(Fisher, 2009, p.78)
There is an unsettling feedback mechanism between the existing social structure and alternatives that people bring about to change it. Till now capitalism managed to co-opt every concept that is raised to oppose and alter it. Commons is not exempt from this trend. We need to be careful not to co-opt or dilute this term to protect its true meaning and radicality. What is shared is not necessarily a commons, without a political direction there is no commoning.
For us no complexities, no contradictions, no learning-from-Las-Vegas,(…) no biennale-activism, no fake-bottom-up-we-work-for-the-people, no architects-as-social-entrepreneur, no architect-as-social-opinionist, no-architect-as-cultural-opinionist,(…) no confusing architecture with everything that is not architecture; no confusing life with everything that is not life.(Aureli, 2008)
Even though we may be borrowing terminology from philosophy, geography, sociology and anthropology our main concern is architecture. We will not start calling anything architecture while it is a spatial practice, yet we will not play just another role in mystifying architecture and placing it in the high palace. As with anything in this research, we will approach architecture critically. We know that architecture has been an accomplice of the capital. If we do not put the spotlight on architecture and architects, we cannot expect change neither in the field nor in the wider society it is operating in.
This PhD takes a critical position on the performance of and reflections on the emergent architectures of the commons. It goes beyond Ostrom's(1990) managerial lens and expands towards a broad techno-social literature on governance. By questioning real-life implications and representations of architectures of the commons, we critically and constructively reflect on existing alternatives, including learning from my own actions.
Here the commons is understood as a dynamic, open and ambiguous process, a continuation towards new horizons of possibilities for an alternative world, not an endpoint. This research is an attempt to explore the potential of the architecture of the commons not as a final destination but as a practice of co-learning with fellow travellers via sharing knowledge, tools and frameworks to construct their own version of this journey,
Theoretical framework
The commons between theory and practice
One of the most cited articles on the commons was published in 1968 by the American ecologist Garret Hardin. While trying to prove there cannot be enough food to feed the population of people and other species with a Neomalthusian(Malthusianism, n.d.) approach, Hardin claimed that commonly managed meadows would be over-grazed and hence the management of the commons would end up in a tragedy. His idea resonated especially among natural science disciplines for years, and at the same time, it has received various criticism. His theory of the Tragedy of the Commons has been proven wrong by many scholars such as Elinor Ostrom and David Harvey. Their reasoning lies in the author’s mistaking the commons for open access(Harvey, 2011) and his limited imagination of people’s capacities toward collectivism(Ostrom, 2008). While Hardin considers the commons just as a solution for resource management, we agree with Massimo De Angelis’s(2017) definition of the commons as“social systems in which a plurality, a‘community’, by standing in particular relation to the‘things’, the‘goods’, also reproduces the social relations among the people”.
Motivation
Theoretical framework