The commons is political, so is its architecture.
The discussions about the commons often tend to cast a happy-go-lucky narrative about sharing. This narrative of“if we were to share everything, the world be a better place, so commons is a very good idea” is not wrong per se but it obscures the struggles behind the generation and sustaining of the commons. In the existing world order, in which the individual is valued very highly over society, the commons can only happen through struggle. Neoliberalism does not only signify the market logic of the global exchange of goods and services but is at the same time the culture in which we live. As Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval(2013) explain, neoliberalism has at the same altered our subjectivities, including our socialising habits directed towards competition rather than collaboration. In an effort to find some space beyond the state and the market(the main actors of neoliberalism working hand in hand), the commons not only struggle for a legal basis but at the same time political and social ones. It is inspiring to think of water, air or languages as commons yet one should not overlook the privatisation of freshwater resources, heavy air pollution by big industries and colonial practices against communities sharing an indigenous language. The commons is political, founding a commoning practice around a community is realised always as a political struggle. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all the people in the community share the same political view, yet the mere act of their commoning is political.
While architecture is involved in spatialising these commoning activities, that space(re)production process is also political. The reason behind emphasising the political characteristics of the architecture of the commons lies in the altering position of architecture in its relation to politics. This implies a shift from an architecture that reflects and multiplies the political realms of its day to an architecture that challenges and tries to alter this realm. Here architecture is no longer merely the provision of a service to the client, holding capital to construct, but is rather a statement about how the society can be governed in another way. For us, commons is an anti-capitalist endeavour in which the common good of all the planet is favoured over individual or group interests. Architecture of the commons is the critical(re)production of spaces for other ways of living in postcapitalism, in the here and now, even if temporary.
The governance of the commons determines its architecture, architecture determines the governance of the commons.
The relationship between architecture and the commons is an intricate one. They both affect each other, in this sense the relationship between the two is reciprocal. While the commons define the role of architecture for the shared sources and the community, the way architecture is organised also impacts the way the community acts and lives in the commons. This symbiotic relationship becomes more evident because of the in-becoming characteristics of the architecture of the commons. The ever-changing modus operandi of the commons, the open-ended design structure and the possibilities for appropriation all come together. Either with or without the involvement of architects, the architecture of the commons adapts to the activities happening on the ground, expands, shrinks, moves if necessary. With every new architectural configuration commoning is reshaped as well.
Commons is comprised of three main ingredients, the commoners or the community, which has been used interchangeably throughout this research, resources and the governance of sharing these resources. When architecture is involved in commoning, it becomes both part of the resources and governance. Architecture’s provision of spaces is added to the shared resources, and the way it is provisioned and configured plays a role in the governance of the commons. While the architecture is dictated by the needs and desires of the community, its production also has an impact on the future sharing of spaces. As seen in R-Urban, the kitchen contributes as a shared resource and at the same time has implications on the governance, for example by its potential use to welcome newcomers or by its cleaning routines. The form of architecture and its content, namely the commons, become one.
Appropriation and care are crucial in the interaction between the commons and architecture. Following Massimo De Angelis’s(2017) reading of the commons as social systems, we need to keep in mind the dynamics of a community. Coupled with the experimentation on finding other ways of living, the commons is in a perpetual in-becoming state. The way architecture facilitates and enriches this aspect happens mostly via appropriation and care. Appropriation not only allows for a flexible and adaptable structure, but it also gives the community the agency to intervene in the architecture of the commons, which in time alters the subjectivities and the social system of the commons. Care for the commons and for the architecture of the commons are interlinked. The care approach in governance introduces intersectional perspectives, inclusion, maintenance and repair of the existing material and immaterial resources, such as the architecture but at the same time human relations.
Architecture enables prefiguration.
The practice of architecture has been divided into two from its conception till today as projecting and making. While projecting is about a world to come, making is its embodiment. Prefiguration is embedded in the practice of architecture to dream of and(sometimes) execute a new way of living. By generating spaces for the commons, and playing a part in visualising and realising its needs and desires, architecture enables prefiguration. Prefiguration implies a condition in which means and ends meet(Stavrides, 2016). People aiming to change the world in a certain way form a community and start to live in the world they would like to create. As a political practice, prefiguration explores alternatives to the existing world order in the here and now, without waiting for a transformation or revolution to happen. Instead of following and multiplying the existing social structures, architecture functions to radically imagine this new world.
An architectural project is a vision towards the future, very similar to prefiguration. Architecture and prefiguration converge in the commons. The perpetual in-becoming state of the architecture of the commons allows prefiguration to nourish and experiment with the protocols of sharing resources. On the other hand, the role of the architect is also challenged. Instead of an external visionary, she is mostly part of the community. Projecting is fed by the ideas and concepts that the community would like to bring about, the making becomes an engaged practice instead of an alienated one. In line with the ideals of prefiguration where means and ends are coherent, the projecting and making of architecture of the commons are complimentary and harmonious. For example, if the commons is dreaming of a just world, then one imagines its architectural production to be a just one as well, in which labour and nature are not exploited.
Performativity supports prefiguration while blocking critique.
The representation of architecture of the commons in the media, mostly in architectural magazines, journals and websites, is heavily informed by its makers. Most of the texts and images are generated by the architects themselves who are involved in these projects as designers. This situation grants the architecture of the commons a performative character. As Judith Butler(1993) coins the term, this is a discourse becoming reality. By declaring these projects are commons, that they support solidarity, or generate caring environments, the architects display performativity. What they declare becomes accepted and considered real. In this sense, even realised in the existing world order, within the confines of the state and market forces, performativity enables the architecture of the commons to play a role in prefiguration. Performativity functions to generate a make-believe environment about sharing spaces and resources of the commons. This is very useful in creating and sustaining the architecture of the commons since during these spaces prefiguration is experimented with, all the while the commons is kept alive and well.
On the other hand, since the large proportion of the discourse on the architecture of the commons stems from the architects themselves who designed these spaces, it blocks critique. There is not a contradictory opinion in the media about how the architecture of the commons is operating, and whether it really achieves its social and/or environmental goals. Compared to the critique of mainstream architectural projects, the critique of the architecture of the commons requires a different approach. While the designers of the architecture of the commons are overrepresented in the commons discourse, their intentions are widely published with their own words and images and there is hardly any reading of what has actually been realised. This may help spread a new approach to the role of architecture in socio-political spheres, alter widely used concepts by for example introducing solidarity and care into the discourse of architecture, and trigger different ways of thinking about our society and its spatial(re)production in the field of architecture. Nonetheless, we cease to understand how the commons operate in real life. The critique can be defined as a coherency check between what has been intended and what has been realised. When the overall discourse on the architecture of the commons is developed by the designers of these projects, we hear about the intentions as if they have been achieved perfectly lacking a critical lens on its actual realisation.
Without critique, the architecture of the commons misses its chance to generate a real change.
Today in our capitalist world order, the architectures of the commons can only survive as islands. Mostly, they are(temporarily) liberated from the power structures of the state and market through urban struggles. While the property regime around them belongs to the neoliberal system, they sustain their commoning activities as islands of prefiguration. This reminds us of the concept of folk politics by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams(2015). Folk politics refers to the immediate reactionary citizen actions against neoliberalism. They argue how these actions fail to trigger a paradigm shift in the global system of economic and political governance. The commons, especially architectures of the commons-due to their spatial limitations- share the same fate with folk politics. Even though they are experimental spaces to prefigure the postcapitalist life, their impact on generating real change is vague.
Critique is essential in breaking free of the limitations of folk politics and moving towards a systemic change. This argument is rooted in Michel Foucault’s(2019) notion of critique where he calls on the critique to”bring out the conditions of acceptability of a system and follow the breaking points which indicate its emergence." Critique alters the“politics of truth”, redefines what is deemed acceptable by society, and brings the existing order to a breaking point where change becomes inevitable. This is the power of critique. However, we need to distinguish between the two layers of critique. One is the architecture of the commons itself as a critical practice, and the latter is the critical reflection on the architecture of the commons. These two layers co-exist simultaneously and feed each other in a growing vortex. Critical reflection empowers the practice, while the practice produces new knowledge to reflect upon. While we define the architecture of the commons as a critical practice, the lack of critical reflection due to its performativity, holds off the vortex to grow.
The critique is dead, long live the critique. Knowledge commons can bring new perspectives for critical reflection.
As a consequence of the post-political turn in architecture, the proliferation of post-truth, and the evolution in the use of social media, the architectural critique as we know it no longer exists. Our daily information flow varies from chat groups to social media posts, magazines to podcasts, websites to books. Anyone can publish their own works, without a trustful platform that applies fact-checking. Anyone can be a critic and share their opinions about this or that project on social media. No one is expected to agree. The critic as an authority no longer exists. There is still academic publishing based on rigorous theory and research, yet it is often late to the party because of the long times required for peer reviewing processes, and it is mostly disdained to be too sophisticated for a broad audience. In the everyday media sphere of architecture, we are exposed to information overflow with our short attention span, and it can hardly transform to become knowledge.
Knowledge commons as an operative framework have made wide-scale collaborative projects possible, such as Wikipedia and GitHub. They can function as a tool to transform abundant and incomprehensible information into multi-layered, dissensual knowledge.“Collective-individual reappropriation and an interactive use of machines”(Guattari, 2013) signifies the self-governance of the knowledge commons. With the introduction of knowledge commons as a new critique for the architecture of the commons, we can envision a platform on which projects are shared by multiple actors, with various angles such as the impact of the project on its community, its material and labour arrangements during its construction, its overall environmental footprint, its governance of spatial configurations, open design features. With the support of digital collaborative editing tools, dissensual knowledge would become commons, and support the critical practice with truthful and insightful reflection.
The in-becoming characteristics of the architecture of the commons require a temporal critique and an ever-changing governance.
The commons are dynamic social systems, that are bound to evolve and change in time. Thus, their architecture is also open for appropriation by its community due to altering needs and desires and the governance of the commons. Thus, its critique should adopt and reflect this temporality too, and based on this critique the practice of commoning may alter. This ever-growing vortex between critical practice and critical reflection is essential in understanding the architecture of the commons, even though at the same time it grants an ambiguous character to it.
The strands of dissensus-solidarity, inclusion-community, and horizontality-structured network can be adjusted and readjusted time and again in order to sustain, improve and extend the commoning activities. They imply different routes an architecture of the commons can take in time. In the scope of this research they have been the outcome of many readings on the architecture of the commons yet, they have not been tested in actual cases. There is an expansive field of research on their application, both for the architecture of the commons also for other types of new commons(Hess, 2008) such as knowledge, digital or cultural commons. Any research on the commons is an ambiguous journey nonetheless. The prefigurative practice of creating the world one community wants to live in is a process of testing, failing and testing again. The unknowns are not easy to define because of the intricate relationships between the shared resource, community and the governance structure all of which are highly exposed to external factors of the existing world order. An alternative way of living based on the commons is a continuous struggle against neoliberalism both in the generation of collective subjectivities and in finding a space of action beyond the state and the market. This perpetual in-becoming characteristics of the commons is at the same time a reflection of this continuous struggle with tactical manoeuvres while its ambiguity protects it from becoming co-opted or commodified back into neoliberalism.
References
Butler, J.(1993).Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of'Sex'. Routledge.
Dardot, P. & Laval, C.(2013).The New Way of the World: Neoliberal Society. London: Verso Books.
De Angelis, M.(2017).Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism. Zed Books.
Guattari, F.(2013) Towards a Post-Media Era. In: C. Apprich, J. B. Slater, A. Iles & O. L. Schultz eds. 2013. Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology. Berlin: Mute Books: 26-27.
Foucault, M.(2019). What Is Critique? In J. Schmidt(Ed.),What Is Enlightenment?(pp. 382–398). University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520916890-029
The commons is political, so is its architecture.
The governance of the commons determines its architecture, architecture determines the governance of the commons.
Architecture enables prefiguration.
Performativity supports prefiguration while blocking critique.
Without critique, the architecture of the commons misses its chance to generate a real change.
The critique is dead, long live the critique. Knowledge commons can bring new perspectives for critical reflection.
The in-becoming characteristics of the architecture of the commons require a temporal critique and an ever-changing governance.
References