From Communities to Places: Post-Plural Activism in the Anthropocene

Collective social intervention is traditionally focussing on social problems within communities. Although the notion of community can be defined in multiple ways (e.g. ethnicity, class), territorial approaches to community have been dominant over the last decades at least in the European context. Communities are thus thought of as urban quarters and social intervention designed to aim at social integration or cohesion.

The present contribution will relate the experiences from an action-research project started back in 2017 and raising the question of how collective social intervention could be conceptualised if the entry point were places in their multi-dimensional (material, ideational, emotional, temporal and spatial) and relational arrangement of human and non-human entities: a small public place in front of a supermarket, a parking lot behind the town hall, etc. And what would it look like if the same places were the sites of intervention, if social problems and target populations emerging in the process were not displaced or institutionalised? In the course of experimentation, the project team developed three main intervention strategies with regard to the multi-dimensionality and the relationality of human and non-human entities, namely the strategies of extension (inserting new entities into the arrangement, thus extending the perception of the existing arrangement), inversion, and exaggeration. These intervention strategies allowed more specifically to question the taken-for-grantedness of the infrastructure, social problem work, etc. Making places the point of departure of intervention allowed moreover to re-think the 'use' of places as tools (and not only contexts) in social activism, not least with regard to climate change/environmental problems and their abstract and complex 'nature'.