Urban Commons As Emancipatory Spatial Practice? Challenges and Potentials in the Post-Democratic Era

In the context of the economic and financial crisis, which has profoundly reshaped cities and regions around the globe, alternative forms of social and economic organisation are increasingly discussed in urban and regional research and practice. Particularly commons are (again) hotly debated as an alternative way to organize the production, distribution and consumption of certain resources. We interpret urban commons as relational processes (not a product); as socio-spatial and socio-political practices of actors collectively producing and appropriating, maintaining, distributing and consuming certain urban resources. Commons are produced by actors with the aim to satisfy basic needs beyond state and market. However, an understanding of neoliberal urbanization helps to contextualize the potential, as well as the challenges, of urban commons. The practice of commoning may have potential to emancipate various social groups from hegemonic neoliberal structures in the post-democratic city, hence the potential of changing power structures in urban development. Emancipation and the related approaches of ‘emancipatory city’ help us to define urban commons in the context of the neoliberal city: emancipation means active political and social self-liberation from paternalistic and hegemonic structures, and a democratization of social and political orders by citizens (e.g. through self-organization), a political process often hindered by the political order and its institutional and spatial structures.

Based on two case studies of urban food commons in Vienna, these questions are answered: how can urban commoning as a relational practice unfold its emancipatory potential? How can urban commoning cope with challenges as the instrumentalization by neoliberal rhetoric, as well as the risk of becoming socially exclusive through institutionalization and defining concepts of ‘us’ versus a ‘them’ and thus reproducing inequalities in the production of urban space?