From the squat to the neighbourhood

Popular infrastructures as reproductive urban commons

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8945830
AutoresSergio Ruiz Cayuela (0000-0001-7968-1539, Coventry University, autor correspondente), Melissa Garcia-Lamarca (0000-0002-4813-3633, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona)
Ano2023
Volume144
Páginas103807-103807
Data de publicação2023-06-20
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoGeoforum (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0016-7185 • E-ISSN: 1872-9398
EditoraElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103807
OpenAlexW4381434966
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas14
Referências citadas47

We are currently experiencing a manifold crisis of social reproduction which has seriously affected the capacity of popular access to basic goods such as housing, particularly in urban environments. This article seeks to contribute to and expand debates around the urban housing commons by looking at decommodified and collectively managed housing alternatives through the lens of the reproductive commons. Through the case of the Bloc La Bordeta squat and the broader commons ecologies in Barcelona’s Sants district, we explore how complex networks of emancipatory reproductive commons subsist and expand in urban environments, and investigate the role of popular infrastructures in this process. We highlight the reproductive dimension of housing squats in sustaining radical movements in the city. However, popular support is also crucial in defending the housing commons from enclosure and state repression, which creates a mutual interdependence among reproductive commons and urban commons ecologies. In looking at the particular difficulties of reproductive urban commoning, we explore material and subjective challenges of the reproductive urban commons, and we illustrate the importance of looking into and beyond housing and of grounding housing commons’ connections and (dis)continuities within the wider territorial and socio-political context. These challenges create differential forms of commoning in which participation and engagement are unequal but that, nevertheless, are able to support thriving popular infrastructures that become the pillars of the resistance against capitalist urbanisation processes

Commons · Context (archaeology · Economic growth · Economics · Environmental resource management · Environmental stewardship · Geography · Grassroots · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Reproduction · Social science · Sociology · Thriving · Urbanization · Ecology · Law · Urban Agriculture and Sustainability · Urban Planning and Governance · Water Governance and Infrastructure