commoning

This article came out of many years of thinking and talking together about our earlier work in an urban youth garden in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. We were really interested in the way youth talked about the changes in themselves as people who could learn to care for each other and shared spaces (commons). We had the opportunity to publish in a special issue of Cities on storying the 'counter-city', so we used our thinking about changes in subjectivity to write and think about what this might mean for postcapitalist countercities already present in place. 

The term “solidarity economy” is most commonly deployed to describe altruistic and socially beneficial ways of doingbusiness, often in opposition to ones that are less so. Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork among Danish minority gangs, this article seeks to open the discussion on solidarity economies beyond these traditional understandings by addingthe perspective of gangs. It explores the more exclusive and violent aspects of solidarity economies, drawing on the analytical lenses of reciprocity and pooling.

Increasingly, other-than-scientific questions and creative expressions of climate change are gaining ground as legitimate forms of new knowledge in the fields of feminism, environmental humanities, environmental cultural studies and design studies, of which this piece of work is a part. The work offers a novel contribution to this interdisciplinary scholarship by creatively interpreting the perspectives, experiences and practices of people living with urban heat in Penrith NSW as an imagined conversation between a mother and child.

This chapter extends upon the book's discussions of habit to the process of adapting to anthropogenically induced global warming. We reveal the role of designed practices, products and infrastructures in habituating urban populations to a changing climate. Our central concern is the ‘world within the world’ design has helped to create. In the rapidly densifying city, atmospheric commons are shaped and reshaped by human design; climate change is lived and felt in hostile heat islands and polluted, particulate-laden city air.

This practice-based doctorate sets out to investigate and intervene in the tense relation between the production of socially as well as politically relevant design work and the socio-economic precariousness many designers experience. Starting from an engagement with the precarious working conditions of designers, their genealogy over the last 30+ years and the role precarisation plays in forming docile creative subjects, the research moves on to a wider critique of the political economy and of its precarising value practices.

Avec d’autres chercheuses et chercheurs engagés, je lutte pour rompre avec une conception universaliste du monde et opérer une transition vers un vivre-ensemble « centré sur le plurivers constitué d’une multiplicité de mondes enchevêtrés et co-constitutifs, mais distincts ». Dans le sillon de Dardot et Laval3, je comprends la révolution comme un moment d’accélération, d’intensification et de collectivisation d’une activité autonome et auto-organisée dans toutes les sphères de la vie économique, sociale, politique ou culturelle.

This chapter explores how geographic information systems (GIS) can be used in diverse economies research by first tracing how debates about GIS methods and associated epistemologies have changed since the 1980s. Although initially seen as a tool limited to quantitative spatial analysis, GIS has since expanded in scope to support and extend a variety of interpretivist modes of knowledge. Participatory, qualitative, and critical GIS emerged as some diverse ways to use GIS and spatial data. Scholars using a diverse economies approach participated in this expansion of the scope of GIS.

Much of the debate over sustainable development revolves around how to balance the competing demands of economic development, social well-being, and environmental protection. “Jobs vs. environment” is only one of the many forms that such struggles take. But what if the very terms of this debate are part of the problem? Reimagining Livelihoods argues that the “hegemonic trio” of economy, society, and environment not only fails to describe the actual world around us but poses a tremendous obstacle to enacting a truly sustainable future.

Deepening ecological crisis alongside a half century of widening inequality and economic instability are evidence that Business as Usual cannot go on. Transformation is required, particularly in the realm of corporate activity, the business of business. Shareholder primacy is a powerful social norm that constrains transformation. It positions publicly traded corporations as compelled by competitive necessity and bound by law to place shareholder returns first.