Reposted from our sister site Commons Transition, Dan Hancox shares the lowdown on a few projects aiming to bring the Commons to the institutional sphere.

As construction noise and traffic hummed in the background, two Turkish women sat on a park bench in Istanbul, talking about what they want from their city’s public spaces: “chit-chats, picnics, resting, walking, sunbathing.”

Other voices chimed in saying public spaces should be used for artistic activities, sports, theatrical performances, traditional games, or just congregating to drink coffee and talk. “Nothing happens if we don’t come together,” said another.

The clips are from a short Turkish film released this year, called Bi’ Dusun Olsun – Imagine It Into Being – as part of a European film project called Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons.

In their sunny idealism, they hardly sound like controversial demands, and even less like revolutionary rallying cries.

Yet these types of demands were what sparked the protests against the planned demolition of Istanbul’s Gezi Park in 2013, which would have been replaced by a Ottoman architecture style shopping mall.

The demonstrations grew into a nationwide uprising involving millions of people, and a police response that resulted in several deaths, thousands of injuries and arrests. At times, the unrest threatened to bring down the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who at the time was prime minister.

The protesters’ message was clear: Public space is serious business.

The notion of “the commons” is an ancient one. It is a broad term covering shared spaces, goods, natural resources, creativity and knowledge, which is held and governed collectively and democratically, rather than privately.

The concept has been growing in popularity among Europe’s social movements, especially since 2011, the year Spain’s “indignados” protesters took over their city squares, following the example of Egyptians in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Later that year, the international “Occupy” movement used similar tactics.

Bi’ Dü?ün Olsun – Ça?r? from MODE Istanbul on Vimeo.

Going mainstream?

Now, the idea of the commons as an organising principle has moved from the streets to the heart of the European political establishment. For the first time, one of the European Parliament’s 28 Intergroups – groups made up of members from different political groupings, and that focus on certain issues – is devoted to discussing and defending the commons.

The Intergroup on Public Services and Common Goods was launched at the end of May, with support and members from the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, the Greens, the European United Left and Italy’s Five Star Movement.

The Intergroup’s stated goal is to defend shared, common goods – such as water, medical innovations and open-source code – from privatisation.

Last week, the Intergroup hosted an unlikely meeting of grassroots activists and members of the European Parliament (MEPs) inside the parliament building, to mark the finale of the “Reclaiming the Commons” project that spawned the Turkish film mentioned above, among others.

In a sense, it was an incongruous location for the discussion – in a meeting room in the heart of bureaucratic politics.

For many of the commons activists, the European Parliament would represent exactly the type of institution from which democracy needs reclaiming.

“I’m amazed we managed to get the Intergroup accepted, to be honest,” British Labour MEP Julie Ward said after the meeting.

Ward, who was elected for the first time in 2014, believes that activist movements have recently begun to filter up into EU parliamentary politics.

“There are a lot of new MEPs here, and a lot of them have activist or campaigning backgrounds,” explained Ward.

“And for some of us with activist backgrounds, we don’t want to let it go. Public services are under threat everywhere, and it’s up to us to stand up for them,” Ward said.

The tussle between state and private ownership highlights why the commons has become a fashionable piece of language – especially given recent history.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, centre-left parties across Western Europe have jettisoned the word “socialism”, or of anything that smacks of shared ownership.

In the case of the UK’s Labour Party, this was reflected in the modification of the party constitution’s Clause Four, on Tony Blair’s initiative, to remove a reference to “common ownership”.

But, some looking at the composition of the Intergroup, ask if the word “commons” is in fact just modish code for “socialism”? Ward said she is proud to have described herself as a socialist when campaigning, but noted that the Greens were also members of the Intergroup.

Ward conceded that such a working group – tasked with obstructing privatisation, dismantling intellectual copyright and regulating market intervention – will face staunch opposition from business friendly MEPs in the European Parliament and lobbyists close to it.

But, Ward added, “politics is a fight”.

The ‘institutional glass ceiling’

The idea of the commons can often seem quite abstract, making it potentially difficult for the Intergroup to focus on tangible goals or legislation. But it doesn’t have to be that way, explained Sophie Bloemen of the Commons Network, one of the guest speakers at the European Parliament event.

“If you talk about participatory democracy, [the Intergroup] already is serving as an anchor for these political networks to convene,” Bloemen said.

“I think it could potentially start formulating policy proposals on specific issues – in particular the protection of water, and the digital commons,” explained Bloemen.

But the MEPs will not be able to do this alone, Bloemen believes, and will need to reach out to the same activists who generated this energy in the first place. This is something she witnessed first-hand while living in Oakland during the Occupy movement.

As an example of this grassroots energy, Bloemen cited the collaborative spirit of so-called “hacker spaces” for sharing knowledge and skills to collectively solve problems in local communities.

“These hacker spaces are not just a geeky computer thing. It wasn’t all about computer code or open-source software. There were a lot of different groups, it was very community-based. For example, there was a sewing group, and one on participatory budgeting, and a food network. It was about pooling resources, about a community doing things together,” Bloemen told.

In “Municipal Recipes“, a Spanish film produced as part of the “Reclaiming The Commons” project about the citizens’ platforms that last month launched many “indignados” into power in Barcelona, Madrid and beyond, Gala Pin asked her fellow activists, “How do you not hit your head on the institutional glass ceiling?”

Shortly after the film was made, Pin was elected to Barcelona town hall along with 10 other city councillors. In Brussels and in Barcelona, the coming months and years are going to provide a fascinating answer to Pin’s question – can the people elected to defend the commons do so from inside the institutions of power?

Recetas municipales. Una conversacio?n sobre el cuidado de las ciudades from ZEMOS98 on Vimeo. (Press “cc” to activate English subtitles)

Lead image by Olmo Calvo;

The post Integrating activism into governance institutions appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Cross-posted from CommonsTransition.org, Carlos Delclós explores the gap between people and increasingly unaccountable institutions beholden to financial interests, citizens are rising up to reclaim the commons.

The ubiquity of social unrest and economic conflict in Europe tells us that we are living in times of intense contradictions.

Where streets have not filled up with massive protests calling for a more direct, participatory and meaningful democratic culture, ballot boxes are increasingly filling up with votes for post-fascist parties like the National Front or UKIP, whose voices are in turn amplified and over-represented by consistently high voter abstention rates.

Though many are looking to the rise of new parties like Syriza and Podemos for signs of hope, the gap between the idea of Europe as a common, borderless space of emancipatory potential and the threat of a Europe characterised by nationalist entrenchment remains a daunting reality.

Over the last few years, the Doc Next Network has been researching, documenting and playing in this gap, and building an archive of short, socially conscious documentaries and independent films in the process. During the first phase, called Remapping Europe, we explored the contours of Europe’s borders, whether these were internal between member states, external to the common area or inherent in the very idea of Europe.

We learned that borders are something we carry with us; they continuously shape the structure and texture of our surroundings by imposing and reproducing relationships of exclusion and exploitation. As the political and social theorists Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson point out, they are not mere obstructions of global flows of capital. Rather, they are the essential devices through which these flows are articulated, mediating social relationships and access to the most basic resources required to satisfy human needs, such as land, labor, money and knowledge, often referred to as “the commons”.

This insight led to the project’s next phase, called Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons, which looks at how borders operate at a more local level to enclose the commons and how those enclosures are being confronted and overcome. In this series of posts, we will present some of our results along with content from our Media Collection. By doing so, we will explore the challenges faced by ordinary people who are working together to produce an emancipatory horizon of self-organised and self-managed commons, free from the mediation of both the state and the market.

The challenges faced by these movements are many. The enclosure of the commons is not limited to the privatisation of public resources, though this is certainly one of the forms in which it takes place. Enclosure goes beyond the transfer of resources to produce two major tendencies: closing in and crowding out.

Think of the internet. Ostensibly, it is conceived to allow any user to connect with any other user or set of users anywhere in the world to exchange information in real-time. Many of us still remember how, around the turn of the century, several notable and enthusiastic intellectuals referred to an obliteration of the tension between time and space that would eventually lead to radically horizontal social relations. Of course, the reality of the internet is more complex than that.

In a recent essay, net artist and co-founder of the Geocities Research Institute Olia Lialina describes how the field of User Experience (UX) has changed the way people use the internet over the years. Premised around “scripting the user”, UX directs what information we consume, what users we relate to and how, eliminating clicks by relegating more and more processes to the back-end of websites and applications (where they run automatically) and directing those we do make through a streamlined, visually attractive front-end.

If we think of a company such as Facebook, the tendency towards enclosure becomes even clearer. In addition to information about the people we interact with, Facebook’s algorithms are constantly collecting data on our behavioural patterns, preferences and tastes. The algorithms, in turn, determine what stories we see in our feeds and what is marketed to us.

Each click determines the next several, reproducing and reinforcing our previously existing interests and shielding us from the influence of those whose interests diverge from our own. In this way, we are closed into increasingly specific interest groups and crowded out of a forum for interaction with a much more varied multitude. Meanwhile, people all over the world are coming to believe that Facebook actually is the internet, and more and more companies and institutions are submitting an increasing share of their social activity to the logic of a single company.

Urbanisation has remarkably similar effects, and that is because its goals are not much different than those of Facebook. Ultimately, the goal of urban planning is to direct social relations so that they are predictable enough to guarantee security, maximise profits and minimise conflict for flows of capital. The social ecologist Murray Bookchin realised this, and in The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, he proposed that urbanisation was ultimately at war against the historical notion of the city:

City space, with its human propinquity, distinctive neighbourhoods and humanly scaled politics—like rural space, with its closeness to nature, its high sense of mutual aid and its strong family relationships—is being absorbed by urbanisation, with its smothering traits of anonymity, homogenisation, and institutional gigantism.

The overwhelming scale of the process can even lead people to enclose themselves, as he went on to point out:

The result is that the ego itself tends to become passive, disembodied, and introverted in the face of a technological and bureaucratic gigantism unprecedented, indeed unimaginable, in earlier human history. Public life, already buffeted by techniques for engineering public consent, tends to dissolve into private life, a form of mere survivalism that can easily take highly sinister forms.

Bookchin also linked the emergence of a market economy, freedom of trade and industrial innovation in Europe to the development of roads, rivers and canals.

The French from ZEMOS98 on Vimeo.

Tellingly, while the latter were systematically homogenised, redirected and, in the case of the rivers, polluted, the former are precisely the elements that were prioritised throughout the development of the European Union, beginning with its roots in the European Coal and Steel Community.

While there is much to be said about his idealisation of rural communities and pre-capitalist society in general, reading The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship today is an illuminating experience. His agenda for community-based, libertarian municipal politics matches the demands of the radical democratic movements that took center stage in post-2011 Europe, while the Troika imposed austerity through the sheer force of its own “institutional gigantism”. And his critique of urbanisation resonates with the pathological geographies of the housing and construction bust of countries like Spain and Ireland.

NONCITY, an independent film by Nuno Pessoa and Andrea Fernández, captures Bookchin’s critique of urbanisation at the expense of the city as it follows two visitors wandering through Arroyo de la Encomienda, a Spanish ghost town on the outskirts of Valladolid left behind by speculative town planning and corruption. Its mayor resigned a year after being charged with bribery and obstruction, once he had been sentenced to three years of prison.

NONCITY from TNGNT on Vimeo.

We are beginning to see the cracks in the pavement. Seemingly small gestures can provoke widespread revolt, whether it is cutting down a tree in Istanbul or evicting a squat in Hamburg or Barcelona. Mainstream publications like The Guardian are beginning to run articles on the commons, heralding “a wave of disruption” that will challenge neoliberalism.

And the politics of urbanisation now generates considerable interest, with prominent blogs and web magazines dedicating considerable space to polemics on Richard Florida’s creative-class oriented approach to “urban renewal” or Neil Smith and David Harvey’s critique of gentrification and city branding. We are also seeing the rise of what I’d argue has become a sub-genre of internet literature, namely, the pseudo-Marxist think-piece on hipsters and gentrification.

Most importantly, we are seeing more and more attempts by ordinary citizens to take back what is rightfully theirs, what is rightfully everyone’s. Over the next several weeks, we will tell some of those stories. It’s true that we are not going to change the world with one or two urban gardens. But when we care for the seeds planted in the gaps of a hollow system, we are choosing to cultivate the living city and leave the dead weight of urbanisation behind. And who knows what may tremble beneath the cobblestones?

Municipal Tremors – Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons teaser (Spain Medialab) from Doc Next Network on Vimeo.

European cities for the commons is an editorial partnership supported by Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons, a Doc Next Network project.

This article was originally published in Open Democracy

The post Closed in and crowded out: urbanising against the city appeared first on P2P Foundation.