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This book explores contemporary urban experiences connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. Part of a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and the politics of urban commons, it uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity is emerging today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality. In such a world, people experience the potentialities of emancipation activated by concrete forms of space commoning. By focusing on concrete collective experiences of urban space appropriation and participatory design experiments this book traces differing, but potentially compatible, trajectories through which common space (or space-as-commons) becomes an important factor in social change. In the everydayness of self-organized neighborhoods, in the struggles for justice in occupied public spaces, in the emergence of “territories in resistance,” and in dissident artistic practices of collaborative creation, collective inventiveness produces fragments of an emancipated society.
cases, outwardly racist demonstrations were also orchestrated through public space appropriation. What seems to be a distinguishing characteristic of potentially emancipating struggles in and through public spaces is their power to activate popular inventiveness and participation. Being part of a large crowd in protest is usually consoling and gratifying; it can even make people feel that they belong to a powerful machine, a mighty war machine. These feelings, however, do not necessarily lead to liberating empowerment. Unless connected to mechanisms of sharing and