Urban Commons

Rethinking the City

Christian Borch, Martin Kornberger, Christian Borch, Martin Kornberger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317702962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique du droit

This book rethinks the city by examining its various forms of collectivity – their atmospheres, modes of exclusion and self-organization, as well as how they are governed – on the basis of a critical discussion of the notion of urban commons. The idea of the commons has received surprisingly little attention in urban theory, although the city may well be conceived as a shared resource. Urban Commons: Rethinking the City offers an attempt to reconsider what a city might be by studying how the notion of the commons opens up new understandings of urban collectivities, addressing a range of questions about urban diversity, urban governance, urban belonging, urban sexuality, urban subcultures, and urban poverty; but also by discussing in more methodological terms how one might study the urban commons. In these respects, the rethinking of the city undertaken in this book has a critical dimension, as the notion of the commons delivers new insights about how collective urban life is formed and governed.

Chapter 1

The city is not a Menschenpark

Rethinking the tragedy of the urban commons beyond the human/non-human divide

Jonathan Metzger

the possibility of belonging to the order of the city is entirely dependent on a radical exclusion of the ‘victim’ from the benefits of membership.

Nick Lee and Paul Stenner, Who Pays? Can We Pay Them Back?

‘we’ no longer know who we are, nor of course where we are, we who had believed we were modern … End of modernization. End of story. Time to start over.

Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns

Urban commons is a concept that is currently ‘trending’ in the social sciences. Most of this presently emerging research more or less uncritically builds upon the influential theory of the commons presented by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, and generally focuses upon issues regarding the production, maintenance and access to various forms of urban common goods. One thing that the interlocutors in the expanding academic debate on the urban commons appear to take for all but granted is that the subjects of the commons, the commoners, are presumably always ‘human’, and that the objects constituting the commons are presumably always non-human. I want to argue that this taken-for-granted ontological divide between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, means and ends, resources and extractors, is far too self-assured and remains dangerously unquestioned in this literature. In the light of a dawning understanding of the fundamental ecological entanglements of humanity, we must learn to rethink previously taken-for-granted ontological categories such as culture/nature and human/non-human, destabilizing them to do away with destructive preconceptions that place humans on one side and non-humans on the other. We need, for instance, to recognize that any neat separation of ‘commons’ on the one hand and ‘commoners’ on the other involves what philosopher Karen Barad calls an ‘agentic cut’, and as such bears with it an undisavowable ethico-political burden of responsibility to attend to the effects of any such enactment of ordering categories (Barad, 1998; see further Metzger, 2014).

In this chapter I wrestle with these questions by way of an examination of the historical and contemporary relations between humans and other-than-human animals in European cities, both as concretized/concretizing ideals and as living assemblages. The questions I ask are: how can we understand the urban commons beyond a taken-for-granted ontological divide between humans and non-humans, nature and culture? How can we learn to recognize the deep entanglements in urban areas between those things we normally categorize under these labels in the complex and constantly evolving milieus we describe as ‘urban’? Admittedly, this to some degree pertains to a deconstruction of the concept of the urban commons, although not in the form of an undifferentiated critical gesture, but rather proceeding from Karen Barad’s (1998: 104) insight that:

the political potential of deconstructive analysis lies not in the simple recognition of the inevitability of exclusions, but in insisting upon accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted and in taking up responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundaries.

The chapter is structured in the following way: I first present a short empirical vignette that will function as an opening into the wider issues discussed in the text. I then proceed to explicate what I see as some of the trouble with dominant Western historical and contemporary cultural preconceptions regarding ‘the urban’, which also frame much of the debate on urban commons. In a generally sympathetic but also perhaps somewhat against-the-grain reading of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s Rules For The Human Zoo, I argue that it is precisely as this – an exclusively human zoo – that the city has been conceptualized in much of the Western cultural tradition. In the following section I show how these preconceptions also underpin current and previous debates about ‘the commons’ in general, and so-called ‘urban commons’ in particular. I try to destabilize these preconceptions through posing the question if we can ever easily demarcate what constitutes ‘commoners’ and what constitute ‘commons’ in complex ecological entanglement, ending up in asking with Bruno Latour: how can we relate to an urban ‘we’, a collectif of the urban commons, in a responsible way in the Anthropocene?

Wolf in the city

On the night between the 6th and 7th of May 2001 a wolf passed through innermost Stockholm, going south to north along the transport infrastructure originally planned for maximizing human mobility, such as the towering Västerbron bridge across Riddarfjärden. This first recorded wolf passage through Stockholm since the eighteenth century aroused more curiosity than fear and the wolf soon turned out to be but a temporary visitor, a young male on a quest for a soulmate – which we know can carry humans as well as other animals on the most improbable of journeys. The wolf also made his way duly and promptly to greener pastures – quite literally. When tracked down en route through the city, the wolf was given police escort through downtown to get him out as quickly as possible, either by his own will and power or – if necessary – by force. After being tracked down, he was constantly followed at close distance by a zoologist who kept the wolf on mark with a tranquilizer gun in case he showed any aggressive tendencies or any tendencies towards wishing to dwell for a more prolonged period of time in highly populated areas.

Since then, wolf sightings have become quite recurrent in the Stockholm area as a result of the increase in the domestic wolf population during recent decades. In 2012 there were around 100 reported sightings in the greater Stockholm area, a handful of which were also positively confirmed by authorities. Zoologists have argued that this can be seen as evidence of the recent reactivation of a historical wolf’s north–south migratory route, as the straits on which the city is located constitutes a natural passage point across the extensive Läke Mälaren, which cuts through a large part of the geographical middle part of Sweden. The increased intensity of wolf sightings, and a few wolf attacks, mostly on dogs, in the close vicinity of Stockholm have started to generate some fears among urban dwellers of the growing national population of the large canine predator, which otherwise has been subject to some romanticization among Swedish urbanites.

The established protocol of close police observation and escort of any wolf that strays into the Stockholm area, to get it out of the city as quickly and smoothly as possible (but preferably without the use of violence) – and the associated feelings that even though wolves are great to have in the countryside, they certainly do not belong in the city – are, although quite understandable reactions in themselves, also clearly indicative of how wildlife – and especially major predators – is seen to be completely anathema to the idea of the city, its mere presence constituting a major disruption or transgression (see also Hiedanpää, 2013). As noted by Philo and Wilbert (2000: 10), many forms of human discourse ‘include a strong envisaging of both where animals are placed in the abstract “scheme of things” and where they should be found in the non-discursive spaces and places of the world’. In the so-called Western world, most animals have at least for the past 200 years or so generally been seen as disturbances, threats or hazards by those who have been vested with the power and responsibility to govern urban space – leading to an ever expanded project of evacuating the presence of living animals out of cities.¹ But further it could even be argued that also before this, perhaps as far back as antiquity, the Western idea of the city has generally been formulated as the ideally exclusive dwelling of humans, standing in direct contrast to the savage nature imagined to exist outside of the city walls. Walls that both physically and symbolically have been seen as generating a protective space in which the unique and supposedly superior traits that have been thought to distinguish humans from animals could be cultivated and fostered.

Ecologizing the urban commons

Relating to the vignette above, it could be argued that there exists a deeply-ingrained Western cultural preconception concerning the otherness of animals to urbanity. An idea that animals simply do not belong in the city – reflecting long-held cultural preconceptions about the ‘cultural’ achievement of the human-populated city as being the opposite of the ‘natural’ endowment of animal-infested wilderness, and further positing that these are categories that are ontologically mutually opposed and therefore should be kept apart and purified both conceptually and spatially.² As urban historian Christopher Otter has noted, ‘civilized society […] was measured by its distance from nature, a distance as much material as moral or spiritual’ (Otter, 2004: 46). Nevertheless, the other-than-human animal was never completely successfully expelled from the city – nor from the human for that matter – and in this chapter I argue that it neither can, nor should be.

Rather, in thinking about the city in general, and about urban commons in particular, we need to learn to come to grips with how we can make sense of these phenomena in what we, with Sarah Whatmore, can call a more-than-human way (Whatmore, 2002; Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2006). Such a new handle on ‘urban things’ could function as a foundation of a new general ecological sensibility that could be argued to constitute a key component in a future survival strategy for our rapidly urbanizing, but also currently highly self-destructive species. In relation to the concept of the urban commons, this is particularly important, seeing that the dominant social scientific theories about commons management that are currently being widely cast as solutions for our unfolding multiple ecological crisis – such as Elinor Ostrom’s celebrated theory of common pool resource management – still appear to lean up against a foundational ontology that posits humanity as being primarily not of nature but rather over and above nature, thus imagining humans as superior world-makers and the shepherding crown of creation. In this chapter I try to make the argument that in the approaching impasse facing our species, such an ontological position is deeply problematic in relation to our ideas about commons, urban or otherwise.

I therefore try to do to Ostrom’s argument what Michel Serres did to the story of Sisyphus and the rock (Serres, 1987: 301–2). Serres alerts us to how the retelling of this myth always puts the focus on the human character Sisyphus, while barely no attention is paid to thinking about the rock. Just as Serres wants to make the rock count and begin asking such questions as how we can care for the rock, which is so obviously repelled by the designs of men and gods, I want to ask the question about how we can begin to really care for the fate of some of the things, many of which are living, which we imagine as commons – and not just those we think of as the commoners. With Latour (1998) we may pose this as a project that counteracts the thoroughly modern perspective on the commons offered by Elinor Ostrom with the question: ‘how may the commons be ecologized?’

This question is, in our current times, particularly relevant in relation to questions of urbanity and cities. Not only because since 2008, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s human population lives in towns and cities, with a steadily rising pace of global urbanization, but also because cities are global zones of intense exchange or interaction. In the words of historian Fernand Braudel, cities function as ‘electric transformers’ that ‘increase tension, accelerate the rhythm of exchange and ceaselessly stir up men’s lives’ in relation to not only commerce, but also the circulation of cultural trends and ideas (Braudel, 1973: 373). Or as aptly formulated by Barbara Czarniawska (2002: 1), the city is ‘a societal laboratory’ and they have ‘traditionally been the birthplaces of invention and innovation, but are also sites permitting intense imitation’. Cities are thus places where new things and ideas emerge and may take root. Finally, and in the context of this chapter, importantly: cities have historically also always been sites of cohabitation in the face of intense difference, thus generating philosophies and skills of conviviality among their inhabitants for not only living with and sharing space with – but also in various ways capitalizing on and appreciating – difference as for instance noted in seminal studies by Georg Simmel, Louis Wirth and Jane Jacobs. The city is thus a key space for anyone interested in suggesting new ways of living together across difference, an ambition which this chapter aligns itself with by making an alliance with the growing number of scholars who argue for the necessity of a new more-than-human sensibility as well as the development of political practices for urban multispecies conviviality (Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2006).

I explicate the above line of argument through a reading of the Ostromian conceptualization of the urban commons that perhaps might to some degree amount to an operation similar to the telling description that philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave as to how he performed his readings of other philosophers: the act of having intellectual intercourse with an author in a way that is banned in many of the states of the US and then giving the author a child that would be its own offspring, yet monstrous to him or her. In this case, the ideosexual abuse is even worse since I am bringing a pack of, perhaps just as unwilling, bed partners with me – and foremost among them are philosophers Donna Haraway and Peter Sloterdijk, as well as a host of (more-than-)human geographers.

The city: a human zoo?

In Western philosophy there has ever since antiquity existed an interest in the role played by the built environment, and in particular the city, for the development of humanity – as evinced by the many pivotal discussions on the polis in Greek classical philosophy. In more recent times, many architects today allow themselves to be inspired by contemporary philosophy, and in the 1970s there was a wave of interest in the writings of Martin Heidegger, perhaps particularly the essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (reproduced in Heidegger, 1975), but many of these readings did not consider that Heidegger most often used the built environment in metaphorical terms, for instance stating that the house of being was language.

A few decades later, as the more superficial reading of Heidegger’s work in architecture subsided and the trendy ‘starchitects’ moved on to appropriate philosophical buzzwords of more contemporary origin, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk embarked on a seminal project to more thoroughly develop a spatial philosophy inspired by, but also partially in response to, Heidegger. This project of ‘Being and Space’, as complementary and opposed to ‘Being and Time’, culminated in the great trilogy of Sphereology (Sloterdijk, 1998, 1999, 2004). But questions of spatiality, and particularly architecture and the built environment, are also central to the essay ‘Rules for the Human Zoo’ (Sloterdijk, 2009). The text, originally entitled Regeln für den Menschenpark, and also known as the Elmauer Rede, was first presented as a commentary at a small international philosophy conference in Elmau in 1999 and later became the focal point of one of those great public intellectual pitched battles that you only get in Germany. This is not the place to get into the details of that Streit (but see e.g. Varney Rorty, 2000), but suffice to say that on the back of it I see Sloterdijk as a risky thinker, in the positive Stengersian notion of that term, and the siren song of his work in my ears functions as a navigation mark which helps me calibrate my ethico-political compass, although not always necessarily along the same bearings that he points out. So I will move on and see what possible use can be made in this context of some of the ideas in the paper, keeping in mind that these are potentially explosive ideas that perhaps need to be handled with some care and delicacy.

Proceeding from a discussion of Heidegger’s essay Letter on Humanism, Sloterdijk unfolds an argument about the technologies of producing humanity, what it is to be...