Description

Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat)

Moderators: Alex Grigor, Michal Huss, Konstantinos Pittas

This panel explores the current potentials of and constraints for the production of the city (understood as a social, historical, and multi-sensual construct) as a common space. How can we prevent a pandemic from becoming another excuse for neoliberal austerity, new enclosures, repression, and mass securitisation at the city level? How can physical spaces become ‘common’, against the backdrop of the privatisation impetus of global capitalism and the proliferation of virtual spaces? As information and communication technologies influence the city’s networks and the processes of immaterial labour, what new capacities to be ‘in common’ emerge and what new forms of solidarity and mutual care networks can be prefigured? How can emerging urban social movements practise the commons in translocal spaces? 

Programme:
Commoning the City, Friday 12 June 2020:
Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat)

Whose Commons, for Whom? Friday 12 June 2020:
Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua)

Reclaiming the Cultural Commons, Saturday 13 June 2020:
Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College)