In sociology, countless efforts have been made to theoretically grasp the concept of community, and various approaches aim to take post-traditional phenomena of community building and practices into account. In this contribution, I approach the question of community from an urban commons perspective. Therefore, I begin with some general remarks on how to understand contemporary ‘actually existing commons’, on the specifics of urban commons and on post-marxist commons theory. (1) On this basis, I offer three theses on the question of community: First, the advantage of commons theory is that it conceptualizes community in a non-essentializing way – as the community of users – and does not link it to identity categories. Second, urban commons offer an understanding of commoning as alternative to life forms under capitalism or as transformative, but always embedded in and connected to society, as ‘peninsulas’ and not as enclaves. Third, current commons and/or community building practices have to be analyzed regarding their role in what Silke van Dyk and Tina Haubner characterize as Community Capitalism (van Dyk, Haubner 2021). Derived from the specific context of (urban) commons those theses have the potential to be reminders of ambivalences and to prevent a reduction of complexity in analytical thinking about community and society in general.

If we talk about commons in Europe, historically, we refer to medieval patterns of collective use of common lands for subsistence, be it woods, meadows or ponds for fishing (Linebaugh 2008). With the onset of industrialization and the development of capitalism violent processes of enclosure of the means of production and privatization of land in England and Europe began and stretched over a long period of time. Karl Marx characterized this process as original accumulation (Marx 2009). While enclosure and primitive accumulation are mostly seen as historical processes, post-marxist commons researchers emphasize that they have not been completed. Both, processes of enclosure and (re)claiming of commons, are ongoing (Caffentzis 2009). Moreover, commoning and enclosure are global phenomena (Federici 2019), although they differ in their dynamics and socio-cultural forms.

Since the work of economist Elinor Ostrom (1990), showing that commons do exist and that they can work, gained broader attention, there is a renewed interest in commons both on the theoretical and practical level. My understanding of the connection between past and current collective practices is inspired by Efrat Eizenberg (2012) who looks at urban gardening practices in New York. Eizenberg refers to contemporary practices in Western capitalist societies as ‘actually existing commons’ for two reasons: First to emphasize that they are not mere utopias, and second to make clear that they should not be seen as a ‘return’ to some idealized past. Instead, the term describes social forms or practices, that, on the basis of (implicit or explicit) historical-conceptual references, seek new ways for a use-value oriented economy, livelihoods and non-hierarchical social relations under current socio-economic conditions. As such, they are often precarious in their existence, and permeated by contradictions and power relations (Thompson 2015).

According to Amanda Huron (2015) especially urban societies provide an environment in which these contradictions of commoning become more visible. This is due to two characteristics of urban societies: the high density (of people and capital) and the higher level of diversity of lifestyles and cultures. Based on her research on urban housing cooperatives in the US context Huron describes commons that are constituted by the collective work of strangers in the broadest sense. This refutes the assumption, sometimes found in commons literature, that commoners need to have a common past and future for commoning to succeed, and that commons therefore only work in ‘traditional’, small communities. In an urban environment, commons come into being with differences between participants and they have to come to terms with fluctuation. Huron derives from that observation a differentiation between the processes and community dynamics of re-claiming and the long-term maintenance of commons. Since commons are conceptualized as open structures on the one hand, but on the other hand need boundary work to clarify belonging, urban commons point to possibilities and limits of solidarity in everyday practices.

Communities of users

Community in commons can be constituted in a non-essentializing way, not linked to identity categories or a superordinate reference point, entity or authority. Cohesion and belonging in commons are not necessarily based on family ties or socio-structural characteristics. In the context of collective housing, for example, groups have to decide with whom to share their living space. Motivations for collective housing may vary – from political-economic motivations of reclaiming private property to more daily life-based ideas of mutual aid, tighter and wider ideas of communification, multigenerational housing, communes, or pragmatic self-governance for affordable or ecological housing. A term often used in the context of co-housing is that of a chosen family (Wahlfamilie), transporting also the ambivalence of the voluntary nature in combination with the necessities of care. As commons need to be cared for – care for fellow commoners and the community as well as for the good (as commons are not just an openly accessible resource) - Caffentzis and Federici (2014) propose contributions to maintaining the commons as the criterion for belonging.

Communities in commons thus are caring communities, constituted in collective action in relation to the good used.

They are the community of users (or producer-users). Community is constituted via collective self-governing the commons; community is the process of commoning. “They [the urban community gardeners] are a community because they cooperate, collaborate and communicate on the usage, production, and maintenance of a common resource […] gardeners are facilitating a new modality and definition of community that enhance their social cohesion, level of autonomy, and the intensity of social bonds” (Eizenberg 2012: 776).

‘Peninsulas’ instead of enclaves

Typical for urban commons is an understanding of commoning as alternative or transformative but always connected to and embedded in society, in two regards. Urban commons researcher Stavros Stavrides (Stavrides 2016) distinguishes urban community spaces from public and private spaces. Public spaces are primarily created by a certain authority (local, regional or state) which controls them and establishes the rules under which people may use them while private spaces belong to and are controlled by specific individuals or economic entities having the right to establish the conditions for usage. Yet, those urban community spaces can also be commodified and privatized enclaves in the cities such as gated communities.

Commons spaces, instead, are always in the making and a place of politics: Common space, thus, may be shaped through the practices of an emerging and not necessarily homogeneous community.

According to Stavrides, we need to abandon a view that fantasizes about uncontaminated enclaves of emancipation. Rather than perpetuating an image of the city as an archipelago of enclave islands it should be seen as a space of thresholds. “Thresholds explicitly symbolize the potentiality of sharing by establishing intermediary areas of crossing, by opening the inside to the outside” (ibid 56). Practical examples of commoning in an urban context are more ephemeral prefigurative politics of protesting, appropriating and caring for public spaces, urban gardening etc. These are not isolated holistic subsistence projects, covering all aspects of life. It is rather the case that certain spheres of life are organized according to principles of alternative economies (housing, food coops etc.). The German commons activist and researcher Friederike Habermann (2009) uses the metaphor of peninsulas against the current (Halbinseln gegen den Strom) to characterize both, the alternative modes and the connectedness of the practices and approaches of commoning to and with hegemonic capitalist economy and society. While I underline the principle and emancipatory potential of openness, it must be stressed that there is a lack of stability of many commoning processes. This is partly due to a lack of supportive structures, as a result of the commons’ marginal existence in relation to the capitalist economy. Commons need more institutions that ensure continuity.

Community capitalism

It is also necessary to look at the ambivalences of the renewed interest in community against the background of an eroding welfare-state regime and increasing precarity. Volunteering is promoted by the state, as community projects and grassroots activities contribute to the social reproduction of livelihoods. However, shifting the solution of society’s problems to the collective micro-level can also lead to an exaggeration of their potential and a structurally conditioned overload of the collectives (Barthel/Meißner 2022: 165). An overload with expectations and assignments might increase pressure on social relations. Small collectives in community capitalism are then subject to a similar contradictory dynamic as individualized subjects in classic neoliberalism: Collectives are made responsible for making a living, while at the same time they are situated in structurally competitive relationships (which are unavailable to them). This might be beyond individualism but not beyond (neo)liberalism. Thus, the unresolved question remains, if or under what circumstances commoning is neoliberalism’s ‘Plan B’, complementing market and state, or the Original Disaccumulation of Capital (Caffentzis 2009)?

1. The following elaborations are based on the conceptual frame of the research project “Within and Beyond Law? Feminist Perspectives on Urban and Housing Commons” (2021 – 2024) which is a sub-project of the DFG Research Unit “Law-Gender-Collectivity”: www.recht-geschlecht-kollektivitaet.de/en/

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