Search

In recent years the debate about the commons has proliferated, focusing on different aspects, such as ownership, governance, social relations, the relation with the urban and the dynamics of capital accumulation, among the others. Housing struggles represent an important topic of interest within this field of studies because it offers the chance to highlight the conflicting relation between enclosures and commons in contemporary cities. The aim of the paper is to investigate the practices of movements struggling for housing through the perspective of commoning, focusing on the processes of production, maintenance and claiming of urban commons in a neighbourhood in the city of Bologna experiencing gentrification. The practices promoted by the collective Social Log are acknowledged to be a specific form of creation of the common where the most marginalized groups of society are subjectified through the constituting power of social cooperation. Commoning represents therefore the main point of the analysis which considers the political potential of the commons within the processes of resistance against the neoliberal city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]