Commoning the City Empirical Perspectives on Urban Ecology, Economics and Ethics Space, Materiality and the Normative Series

This collection seeks to expand the limits of current debates about urban commoning practices that imply a radical will to establish collaborative and solidarity networks based on anti-capitalist principles of economics, ecology and ethics.

The chapters in this volume draw on case studies in a diversity of urban contexts, ranging from Detroit, USA to Kyrenia, Cyprus ? on urban gardening and land stewardship, collaborative housing experiments, alternative food networks, claims to urban leisure space, migrants? appropriation of urban space and workers? cooperatives/collectives. The analysis pursued by the eleven chapters opens new fields of research in front of us: the entanglements of racial capitalism with enclosures and of black geographies with the commons, the critical history of settler colonialism and indigenous commons, law as a force of enclosure and as a strategy of commoning, housing commons from the urban scale perspective, solidarity economies as labour commons, territoriality in the urban commons, the non-territoriality of mobile commons, the new materialist and post-humanist critique of the commons debate and feminist ethics of care.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

List of contributors

Introduction. Towards an Ethos for Commoning the City: An Introduction, Derya Özkan and Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç

PART 1. COMMONING URBAN NATURE

Chapter 1. Racial capitalism and a tentative commons. Urban farming and claims to space in post-bankruptcy Detroit, Rachael Baker

Chapter 2. The Politics of Food. Commoning Practices in Alternative Food Networks in Istanbul,Ayça İnce and Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu

Chapter 3. Insurgent Ecologies: Rhetorics of Resistance and Aspiration in Istanbul’s Ancient Market Gardens (2014-2018), Charles Zerner

Chapter 4. "A Revolution under our feet": Food Sovereignty and the Commons in the case of Campi Aperti, Massimo De Angelis and Dagmar Diesner

PART 2. CLAIMS TO URBAN LAND: BEYOND PUBLIC - PRIVATE PROPERTY

Chapter 5. Urban commoning and the right not to be excluded, Nicholas Blomley

Chapter 6. From graveyards to the ‘people’s gardens’: The making of public leisure space in Istanbul, Berin Golonu

Chapter 7. "Time to protect Kyrenia": defending the right to landscape in northern Cyprus, Ezgican Özdemir

Chapter 8. A migrant’s tale of two cities: Mobile Commons and the alteration of urban space in Athens and Hamburg, Martin Bak Jørgensen and Vasiliki Makrygianni

PART 3. RESPONSES TO PRECARITY

Chapter 9. Contradictions of housing commons: between middle class and anarchist models in Berlin, Kenton Card

Chapter 10. Precarious Commons. An Urban Garden for Uncertain Times,Elke Krasny

Chapter 11. Cooperative Economies as Commons: Labor and Production in Solidarity,Bengi Akbulut

Derya Özkan: Department of Cinema and Digital Media, Izmir University of Economics.

Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç: Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (2019–2020), Koç University and Department of Anthropology, Istanbul University.