Housing the Social- Why commons now?

A workshop by Pablo de Soto and Jose Perez de Lama, hackitectura.net
with the collaboration of Jaime Díez Honrado and supported by cartografiaciudadana.net
Curator: Daphne Dragona

Mapping the Commons, Athens is a collective study, a contemporary reading and an open cartography of Athens and its special dynamic. In a difficult financial period in which the contemporary metropolis seems restless and vulnerable, the Hackitectura collective in collaboration with an interdisciplinary group of young researchers and students seeked for, examined and documented the points of the city where a new form of common wealth can be located. Seeing beyond the “public” and the “private”, new types of commons were mapped which were based on collectivity, sociability, open and free access, gift economy or peer to peer practices. During a seven day workshop a different image of the city was thus formed full of promises, but yet fluid and unstable. Although the new common resources and places that were located within the urban environment are outcomes of the knowledge and the ideas that the multitude of the metropolis possesses and shares, at the same time it was noted that the new common wealth can not easily escape cases of exploitation and appropriation. 


[common]

The recurrent concept of the commons elaborates on the same idea, that is, that in nowadays world  the production of wealth and social life are heavily dependent on communication, cooperation, affects and collective creativity. The commons would be, then, those milieux of shared resources, that are generated by the participation of the many and multiple, which constitute, some would say, the essential productive fabric of the 21st Century metroplis. And then, if we make this connection between commons and production, we have to think of political economy; power, rents and conflict.

[mapping]

However, due to our tradition of the private and the public, of property and individualism, the commons are still hard to see for our late 20th Century eyes. We propose, therefore, a search for the commons; a search that will take the form of a mapping process. We understand mapping, of course, as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, and as artists and social astivists have been using it during the last decade, as a performance that can become a reflection, a work of art, a social action.

[a new Athens?]

Athens, a global posfordist metropolis, in the middle of the economic crisis, periodically struck by social rebellions, was the object of the mapping project. A group of more than 30 architects, activists, artists and filmmakers worked for more than a week developin collaborative mapping strategies, audiovisual languagues, using free software participatory wiki-mapping tools. We proposed the hypothesis that a new [view of the] city will come out of the process, one where the many and multiple, often struggling against the state and capital, are continously, and exuberantly, supporting and producing the commonwealth of its social life.

[work in progress]

This view of the city has taken the form of an interactive video-cartography, an overhead route on the metropolis and the wealth of its various commons: from squatted and self-managed parks in the heart of the city to digital platforms for the sharing and upcycling of objects; from anger and its expression on the streets to the thousand wireless network nodes open in the city, from the critical mass of cyclists demmanding roads for people not cars to the language as main common, from the free software and P2P to the parties demand the ludic use of the streets, from the animals as fellow humans to graffiti as artistic expression in the common canvas that is the city …


read more about the project