Professor Ash Amin, on behalf of himself and his co-organiser Philip Howell, offered some closing remarks on the talks and discussions from the symposium. For him, the contributors to the symposium had been engaged in creating an incipient politics of possibility around the commons, emerging from a shared sense of the need to bring back commoning and togetherness in social life. As the talks and discussions had shown, however, the reported erosion of the commons was an ambiguous and multifaceted process, characterised both by openings and enclosures. The symposium’s contributors had also highlighted a wealth of novel experiments attempting to disturb the apparent equilibrium of exclusion and enclosure. What then could we expect of such experiments? And how might they seek to overcome such fundamental challenges to the commons and processes of commoning?
Session 8: Biocommons
The eighth and final session of the symposium was on the topic of the biocommons. Maria Fannin from the University of Bristol talked about biobanking, drawing on her extensive work on the Bristol-based ‘Children of the 90s’ longitudinal study. Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern from the University of Cambridge discussed the politics of altruism in relation to the example of practices of organ donation. An important theme in both of these talks, and one brought out in the subsequent discussion, was the significance of paying attention to the role of feelings of love and care when trying to understand the commons and processes of commoning.
Session 7: Humans/animals
The seventh session of the symposium was on the topic of human and animal commons. Professor Eduardo Mendieta of Stony Brook University spoke about the prospects of interspecies cosmopolitanism and animal rights to the city, arguing that the just city is a zoopolis. Adam Reed from the University of St Andrews contrasted the different visions and attitudes towards the commons of a Scottish animal welfare campaigning organisation and a group of London-based libertarian bloggers, unsettling some assumptions about the politics of the commons. Common to both talks was a concern with how the notion of the commons could be broadened to include other beings, and what other conditions this engendered.
Sessions 5 & 6: Urban Commons
The fifth and sixth sessions of the symposium, on Tuesday morning, discussed the topic of the urban commons. Professor Edgar Pieterse from the African Centre for Cities talked about the shaping of urban futures in South Africa, drawing on his own experiences engaging with policy work. Professor Henrietta Palmer from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm drew on recent work with colleagues on commoning the city to describe the complex emergence of urban commons. Professor Denise Morado from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil talked about her work with residents in informal settlements in Brazil, and their attempts to claim rights to the city and occupy land. Finally, Colin McFarlane from Durham University talked about the metabolisation of the commons in the context of his work on sanitation in urban spaces in Mumbai. All of the talks emphasised the difficulty in defining and identifying the urban commons, and the contradictory processes feeding into their emergence.
Session 4: Neoliberal Commons
The fourth session of the symposium was on the relationships between neoliberalism and the commons. Professor Filip de Boeck from KU Leuven talked about the neoliberal urban expansion of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Professor Sarah Radcliffe from the University of Cambridge talked about the uneven geographies of neoliberal development. A strong theme in both of these talks was the difficulty of understanding and managing neoliberal developments and their effects on the commons, due to their fast-moving, mobile and changeable nature.
Session 3: Rights
The third session of the symposium was on the topic of commons and rights. Professor Nicholas Blomley from Simon Fraser University, Canada, spoke about understandings of common rights to land in the context of urban gentrification and displacement. Alex Jeffrey from the University of Cambridge talked about the growth transnational courts as an attempt to create a new legal commons. A strong theme of both papers was the idea of law and conceptions of rights being something which is not only constructed in the court room and other formal legal institutions, but which is also contested through people’s everyday struggles for land rights or justice for war crimes, and the actions of NGOs like Amnesty International in identifying possible contraventions of international law.
Session 2: Politics of Nature
The second session of the symposium was on the topic of the politics of nature. Professor Sarah Whatmore from the University of Oxford talked about the politics of environmental expertise, drawing from her work with the Ryedale Flood Research Group in Pickering. Kathryn Yusoff from Queen Mary University of London talked about narratives of the Anthropocene, and the role of geology as a constitutive element of the politics of the commons. Both speakers were concerned with developing an approach to geopolitics attentive to the materiality and specificity of earthly processes, and both also highlighted the multiple scales and sites of political action and subjectivity related to the commons.
Session 1: Parallel Commons
The first session of the symposium was on the topic of parallel commons, concerning resource efficiency and security. Professor Bruce Lankford from the University of East Anglia introduced the notion of the ‘paracommons’ (discussed in this book), which describes the material gains in resources made as a result of greater resource efficiency. Professor Keith Richards from the University of Cambridge talked about his role in the Foreseer project with other University of Cambridge colleagues, developing material flow models and scenarios for future energy consumption, land use, greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption. Both talks highlighted the physical and social complexity of ‘the commons’, and the nested assumptions made in order to create models and projections for their management. Furthermore, both speakers were concerned with making visible the ways in which common resources arise and are consumed, as well as how they might flow between different systems or have impacts on other interdependent resources.
Monday evening public lectures
The Monday evening public lectures will be held 4.30-6.30pm in the Queen’s Building Lecture Theatre, Emmanuel College [map], University of Cambridge, St Andrew’s Street, Cambridge
Professor John Urry of Lancaster University will be talking about ‘Offshoring as a way of undermining the Commons?’. Offshoring has become a pervasive feature of contemporary societies, posing huge challenges both for governments and citizens. Elements of contemporary offshoring come in diverse forms – in work, finance, pleasure, waste, emissions, energy, security, and taxation – but each generates new patterns of power, reducing responsibilities for a privileged and powerful ‘offshore class,’ and undermining the possibilities of democratic governance. The offshore secret worlds that result directly or indirectly undermine various kinds of ‘commons’. But can offshoring of these commons, and the dark side of globalization, be resisted and reversed? John Urry explores the potential for ‘reshoring’ such commons, for strengthening democracy and for promoting low carbon futures.
Professor Natalie Fenton of Goldsmiths College, University of London will be talking about ‘Politics in Common in the Digital Age’. In opposition to the neoliberal destruction of solidarities, a new progressive collectivism has begun to emerge, re-establishing the idea of the demos in a way that challenges many of the assumptions of liberal democracy. The internet has played an important role in these emergent publics, enabling the return of a critical discourse based on inequality and the destruction of public goods. But it has also revealed crucial problems in the realization of mediated solidarity and collective politics, and in particular the difficulties with the notion of ‘political value’ in this new commons. Natalie Fenton explores these issues in relation to pluralism and horizontalism, freedom and autonomy, solidarity and the problem of ‘politics in common’ in the digital age.
Shrinking Commons Symposium begins 8th September
The Shrinking Commons Symposium will take place on the 8th and 9th September, bringing together leading scholars from the fields of geography, sociology, anthropology, law, architecture, philosophy, development studies, urban studies and more to discuss pressing issues around common property and resources. From climate change to the development of online communities and forms of interaction, questions about the ways we use commons and the condition we find them in increasingly animate contemporary discourse. Topics of discussion at the symposium will include: land and nature; technologies and infrastructures; and urban publics and rights.
This website will be used to collect together resources related to the symposium as well as providing a record of the symposium talks and discussions. For more information about the public lectures related to the symposium please see here. To follow the symposium in real time follow us on twitter and look out for the hashtag #commonlife.