Commoning the City

Introduction

Towards an ethos for commoning the city

Derya Özkan and Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç

This edited volume has its roots in Spaces in Common (SiC), a series of events organized in 2016 as part of the research project "Changing Imaginations of Istanbul. From Oriental to the Cool City" (2011City" ( -2016. 1 The project had taken a new turn in the aftermath of the Gezi uprising in 2013, shifting its focus from the enclosure of urban culture via city branding towards debates on the commons and commoning in Istanbul. The uprising was the harbinger of a new modality of politics in Turkey (Badiou 2012, cited in Erensü andKaraman 2017, 31), marked by solidarity networks, cutting across class (and other) identities and intersecting on a common ground that offered a prospect of political organization and collective action. The SiC series came out of that moment as an excursion into the modes of radical thought and action that underlay what was popularly expressed as "the Gezi spirit." The series included public talks on the commons 2 and panels that hosted a group of Istanbulbased activists to discuss the post-Gezi commoning experiences in Istanbul. 3 The Gezi uprising was a transformative experience . It enabled an unprecedented political imaginary, fuelling practices of commoning in Istanbul and beyond; and it also changed the way we think about Istanbul, and about the city in general. It made concrete the possibility of a new political subjectivity and another social life, making room for lifespaces based on a solidarity ethos. It inspired us to understand the production of contemporary urban space "beyond the conceptual and physical boundaries of the city" (Erensü and Karaman 2017, 33), twisting together the urban and the rural, integrating nature into our urban imaginations. Organizing the SiC panels, we were preoccupied with the politico-practical implications of the Gezi spirit, instantiated in its survivals, as well as in its precursors. It was crucial to comprehend the very moment we were going through, a moment pregnant with possibilities. We wanted to uncover the "life beyond life," as Kristin would put it.

Not the memory of the event or its legacy, although some form of these are surely already in the making, but its prolongation, every bit as vital to the event's logic as the initial acts of insurrection in the streets of the city. It is the continuation of the combat by other means. In the dialectic of the lived and the conceivedthe phrase is Henri Lefebvre'sthe thought of a moment is generated only with and after it: unleashed by the creative energies and excess of the moment itself. Actions produce dreams and ideas, and not the reverse." (Ross 2015, 24, emphasis added in the last sentence)

SiC events gave us the opportunity to converse with othersthe commoners and commoners-to-be of Istanbulabout the political space that flourished in the cracks of the capitalist system, once opened up by Gezi. We came together with local initiatives to reflect on the urban practices of commoning as grassroots strategies for creating life forms alternative to capitalist ways of living. At a later stage, as planning this volume, we widened the circle, with interlocutors from outside Istanbul who happen to be scholars and/or activists. The growing conversation steered us to an expanded scope, including empirical work in a diversity of urban contexts. 4 The chapters here, thus, draw on case studies carried out in Istanbul as well as in other cities across the world, ranging from Detroit, USA to Kyrenia, Cyprusstudies 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. Including other cities in the discussion enabled us to reflect on how commoning practices in different sociogeographical contexts speak to each other, as we elaborate below. Commoning practices imply a radical will to establish collaborative and solidarity networks based on anti-capitalist principles of economics, ecology, and ethics. The collection seeks to expand the limits of current debates about the commons and commoning, by bringing together the three axes of economics, ecology, and ethics, and by putting them in dialogue with seemingly remote theories and conceptualizations in social sciences and humanities. The cases we have brought together in this volume open new fields of research in front of us: the entanglements of racial capitalism with enclosures and of black geographies with the commons (Baker), the critical history of settler colonialism and indigenous commons (Blomley), law as a force of enclosure (Blomley), and law as a strategy of commoning (Özdemir), housing commons from the urban-scale perspective (Card), solidarity economies as labour commons (Akbulut), territoriality in the urban commons (Blomley), the non-territoriality of mobile commons (Jørgensen and Makrygianni), new materialist and posthumanist critique of the commons debate (Zerner), and feminist ethics of care (Krasny).

With these case studies, we contribute mainly to two literatures: urban studies and the commons literature. The major contribution to urban studies is the shift of focus from enclosures to commoning, from dystopian visions of neoliberal urbanism to a view that is keen on understanding affirmative practices of commoning together with their limitations. Critical urban studies literature has long been dominated by discussions on neoliberal policies and their disastrous impact on the urban social space and relations. Developed as a response to capitalism's crisis in the late 1960s/early 1970s, neoliberalism spread across the globe, causing permanent damage to the ethics of caring for the common good. The rule of the capitalist regime has expanded globally to sustain market-oriented economic growth, at the expense of an unprecedented elimination of people's hard-earned social rights. Cutbacks in public expenditure for social services (such as education and health care), combined with the privatization of public assets and deregulation of markets, have significantly weakened the safety net for the poor.

Cities have acquired a new strategic centrality in neoliberal times. Gentrification has become one of the driving forces for capital accumulation through a valorization of urban land, enabling the transfer of property from the urban poor to the affluent populations of the city. Indeed it has become a global urban strategy of urban governance, deployed to implement and justify largescale urban redevelopment plans, by forming state-market alliances in translocally interconnected ways ). Programs about city branding and marketing are another hallmark of neoliberal urbanism, planned by local governments and carried out by private-public partnerships, in order to enliven urban economies, especially in de-industrializing and declining cities (Özkan 2015). As Sharon Zukin formulated in her book Cultures of Cities (1996), culture in neoliberal times has become "an economic base," taking on an infrastructural quality, constituting a major building block of the urban economy. As a result, there emerged exclusive cultural enclaves within the city, giving way to new consumption patterns among the emergent urban classes, such as bobos or hipsters, serving what David Harvey coined as "accumulation by dispossession" . Under such conditions, the putatively dichotomous relation between the state and the market, or the public and the private, dissolves and transforms into a congruous partnership, requiring us to find new concepts to understand this relatively recent mechanism of urban capital accumulation.

Neoliberal urbanism has recently mutated into what is called austerity urbanism, as a last resort in response to capitalism's regular crisis tendencies. Austerity policies have assumed systemic intensity since the Wall Street crash of 2008, marking a new phase in the neoliberal regime of capital accumulation . 5 The funds saved by increasing cuts in social services, wages and budgets, and elimination of affordable housing are used to subsidize private investors to help them redevelop the city centre . Austerity measures caused a profound uncertainty and misery (Thébaud-Mony 2016), leading to what has been discussed within the last ten years as precarization . As a neoliberal instrument of governance , precarization worsens the conditions of work and life, creating extreme levels of social insecurity. And yet, as Isabell articulates, the regime of governmentality based on precarization is also constitutive of emancipatory politics. It is the same precarized subjects that rise up against measures of austerity and come together on the basis of their existential vulnerability, and that create common spaces under the conditions imposed by neoliberalism. The cases studied in this volume are responses to precarization largely caused by austerity urbanism. They are practices of commoning space and resources which have been taken away from the people as a result of ongoing enclosures. The commoners are developing new ways to meet their basic needs and fulfil their singular and collective desires, which neoliberal urbanism has undermined. To achieve a self-determined life, the commoners are not only discovering the commons but also inventing new ones.

We take theories and practices of commoning as a guide to understand the complexities of the current urban condition, as well as the possibilities it produces for counteraction. 6 Following Peter Linebaugh (2009), we prefer to use "commoning" rather than "the commons" as shared physical spaces or resources. 7 The concept of commoning articulates the dynamic and transformative quality of the commons, as well as the relationality and performativity inherent to them. The dynamic and transformative aspect implies that a commons is not a static resource, but a constitution of social networks that seek to co-create and sustain a life-world based on a continuously debated ethos. 8 This is akin to what we have learned from Lefebvre, who views social space as a set of social relations rather than a static object or a physical container in which things are located or practices take place . For Lefebvre, space is a process; it is fluid and alive. Space is not a dead or inert thing; space is always becoming (Özkan 2008). From a Lefebvrian perspective, the space is produced by not only urban planners and authorities but also people who live in, pass through, speak about, and even those who just breathe in the city. All contribute to the production of the city as a common space, including its everyday life, culture, and social relations. This space is also potentially conducive to practices of commoning that are "enacting 'another world' within the neoliberal landscape, and in doing so are altering subjectivities, relations and spaces" , 4, see also Kanngieser 2013. , Midnight Notes Collective 1990, as well as to the feminist readings of precarization and commoning . 7 The latter approach has a longer history, usually traced back to the classical piece by Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons" (1968), and to the common pool resource (CPR) theory developed by Elinor . See also . Hardin, apparently informed by the Malthusian theories on overpopulation, was first to raise the issue of resource depletion/scramble competition related with the commons concept, a subject matter that was widely debated throughout the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. cited in Dawney et al. 2015, 1). For recent critical evaluations of the Hardin-Ostrom debate, see Akbulut 2017, Borch andKornberger 2015. 8 In their introduction to another collection published in the Routledge series, Space, Materiality and the Normative, likewise conceptualize the urban commons in terms of social relationality rather than (subtractive) resources. As framing their argument, they put into conversation classical theories of urban value, density and relationality , of the city as a collectivity (Wirth 1938), with the more recently developed conceptions of atmospheres . The natural resource perspective, as argue, does not hold up well in explaining the urban commons (or perhaps any commons), because the use of urban space may lead to value creation that invalidates clear-cut distinctions between spatial production and consumption (8-9). Following Ebenezer Howard, they suggest that density and relationality are foundational to the urban commons that constitute the city, as the latter resembles a "polyatmospheric" composite (10), or a "condensed 'macro foam' of singular bubbles, i.e. basic forms of sociality" (9). The city life is the output of what is happening in all these bubbles, or "minor commons," which are not only shared and co-experienced by the people (commoners) but also "strategically produced in order, for example, to achieve particular commercial or political effects" (10).

In putting Lefebvre in conversation with Hardt and Negri, we reconsider the social production of urban space, reformulating its definition as the biopolitical production of a common social life through the practices of the multitude (Özkan 2008). 9 In Negri's words, "the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory used to be to the working class" (Negri 2017, 41). Hardt and Negri conceive of the multitude as a disorganized and heterogeneous collectivity, replacing the homogeneous and unitary categories of the working class, the people or the masses (Hardt and Negri 2004, 97-227). The multitude encompasses a multiplicity of singularities subordinated by capitalist relations of social production in heterogeneous ways, including economical, geographical, cultural, racial, sexual subordinations. As the creation of value stretches out beyond factory walls to embrace the whole society, the domain of exploitation as well as emancipation becomes social life . Production today can be understood as the biopolitical production of social life as a whole by the multitude. The commons is produced through social production, now taking place inside and outside the factory, in the office block, at home, on the internet, on the street, and through practices in all domains of social life (Özkan 2008).

The cases of commoning in this volume do not instantiate flawless or ideal life-worlds. They are imperfect, contradictory, and full of ongoing conflict. Negotiation over conflicts, in fact, is their lifeblood. We focus on both accomplishments as well as failures of practices of commoning the city. Our approach is affirmative and critical at the same time, regarding the drawbacks of commoning practices while keeping an open eye for their achievements. We take caution not to fall into the trap of romanticization, a tendency not hard to come by within the commons literature.

Another tendency in the existing commons literature is the prevalence of theoretical ruminations with insufficient empirical evidence. Our edited volume was planned to bring together case studies that substantiate theory with concrete findings. The eleven chapters in this book offer empirical reflections, while putting the commons literature in dialogue with various conceptualizations in social sciences and humanities, which we have outlined above. The contributions to this volume come from various social science disciplines, from sociology to economics, all committed to interdisciplinary perspectives in various ways. Overall, these case studies represent fragments of an emergent culture of commoning based on an ethos of careto which we will return at the end of this introduction.

Commoning urban nature

In Part 1, we see three interrelated themes cutting across the political economy of food in the four case studies: the question of food sovereignty, alternative food networks, and (preservation of/sustaining) ecological heritage. Rachael Baker's chapter on the politics of urban farming in post-bankruptcy Detroit (USA) provides a historical perspective on food sovereignty in an urban landscape marked by racial segregation, dispossession, and poverty. Detroit, a predominantly Black Midwest city with more than 2,000 urban gardens, has a long history of redistributing vacant property to its residents for tentative voluntary stewardship through the municipally led Farm-a-Lot program. Black farmers would till the land to supply their community with local foods and sustain their lives. This program was instituted as a strategy to develop the urban lands damaged largely due to police brutality against the Black rebels of the late 1960s. The local government's bankruptcy measures to redevelop the cityheld properties have recently disrupted the Farm-a-Lot program, a process leading to a large-scale transfer of cultivable lands and residential areas from Black tenants to farming businesses and white residents. The Detroit case is quite telling about the US context of racial capitalism, where we cannot talk about Black politics regardless of its intertwinement with class-based grievances. White people's privileged access to property is evidenced in this case by the exclusion of Black farmers from negotiations over land ownership, a situation that has at the same time created its own conditions of counter action. The city's agricultural community is worthy of consideration with its potential to create and animate post-capitalist frameworks of land values, as well as with the decolonial imagination of the commons. Black farmers in Detroit contend for a dignified livelihood within hierarchical power relations in the city, practicing their right to "healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods," and "to define their own food and agriculture systems" , eventually raising an insurgent claim to food sovereignty in urban nature to work out an autonomous political and economic system alternative to that of capital.

In Chapter 2, Ayça İnce and Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu discuss food sovereignty as it is claimed through the practices of alternative food networks (AFNs) in three cases in Istanbul: BÜKOOP (Boğaziçi University Consumers' Cooperative), the neighbourhood cooperative Kadıköy Coop, and the food collective DÜRTÜK (Resisting Producer and Consumer Collective). AFNs are selfgoverning organizations that identify the pitfalls of the exchange-value-dominated food provision system and that take action to redefine and transform it. Having emerged as responses to the monopolization of corporatized agriculture in Turkey, AFNs are experimenting with alternative management of shared resources to reorganize the processes of production, consumption, and distribution by reconnecting urban consumers with small-scale (urban and rural) producers. İnce and Kadirbeyoğlu insist that creating alternative modes of exchange in food provision is possible, and they present AFNs as spaces of possibility towards this end. In order to do that, they argue, one needs to first shatter the dualisms established by the conventional food system, between nature and culture, rural and urban, producer and consumer, environment and society.

İnce and Kadirbeyoğlu are sceptical about organic certification mechanisms, which create a niche within the capitalist food market dominated by large-scale agro-businesses, and works to keep urban dwellers disengaged with food production. They favour AFNs for they operate in an autonomous manner, by depending on a trust relationship between farmers and urban consumers rather than relying on the methods of certification instituted collaboratively by the state and the market. The question of ethics thus plays a predominant role in creating alternative food networks, leading us to consider questions of fair trade and ecological sustainability. It is only through putting into practice a shared ethics of care that the acts of AFNs can be considered practices of commoning. This is the only way that might lead to the recovery of food from being a profit-oriented resource, and to the reclamation of its status as something "inflected with personal and communal meanings" (İnce and Kadirbeyoğlu, 38).

In Chapter 3, Charles Zerner focuses on the centuries-long history of Yedikule urban gardens (bostans from fifth century CE onwards 10 ), their historical and economic value and significance for both urban dwellers and those who farm them. Zerner discusses the insurgency that followed the partial destruction of Yedikule bostans in the aftermath of the Gezi uprising in Istanbul in the summer of 2013. He sees Yedikule bostans as neither private property nor a community-based common property resource management system. The gardeners at Yedikule bostans are land managers (or lease holders) that make decisions about cultivation practices and regulate access to plots under the jurisdiction of the local government. 11 They are neither peasants nor green activiststhey are labourers who try to make a living through farming urban land that happens to be a site of ecological heritage, a common property of humankind, with larger cultural and archaeological meanings. 12 Zerner discusses the multiple publics that participated in the defence of the bostans in 2013 and the ways in which they imagined Yedikule bostans. He emphasizes the power of imaginaries to shape landscapes and asserts that 10 There are historical documents and maps attesting to the fact that the bostans existed together with the Byzantine Theodosian city walls from the very beginning. For a detailed analysis of the history of Yedikule bostans, see White, Shopov, and Ostovich 2015. 11 Yedikule gardens have been placed under the municipality's jurisdiction in the 1980s.

Beforehand, they used to be either state-owned property (hazine arazisi) or foundation land (vakıf arazisi). 12 Zerner writes about a group of experts that wrote a report and presented it to UNESCO to call for the recognition of Yedikule gardens as a site of world heritage.

"How one 'images' the world literally conditions how reality is both conceptualized and shaped" (Corner 1999, 153 Despite the fact that Yedikule bostans have never been a commons selfgoverned by clear rules, Zerner recognizes that there are signs of collaboration and collective action, that the gardens constitute an informal, improvised form of commoning. The gardeners' actions cannot squarely be placed in the realm of the political , and yet, they have a relative autonomy based on their informal cooperation. Zerner suggests a vision for the future of Yedikule gardens as an agro-biodiversity sanctuary that houses data on historical agricultural practices, and that celebrates an insurgent ecology of weeds, roots, seeds, sprouts, rhizomes, soils, underground water resources, walls and rubble.

The closing chapter of Part 1, by Massimo de Angelis and Dagmar Diesner, presents a case of commoning that is organized around a small farmers' and consumers' association, and that can be located into the realm of the political more squarely than Zerner's case of Yedikule bostans. De Angelis and Diesner discuss the case of Campi Aperti, a self-governing association that was formed in 2002, mobilized around 120 farms cultivating 800 hectares of land and providing fresh produce to eight local markets in Bologna. They define Campi Aperti as an autonomous political and economic food system that is centred on values different from those of the capitalist food market. Campi Aperti aims to operate outside the industrial food market dominated by food corporations that see nature as a resource and exploit it for their private economic advantages. Campi Aperti promotes an alternative model, including strategies, patterns, and methods for food production, distribution, and consumption.

Campi Aperti's autonomous model of value production is supposed to remain outside the European Union regulations and agricultural policies that are shaped by a merely economic and predominantly profit-oriented logic. The association reprehends impersonal market transactions and favours a face-to-face participatory food provision process that strives to balance the varying needs of farmers, consumers, and nature. While trying to regard small-scale farmers' incomes and to support them so the producers can maintain their livelihoods, Campi Aperti also works to make it possible for consumers to access high-quality food at affordable prices. The association cares for not only human but also non-human nature and aims to establish new agro-ecological relations that form a social metabolism of humans in alliance with non-human nature, which is "healing, sustainable and resilient" (De Angelis and Diesner,76). Similar to the members of AFNs discussed by İnce and Kadirbeyoğlu in Chapter 2, the members of Campi Aperti struggle to create a horizontally governed ethical space, a commons that moves away from the industrial food regime towards an agro-ecological one, replacing state organic licences with commons licences, public-private protocols with an autonomous commons protocol, and promoting trust and social justice among themselves and with others. The ultimate goal for Campi Aperti is food sovereignty, and the only way to achieve that end is commoning the food provision system.

Claims to urban land: beyond public and private property

Part 2 focuses on claims to urban land which require definitions beyond the given distinction between public and private property. In the opening chapter of Part 2, Blomley's conceptual reflections on property bring us back to Baker's discussion in Part 1 on how local farmers' access to urban land in Detroit is defined by race-based power relations. The White privilege that Baker has problematized functions as "the force of exclusion," as Blomley would put it, by no means justifiable, for it denies a basic principle of democracy in market societies, the right to private property that C. B. Macpherson describes as a requirement for human freedom . This is an issue not only of unequal or unfair allocation of resources, or coordination of land use, but also of dictating our ways of life, determining our relations with the materiality in which our human existence is embedded. The paradigm of private property, premised on the right to exclude, reinforces structural violence by reproducing hierarchical power relations within the city. When we put together the arguments offered by Blomley and Baker in this volume, it becomes clearer how power and property relations mutually define each other, rather than one of them constituting the other.

Human freedom necessitates common property, Macpherson argues, "a property in the means of labourthat is, in the resources, the land and capitalthis does not need to be an exclusive property" (ibid., 79). Blomley pursues this notion of common property, as the right not to be excluded (RN2BE) from a valued resource, in order to think about commoning practices in urban contexts, with a focus on the territorial dimensions of squatting, homelessness, sitdown strikes, and anti-racist resistance in the Global North. In these cases, the right to exclude is translated into a collective autonomous claim to a space enclosed by private or public stakeholders.

Blomley expands on Macpherson's theory, by accentuating the territoriality that "helps materialize, organize and stabilize" all the social relations surrounding a property, that "serves to classify, communicate, enforce, inscribe, and legitimize a set of entitlements" (Blomley,93). A crucial contribution Blomley makes to the commons literature is the emphasis on the territorial claims inherent to urban struggles marked by the RN2BE as "a relational form of commoning" (100). We can only grasp the full import of these claims by taking into consideration the race-and class-based hierarchies of the society, and the particular positioning of the claimants-as-commoners within those hierarchies.

In Chapter 6, Berin Gölönü presents a historical case study of the recreational sites of Taksim, focusing on the patterns in which diverse urban communities negotiate with municipal authorities over the use and historic significance of these sites. The history she narrates goes back to the late nineteenth century, a period that witnessed the formation of the first municipal gardens in Istanbul, such as the Taksim garden in Pera (Beyoğlu) that would be included in a larger city park plan during the early Republican period. These gardens were planned as sites for outdoor recreation activities, instead of the graveyards, which had been vital to social life as leisure grounds for the locals until they were expropriated as a "measure to control cholera outbreaks" recurring in the mid-nineteenth century. The Taksim garden, as the main focus of the chapter, was itself designed on a plot that had formerly been occupied by the Catholic and Protestant cemeteries, while the latter were transferred to a nearby neighbourhood, Feriköy.

Gölönü reads this process within the context of the late Ottoman reforms that paved the way for an increased municipal authority to redefine the property relations and to control the use of common areas in the city under the pretext of providing public service more efficiently. Pera residents' struggles over the fate of the common spaces around Taksim, non-Muslims' cemeteries in particular, reveal how "public benefit" is a highly contentious concept that can be easily hijacked by contingent political factors, including the motives for maintaining order and securitization, as well as for rent-seeking urban development. While the cemeteries were free of charge, only those who could afford the entry fee enjoyed the Taksim garden. Expropriation, or stately enclosure, is assumed to serve a contingent public that includes only privileged sections of the society, like the Muslim majority in Turkey that capitalized on the forced eviction and dispossession of the Greek and Armenian communities during the early Republican period. 13 Taksim garden was historically never an autonomous case of commoning, and yet it acquired a totally different character when occupied by activists during the Gezi uprisings of 2013. The liberated Gezi Park worked as a commons during the sixteen-days long takeover, demonstrating a case in which public space is transformed through commoning into an autonomous space.

Public space claimed as commons also appears in Ezgican Özdemir's study of coastal areas of Kyrenia in Northern Cyprus. Since 1974, Cyprus has been a divided island, as a result of the ongoing occupation of the north by Turkish military forces, and the still internationally unrecognized rule of the de-facto state of Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus -Kuzey Kıbrıs Türk Cumhuriyeti (TRNC), which is complicit in the redevelopment plans for the Kyrenian coast. In order to create the necessary conditions for capital accumulation, TRNC governments have implemented a set of territorializing practices, manipulating legal frameworks and (re)interpreting laws, changing place names, enclosing urban land for military uses, and abusing practices of land registry (Navaro-Yashin 2009). Özdemir's analysis demonstrates Blomley's point in Chapter 5, that "territory is a means through which the relations of property are organized" (Blomley,94). The state enforces its legal and political processes of planning and development in collaboration with market forces to turn formerly public spaces of leisure into privatized beaches, exclusive hotels, holiday resorts, and casinos.

Özdemir discusses the two local activist organizations' resistance to the privatization of the coastal landscape of Kyrenia for tourism-oriented urban development. In Özdemir's cases of enclosure, "law-making becomes power making" (Benjamin 1978, 295). The local activists reclaim the sea coast as a public space "free for all," and thus defend their right to landscape. For them, the legal field is not only a source of hegemonic violence exerted upon the landscapes they fight for, but it is also a vital means of their struggle; in other words, law is a battleground .

Özdemir insists that one needs to pay due attention to law as strategy in order to fully understand the urban struggles that count as commoning practices. The activists in Kyrenia strategically try to maintain the status of these urban landscapes as public spaces, although their relationship to these places exceed the limited liberties suggested by the term "public space." Coastal areas in North Cyprus have been spaces of sociality imbued with cultural and political meanings, representing lived realities and histories of the island including not only sweet memories but also (ongoing) conflict and violence. Local activists develop a capability to manoeuvre out of the confines of the legal system through instrumentalizing the tools of the state and the market, to contest capital accumulation and to commit acts of commoning. Özdemir points out how the activists' commoning practices are entangled with the realms of power dynamics and authority, and how commoners need to struggle through state power that violently permeates people's livelihoods, and how they deflect law to serve emancipatory purposes.

Chapter 8 deploys the concept of mobile commons to elaborate on migrants' practices of commoning urban space as emancipatory acts in two crisis-ridden European cities, Athens in the south and Hamburg in the north. Referring to Massimo De Angelis (2012, 185), Martin Bak Jørgensen and Vasiliki Makrygianni define the commons as systems that "create a social basis for alternative ways of articulating social production, independent from capital and its prerogatives." Jørgensen and Makrygianni argue that framing migrants' urban practices on-the-move as commoning puts into perspective the interconnections between European cities that seemingly have dissimilar experiences regarding the refugee and economic crises. Mobile commons also affects encounters between native and migrant urban dwellers, creating a common ground for practices of mutual solidarity and social justice both within the city and across borders. Jørgensen and Makrygianni suggest that mobile commons shatters structures of otherness, creating a diverse "we" made up of natives and migrants, breaking the boundaries between local residents and newcomers.

Jørgensen and Makrygianni's cases of mobile commons are marked by lack of any claim whatsoever to territoriality. Mobile commons are unstable, ephemeral and porous, hence inimical to alienation and commodification. Thanks to their unsteady character, they escape the social relations commanded by capital, spread through migrants' routes in Europe, and constitute autonomous spaces. The practices of commoning in Hamburg include cases such as Park Fiction, a communal space used for recreational activities and other collective purposes, hosting protests and demonstrations; Arrivati Park, a city park located in the St Pauli neighbourhood, turned into a collective space by Hamburg Recht auf Stadt (Right to the City) Network, and defined as "a socio-political chill-out zone" where migrants and other urban dwellers can mingle; and Rote Flora, a former theatre that has been squatted and then turned into an autonomous cultural centre. The cases in Athens Jørgensen and Makrygianni discuss are: Melissa, a network of migrant women which aims to strengthen their bonds with each other and with the host society; and the Pedion tou Areos Park, the largest green area in the city centre, which has long been a shelter for the city's "vagabonds," and which has since 2015 become a place for incoming migrants to set up their tents. These cases are examples of mobile commons that collectively deal with migrants' everyday life issues, and that transgress boundaries set by resident or non-resident legal statuses. At Arrivati Park, for instance, the Urban Citizenship Card issued by the activist "Free and Solidarity City Hamburg" alliance was an attempt to position the carriers of this card symbolically as legitimate political subjects, despite the fact that it had no institutional power. This gesture is reminiscent of the concept of post-identity politics that is recurrent also in various other cases of commoning covered in this volume.

Responses to precarity

In Part 3, we have three chapters that focus on cases that can be seen as responses to increasing precarity and insecurity in three cities, Berlin, Palermo, and Istanbul. In Chapter 9, Kenton Card explores alternative housing models developed and materialized in Berlin over the past two decades to cope with the rampant housing shortage as a consequence of neoliberal urban restructuring. The chapter presents ethnographic findings on two models, Baugruppe (Building Groups) and Mietshäuser Syndikat, that differ with respect to the understanding of property ownership they are premised on. Building Groups (BG) is a type of middle-class cohousing, where members pool their financial assets to establish a temporary development company, collectively design projects, participate in the construction process, and found an owners' association for managing common spaces and maintenance. It is interesting to see how class habitus defines the ways in which people address their housing insecurity in contemporary Berlin, and obviously the private property regime rules supreme in the BG experience. The residents, as Card notes, usually care mostly about private ownership of their apartments, no matter how efficiently the common spaces inside the buildings are managed or maintained. Regarding the collectively owned and used spaces, BG materializes a particular understanding of the urban commons, a rather loosely defined version of it, partly premised on the right to exclude. These include "green spaces, common rooms, roof balconies, art galleries, vegetable gardens, playgrounds" owned by the BG association, "but not treated as typically exclusive private property," especially if it is a park accessible to non-residents (Card,164). Apparently, the inclusion of common spaces in the BG projects is a highly debatable subject that at times leads to conflicts among the members concerning whom to allow to use these spaces and the organization of maintenance labour.

Mietshäuser Syndikat (MS), a tenants' association emerged out of a squatting experience in Freiburg, Germany, addresses the housing problem in a quite different way than BG. The syndicate, organized through decentralized and democratic governance, has institutionalized a dual ownership that collectivizes control and thereby ensures that both residential units and common spaces remain permanently affordable for members. Unlike BG, no one in the syndicate is allowed to profit by selling their units. Although it situates itself against the market and the state, we are cautioned that the MS "remains enmeshed in both" (Card 163,170) through bank loans and mortgages, utility bills, the wage labour hired for the projects, legal responsibilities emerging from dual ownership, as well as through the obligation to conform with city zoning.

Card is sceptical about the capacities of BG and MS models for developing longterm and non-exclusionary solutions to housing insecurity in Germany or elsewhere. Based on the processes of co-production and co-maintenance, he acknowledges that both cases instantiate experiences of urban commoning through collective actions to develop affordable housing and sustain common resources. However, BG is incompatible with the commons ideal, he argues, for what it offers is no more than "a form of self-help neoliberal housing" (Card,168). It functions as a "'privileged enclave' of a 'bounded security,' accessible only for premium users that ignore wider distributional questions about uneven access to resource politics" (Hodson and Marvin 2010, 313). The MS, a model that defies the private property regime and is animated by anti-capitalist sentiments, has its own shortcomings, such as being unable to partake in a broader project of social justice. Card applies the urban scale perspective to the commons context and suggests that long-term solutions for more equitable housing would be possible if the state funded syndicated housing and ensured ongoing affordability, accessibility, and a fair distribution of capital that can be controlled by communities.

Another case that emerged as a response to precarity is Becoming Garden in Palermo, analysed by Elke Krasny in Chapter 10. Krasny elaborates on the concept of precarious commons that are uncertain, fragile, vulnerable, and yet that are material manifestations of a persistent will to respond to economic, ecological, and social crises. Krasny promotes an engaged scholarship that is obliged both to critique the damages caused by neoliberal governance regimes and to recognize the emergent forms of commoning that are responsive to the pervasive precarity driven by capital. With reference to a feminist political ethics, she emphasizes that this recognition sets in motion a set of care obligations, motivations, skills, and care temporalities, which come together in the form of an ethics of collaboration for the common good. This feminist ethics with an emphasis on care connects us to the historical question of reproductive labour that sustains our lives, and to an understanding of mutuality in humannon-human interdependence. Taking care of the commons includes not only preserving non-reproducible resources but also finding ways to sustain the reproducibles and keep the commons alive.

Krasny joins the other contributors to this volume in opting for the concept of commoning rather than the commons, in other words, seeing the commons not as a static resource but as a dynamic activity. Krasny goes further to introduce a care perspective to expand the notion of commons-as-activities: the commons depend on human-non-human relations as well as on the rules and social processes that constitute them, therefore, they need to be recognized in their social and environmental relationality. Krasny mobilizes the concept of precarious commons to look at Becoming Garden taking root in an abandoned housing complex on the outskirts of Palermo, a remnant of welfare state planning and hallmark of urban social inequality. In this poor and declining area stigmatized for its criminality, ZEN Insieme Association has been active since 1988, working to alleviate poverty and fight criminality largely stemming from a mafia-dominated neighbourhood economy. Krasny sees a potential for commoning in this long uncared-for public ground. Becoming Garden connects children, teenagers, women, and others through their existential precariousness and becomes the ground on which a commons based on collaborative care is about to be created on the ruins of a long-dysfunctioning welfare state.

The last chapter explores two cases from Istanbul which both involve production in solidarity. Bengi Akbulut contributes to the growing dialogue between the commons debate and the solidarity/alternative economies literature, focusing on two workers' cooperatives/collectives, Free Kazova Textile Cooperative and Komşu Kafe Collective: a knitwear factory in Şişli run by the workers since the former employer's bankruptcy in 2013 and a café in Kadıköy founded around the same time by a group of people connected through Migrant Solidarity Kitchen in Tarlabaşı. Akbulut is particularly interested in how the commons and commoning framework can contribute to our understanding of solidarity economies, as forms of organizing processes of (re)production, exchange, and consumption in egalitarian, collective, and democratic ways. She examines how cooperative economies animate commoning practices related to labour and the products of labour, through collective management, democratic decision-making, and nonhierarchical social relations.

There are two registers of the commons, as discussed through Akbulut's cases. One is collective governance of the shared resources used in production, that is the collective appropriation and management of capital and labour power. The second is treating the surplus value, i.e. what is produced with collective labour, as a "common wealth" . Such experiments with collective appropriation and democratic management of the resources might be reminiscent of the cases referred to in common-pool resource (CPR) theories, however, there are significant differences: for CPR theorists, commoning is possible only within small-scale, exclusive, closed communities. CPR theorists are primarily concerned with the problem of overuse and depletion due to self-interested individualism, while Akbulut's cases demonstrate the individual is not necessarily inherently self-interested (e.g. ). The idea of labour as a shared resource indicates that the workers are not merely conditioned by personal interests, and work does not necessarily imply physical and emotional burden. As experienced in Free Kazova and Komşu Kafe, labour turns into a pleasurable collective act inspired by social values stemming from a self-determined ethos that defy egocentrism.

This brings us to another dimension of the labour commons: the arrangement of social relations within and around the production process according to democratic principles. The work is organized in both Free Kazova and Komşu Kafe based on decisions reached at the end of widely attended meetings that include thorough deliberation and negotiation. Tasks alternate between the members rather than each assuming a specific role in the division of labour, a work system that reinforces the collective quality, or commonness, of the labour involved in the production. The way the service labour is organized at Komşu Kafe has also radically changed the producers' relations with consumers, blurring the distinctions between the two, as customers find themselves participating in the work necessary to run the cafe, ranging from price-setting to serving the food.

Free Kazova and Komşu Kafe, as collectively governed enterprises, are not merely commons in fixed and physical forms; they are "relational, dynamic, continuously (re)produced," gesturing to a sense of participatory space and loosely bounded community (Akbulut,194). The idea of collective governance of the commons entails that a circle of supportersartists, academics, neighbourhood residents, and so onalso contribute to the commons by participating in the assemblies and switching smoothly between the roles of outsider and customer, friend and commoner. These initiatives, thus, offer a quite different understanding of the commons than the CPR commons, which are managed and sustained by small-scale, welldefined groups made up of self-interested individuals supposed to be motivated "to free ride on others' labour and shirk from work" (Akbulut, 196;). This is a significant difference, implying a shift from the prevailing motto "you're on your own" to an ethos of "we are in this together. " Akbulut points to labour commons' possible contributions to labour politics, by discussing their potential in establishing "a notion of labour beyond being a commodity" and developing everyday strategies to counter precarity (201). She also makes a parallel argument to Card's, by accentuating the significance of contact and cooperation between commoning initiatives, as well as of alternative credit systems and purchasing policies, so as to institute politically meaningful solidarity networks and to build up economic autonomy.