Flanagan, Kevin
(2022)
Commoning the City.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
In 2015, the citizens’ platform, Barcelona En Comú won the municipal
elections in the city of Barcelona. Emerging out of Spain’s anti-austerity
and 15M movements, this activist led platform advanced a radically
democratic political agenda. Between 2015 and 2019 they introduced a
range of public policies aimed at empowering citizens through an expansion
of participatory and economic democracy. This political programme
included support for digital commons, urban commons and solidarity
economy. Over the past three decades, the commons has featured
increasingly as a subject in the political discourse of social movements. I
argue that in the case of Barcelona, the commons has functioned as a
bridging concept enabling political convergence among local movements.
This anthropological research project set out to investigate the emergence of
the commons as a political subject in the city of Barcelona. It asks a number
of questions. What constitutes the social imaginary (Taylor 2004; Kelty
2008) of the commons? What does it mean to imagine and make the city as
a commons (Foster and Iaione 2015)? Who imagines the city as a
commons? What assemblages and networks of people, communities,
activists, social movements, politicians and civic organisations make such
political projects possible? What conditions of possibility, what social,
institutional, historical and cultural factors lend themselves to imagining the
city as a commons? The thesis explores continuities between the experience
of social movements prior to 2015 and how they informed the policies and
programmes of Barcelona En Comú. It considers how commoning practices
have figured within movement practice and examines how apparently
different social worlds, the worlds of free culture and techno-politics (digital
commons), urban commons, and the solidarity economy, converged with the
municipalist movement, and the political possibilities this afforded. In
conclusion, I consider this convergence as part of a social movement project
(Nilsen and Cox 2013), aimed at advancing a radically democratic vision of
politics and economy.
| Item Type: |
Thesis
(PhD)
|
| Keywords: |
Commoning; City; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology |
| Item ID: |
16565 |
| Depositing User: |
IR eTheses
|
| Date Deposited: |
22 Sep 2022 11:33 |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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