"If the analysis of the commons is of vital relevance today, it is because they are understood as a tool of political organization in the face of the decomposition of the institutions of the welfare state and the general privatization of life".
TheECFchannel (June 12, 2017), Idea Camp 2017: Conversation between Katherine Watson and Ana Méndez
One of the lines of work that is opened in the context of the IDYS research group is to address the notion of urban commons from an initiatory point of view. The urban commons refers us to a wide field of research that raises a multitude of associated meanings. Commons, common property, common resource, procommon are some declinations of this concept that ultimately poses a political way of relating and acting from a counter-hegemonic position
The urban commons refer us to the common and collectively managed assets. Social centres, self-managed spaces, citizens' spaces, citizens' laboratories, hacklabs are some of their expressions. These communities articulate a political framework for the shared management of material and immaterial commons: resources, spaces, knowledge, experiences , etc...
There are numerous initiatives that we find in different contexts. In Madrid we have some reference cases as this is a square or as it has been the ungovernable. However, there are some timid cases where this practice changes of scale and becomes a pretension of incidence in the city scale, the most recognized case is the Bologna Regulation. And it is in this space where we are interested in stopping our gaze and asking ourselves about this possibility. Is it possible to generate a city made up of urban commons? What would it be like? What would be the basis for formulating this new urbanism?
Our way of approaching this question is to propose a basic exercise where we can project a city as a sum of pieces of different cities. The formalization of this is embodied in a model that works as an urban collage or a patchwork of communities and urban fabrics. This Frankenstein of the city articulates a fiction and the simulation that allow us to approach this issue from a playful and experiential learning environment.
In this first approach, we start from 10 experiences that make up this first city of the commons: La escuela la esperanza/Al Borde, 81/2 Yap /Orizzontale/ La Borda/La col/ Núcleo productivo/ Pico Colectivo/Sk8+U/ La Cite de Chantier/ Collective Etc/ Tiuna al Fuerte/ Alejandro Haiek/ The arch/ Constructlab /La casa de la lluvia de ideas/ Arquitectura expandida/ Floating university/ Raumlabour