On commonist urbanisation: Autonomy and centrality within and beyond the city

Abstract

Urban commons are widely regarded as key sites of resistance to capitalism. Yet their ‘urban’ status is often framed as a self-evident locative attribute with limited explanatory power rather than a more substantive socio-geographical condition inviting critical analysis. Is this urban condition essential to prefigure a communal, postcapitalist alternative? Can commoning and urbanisation work as a dialectic of interconnected, multiscalar processes? The article addresses these questions by considering a virtual concept, commonist urbanisation – an expansive force oriented towards the reproduction of communes rather than the reproduction of capital, based on commoning rather than commodification. It examines how spatial structures mediate the evolution of commons and the role urbanisation plays in the process. Three aspects of this problem are discussed, confronting forms of composition, metabolism and articulation in capitalist and communal contexts, then using the latter to speculate on the potential generalisation of commoning principles in an expanding commonist totality. Shifting the focus of analysis from settlement and commune typologies to the question of centrality formation, the article uses a (neo)Lefebvrian lens to reconsider how we frame the urban in debates about the commons and in critical scholarship more generally. Urbanisation remains a crucial element in this new perspective, but not as an a priori or uniquely privileged source of commons. Instead, its significance stems from the dialectical unfolding of communal logics within capitalism, where the urban condition constitutes a major, inescapable driving factor rearticulating centrality regimes across multiple scales.