Crafting and maintaining socio-ecological commons: Notes from a city of ruins

Abstract

Once dismissed as a model of resource management that is doomed to fail, over the last three decades the commons have been taken up in academic research and social practices as a form of self-governance providing paths away from profit-oriented development in urban and rural settings. This article draws on research on a situated commoning project in a post-industrial area in Rome, Italy, to explore how contemporary activist practices complicate prevalent definitions of the commons based on the bifurcation between active human collectives and passive resources. It begins by briefly outlining influential perspectives on the commons, including Anna Tsing’s anthropological work on ‘latent commons’. Then, it problematizes and extends these debates through the analysis of the Italian case. Drawing on feminist perspectives on more-than-human interdependences, as well as Marxist insights on contentious commoning, it brings to the fore relations of care and repair that strive to create enduring paths of urban decommodification, as well as forms of collective flourishing in contexts of uneven social and ecological precarity.