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«Normality was the problem!» Femminismi e Commoning nella riproduzione sociale della città
Abstract
La ricerca si inserisce nell'intenso rapporto tra femminismi e commoning, con l'obiettivo generale di riflettere sul ruolo reale e potenziale delle donne nelle esperienze di mutualismo che alimentano forme di vita collettiva e percorsi di riappropriazione di spazi, pratiche e diritti negli scenari urbani. Una visione di genere è coerente con le basi teoriche del commoning, fenomeno percepito come alternativa all'individualismo e all'isolamento capitalistico, in quanto capace di dare voce a un nuovo dibattito su una gestione più equa ed efficace delle risorse e degli spazi. Attraverso una lettura critica della letteratura sulla riproduzione sociale, si propone una visione di riproduzione comune con il fine ultimo di contribuire al dibattito che vede la necessità di generare nuove teorie e modelli urbani più coerenti con le sfide sociali attuali.
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This paper conceptualizes affective urbanism as both research framework and praxis, engaging professionals and concerned publics alike in the insurgent making of cities. With its focus on affect and bodily encounters, it taps into the rich knowledge of practices of improvising and inventing in everyday life, which tend to fall outside the realm of discursive and visual representations. An analysis of spatial practices of the collective Plataforma de Afectados Por La Hipoteca in Barcelona illustrates how a mobilization of affects fosters not only individual, but first and foremost a collective capacity to negotiate belonging, appropriate space and contest alienated conditions of everyday life. The argument rests on the hypothesis that affect implicates the ethical engagement with people at places of everyday life, thus producing a medium and means for transgressing socio-spatial divides and challenging practices of exclusion, othering and dispossession. The value of this kind of work does not necessarily lie in the quality of conceived or materialized design, but rather in enacting an inclusive and empathic design praxis which connects to people’s multiple lived spaces and cultivates lived space of deep and caring social relations.
In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology cannot produce an urban theory for our time. Engaging in a symptomatic reading of their work, and with a focus on the implications of their limited mobilization of social ontology—or Lefebvre’s ontology of the everyday—we ask what is occluded in planetary urbanization. In particular, we explore three areas of concern: the urban as the grounds for difference, centrality and the everyday; the omission of subjects of and occlusion of subjectivity; and the occlusion of a constitutive outside and its political capacities to remake the urban.
Una recente attenzione sta convogliando le analisi di urban development verso il riconoscimento del ruolo che svolgono le comunità informali nell'attivare nuove specializzazioni produttive. Le comunità di cittadini, sulla spinta della libera adesione, sarebbero più efficaci nel processo di creazione di nuove opportunità utili al territorio. Allo stesso tempo, le modalità dell'interazione sociale, essendo caratteristica specifica di un luogo, non si prestano ad una lettura univoca ed orizzontale per la codifica nei modelli di sviluppo. Con riguardo a tali problemi, alcuni lavori adottano scelte metodologiche che invertono la comune prospettiva sull'individuazione orizzontale delle commonalities utili a circoscrivere i modelli di sviluppo di un'area. La consapevolezza delle profonde differenze nell'agire collettivo e informale, invero, spiegherebbe la necessità di condurre, indagini in profondità e la raccolta selettiva di best practices. Sulla base di alcune caratteristiche già riconosciute come best practices nell'attività di decision-making di alcuni centri sociali napoletani, il presente studio compie un'analisi che estende l'osservazione a tutti gli altri, cercando di evidenziarne il grado evolutivo e le eventuali necessità per il miglioramento della produttività dell'economia cittadina. A recent focus on the role played by informal communities in establishing new production specializations is emerging by the current urban development theories. The community of citizens, driven by the free membership, would be effective in the process of creating new job opportunities and innovative and responsible public procurement. At the same time, the social interaction modes, being specific characteristic of a place, do not lend themselves to an unambiguous and horizontal reading for encoding in development patterns. With regard to these problems, some researches adopt methodological choices that reverse the common horizontal perspective in defining the models of development of an area. Awareness of deep differences in acting collectively, indeed, explain the need to conduct, in depth investigations and selective collection of best practices. Based on some Neapolitans social centers' features, already recognized as best practices in the activity of urban decision-making, this study makes an analysis that extends the observation to all the others, trying to highlight the degree of evolution and possible needs to improve the productivity of the local economy. Codici JEL: O47; O43; O17 Keywords: comunità informali; produttività urbana; specializzazione dinamica; urban and regional development; centri sociali, industria culturale e creativa La raccolta dei dati è stata effettuata dalla dott.ssa Donatella Striano, in tirocinio presso l'IRISS/CNR con Fondo Garanzia Giovani, DGR 117/2014.
This paper concentrates on the scientific work of Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012), who for more than forty years carried out theoretical and empirical research on common-pool resources. Ostrom theorizes that the commons often prevent resource exhaustion more effectively than the state, international institutions, or private owners. However, one of the foundations of commons, as an alternative program to the private/state dualism, ought to be the principle of equality that includes a gender perspective in theory and practice. The goal of this article is to provide thoughtful ways of incorporating gender in economic research from the viewpoint of feminist epistemology and to indicate the place of gender in Ostrom’s work. The methodology of this study could be used for reading economic publications through a gender perspective as well as for inspiring economists to use both gender as a category of analysis and gender-sensitive language in their theoretical and empirical studies.
Life's Work is a study of the shifting spaces and material practices of social reproduction in the global era. The volume blurs the heavily drawn boundaries between production and reproduction, showing through case studies of migration, education and domesticity how the practices of everyday life challenge these categorical distinctions. New and innovative study of the shifting spaces and material practices of social reproduction in the global era. Investigates changing conceptions of subjectivity, national identity and modernity. Focuses on both theoretical and practical issues. Includes case studies on migration, education and domesticity.
The purpose of this essay is to initiate a conversation about the production and analysis of knowledge on women and the urban. Starting with a brief overview of how women have been addressed in the field of urban studies, I turn to their treatment in works by critical urban scholars, revealing how women fall away from urban theories. The dis missal of women from theory construction and the impact on women's lives of the imbri cation of the gendered subject into neoliberal discourses about the city adds urgency to a feminist intervention. A feminist analytic requires the promotion of a new kind of global urban studies that takes seriously women's struggles, strategies and everyday desires.
This article draws upon the insights of 75 Occupy activists from Toronto and across the United States interviewed as part of the 3-year study ‘Social Media in the Hands of Young Citizens’. This article highlights three major roles adopted by women in the so-called leaderless, horizontally structured Occupy movement – both within the offline, face-to-face General Assembly meetings held during the Occupy encampments and within the online spaces of Facebook pages, Web sites, affinity groups, and working committees. As key participants in the movement, women used social technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and livestreaming as modes of activist engagement, developing unique roles such as that of the ‘Admin’ (Social Media Administrator), the ‘Documentarian’, and the ‘Connector’. The women’s adoption of these roles illustrates, we argue, the emerging notion of ‘connective labor’ an extended enactment of Bennett and Segerberg’s (2012) notion of ‘the logic of connective action’, augmenting its logic to reveal the often hidden labor of women in sustaining the networked and affective dimension of social movements. This article highlights the gendered, hybrid, embodied, and material nature of women’s connective labor that has supported, and in many ways sustained, the contemporary Occupy movement.
Women have been often invisible in urban planning. Col·lectiu Punt 6, a feminist organisation of women architects and urban planners based in Barcelona, Spain, has developed planning techniques and tools to include women both as objects and subjects of urban planning, and as experts of everyday life. The article focuses on the participatory tools that Col·lectiu Punt 6 has developed that can be used in the different stages of planning, from assessing to evaluating planning policies and interventions, as well as tools of women’s empowerment with the goal of promoting bottom-up models of planning. Evidence is shown of how, using these tools, planning becomes more inclusive not only of women in their diversity, but also of children, youth, the elderly, as well as people of different race, ethnicity, income, sexual and gender identities, and capacities. Examples from different contexts are provided, from Spain and Latin America.
This book examines the deliberate and unintended spatial consequences of feminism’s second wave, a social movement dedicated to reconfiguring power relations between women and men. Placing the women’s movement of the 1970s in the context of other social movements that have changed the use of urban space, this book argues that reform feminists used the legal system to end the mandatory segregation of women and men in public institutions, while radical activists created small-scale places that gave women the confidence to claim their rights to the public sphere. Women’s centers, bookstores, health clinics, and domestic violence shelters established feminist places for women’s liberation in Boston, Los Angeles, and many other cities. Unable to afford their own buildings, radicals adapted existing structures to serve as women’s centers that fostered autonomy, health clinics that promoted reproductive rights, bookstores that connected women to feminist thought, and domestic violence shelters that protected their bodily integrity. Legal equal opportunity reforms and daily practices of liberation enhanced women’s choices in education and occupations. Once the majority of wives and mothers had joined the labor force, by the mid-1980s, new buildings began to emerge that substituted for the unpaid domestic tasks once performed in the home. Fast food franchises, childcare facilities, adult day centers, and hospices were among the inadvertent spatial consequences of the second wave.
The global financial crisis has triggered a dramatic transformation of employment in the weakest Eurozone economies. This is evidenced in deteriorating work conditions, limited employee negotiating power, low pay, zero-hours contracts and, most importantly, periods of prolonged unemployment for most of the working population, especially women. We offer a critical analysis of the boundaries of formal and informal, paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive work, and explore how austerity policies implemented in Greece in the aftermath of the global financial crisis have transformed women’s everyday lives. In contributing to critical discussions of neoliberal capitalism and recent feminist geography studies, our empirical study focuses on how women’s struggles over social reproduction unfold in the public and private spheres. It proposes that women’s temporary retreat to unpaid work at home constitutes a form of resistance to intensifying precarisation, and, at times, contributes to the emergence of new collective forms of reproduction.
Using a feminist political economy approach, contributors document the impact of current socio-economic policies on states, markets, households, and communities. Relying on impressive empirical research, they argue that women bear the costs of and responsibility for care-giving and show that the theoretical framework provided by feminist analyses of social reproduction not only corrects the gender-blindness of most economic theories but suggests an alternative that places care-giving at its centre. In this illuminating study, they challenge feminist scholars to re-engage with materialism and political economy to engage with feminism.
This book rethinks the city by examining its various forms of collectivity - their atmospheres, modes of exclusion and self-organization, as well as how they are governed - on the basis of a critical discussion of the notion of urban commons. The idea of the commons has received surprisingly little attention in urban theory, although the city may well be conceived as a shared resource. Urban Commons: Rethinking the City offers an attempt to reconsider what a city might be by studying how the notion of the commons opens up new understandings of urban collectivities, addressing a range of questions about urban diversity, urban governance, urban belonging, urban sexuality, urban subcultures, and urban poverty; but also by discussing in more methodological terms how one might study the urban commons. In these respects, the rethinking of the city undertaken in this book has a critical dimension, as the notion of the commons delivers new insights about how collective urban life is formed and governed. © 2015 Selection and editorial matter, Christian Borch and Martin Kornberger. All rights reserved.
This essay takes as its provocation a question posed by the feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser: “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?” In urban studies, this question has been usefully reframed by Neil Brenner to consider what is critical about critical urban theory. This essay discusses how the “urban” is currently being conceptualized in various worlds of urban studies and what this might mean for the urban question of the current historical conjuncture. Launched from places on the map that are forms of urban government but that have distinctive agrarian histories and rural presents, the essay foregrounds the undecidability of the urban, be it geographies of urbanization or urban politics. What is at stake is a critical urban theory attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituting process of global political economy and deconstruction as a methodology of generalization and theorization.
Urban studies have recently witnessed a revival of critical interest in comparison, situated within a broader postcolonial critique of the parochialism of (Western) urban theory. However, recent discussions of the comparative within urban studies have tended to neglect sexual politics, despite the emergence of a significant body of work on the queer politics of comparison. Urban research on sexualities has tended to focus on the territorialisation of same-sex desire and identifications in territories such as gay villages or neighbourhoods and has often overlooked the sexual politics of networked relations and connections between cities. Although relational approaches to urbanism have been adopted in this field, there has been little explicit engagement with the comparative, which remains largely under-theorised. This paper considers the usefulness of Kevin Ward's work on ‘relational comparison’ in informing research agendas on the sexual politics of (transnational) connections between cities. It argues that the use of relational comparison can help interrogate the transnational politics of knowledge production in the field and can help in opening up new research agendas.
The nature of public space in contemporary society is changing. This paper uses the turmoil over People's Park in Berkeley, California, as a means for exploring changing ideas about and practices in public space. I argue that as public space is increasingly privatized or otherwise brought under greater control, possibilities for democratic action are minimized. To make this claim, I provide a brief outline of the roots of the August 1991 riots at People's Park. I then examine the role that public space plays in modern democracies, and how ideas about public space have developed dialectically with definitions of who counts as “the public.” In American democracy, “the public” is constituted by private individuals. In this paper, I suggest that the presence of homeless people in public spaces raises important contradictions at the heart of this definition of “the public.” Many commentators suggest that these contradictions have led to “the end of public space” in contemporary cities, or at the very least, the removal of its political functions to the “space” of electronic communication. I examine what this move means for democratic action in the city and show that material public spaces remain a necessity for (particularly) oppositional political movements. This returns us to People's Park, as these were precisely the issues that structured the riots in 1991. I conclude the paper with a sketch of where People's Park and the issues raised by the riots now stand.
The paper contains a critical review of urban theory and of some current work in urban studies on ‘women's issues’. It is argued that the nature of the changing interrelationships between production and reproduction, as part of a single inseparable process that varies across space and over time, should be the key focus for a feminist urban studies. Ways in which an understanding of these changing relationships can add to the analysis of housing policy in postwar Britain are outlined.
The principal aim of the paper is advocacy, and the plea is for feminist theory and feminist analysis. It is beginning to be accepted that urban studies, by ignoring gender divisions, is neglecting an important structuring element of urban space and urban processes. Recognition of the significance of gender divisions, however, must not lead to an insistence on analysis focusing solely on women and women's behaviour. Thus the object of feminist research should not be women alone, but rather the structure of social relations that contributes to female oppression, this involving confrontation with the theoretical issues raised by an analysis of patriarchy (a term used here to refer to temporally and spatially specific relations between men and women, rather than to the oppression of all women in all forms of society). Despite the advances already made in integrating women's lives into urban studies, a large number of the studies about women and the urban environment are ultimately unsatisfactory. Their foci stop short at the description and analysis of women's behaviour only. However, this is not to denigrate the very real function they serve in bringing gender differences to the research forefront. After a review of the literature on gender differences in the organisation, use, and conception of urban space, a more specific focus for a feminist urban studies is outlined, with an example of how this might be applied to the historical analysis of postwar housing policy in Britain.
This paper presents detailed findings on various practices of social reproduction - the production, exchange, and deployment of environmental knowledge - and points to the transformative potential inherent in the mundane practices of work, play, and learning. The village of Howa in Sudan has been incorporated within a state-sponsored agricultural development project and the content, mode of acquisition and utility of children's environmental knowledge has thereby changed dramatically. In addressing these, my larger research goal is to locate instances of rupture, resistance, or reformulation in the face of socioeconomic and cultural-ecological change imposed externally. The study employs ethnographic methods to elicit information on the content and organization of children's environmental knowledge and the means of its acquisition and use. The socioeconomic processes of differentiation and commoditization associated with inclusion in the agricultural project increased demands for children's labor and began to dissolve the existing unity of work and play, to dislodge the home as the locus of social reproduction, and to deskill the peasant population. Coupled with static land tenure relations, these changes are likely to lead to significant disjuncture between what children learn and what they will do as adults. The trajectory of economic development may thereby also be altered. -from Author
Investigates the attempts being made in the USA to unite the best features of social reforms with available social services. Looks at the growth of the urban settlement, housing and work, identifies new approaches and makes proposals for change in the US. -after Author
With the urbanization of the world's population proceeding apace and the equally rapid urbanization of poverty, urban theory has an urgent challenge to meet if it is to remain relevant to the majority of cities and their populations, many of which are outside the West. This groundbreaking book establishes a new framework for urban development. It makes the argument that all cities are best understood as ‘ordinary’, and crosses the longstanding divide in urban scholarship and urban policy between Western and other cities (especially those labelled ‘Third World’). It considers the two framing axes of urban modernity and development, and argues that if cities are to be imagined in equitable and creative ways, urban theory must overcome these axes with their Western bias, and that resources must become at least as cosmopolitan as cities themselves. Tracking paths across previously separate literatures and debates, this innovative book, a postcolonial critique of urban studies, traces the outlines of a cosmopolitan approach to cities, drawing on evidence from Rio, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Kuala Lumpur. Key urban scholars and debates, from Simmel, Benjamin and the Chicago School to Global and World Cities theories are explored, together with anthropological and developmentalist accounts of poorer cities. Offering an alternative approach, Ordinary Cities skilfully brings together theories of urban development for students and researchers of urban studies, geography and development.
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Tra tutte si cita il "Manifesto Femminista Transnazionale: Per uscire insieme dalla pandemia e cambiare il sistema", tradotto in sette lingue, che apre con le seguenti affermazioni che hanno ispirato il titolo dell'articolo: «Non
torneremo alla normalità perché la normalità era il problema»
(https://nonunadimeno.wordpress.com/2020/04/18/manifesto-femminista-transnazionale-per-uscire-insieme-dalla-pandemia-e-cambiare-il-sistema-testi-multilanguage/).
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