Beyond Tragedy: Differential Commoning in a Manufactured Housing Cooperative

Abstract

Caught between the dual crises of declining economic opportunity and diminishing public assistance, people on the economic margins resist threats to their livelihoods by opting to share resources. The processes involved in managing these "commons" are often messy and paradoxical amid differing livelihood concerns and subject positions. Unevenness tends to emerge along new and existing lines of power.Rather than reducing such tendencies to a "tragedy" to be eliminated, I argue that grappling with uneven relations offers a more dynamic account of commoning: "differential commoning". This paper takes as its example the residents of a "manufactured housing" community who organized as a cooperative in response to the threat of eviction. Their struggle to collectivize, I suggest, illustrates the need for a more situated conceptualization of commoning, rather than a concept defined within the rigidity of economic rationality or the homogeneity of some imagined community.

Marginalising co-operation? A discursive analysis of media reporting on the Co-operative Bank

“…Rather than simplistically positioning co-operation as a solution to rampant capitalism on the one hand and austerity on the other, studies have highlighted the complex environment within which co-operatives operate (Noterman, 2016;Levi and Davis, 2008;Meira, 2014;Sanders and McClellan, 2014;Bretos and Errasti, 2016). They argue that co-operatives cannot be analysed in isolation; the wider social, political and institutional contexts need to be taken into account (Boone and Özcan, 2016;Gupta, 2014;Lambru and Petrescu, 2014).…”

Urban commons are more‐than‐property

“…Literature on urban commons most often highlights the distinctiveness of the urban location and relies on an understanding of urban commons as physical sites (Łapniewska, 2017). For example, studies have been performed on urban commons as different forms of housing (Bunce, 2016;Huron, 2015;Noterman, 2016), community gardens (Eizenberg, 2011), independent spaces (Bresnihan & Byrne, 2015), and open rubbish dumps (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015) to mention a few. There is a growing literature on the role of sharing and collaboration in the city that focuses on the governance arrangements of urban commons (Iaione, 2016).…”

“…Contra the tragedy of the commons thesis, no particular property regime is essentially better than any other in producing or maintaining a commons or urban commons; commons can come into being in public, private, micro-public, or semiprivate spaces and are not restricted by different forms of property ownership (Eizenberg, 2011;Gibson-Graham et al, 2013. Debates about management, property, and ownership continue to be central to the political projects of reclaiming and resisting the enclosure of urban commons (Blomley, 2008;Jeffrey, McFarlane & Vasudevan, 2012;Lee & Webster, 2006;Noterman, 2016). Debates about management, property, and ownership continue to be central to the political projects of reclaiming and resisting the enclosure of urban commons (Blomley, 2008;Jeffrey, McFarlane & Vasudevan, 2012;Lee & Webster, 2006;Noterman, 2016).…”

“…Commons are 'not necessarily open to all; it is often only open to a certain group of people, and those people make sure to regulate it in order to ensure its long-term sustainability' (Huron, 2015, p.4). It is practices of inclusion and exclusion enacted by commoners that determine how 'open' a particular commons is rather than the regime of property ownership (Noterman, 2016). According to Gibson-Graham et al (2013, pp.131-2), 'all forms of property can be potential commons' and 'the question of who "owns" a commons is open.…”

“…Property ownership can be used for 'political claim-making in the city, and a site of contestation' (Blomley, 2008, p.316) and as a form of exclusion. Debates about management, property, and ownership continue to be central to the political projects of reclaiming and resisting the enclosure of urban commons (Blomley, 2008;Jeffrey, McFarlane & Vasudevan, 2012;Lee & Webster, 2006;Noterman, 2016).…”