More than Bare-Bones Survival? From the Urban Margins to the Urban Commons

Abstract

We revisit the urban margins by recasting service hubsconspicuous clusters of helping agencies in inner-city locales, designed to serve vulnerable populationsas both spaces of survival but potentially transformative, emerging as so-called 'cracks' in the city. We undertake this recasting using the concept of the commons. Using case studies in London, Miami and Osaka, we focus on the everyday practices of commoning and the role service hubs play in the city as spaces of sustenance, care and solidarity. The results are mixedservice hubs enabled unfettered survival and operated largely outside of capitalism, ensuring that some spaces in the city remain de-commodified and 'at the margins'. However, the service hubs were also limited in their transformational capacity. These results contribute to a sense of commons at the margins, rethinking them more as an edge between capitalism and an existence separate from it, rather than presenting them as exclusively marginal in the sense of subordinated, excluded and bordered.

Revisiting the emerging lopsided city

“…I agree that my big picture perspective should not ignore the small practices, as long as the former perspective is also retained, a balance that I argue has been lost since the rise of more fragmentary perspective since the 1990s heyday. I further agree with the importance of the everyday state and its extensions into the voluntary sector, the commons and social infrastructure, areas in which I have already published (DeVerteuil et al, 2022). I do not disagree with Bloch that the vernacular and the contested persist in the lopsided city, and I do not deny the existence of everyday fabrics.…”

Commons, counterpublics and dissident urban space

“…The commons have become a particularly popular and integral way to understand dissident urban space in the capitalist city in the 21 st century, offering an alternative to enclosure and accumulation by dispossession (e.g. Amin & Howell, 2016;DeVerteuil et al, 2022;Gillespie, 2016;Harvey, 2012;Huron, 2019). At an abstract level, the commons represent the promise and practice of "life beyond marketization, privatization and commercialization" (Jeffrey et al, 2012(Jeffrey et al, , p. 1249, of urban space that is "both collective and non-commodified-off-limits to the logic of market exchange and market valuations" (Harvey, 2012, p. 73).…”