The Precariousness Of Urban Commons In The Face Of European Public Law

Abstract

Urban commons are a form of conceptualisation and self-management of the production of space that presents itself as a divergent alternative to the legal-economic dichotomy Public (General Interest of the State) vs Private (Free will of the parties in the market). The great boom and mystification of the term has promoted the qualification of a great type of urban practices, both new and existing, as common urban practices, such as those promoted in Europe under the ambiguous denomination of ‘participatory urbanism’. Maintaining that there is a basic antagonism between participatory urban planning and urban commons, and that ‘participatory’ is not ‘common’, this article sets out the main legal-urban differences between the Private, Public and Common modes of production of urban space. This will allow us to compare the concept of participatory urban planning developed by the European Union based on the Urban programmes with the conclusions obtained from the field work carried out between 2012 and 2017 on the main urban commons that emerged in Barcelona as a result of the 15th March. A comparative analysis that shows the great dependence that urban commons still have in practice on the public-private regime of production of space.

Jorge León Casero

Associate Professor. School of Philosophy. Universidad de Zaragoza

Carlos Cámara-Menoyo

Architect. PhD. Lecturer. Life-long Learner. Transdisciplinary.

I love learning, teaching and researching, as well as sharing and visualizing data, specially with maps. I have a technical and social background and my multiple research interests are centered around the commodifications between cities, technology and society within informationalism and free culture paradigm. So far, I have applied that approach on the topic of social and spatial inequities.