From the right to the city to the urban commons [PT]

The available approaches on urban commons locate the commons in the city, without discussing what is specifically urban about them. In addition, they do not articulate the dimension of the commons existing in the city with the idea of the city itself as a commons, as formulated by movements that fight for the right to the city. To face the theoretical challenges of conceiving the commons in its urban dimension, I rehearse here an elaboration anchored in the thought of Henri Lefebvre. I argue that the urban commons are produced within the scope of everyday life through commoning practices based on the use, appropriation, and self-management of the city as a collective work. In this way, the urban, characterized by its character of centrality, mediation, and difference, and added to the emancipatory promise of the city, comes to be understood as a contradictory space for the enclosure and production of the commons. More broadly, I conclude that the very production of space, which has become central in the contemporary world to the reproduction of the capitalist social relations, increasingly implies the disputes over the appropriation of the (urban) space itself as commons and the struggles for the right to the city as struggles for the city as a commons.