Summer School | Commoning the City

The Vienna International Summer School "Commoning the City" (22.06.2014 - 29.06.2014) departs from the so-called crisis of public space and explores the concept of the commons as a third element that complements the state and the market. Thus it aims at reframing and invigorating the debate based on an aggressive repudiation of neoliberal politics as much as a radical re-imagination of alternatives beyond capitalism.

In recent years, theorists, activists and artists have explored the power of commoning in urban struggles for social justice and redistribution; they have persisted on human rights to clean water and air, healthy food, shelter, health and education threatened by the ongoing enclosure of public goods. Somewhat paradoxically, capitalism has also started to promote the commons in its own way, seamlessly merging the alternative value systems of the commons into turbo-capitalism. The summer school proposes to investigate precisely this ambiguous territory of claiming and reclaiming: we want to discuss the field of forces that give rise to and foster urban commons; we want to study the diverse and competing practices that constitute commons in the city.

Our areas of investigation are collective learning, communal living, collaborative listening, collaborative planning/building, cruising/acting together, common trading and common debate. With regard to these practices, we want to study why it is seemingly easier to imagine the destruction of the earth than the end of Capitalism. Can a recontextualization of the old idea of the commons provide a new strategy to disrupt profit-driven appropriations of the city? How can we explore together the potential for non-capitalist urban life? What kind of urban cultures can we produce, what alternative spaces can we create, how might self-managed cities look like?