I am interested in the possibilities to incorporate a ‘commons-based governance’ into public institutional procedures as a way to democratice the way cities are envisioned, planned and built. This interest is born out of my professional and political experience. Since 2014, I have been involved in the municipalist movement in Spain where the electoral initiatives had the explicit goal of building local power through radically democratic, feminist, ecologically resilient, and equitable forms of social organization. Some of the regulations developed by the so-called “Cities of Change” had to do with the collective management of public resources and the decissions around them.
My PhD research on the Becoming-Common of the Public is a practice-based activist research looking at counter-planning strategies deployed during the municipalist experience in Spain. The aim of this inquiry is twofold. First, to identify the elements involved in commons-based urban governance processes and to propose operative tools to be used by social and institutional actors when making plans about how to democratically shape their cities. Second, to establish a connection between the macro theories on “the city as a commons” and micro experiences of individual projects into a ‘meso’ level of the practices where the knowledge produced by urban commoning processes contributes to their scaling.
If you are interested to know more about the reserach, I am documenting it in the Open Science Framework online platform.
Project keywords:
urban commons, municipalism, activist research, counter-planning
