Why is the commons a useful perspective for thinking about urban design and architecture?
Stefan Gruber, a Carnegie Mellon professor of architecture and urbanism, sees cities as a prime site of struggle between capitalism and commons, and at the same time more accessible than most national or international policy venues.
“The history of urbanization is intricately entangled with the history of industrialization and capitalism,” said Gruber, citing thinkers like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells. “Cities provide access to a high concentration of labor and production, infrastructure, trade, finance, and consumption markets.”
Yet even though cities have contributed to capitalist growth, Gruber noted, “they have also been the arenas where the contradictions of capitalism, such as inequities, the environment, and class struggle, have played out most visibly.” Much of Gruber’s work has therefore focused on urban zones where the struggle between capitalism and commons is playing out, with an eye toward learning how commons can prevail, sometimes through commons/public partnerships.
Gruber explores these themes in a course that he teaches, “Commoning in the City,” which examines how transitions towards just, regenerative, and self-determined communities in the city might develop, beyond the paradigms of the market and state.
With six co-curators, he has also helped launch a traveling exhibit called An Atlas of Commoning: Spaces of Collective Production, which showcases notable urban commons projects. The Atlas, now on a ten-year international tour, is part of an ongoing visual archive of initiatives that use participatory action, community design, and creative commons/public collaborations to reinvent city life. The Atlas is a collaboration with the German cultural organization ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and ARCH+, a German magazine for architecture and urbanism.
In a few days, the exhibition will have a major opening in Tbilisi, Georgia, a place where “the notion of commons is intertwined with the historical legacies of Soviet collectivism and traditional community practices,” and then by rapid urbanization and privatization of public spaces following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Contemporary grassroots initiatives have therefore focused on reclaiming shared (non-state) stewardship of communal spaces, cultural heritage, social practices, and the environment.
The ambitious goal of the Atlas of Commoning is “to recapture and redefine the open and emancipatory space of ‘us’ as a concept.” As the book’s preface explains:
As human beings, we are both individuals and members of a community at once; we are interconnected, and that interconnection needs to be given expression—we need places that are dedicated to communal life and that we shape together, conscious of our shared responsibility for them, places where community becomes a lived reality.
The author of the preface, Elke aus dem Moore, cites a Hamburg, Germany, project in the 1990s, “Park Fiction,” which invited citizens to articulate their wishes for a future park in pictures or words. The initiative became a participatory art project and then a political vehicle for asserting the needs and desires of residents, eventually defeating the plans of privileged commercial interests.
In my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #55), I talk with Stefan Gruber about the Atlas of Commoning, special challenges of stewarding commons in cities around the world, and his philosophical approach to the topic.
Gruber said he’s
“[I have] long been intrigued by this this notion that we shape our buildings and they in turn shape us. There’s a general understanding that our homes, our neighborhoods, our cities are expressions our of our values. But at the same time, these spaces themselves affect our well-being and our social relations, and also, obviously, the planetary well-being.”
“If we accept this reciprocal relationship,” he continued, “the question really becomes, Who is we? Is it predominantly the landlords, the developers, and the privileged class that shape our cities? Or can architecture play another role, not merely in reproducing existing power structures, but in renegotiating our social relationships?”
“How do we begin to democratize planning and design,” he asks, “and how do we bring in citizens who, as [the late commons scholar] Elinor Ostrom often said, are best at solving problems on the ground, because they understand them?”
Gruber has spent a lot of time looking at novel forms of public housing developed in collaboration with social movements. Having spent time as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria, Gruber is quite familiar with the Red Vienna period of that city’s life after World War I, when large numbers of people migrated to the outskirts of the city to squat on land, grow food, and build their own informal housing. It was an entirely self-organized, alternative economy based on self-produced building materials and sweat-equity labor.
Perceiving a political threat to its authority,
“The Vienna municipal government began to develop its own municipal housing as an alternative,” Gruber noted. “It argued that it could create more affordable and efficient housing through economies of scale.”
And so the homegrown commoning, outside of state power, came to exert political pressure on politicians. The self-organized migrant housing ended up prodding the city to taking aggressive action that it would not have otherwise taken.
From 1923 to 1934, when the ruling Social Democratic Party governed, the City of Vienna built 64,000 new units in 400 housing blocks. About one-tenth of the population, or 200,000 people, lived in this highly affordable “social housing.” Today, a remarkable 35 percent of Vienna’s overall housing stock is quality-built public housing. (A New York Times Magazine profile of Vienna’s housing in 2023 was entitled, “Imagine a Renter’s Utopia. It Might Look Like Vienna.”)
Another impressive commons-inspired housing initiative profiled in An Atlas of Commoning is the cooperative housing of Montevideo, Uruguay, which has combined government support with sweat-equity construction by residents.
The state’s idea was to find strike a workable compromise between massive, modernist public housing projects and ramshackle, informal settlements. The state provided land to cooperatives, but also financing so people could buy units in housing cooperatives. But people were allowed to make downpayments by doing construction labor for 21 hours a week, Gruber noted,
“This has allowed Montevideo to build thousands of cooperative housing projects over the past thirty years,” said Gruber, while giving people a greater sense of ownership and commitment. It’s social housing, not public housing.
Earlier in his career, Gruber had worked on the design of The High Line, the elevated pedestrian park on the west side of New York City that is now a hot tourist destination. While it’s been a huge success as a public space, said Gruber,
“The High Line became a catalyst for gentrification of the Chelsea neighborhood.”
“This became a red flag for me about questions of community engagement and participation,” he said, “but it also raised questions about what role or measures the city could have taken strategically to avoid displacement and to create a much stronger sense of ownership.”
The experience contributed to Gruber’s leaving his job at a renowned architectural practice and moving to academia to “think more fundamentally about the role of architecture” in cities. The commons is clearly a big part of this ongoing investigation and reflection. In one of Gruber’s classes, a session is dedicated to The High Line project is entitled, “Does Good Design Inevitably Lead to Gentrification?”
In his experiments with neighborhood engagement and commons/public partnerships, Gruber clearly sees great potential in the commons. One strategy for advancing this vision is to knit together the many lesser, little-known experiments that are dismissed as too small and marginal to matter.
“The Atlas of Commoning is beginning to put these many initiatives from around the world in relationship to one another, to actually outline the possibility of this alternative city of future.”
You can listen to my interview with Stefan Gruber here. The print version of An Atlas of Commoning, published in 2018, is sold out, but an online version can be found here.
