New Geographies 12: Commons

New Geographies 12: Commons

Edited by Mojdeh Mahdavi and Liang Wang

New Geographies 12: Commons seeks to open a conversation to delineate the historical and theoretical knowledge and a set of key issues that shape the idea of commons today. In particular, it aspires to decipher the tension central to this dialectic: the hinge between commoning and enclosure. It mobilizes the concept of the commons (singular) as a politico-spatial framework to interrogate and politicize various forms of contemporary commons (plural). It grounds the delicate net of processes and conditions of commons that are in constant flux as the production of space is reconceptualized and restructured to address the requirements of (re)production in the late capitalism. Expanding the discourse of commons into a planetary territory, New Geographies 12: Commons encompasses the intimate and subjective scale of the human body and the more-than-human yet omnipresent living environment and earth. It transcends the subjective world of humans—its perceived boundaries and territories—and recalibrates the terrestrial scale of things to a cosmological framework of the Anthropocene. The commons in this volume is foregrounded as a socio-political project—one that embraces various modes of commoning practice and knowledge production across the globe—to chart an epistemological heterogeneity that is fundamental for an alternative framework for the production of space.

With contributions by Alan Wiig, Amy Balkin, David Bollier, Doina Petrescu & Constantin Petcou, Fanny Lopez, Ivonne Santoyo Orozco, Katherine Melcher, Marina Otero Verzier, Nadia Bertolino, Neeraj Bhatia, Niklas Plaetzer, Viganò Paola, Paolo Cardullo, Peggy Deamer, Rosetta Sarah Elkin, Stavros Stavrides, Stefan Gruber, Taraneh Meshkani, William Conroy, Yan Zhang, Massimo De Angelis, and Rachel Cobb.

Published by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, forthcoming Fall 2021.

Designed by Sean Yendrys.
316 pages, softcover, 20.4 x 25.5 cm
ISBN 978-1-934510-81-0