Evren Uzer Heritage As Commons Commons As Heritage 1

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HACCAH
Heritage as Common(s)
Ed. Benesch, Hammami, Holmberg, Uzer

HACCAH
Common(s) as Heritage
CURATING THE CITY

Makadam Publishers
Gothenburg & Stockholm, Sweden
www.makadambok.se
I S B N 978- 91-70 61- 6 6 4 - 8 ( pdf )
Copyright © 2015 the authors
Design by Plaquette
P W R was invited by Plaquette to further visually explore the notions of heritage

and commons. Their images are on the cover and between chapters.
P W R studio is a studio for research and design run by Hanna Nilsson and
Rasmus Svensson: cloud-based with physical presence in the euro-zone. Currently
occupied with research, image-creation and tool-making in search of networked
autonomy.
C O N T E N TS
9 I N T R O D U CTI O N
SE M I NAR I
19 Sybille Frank – 31 Elizabeth Greenspan – 39 Christine Hansen
SE M I NAR I I
53 Mattias Kärrholm – 65 Tim Edensor – 81 Vanja Larberg
SE M I NAR I I I
89 Kenneth Olwig – 117 Patricia Johanson – 135 Staffan Schmidt
SE M I NAR IV
156 Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen (STEALTH.unlimited) – 165 Kim Trogal –
187 Dougald Hine
SE M I NAR V
207 Lucia Allais – 227 Philip Ursprung – 243 Henric Benesch
SE M I NAR VI
255 Britt Baillie – 265 Chiara de Cesari – 277 Nina Gren
SE M I NAR VI I
287 Feras Hammami – 309 Evren Uzer – 329 Sybille Frank
3 3 9 A B O UT TH E AU TH O R S
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Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

I N T R O D U CT I O N
Henric Benesch
Feras Hammami
Ingrid Holmberg
Evren Uzer
Keeping things in common
During the past year the Urban Heritage Research Cluster as

part of Critical Heritage Studies, University of Gothenburg, have or-
ganized seven seminars under the heading: “Heritage as Common(s)
– Commons as Heritage, or HAC-CAH. The seminars have brought
us to places like Ground Zero in New York, a creek in Olympia, Café
The Swan in Amsterdam, Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility in Pet-
aluma, St Ann´s Church in Manchester, Central Park in New York,
the Old city of Jerusalem, Stortorget in Malmö, the Al-Qaryon Square
in Nablus, and Gezi Park in Istanbul. We have probed the notion
of friendship, scrutinized the paradigm shifts from reproduction to
production, explored the tension between top-down and bottom-up
heritage. We have enjoyed the potential of biological commons and
have looked into the different tempi and temporalities of commoning
and heritage works. The seminar series has originated and evolved
along the path we set up for the Urban Heritage Research Cluster in
the start: “the city as an interface of different temporalities – i.e. past
events, dreams for the future and contemporary constraints – and her-
itage as intermingled in many different urban realities and entangled
in issues of aesthetics, ethics, space and power…”.
9
The seminar series have aimed at an exploration of the subject
matter – Heritage as common(s) / Common(s) as heritage – but have,
moreover, in and of itself made up an experiment. The experimental
dimension came along with an elaboration and expansion of a par-
ticular seminar format. A conventional seminar-format is straight-
forward thing with a content-oriented approach where scholars con-
tribute to a joint discussion and also – in extension of that – build
networks. As an experiment we flipped this order, drawing on the
potential networking capacity of the seminar. Following this, instead
of merely inviting a scholar to contribute with a short paper on our
theme, we invited her or him to instantly do the same – that is to
invite yet another scholar to also contribute with a short paper on
our theme. The second choice of scholar was free of choice, and only
delimited to curiosity: with whom would you like read and discuss
each other’s papers?
The procedure of ‘letting the invited invite’ thus gave the sem-
inars a two-fold set-up. First, A presented a paper that was responded
to or commented by B. Then, the procedure was turned around: B
presented a paper that was responded to by A. Having coming up
with this setup we also realized that the discussion taking place in the
actual seminars also could be addressed. As an added element to the
seminar format we thus decided to invite C (a guest of our choice)
to give a personal account on the two papers presented. This third
account then could pave the way for an open seminar discussion with
the audience. The third party perspective on the papers – respectively
or together – is also included in this volume.
In it’s triadic setup the seminars have been an excellent fa-
cilitator and promoter of trans- and cross-disciplinary encounters. It
has provided a point of interaction between various fields inside and
outside academia. Not only researchers, but students and profession-
10

als as well have taken part in the discussions. And largely due to its
serendipitous scheme, the events have become laboratories of ideas,
influences and practices from a variety of fields such as anthropology,
conservation, architecture, design, planning, archaeology, art, soci-
ology, geography, each with a distinct blend and character of its own.
The publication has a fortuitous trait to it. Rather than adding
a particular reading of the full scope of the material – as it might (or
might not) be interpreted – we have chosen to present it chronolog-
ically. The idea is to keep the raw, open, associative and generative
character of the seminars’ setup. It is, what it is! Stemming from this
decision is also the light level of revision of the twenty-one papers
included in this publication. With minor changes, and additional
post-discussion remarks, the papers are more or less as they were pre-
sented at the seminars.
For Session I Sybille Frank was invited. Through a sociological

approach, she explores the complex relations between cities, com-
mons, and heritage. Dwelling on urban commons, as dynamic and
diverse webs of relations and issues of ”whose heritage” that makes a
common past. Sybille in her turn invited Liz Greenspan who expands
on how negotiation of the past might take place in the commons by
looking at Ground Zero, New York City – in particular at issues of
“public vs private ownership”, and “urban space as a site of contesta-
tion”. As comment (and challenge), Christine Hansen makes urgent
remarks on the emotive aspect of heritage work and commons in re-
lation to meaning and memory.
In Session II Mattias Kärrholm investigates the relation be-

tween public space and responsivity at Stortorget in Malmö, Sweden,
focusing on spatio-temporal aspects of urban commons and crowds.
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Mattias invited Tim Edensor who analyses the relations, connections
and processes that constitute the heritage of St Ann’s Church in
Manchester, unfolding the “scrappy stories” that frame the “unher-
alded” and “everyday life” – ultimately pointing towards the “ethics
of otherness”. Finally as commentator Vanja Larberg addresses urban
politics in Gårda, Gothenburg and the practice of unpacking spaces
and places through various everyday acts.
In Session III Kenneth Olwig problematizes the historical

commons, revisits Garrett Hardin and “the tragedy of the commons”,
bringing them in relation to modern practices (Frederick Law Olm-
stead) and contemporary ones such as Patricia Johansson whom he
also invited. In turn Patricia raises the issue of biological (& ecologi-
cal commons) through a wide range of examples from her artist prac-
tice and makes a case for public art as a shared common. In response,
Staffan Schmidt, as commentator, re-reads Kenneth´s historical and
Patricia´s artistic perspective on the commons, and in doing so brings
the notion of connectivity to our attention.
In Session IV STEALTH (Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen) ex-

plores the practice and heritage of commoning from a design, bring-
ing historical examples such as collective housing movements, in re-
lation to contemporary challenges and their current practice. In turn
they invited Kim Trogal who explores the terminology of the com-
mons, and its historical connections. Having a feminist perspective of
commons she highlights the commons not only as a site of production
– but also reproduction – and care. Building on the arguments prior
in the session Dougald Hine, as commentator, departs from workers
and cooperative movements and explores the notion of friendship as
an integral part of the commons.
12

In Session V Lucia Allais explores issues of representation and

presentation through an installation at the 14th Venice Architecture
Biennale, which describes and performs the problem of preserving
Pompeii. Her guest Philip Ursprung problematizes the notion of ter-
rain vague in relation to artistic practice and gentrification, exploring
re-enactments as immaterial labour and as a way of resisting capital-
ism hegemony. Thomas Laurien as commentator expanded on this
argument bringing it in relation to education and research. However
this sessions written comment is made by Henric Benesch (co-editor
of this publication).
In Session VI Britt Baillie discusses issues of enclosure and right

to the commons with the progressive growth of Right-wing politics
following the market recession as backdrop. In response she advances
new models based on ‘pluralism of ownership’. Britt invited Chiare
di Cesari who addresses to duality of heritage as an argument both
to defend and to enclose or privatize the commons. In turn, the two
papers by Baillie and di Cesari allows Nina Gren, as commentator, to
explore questions of power, statelessness/citizenship and trust in the
context of the Old City of Jerusalem, Palestine.
In Session VII, with a slightly different setup, Evren Uzer,

co-editor of this publication, explores the notion of commoning
within resistance through Gezi Park protests in Turkey and practices
for reclaiming heritage, public space, politics and economics. Feras
Hammami, also co-editor, looks at the micro-politics of re-making
socially shared public spaces through resistance to the Israeli occupa-
tion forces in the Historic City of Nablus, Palestine, as a case. Finally
Sybille Frank was invited as auditor. In the position as both opener
and closer of this seminar series she expands on the discussion of
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resistance, conflict and commons, focusing on the modus operandi
of “agency”, the distribution of power and the role of knowledge pro-
duction.
Last but not least, having gathered all papers for the volume,
we then felt an urge to address the publication in the same spirit
as seminar series. Following that we asked the designers of the vol-
ume, Jonas Fridén and Pascal Prosek to have their take on the setup.
Consequently they have invited PWR Studio (Hanna Nilsson and
Rasmus Svensson) to contribute as well, to what we would like to
think of (in a non-discursive way) as Session VIII – not for closure –
but as further points of entry. The seminar series under the heading
“Heritage as Common(s) – Commons as Heritage”, or HAC-CAH,
then has gone full circle.
Sharing is keeping things in common.

16

I
Seminar
Sybille Frank
Elizabeth Greenspan
Christine Hansen
August
2013
17
I
Sybille Frank
Urban Commons and Urban Heritage

Input for the Urban Heritage Seminar Series,
University of Gothenburg, 23rd August 2013
My paper will deal with the complex relation between Cities,

Commons, and Heritage. I arranged these three terms in a triangle,
and I will dwell on the three sides of the triangle that each connects
two of these terms. I will start with “Urban Commons”, I will then
move on to “Common Heritage”, and I will close with a reflection on
“Urban Heritage”.
Urban / City
Heritage Common(s)
19
Urban Commons
In recent times we have witnessed a rising societal and aca-

demic interest in the idea of “The Commons” (for a research over-
view cf. van Laerhoven/Ostrom 2007, for recent publications on the
topic cf. e.g. Hardt/Negri 2009, Reid/Taylor 2010, Helfrich/Hein-
rich-Böll-Stiftung 2009, 2012). Public and academic discourse have
culminated in diverse social movements around the globe which, as
US-American geographer David Harvey put it, voiced a growing dis-
comfort with the conjunction of deregulated capitalism, neoliberal
politics, marketization, and privatization of common public goods
on a global scale. The perceived loss of commonalities has been ar-
ticulated most often and most aloud in cites. According to Harvey,
cities have experienced several waves of privatization, of enclosures,
of spatial controls and surveillance in the past years (cf. Harvey
2012: 67). It is widely felt that these developments have been mo-
tivated by capitalist class interests, flanked by neoliberal politics.
These politics have diminished the financing of public goods, led to
a decline in state-supplied public goods, and turned public goods into
vehicles for private capital accumulation (cf. Hardt/Negri 2009). At
the end of this process stands a run short availability of urban com-
mon(s). These processes gave birth to the right-to-the city move-
ment which claims that the only possible response for populations to
the above-described developments is to protest and to self-organize
in order to provide for their own commons (cf. Harvey 2012: 87,
Jeffrey/McFarlane/Vasudevan 2012).
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But what is the commons?
In his recent book on “Rebel Cities”, David Harvey defines

the commons as “an unstable and malleable social relation between
a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of its actual-
ly existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or physical environment
deemed crucial to its life and livelihood” (Harvey 2012: 73). This
definition entails several important points: First, the group is socially
defined, second, the resources are socially defined, and third, there
is a social practice of commoning that links the social group to a
specific resource that this group regards as their common(s) (cf. Hel-
frich/Haas 2009). Harvey goes on to argue that “[a]t the heart of the
practice of commoning lies the principle that the relation between
the social group and that aspect of the environment being treated as
a common shall be both collective and non-commodified – off-lim-
its to the logic of market exchange and market valuations” (Harvey
2012: 73). Commons therefore denote a social relation beyond cap-
italization and marketization. They may take different forms: While
intellectual and cultural commons such as languages and knowledge
do not fall under the logic of scarcity since they are in principle open
to all, natural resources such as water are exclusionary resources in
that they will be exhausted if consumed and not cared for.
What are then urban commons?
One thing that has been discussed prominently under the la-
bel of “urban commons” in the past few years is public space (for an
overview of urban commons literature cf. Parker/Johansson 2011, cf.
Jeffrey/McFarlane/Vasudevan 2012). Public space has for long been a
crucial concept in academic reasoning about the city since it is closely
21
linked to the notion of “urbanity”. As scholars such as Georg Simmel
(1903) or Louis Wirth (1938) have pointed out, in urban public space
density and heterogeneity may be experienced in an intensity that
may not be found elsewhere (cf. Hardt/Negri 2009: 249-262). Hence,
public urban space has been regarded as the place where modern soci-
ety as a market-mediated and state-protected association of strangers
could first be experienced as a new social form.
Public spaces and public goods in the city, however, are not
synonyms for “commons”. Harvey argues that public spaces and pub-
lic goods contribute to the qualities of the commons. But “it takes
political action on the part of the citizens and the people to appro-
priate them or to make them so” (Harvey 2012: 73). Public urban
space – that has always been administered by the state – needs to be
appropriated for common purposes in order to become an urban com-
mons (Jeffrey/McFarlane/Vasudevan 2012). He explains: “Syntagma
Square in Athens, Tahrir Square in Cairo, and the Plaza de Catalunya
in Barcelona were public spaces that became an urban commons as
people assembled there to express their political views and make de-
mands” (Harvey 2012: 73). Along these lines Hardt and Negri even
regard “the metropolis as a factory for the production of the common”
(Hardt/Negri 2009: 250).
While public space may be turned into an urban commons by
civic action (cf. Foster 2012; Parker/Johannson 2012), urban com-
mons may also be expropriated. The commercial capitalization of
neighborhoods by the real estate market is a much-discussed example
for the expropriation of city neighborhoods as public spaces collec-
tively produced as urban commons by residents. As soon as real estate
agents let or sell apartments for a lot of money by promoting them
as being located in a lively, multicultural and cosmopolitan quarter,
thereby initiating a process of gentrification, they run the risk of de-
22

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stroying these diversified neighborhoods and everyday neighborhood

life in them. So, while urban commons are continuously being pro-
duced by residents, they are in continuous danger of being appropri-
ated by capital. From this perspective, Harvey argues (Harvey 2012:
80), the entire history of urbanization can be interpreted as an ongo-
ing destruction of the city as a social, political and cultural commons
by capital.
Common Heritage
If we shift our attention to the lowest side of the triangle, the

relation between “Common(s)” and “Heritage” comes to mind.
The Common heritage of mankind is a concept in interna-
tional law which follows the idea that specific natural and cultural
elements of humanity should be held in trust for future generations
and should therefore be protected from exploitation by individuals,
nation states or corporations. The principle of a Common Heritage of
Mankind was first mentioned in the preamble to the Hague Conven-
tion for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed
Conflict in 1954. Several international conventions followed, such
as the UNESCO World Heritage Convention in 1972.
The idea of the existence of a Common Heritage of Mankind
that should be protected raises urgent questions of “Whose heritage?”
is seen as a common heritage and therefore as worthy of protection,
and of “How?” this should be done. Harvey argues that enclosure is
often seen as the best way to preserve certain kinds of heritage as a
valued commons (Harvey 2012: 70). Nature reserves are defined and
fenced off, with public access restricted. This may lead to situations
23
in which one common (nature) “may be protected at the expense
of another” (public access) (Harvey 2012: 70). At the same time,
it is usually criticized if the rich fence themselves off in gated com-
munities within which an “exclusionary commons” becomes defined
(Harvey 2012: 71). In contrast, the enclosure of a non-commodified
heritage space in a commodifying world is often been seen as a good
thing (Harvey 2012: 70). This shows that some forms of common
heritage entail open access, while others may need regulation and
public or private management, and again others need to be enclosed
to be preserved as a commons for a particular social group or for man-
kind as such. Therefore questions of how a common heritage is to
be produced and protected are highly contradictory and most often
contested (cf. Harvey 2012: 71).
The same holds true as to the question of “whose” heritage
is seen as a common heritage (cf. Helfrich/Haas 2009). To illustrate
this, we only need to look briefly at the World Heritage list to see how
closely the idea of a common heritage is linked to power. Up to this
day, UNESCO state parties from Western countries are more likely to
have ‘their’ cultural or natural heritage sites inscribed on the list. The
reasons for this are manifold: First, the definition of criteria for what
qualifies as common heritage build upon Western cultural traditions
and schools of thought, second, the process of bidding for being award-
ed the official seal of a world heritage site is bureaucratic and expensive
so that well-off state parties with modern bureaucracies and knowledge
regimes have a big advantage. Third, the World Heritage Centre in
which Committee decisions are being prepared on whose common in-
terests one seeks to protect is predominantly administered by people
from Western countries. But also on the local scale, we witness fierce
fights for power between different social groups about whose heritage is
being represented in public space as common heritage, and whose not.
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Summing up, different social groups and various public and

private agents can engage in the practice of commoning in the field
of heritage for many different reasons, and on many different spatial
scales. They compete for interpretative supremacy over the past, but
with differing powers and differing chances for success. Naturally, it
is a most exciting question who is winning through in these fights.
Urban Heritage
Finally, on the left side of the triangle, the relationship be-

tween Heritage and the City comes into view.
My recent research on heritage has focused on the rise of a
heritage industry in Europe (cf. Frank 2009, 2015). Since the late
1980s, the number and influence of commercial and civic private
players in the heritage arena has grown to the same extent that the
state or municipalities have gradually withdrawn from the public
representation of history. I argue that, in the past decades, we have
witnessed a considerable diversification of the production and the
consumption of heritage. On the production side, public and private
views of the past have on the one hand diversified and on the other
hand become connected to a globalized leisure and tourism industry.
This process has led to democratization and to commercialization of
heritage at the same time. On the consumption side, the bourgeois
museum has lost its monopole to more popular, experiential forms
of representing and consuming the past, such as theme parks and
living history, so that more and more social groups have engaged in
the consumption of heritage. In addition, the price reductions in and
the expansion of travel offers around the globe have broadened the
25
consumer base of heritage since more and more people from different
parts of the world now can afford to travel to specific places in order
to consume heritage locally (Frank 2012). Accordingly, I understand
“heritage” as a contentious field of the production, representation
and consumption of a meaningful common past, in which various
public and private agents – with differing chances for success – battle
for interpretative supremacy over the past, and in which the past is
localized in certain places (Frank 2014). This means that heritage is
able to grant a common past to places. With this definition, I oppose
much of recent research which has coined heritage as a popular form
of social memory. I argue that social memory only becomes heritage
when it is related to a place and when it is presented there as heritage,
opening it up to public debate.
It is obvious that, if one defines heritage as a contentious
field in which diverse social groups produce, represent and consume
a meaningful common past that becomes localized in certain plac-
es, the urban arena springs to mind. As mentioned before, cities are
extremely dense and heterogeneous spaces in which many different
social groups convene. Accordingly, places in cities are likely to be
interpreted in several ways since different social groups are present
which may locate different heritages in these places. In order to be
able to analyze heritage as a complex system of meaning, recent re-
search has placed it in a matrix (cf. Timothy/Boyd 2003). This ma-
trix demonstrates both the dimensions of the significance of heritage,
and the dimensions of the scales of heritage. Overlapping areas of
the significance of heritage include its economic aspect (generating
income), its social function (creating group identities), its political
dimension (manipulating the past for political purposes), and finally
its scientific (educative) aspect. The dimension of the scales of her-
itage is separated into the four reference frames of the personal, the
26

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local, the national, and the global. Accordingly, people may have
greatly differing experiences in a place depending on whichever area
of significance, and whichever scale of heritage is important for them:
“A medieval cathedral may be an architectural/historical resource,
an exhibition or cultural performance stage, a visual aid for historical
education, an indoor element in a tourism entertainment package,
a restful refuge, or a source of personal religious experience” (Ash-
worth/Hartmann 2005: 247).
If the past is placed as “heritage” in public urban space, it is
exposed to appropriation by supportive, but also to contradictions by
opposing social groups. Each of them may favor the representation of
a different area of the significances, and/or of the scales of heritage.
And if we consider heritage as an industry in which a diverse set of
public and private players seeks to make profit, and in which produc-
ers and (touristic) consumers often are non-locals, it is even more
difficult to create public consensus on who is legitimized to represent
which past as a common heritage, and how.
If the city is seen as a collective product of its citizens, it should
also belong to the citizens who created it. Given the diverse layers
of potential conflict presented in this short outline, it is all the more
incomprehensible that an analysis of the complex and contested con-
junction of the urban, the common(s) and heritage to this day faces
great hesitancy on the part of science. I am very happy that this anal-
ysis is being taken up in the framework of this seminar series.
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Elizabeth Greenspan
Urban Heritage Seminar series:

For the past twelve years, I’ve been studying the rebuilding pro-
cess at the World Trade Center site in New York City. The primary
tension at Ground Zero is one that shapes many urban spaces today: the
conflict between public and private ownership of space. In the 9/11 at-
tacks, ten million square feet of commercial space was destroyed, space
that the landowner and leaseholder wanted to rebuild. But after 9/11,
many New Yorkers, and Americans more broadly, believed that the
site’s future should be determined by a public process, and that com-
mercial development should not be the defining force downtown. For
twelve years, nearly all of the conflicts and controversies that plagued
the WTC site have cohered in some way around this core tension.
In this paper, I will discuss one particular moment in the re-
building effort – the debates over and design of a viewing fence that
surrounded the site – that highlights the subtle negotiations between
public and private forces at Ground Zero. It reveals the ways in which
the land’s owners designed a space, and curated a public history dis-
played on the fence, to protect its commercial agenda.
The story begins six months after 9/11, when rebuilding of-
ficials held a press conference to announce major developments at
31
the site. Recovery workers had rapid cleared the wreckage from the
sixteen acre hole, and officials were preparing the site for redevelop-
ment. The tattered temporary, plywood walls that had gone up the
prior September would come down, officials announced, adding that
the land’s owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,
would build a solid, thirty- to forty-foot-high wall to surround the site
for five to ten years as it rebuilt. Officials explained that an opaque
wall would “protect” those who lived and worked in the area from see-
ing “disconcerting views” as they walked through Lower Manhattan.
Within hours, architects and civic groups around the city be-
gan speaking out. They believed that the primary function of the
wall was to restrict the public’s access to the site and, by extension,
their voice in the rebuilding effort. A few weeks later, a group of ar-
chitects held a charette and developed a new concept. In place of an
opaque wall, they imagined a structure that emphasized “transparen-
cy” and “openness,” one participant told me. Their design featured
a twelve-foot-tall fence—a height more to scale for visitors—made
of stainless-steel mesh that welcomed people to view Ground Zero
from multiple angles. It incorporated small ledges hanging from the
fence so people could leave homemade memorials, as well as signs
explaining that people’s memorials would be collected and archived
by state officials. In a later version, the fence also held white, eras-
able panels with markers for people to leave their own comments,
signatures, and drawings.
Families of 9/11 victims’ had ideas about the wall/fence too.
They told officials that any new structures at the site, particularly
something that would stand for five or ten years, must include a me-
morial to the attacks’ victims. This was the place, they reminded
everyone, where nearly three thousand people died. Both groups –
victims’ families and architects – understood the potent meaning of
32

I
a wall. They saw it as a symbol of exclusion and secrecy, and were

opposed to it as much for what it symbolized as to what it limited in
a practical sense: the view. A wall would literally prevent anyone
from wandering by and taking a look at what the Port Authority and
developer Larry Silverstein were building.
After the architects and victims’ families revolted against the
wall, the Port Authority agreed to build a fence instead, something
that people could see through. But it refused to adopt a number of
the other recommendations. First and foremost, the Port Author-
ity decided to bar spontaneous memorials from the fence entirely.
It honored families’ requests and create an alcove at one end listing
the victims’ names, but prohibited flowers, poems, banners, flags – all
of the items that people had been leaving at the WTC site for the
previous year.
According to those who worked on the project, the Port Au-
thority worried about receiving thousands of objects that it didn’t
know what to do with; it feared mounds of teddy bears overrunning
the area. But that wasn’t all. The Port Authority also feared a fence
full of memorials and handwritten notes could engender a sense of
public attachment to the structure. And this, in turn, could compli-
cate its plans to redevelop the land. As one consultant to the project
told me, “We wanted to maintain the fact that it was temporary. And
giving people a place to leave a teddy bear, that would make it per-
manent.” The Port Authority’s goal, he said, was to build a structure
that no one missed when it came down years later to make way for
office buildings, a permanent memorial, a train station, and more.
An elaborate commemorative fence designed to encourage civic en-
gagement and public expression was precisely the kind of thing the
Port Authority wanted to avoid. According to the consultant, even
the fence’s metal came under scrutiny. Stainless steel was the usual
33
choice for a fence around a construction zone, but because stainless
steel “looks permanent,” he said, they opted for something else that
“looked cheaper.” Ironically, he noted, “it actually may have cost
more in the end for these materials.”
In addition, the Port Authority worked with a design firm
to create a long stretch of photographic panels, thirty-four in all,
that told a stirring, patriotic history of the economic development
of Lower Manhattan over the past century. Each panel contained an
old black-and-white photograph of the Lower Manhattan skyline as
it evolved from 1915 through the 1970s, when construction on the
Twin Towers was completed. The earliest panels showcased some
of the world’s early “tallest building” record holders: “A view of the
Lower Manhattan skyline from the Hudson River around 1915 is
dominated by the Woolworth Building, which at 792 feet was the
tallest in the world from 1913 until the late 1920’s. The second-tall-
est spire visible is an earlier record holder, the 612-foot Singer Tower,
completed in 1908.” The later panels celebrated the towers. One,
dated 1973, displaying an aerial view of the Twin Towers just after
they were completed, described them as “simple, slender, silver, and
soaring,” and compared the effort to build them to the “can-do com-
petitive spirit that fueled the Space Race and moon shots.” The final
panel in the narrative displayed an aerial photograph of the wreck-
age caused by the towers’ collapse.
It was the first official history, the first narrative of any sort, to
appear at Ground Zero and frame the meaning of the attacks. And
it told a big story, a story of American power and innovation. The
history showed taller and taller skyscrapers filling in the open spaces
of the Financial District until, finally, the Twin Towers rose. Then
the narrative skipped over decades of skyscraper history and new tall-
est-building record holders (all of which, by this time, stood in Asia)
34

I
to arrive at the destruction on 9/11. There was only one way to re-
build and recapture America’s greatness, the panels suggested: rebuild
big, tall office buildings.
After it erected the fence, the Port Authority removed any
bouquets or memorials people left at the end of each day. It also erased
all the memorial graffiti people had written. There were no more
handwritten notes and no more homemade memorials; there was no
more public expression in the areas directly surrounding the site.
The story of the fence is important because it shows the Port
Authority’s considerable insight as it orchestrated even seemingly
mundane aspects of the rebuilding effort, like a temporary construc-
tion fence. The Port Authority seemed to know that it was the small,
everyday, even reflexive gestures—like the simple act of leaving a
bouquet of flowers—that shaped people’s thoughts about what kind
of place the WTC site was, and what kind of place it should become.
Was it a destruction zone or a construction zone? A place of loss or a
place of resilience? The difference between these two visions could
mean the difference between public support for the Port Authority’s
rebuilding plans, including building all of the destroyed office space,
or public opposition to them.
But it also shows that officials responded to some of the public’s
concerns. The Port Authority did not insist on building an opaque
wall. It gave the public “access” in so far as people could see the site,
while it simultaneously ended the public’s free expression via memo-
rials and handwritten graffiti. Moreover, it capitalized on the idea of
Ground Zero as a public space rather than trying to reject this notion
entirely. Over the previous year, people had turned the site into a
public space as they left clusters of homemade memorials around the
site. The Port Authority decided to use this newfound public-ness to
its advantage with historic panels that told a beneficial history – one
35
that married patriotism with commercial development. The Port Au-
thority determined the narrative that the WTC site displayed, and
erased any counter-narratives, but it also provided some interactive
history, and it granted the public viewing access.
This approach mirrors officials’ approach to the rebuilding
more broadly. Officials are rebuilding all of the destroyed office space,
despite early public opposition to it, but they are also building a me-
morial, a museum, and a train station. Rebuilding officials dedicated
to the land’s commercial development remained in control and ma-
nipulated the space to advance their agenda, with just enough com-
promise to appease civic-minded architects and the public.
I’d like to end by thinking about another public space. Like
many of you, this past summer, I have been thinking of Taksim
Square, and some of the connections I see between the two places,
including why violence broke out in Istanbul, and why, despite the
charged feelings and numerous protests at Ground Zero over the
years, violence has never broken at the site. There are many differ-
ences between Istanbul and New York, of course. But I wonder if one
of the key differences is this inclination on the part of the Port Au-
thority, and officials more broadly, not to insist on the most extreme
version of their plan.
In other words, can we look at the Port Authority’s decision
to build a fence rather than a wall as a compromise? Or, are there
other difference between Taksim and Ground Zero that are more
substantial? Is it a question of time? Now, in the days after Occupy
Wall Street, would people be less open to developing the WTC site?
Has something changed in cities around the world, in the aftermath
of the economic crash of 2008, making them less tolerant of private
ownership of urban space? Or, did the Port Authority simply (but
not simply at all) manage public perception and collective emotion
36

I
more effectively? It barred homemade memorials and public expres-

sion at Ground Zero partly to stem a possible future backlash against
its rebuilding plans. Perhaps the land’s owners redirected the public’s
connection and sense of attachment to the land in just the right way.
I
Sadness in cities
A reflection
Christine Hansen
A comment to the seminar of

Sybille Frank and Elizabeth Greenspan
There is no arguing with the dead, especially in the field of heritage.

Not all dead are equally influential in this domain but in discussing
what constitutes heritage, the young, famous, heroically or
undeservingly dead hold a lot of sway. Just take a walk around any
city and you’ll see what I mean. Monuments, plaques, gardens of
memory, street names, town squares and statues, although you
could pretty much point to any structure or public space, display
their allegiance to the departed with no apology.
Not surprisingly then, given the topic of this seminar, the two papers
presented here both have bodies in their substructure. Sybille
Frank, although invoking her field research only from the margins
of her presentation, offered us a view into the memorialising of
Checkpoint Charlie as an example of how multiple narratives at
a single site demand accommodation. Despite the site having
been the official diplomatic crossing point for the Berlin Wall, the
contemporary narrative could not exclude the unofficial stories of
those who were killed there while attempting to escape from east
to west. Liz Greenspan’s study of contests over the redevelopment
of the World Trade Centre site in New York similarly has the moral
legitimacy of the dead and the grieving at its heart – as they are at
the site. Here, despite the massive commercial interests pushing for
an expedient design solution, the needs of the bereaved, the injured
39
and the affronted have had to be accommodated by forces unused
to compromise. Both papers are steeped in complex and nuanced
stories of contest and competition, yet despite their finely calibrated
analysis and detailed accounting of forces at play, not to mention (at
least for Greenspan) the overpowering presence of the heroically
and undeservingly dead, rather surprisingly neither explore emotion
as a narrative-shaping agent.
I’ve noticed this lacuna of feeling within the literature of heritage

studies quite broadly and it has always mystified me, as has the
little import given to the role of time. For a field of study often so
interested in the past, heritage scholarship seems weirdly stuck
to the temporally flattened present. Analyses that extend along a
horizontal axis, where the contests between actors have resolved
into a coherent (if conflicted) whole, is the disciplinary norm. But
of course heritage is as subject to the sway of historical forces as
any other phenomenon and disputes over who owns the story of
the past, or of culture or nature or any other category under the
rubric of heritage, can both flare up and fall dormant depending
on contemporary needs. Not only do heritage sites change in form
over time, they also become archives themselves, revealing the
priorities of the societies within which they were created. I think
of the ubiquitous war memorial – the marble or granite obelisk
engraved with the names of the heroically dead – now languishing
in public parks of cities and towns throughout the western world.
When the sadness of loss was fresh, the public memorial was a
way for grief to find a place in the urban landscape. As the need
waned, so too did the intensity of the memorials. Of course a once
revered site falling into dereliction or a once common practice or
story falling out of memory isn’t final either. Debates over the past
can flare unexpectedly, pinning contemporary agendas to revived
interests. Nationalist sentiments, for example, can find a cohering
location at a war memorial or through a song, or ritual such as a
street march (the Orange Order marches of Belfast come to mind)
in the same way that political agitators can align themselves with
(or even appropriate) a historical lineage of sacrifice for a common
cause in a public space such as a town square.
40

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The pulse of intensity that waxes and wanes around heritage is

one of the reasons it is so difficult to define. Clearly the entirety
of the past is not included in the definition, nor is the entirety
of nature, culture, public urban space or any other category.
So where do the boundaries fall? Without some definition the
term loses meaning yet as soon as a definition is proposed, that
which falls outside the boundary is thrown into negative relief and
becomes of heightened interest to critical scholars. As cultural
analysts we are drawn to negative spaces, to the unseen, the
ignored and the silenced, and we are compelled by the messy
stuff that defies categories and dislodges certainties. In our world,
terms slide around and dissolve at the edges. Yet rarely do we
acknowledge the way in which this constant testing of definitions
and deconstructing of boundaries engenders a loss of meaning.
And the erosion is not just a rhetorical dead end in the field of
critical heritage studies. At some point it has real consequences
in contemporary societies struggling to find points of commonality
and connection around which feelings of purpose and belonging
can be fostered.
The triangle of terms and relations proposed by Sybille Frank is a

welcome reprieve from this boundary testing. Not being a social
scientist myself, I am always in awe of a good diagram and Frank’s
triangle is a determinedly framed view into the knotty collision
of heritage, commons and cities. For once I am happy to hand
over the struggle with definitions to be drawn instead into the
current of relations that pass between the three corners. In this
formation she notices that: the density of cities is what lends public
space its potential for transformation into an ‘urban commons’,
yet this transformation is not complete without the space being
appropriated for a common purpose – most compellingly as a
place of assembly at times of political upheaval and discontent; that
the vexed issue of ‘whose heritage?’ (and particularly ‘whose world
heritage?’) sits undigested at the centre of our suspicions that
heritage is an under analysed field; and that a transition from the
public to private sector hallmarks the economisation of heritage in
cities across the globe.
41
It was when I began to think about how this triangle works that I
noticed the dead bodies; the plaza of martyrs, the memorial for
soldiers, the crypt of a saint, the site of the murdered (especially
those murdered in political struggle, by the state or by fanatical
ideologues), the graves of kings and queens and poets. And
noticing the dead, I couldn’t help but notice, especially in the light
of Greenspan’s story of the fence at the World Trade Centre, the
moral authority associated with grief, sadness and outrage. It’s hard
to argue with families of the undeservingly or heroically dead that
a need for their grief to find public expression is not legitimate. The
dead trump flagrantly commercial interests, both in Greenspan’s
example and beyond.
Of course corpses and sadness are not compulsory in the

construction of heritage, but they definitely shift the balance in
favour of a classificatory promotion, at least for a time. And there’s
the rub. When the axis of time is accommodated at the intersection
between heritage, commons and cities, meaning and emotion
become instantly unstable. Or perhaps not so much unstable
as oscillating. Meaning comes and goes, emotion flares up and
dies down, time turns feelings into history. Whatever analysis we
apply today, come back in ten years or one hundred years (or even
tomorrow) and the story will be different.
Seen like this, the terms meaning, emotion and time might sit in a
triangle of their own, not as an alternative to Frank’s but rather an
interior view of the same conjunction. And as in Frank’s triangle, the
real energy is not at the corners where the definitions sit, but along
the sides where the conversation between them is vibrant.
Noticing the exchange between emotion and time, we can look

again at Greenspan’s case study of the World Trade Centre.
While the drama of the attack is still undeniably hot, more than ten
years on from the toppling of the Twin Towers the debris has been
cleared, funerals and memorials for the dead and missing have
been held, and political contests over the rebuilding have been
waged, if not yet won, as the new World Trade Centre rises on the
42

I
skyline. The shocked and grieving citizens of New York and families
of those killed have had over a decade to acclimatise and their
needs for memorialising have already shifted. When the centenary
of the disaster is noted, when it is left to the not-yet-born great
grand children of those killed at the site to remember, how will it
be conceived? Perhaps it will be a place for political ideologues to
invoke a legitimizing history, or perhaps it will sink under the weight
of contemporary concerns and be forgotten. Either way, no matter
how hot the rhetoric seems today, time will shift the intensity.
And if you don’t believe me, look at the English King Richard III
whose body was recently discovered under a public car park in
the city of Leicester. Historians see his death 500 years ago as the
moment at which the War of the Roses finally ended, after nearly
4% of the entire population of England was killed in the bloody
conflict. Yet there he was, long forgotten under an ignominious
council car park with a metre of ash felt set solid over his place of
final repose. It seems though, having escaped his concrete grave
for the moment, his reputation for conflict is about to be revived as
the ‘war of the bones’ flares. A dead English king, especially one as
famous as Richard III, is a huge heritage draw card and the cities
of York and Leicester are preparing their legal teams for a right
royal battle over which has rights to become the next ‘final’ resting
place of the erstwhile monarch. If the rather hasty Richard III Visitor
Centre (standing in for the permanent museum which is under
construction) of Leicester is any indication, both cities are already
counting the future tourist dollars as they firm up their arguments.
Up and down, round and round. As always, heritage is about the
contemporary.
If time can diminish or shift emotional intensity, it can also help

to accrue meaning, the next two terms in my interior triangle.
As Frank pointed out, the transformation of public space into
commons is not complete without the space being appropriated
for a common purpose, particularly at times of upheaval. And often
that space is one that is known as a location for protest. Take
Taksim Square in Istanbul for example, or Sant Jaume’s square
43
in Barcelona, both stages of contemporary and historic civic
action. I find something very moving about deep layers of human
occupation in cities, particularly in public spaces with a history of
protest (and celebration for that matter). The generations of the
past who have sought to make their voices and prayers heard in the
same place adds something to current affairs that can’t be easily
quantified. In taking up the lineage of public dissent associated
with a particular place, today’s actors situate themselves in deeply
affective dialogue with history and align the heritage of the site to
their cause. Of course affective responses can be manipulated
and legitimising historical narratives can be appropriated by vested
interests. But the layers of complexity that build under cities as
populations rise and fall, as epochs of ideas and ideologies flourish
and diminish, or as architecture emerges and submerges, provide
a richness of texture to the contemporary urban landscape that
cannot be artificially replicated. There is an implicit invitation to
commons in these strata; they resist alignment to any single lobby
group (or rather are available to every lobby group), yet anchor the
present in a sense of belonging to a flow of humanity that stretches
beyond their own efforts, or an oppressive sense of obligation,
depending on your view.
At the final edge of the triangle, which links emotion and meaning,
I’m pulled back to the undeservingly dead at the World Trade
Centre site and the sway they have over contemporary events. The
outpouring of grief, shock and outrage that followed the death of
more than 2600 people as a result of the terrorist attacks of 2001
lead to the spontaneous sprouting of candle lit shrines, walls of
remembrance, floral tributes, graffitied messages of solidarity (and
occasionally contest) and numerous other material expressions of
emotion at the site.
More than ten years on, these tributes, messages and tokens of
remembrance still accrue at the boundary fences on a daily basis.
While there is clearly a question of whether and where these public
expressions should be allowed, which Greenspan follows in her
study, my curiosity is piqued by who is making these gestures and
44

I
why. Ten thousand tourists per day take in the memorial, totalling
9.5 million in just two short years, yet hardly any of them are New
Yorkers. The needs of grieving families and local citizens have not
only shifted since the immediate aftermath of the attacks twelve
years ago, they have also been accommodated in the subsequent
official memorial and through inclusion (admittedly hard won)
in the ongoing discussions about the redevelopment. So who
is leaving the teddy bears tied to railings, bouquets of plastic-
wrapped flowers and scrawled messages of remembrance and
solidarity? Why are strangers moved to make such gestures of
connection? Is it something to do with the drama of the destruction
in 2001 unfolding live on TV? Perhaps visitors feel they have some
association with the story through their memory of where they were
and what they were doing when news of the attacks first emerged.
Or maybe it is the explicit ideological context of the terrorist attacks
that invites people to express their allegiances. Whatever the
reason, gestures of connection shift the visitor from outsider to
insider through a performance of their own emotion at the site. In
doing so they become part of one of the most sensational urban
stories in contemporary history.
The need for meaning, to be part of something larger than

ourselves, to find a context for our lives through connection to
others and to the past, is to my mind an under-regarded aspect
of cultural heritage analysis. While we critical scholars are busy
dismantling the definitions of culture and pushing the boundaries
of inclusion to points beyond view, vested commercial interests are
happily exploiting this very human need with no squeamishness
about declaring who is inside and who is out. A flashpoint of
emotion such as the World Trade Centre site is a vantage point
from which to view this phenomenon, but the business of belonging
is integral to how cities, commons and heritage sit in conversation.
Just ask the local real estate agent how it works, or a multinational
sportswear or soft drink manufacturer for that matter. While we
might hesitate over definitions of belonging, commerce is busily
analysing the construction of cultures, sub-cultures and street
movements in order to appropriate their fashion, art, music and
45
tribal allegiances. And as Frank points out in her paper, the real
estate market is hungry for property in transformed urban districts
flavoured by artists and ethnic communities at the once affordable
fringe, in part of the global trend shifting what was once considered
to be common and publicly owned heritage into the private sector.
So, if my improvised triangle (with apologies to Sybille Frank for

such shameless ‘borrowing’) proposes that time adds depth
to cities, the bright flare of emotion draws us in, and collective
meaning anchors us in belonging, it is also my proposal that in the
middle of that grouping lay the dead. They are the strata of time
beneath our feet. They are the grieved for. They are the ancestors
whose lineages we inherit (or refuse). And they are the latest
tourist attraction at your recently re-furbished privately funded local
museum. The dead are a never ending resource for the future,
whichever way you look at it.

II
Seminar
II
Mattias Kärrholm
Tim Edensor
Vanja Larberg
September
2013
51
52

II
Mattias Kärrholm
On ‘crowd space’ as urban commons

– some notes on responsivity
and the transformation of an urban square
The public is what is constantly appropriated, yet con-

stantly resists appropriation.
(Brighenti 2010:35)
The Main Square of Malmö, Stortorget, was inaugurated as a

strategically located market place during the 1530s. The square was
then, with its size of roughly 131 * 145 metres, the largest square of
Northern Europe, and it came to have a structuring role on the city
of Malmö as it played an active role in the changing of the main com-
mercial flow, rising the importance of the axis going in a north-south
direction (and diminishing the role of the east-west route). The size of
the square has, through the centuries, allowed it to be a place for mar-
kets, but also for gathering crowds and objects of all sort, ranging from
riots, and executions to more ordinary or mundane activities such as
weddings and the regular cleaning of the fire hoses of the City Fire
Department (where the large space was needed for the long hoses).
53
In this text, I would like to address the transformation of a
specific urban common, i.e. squares with the possibility of gathering
crowds of both humans and non-humans (cf. Borch 2012), and I will
use the Main Square of Malmö as an example. The aim is to develop
the notion of ‘crowd space’ as an urban common addressing it as a
spatio-temporal phenomenon and as an issue of spatial and temporal
design. The text is divided into two parts. First, I give a short de-
scription of the relationship between public space and responsivity.
Second, I use Stortorget as an example of a public space where the
responsivity to crowds, and thus the possibility of acting as a crowd
space, has changed. I conclude by suggesting a nuanced spatio-tem-
poral interrogation into the field of urban commons
Responsiveness
Noortje Marres uses Walter Lippmann’s and John Dewey’s

pragmatist notion of public space in an article from 2005, to argue
that it is issues that spark a public into being (Marres 2005). When
problems or issues arise that no one seems to be taking care of prop-
erly, but that still affect a series of people, a ‘public’ can be set into
motion. This ‘public’ should not be seen as a group or a community of
just people; it could be as brought by an issue affecting a series of both
things and people, humans and non-humans.
In order for issues to be raised, and for collectives to be gath-
ered around a joint matter of concern, a more architectural question
might also be addressed: that of spatio-temporal responsivity. In The
Production of Space (1991), Lefebvre suggests the necessity for any
new group (or issue) to go through a trial by space:
54

II
groups, classes or fractions cannot constitute themselves, or

recognize one another, as ‘subjects’ unless they generate (or
produce) a space. Ideas, representations or values which do not
succeed in making their mark on space, and thus generating
(or producing) an appropriate morphology, will lose all pith
and become mere signs, resolve themselves into abstract de-
scriptions, or mutate into fantasies (Lefebvre 1991: 416–417).
Here I would like to expand Lefebvre argument to include

not just groups, but series (Sartre 1976) and heterogeneous collec-
tives of all sorts, i.e. to open for a broader discussion on the prob-
lem of recurrent appropriation and its spatial requirements. Several
Swedish architectural researchers have dwelt on the concept of re-
sponsivity (in Swedish: responsivitet, see e.g. Werne 1987, Wikström
2009, Nilsson 2010). The concept is borrowed from the Swedish
sociologist and social psychologist Johan Asplund who uses social
responsivity in order to discuss the ways in which things and people
respond in a certain interaction (Asplund 1987: 29). Nilsson and
Wikström address responsivity with a more material focus than As-
plund, but they do this from two quite different perspectives. Nilsson
uses the concept to discuss how materialities (e.g. Asplund’s example
of a kite) can respond in a certain situation and invoke a sense of
play, e.g. through the body knowing the techniques and material
circumstances of the situation (Nilsson 2010: 60–61, taking parkour
as her example). Wikström uses to concept to talk about a kind of
responsivity of the city, arguing that there increasingly seems to be
a lack in the ability of contemporary architecture to respond to the
activities and inscriptions of people, even though such expectations
might be raising due to the constant progress in responsiveness when
it comes to other kinds of technologies (Wikström 2009). Building
55
on the work of Asplund, Nilsson and Wikström, I would like to sug-
gest spatio-temporal responsivity as an important aspect of the built
environment. How does a certain time-space respond to attempts of
appropriation and for how long is a certain appropriation allowed? It
could be a very basic form of responsivity, as for example the one giv-
en by a moveable benches allowing for an active territorial produc-
tion. It could also be about the possibility of a place to accommodate
for spontaneous meeting of larger groups (to be a ‘crowd space’). But
time is of course always also an actor affecting this responsivity, if the
line of the kite is broken after one minute, if someone tells you to put
the bench back after five, or if someone tears down your poster after
twenty, then this also have an effect on the responsivity of the place
(Kärrholm 2012:130 f.).
The Main Square as crowd space
One of the specific qualities of Stortorget in Malmö is its ca-

pacity to accommodate large crowds. It responds to crowds and crowd
activity. However, Stortorget has also, during the 20th century been
part of spatial design schemes diminishing its capacity as crowd space.
The introduction of large parking spaces, now covering parts of the
square, together with the retailisation of the city centre (Kärrholm
2012), has, for example, brought about a certain fragmentation and
homogenisation of square activities. Some crowds, like the car-crowd
and the shopper-crowd, are strategically planned and thoroughly
designed for, whereas the capacity for spontaneous crowds seems to
have decreased. Lilla torg, the small square just next to Stortorget, is
perhaps an even better example of this. The room for non-paying
56

II
customers has decreased over the year to the extent that one actually
could question the publicness of the square (even though it is for-
mally owned by the municipality). Lilla torg has been undermined
as a crowd space for spontaneous crowds by means of spatial design
(chairs, tables, heaters, fences) during the last two decades: there is
simply no longer room for any other crowds than the paying and dis-
ciplined restaurant guests seated on the outdoor restaurants covering
large parts of square.
Perla Korosec-Serfaty study of Stortorget in Malmö, The
Main Square, Functions and Daily Uses of Stortorget, Malmö (1982)
summarizes a large empirical work made by “Study group on public
squares” in 1978. This was around the time that the pedestrianisation
of Malmö inner city started (Kärrholm 2012). Malmö was in the late
1970s an industrial city in crisis with a declining population of just
under 250,000 inhabitants. Today it has about 300,000 inhabitants
and it is the centre of a large and growing urban region in the south
of Sweden (Scania), and due to the bridge inaugurated in 2000, just
thirty-five minutes by train from the Central Station of Copenha-
gen in Denmark. Comparing Korosec-Serfaty’s results with how the
square is used today, 35 years later, shows some interesting differences.
Stortorget is to some extent still a crowd space (despite the
transformations of the 20th century) – it is there to be re-appropri-
ated at any moment – but this capacity has been undermined by
means of spatial design, retailisation and gentrification. However,
another important part of this development is also played by the
design of temporalities. Comparing the use of the square in 2013
with 1978 we can see some changes: there are now more people
moving through the square, there also seems to be a quicker pace
with less people sitting. The most striking difference is perhaps the
proliferation of planned large-scale events. In 1977, most of the
57
(167) newspaper articles reporting from the square mentions po-
litical gatherings and activities on the square (26%) followed by
official activities (17%). In 2012, the articles (119 all in all) tend to
focus on collective celebrations (23%) followed by delinquency and
safety (19%). The new collective celebrations tend to be quite large
scale week-long events such as Malmöfestivalen (the city festival)
and Musikhjälpen (a fund-raising event), with concerts and cultural
performances. Such events are, as Plöger has suggested, often com-
mercial, but “organized and yet felt to be spontaneous and never to
be too obviously reduced to (cultural) events for commercial pur-
pose” (Plöger 2010:849). In line with the process of eventalisation,
a lot of the stores that were there on Stortorget during the 1970s
(selling everyday things) have disappeared or given places to cafés
and restaurants. Although the pedestrian precinct with hundred
of shops starts here, the square itself has today just five shops (as
compared to fourteen in 1978). Perhaps this can be seen as signifier
of how the square, once an old market space of mixed uses, now
quickly is being turned into a specialized space for events. A study
made by the municipality of Malmö in 2008 shows that this evental-
isation of the square also seems to be welcomed by the inhabitants.
The three most important things that people wanted, was (1.) to
take away the parking place, (2.) to get rid of a 19th century statue
placed in the middle of the square, and (3.) that the square should
become a place of events (Göransson 2008).
One way to describe the change on Stortorget is through the
concept of rhythm (Edensor 2010). Stortorget seems to be structured
by other rhythms today. In the 1970s, the rhythm of work and non-
work seemed to structure the square, with important differences be-
tween weekdays and weekends. Today the strong rhythmical contrasts
seem to be between peak hour and off-hours of eating and drinking,
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rather than working. An even stronger difference might, however,

be seen between the square as place for everyday through-movement
and as place for massive occupation during celebrations and cultural
events Could it be that the need for collective events, and thus the
need for crowds, follows in the wake of an increasingly individualistic
world (as suggested by Borch in his The Politics of Crowds, building
his argument on Freud, Canetti and Mouffe, Borch 2012: 302)? Per-
haps, but although the number and scope of planned events might be
increasing, also on Stortorget, spontaneous meetings and unofficial
appropriations are not.
The clusters of people appropriating the square are smaller
today than in the 1970s, people tend to walk alone rather than in
groups (ratio of ‘single walkers’ changing from 54% to 64%), and
there also tend to be a smaller percentage of people sitting on the
square (people thus spending shorter time on the square on a regular
day). A comparison with Korosec-Serfaty’s study indicates that the
number of sitting people has decreased from 45% to 21% (some of
these might now be paying customers at the out-door restaurants of
Lilla torg instead), whereas shorter breaks, pausing, has increased
from 12% to 20% (people pausing with cell phones, taking pictures,
etc.). Half of the temporary stays on the square today (of 382 meas-
ured breaks, including sitting, pausing and playing) have a duration
of less than one minute and a half. The break people make are often
made alone with an object such as a cell phone, food or a camera
(the number of tourists passing by the square has also increased).
Although people certainly spend a lot of time on the square during
the large and planned events, one could argue that it has become
increasingly hard for crowds and larger groups to temporarily ap-
propriate the square for non-official uses, at least without the proper
means and resources.
59
Crowd space and the common as heritage?
The outcome of a Lefebvrian trial by space is to some extent de-

pendent on spatio-temporal responsivity, on a time-space of ‘blank-
ness’ (Serres 1991). If materialities are not able to respond, or if the
response is short and ephemeral, then it might harder to leave traces
and to confirm your territorial tactics, appropriations or associations.
Perhaps we should be especially careful with large open urban spaces
– that is, the ‘crowd spaces’ – since it seems to be an urban heritage
struggling to survive: in fact, these spaces have, in some European
cities, already been lost or severely reduced through refurbishment,
redesign or the excessive use of urban furniture.
In this text, I have stressed the need for public spaces to allow
for a production of interstities, where new issues can be raised. A
space responsive to crowds, a ‘crowd space’ can be undermined by
laws and regulations, gentrification and cultural homogenisation,
but also by spatial and temporal design. Crowd affordance puts spe-
cific demands on architectural design, where the notions of inter-
visibility, interdependence (of different kinds of public spaces) and
spatio-temporal responsivity, need to be addressed and elaborated
in more ambitious ways. The example of Stortorget showed how
the responsiveness to spontaneous crowds seem to have dimin-
ished as everyday activities and longer temporal stays give away to
through-movement (increasingly of shoppers and tourists), high-
end retail and costly large-scale events.
One important aspect that I have tried to argue for here is ma-
terial agency: in order to investigate the production of meaning one
also needs to address the role of materialities in this production – from
the built environment to moveable artefacts such as cell phones and
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take-away coffee. Different urban materialities respond in different

ways to different activities. One important aspect of heritage is not
about memories or memorialisation of the built environment as such,
but about the conditions that urban materialities set for the activities
producing these memories. The built environment needs to express
a variety in terms of spatio-temporal agency and responsiveness, and
this variety needs to be addressed on different temporal and spatial
scales. Our common interest in urban public space depends on our
built environment and how we produce, manage and maintain a va-
riety of urban spaces within our cities.
References
Asplund, J. (1987). Det sociala livets elementära former. Göteborg:

Korpen.
Borch, C. (2012). The Politics of Crowds. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Brighenti, A. (2010). The Publicness of Public Space: On the Public
Domain. Trento: Universita degli studi Trento.
Edensor, T. (2010). Thinking about rhythm and space. In: Edensor, T.
(ed.), Geographies of Rhythm. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–20.
Göransson, S. (2008). Så tycker Malmöborna: Dialog om Stortorget. PM
2008-05-16. Malmö: Malmö stad.
Kärrholm, M. (2012). Retailising Space. Farnham: Ashgate.
Korosec-Serfaty, P. (1982). The Main Square: Functions and daily uses of
Stortorget, Malmö. Aris Nova Series 1. Lund: Lunds universitet.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Marres, N. (2005). Issues spark a public into being. In: Latour, B. &
Weibel, P. (eds.), Making Things Public. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
208–217.
Nilsson, E. (2010). Arkitekturens kroppslighet/Staden som terräng. Lund:
LTH.
Plöger, J. (2010). Presence-experiences: The eventualisation of urban
space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28:848–866.
Sartre, J. P. (1976). Critique of Dialectical Reason. London: NLB.
Serres, M. (1991). Rome: The Book of Foundations. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Werne, F. (1987). Den osynliga arkitekturen. Göteborg: Vinga Press.
Wikström, T. (2009). The Responsive City. Online (2010): http://
tomaswikstrom.nu/drupal/node/18 .
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64

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Tim Edensor
Everyday heritage:
stone and the everyday,
homely spaces of the neighbourhood
HERITAGE has commonly focused on material icons and

sites, reaching its apogee with world heritage sites. The past is ‘con-
stantly selected, filtered and restructured in terms set by the questions
and necessities of the present’ (Jedlowski, 2001: 30). Memories are
selected and interpreted on the basis of culturally located knowledge
and consolidated in the ‘common sense’ of the everyday. There are
thus tendencies to fix authoritative meanings about the past through
the production of monuments, heritage districts and museums. These
normative processes disguise a politics wherein developers and ex-
perts remember space for us and decide which fragments and spaces
of memory are incinerated, dumped or buried, and which are fore-
grounded and institutionalised. Heritage spaces tend to banish the
ambiguity and multiplicity of the past. Here there is the compilation
of potted stories and the arrangement of authoritative displays that
transmit selective knowledge.
In recent years, more dramatic, spectacular, ‘interpretive’
techniques of transmitting ideas about the past have replaced dry
and expert accounts through audio-visual presentations and themed
simulacra, which attempt to capture the ‘feel’ of a historical period.
65
However, these also tend to perform a narrative and dramatic fix-
ing, limiting the interpretative, imaginative and performative scope
of visitors. The selection of particular stories, characters, events and
other fragments to stimulate memory persists. The arrangement of se-
lective artefacts in orderly displays and the scrubbing away of clutter
and the patina that testifies to historical processes and age eclipses
mystery and ‘stabilises the identity of things and places’ (Thomas,
1991). Those objects and sites championed as most ‘authentic’, ‘val-
uable’ or ‘archetypal’ are positioned against uncluttered backgrounds
and do not mingle with other fragments, disguising the excessive sen-
sual and semiotic effects they bear.
These purifying regimes of encoding and spacing through
which things and places are detached from previous contexts testi-
fies to the regulation of how sites are understood, practised and ex-
perienced, minimising the possibility to experience the profusion of
matter and meaning that circulates through places and the past. Of
course, dominant versions of history, identity and heritage are con-
tested. However, these are often posit other, alternative forms of his-
tory – women’s history, the histories of the subaltern or colonised or
ethnically marginalised, the history of the working class, or of homo-
sexuals. As Michael Landzelius has convincingly argued, these forms
of heritage can equally reify the past, suggesting that they directly re-
fer ‘to entities that existed in the past, compartmentalised and ready
to be claimed, rather than being socially and culturally constructed in
identity struggles of the present’ – as they invariably are (2003: 206).
They also deny the multiplicity and mystery of the past, suggesting
the unfolding, linear past of a distinctive and particular heritage and
thus producing essentialist forms of identity.
Whilst there are no doubt political imperatives to contin-
gently stabilise certain memories in place, and such sites provide im-
66

I
portant anchoring functions, there is a danger that such regulated,

commodified, encoded and rather unsensual sites of memory might
become all-pervasive in the spatialisation of memory. They might
proffer the notion that there are places for remembering and places
where memories and the past are irrelevant.
There are many ways in which alternative versions of herit-
age might be discussed. Heritage is apparent in unreflexive habits:
how we address one another and share common routines and points
of intersection. The things we eat, drink, how we relax and dance,
celebrate, discuss, romance, gossip, laugh and tell jokes, our linguistic
inflexions and phrases, all passed down and continuously adapted.
In this sense, and further, a shared heritage might be conceived as
embodied in the way we move, our gestures, the way we sit and wait
and linger, how we relate physically to each other. Such a heritage
produces bodies based on class, place, ethnicity, and is a kind of living
past in us. And there are forms of shared media heritage – memories
of moon landings, television programmes – consider how successful
American series Breaking Bad will be the subject of shared memories
in the future – football and pop music. Moreover, heritage is pro-
foundly related to the national, the regional and the local – that is,
heritage is scaled.
In the past, I’ve looked at how industrial ruins serve as unruly
sites at which unexpected resonances from the past emerge (Edensor,
2005)). Whether manifest as sensual intuitions, obsolete styles, or
obscure signs, such derelict spaces are replete with a charged past that
is precisely not curated.
However, in order to critique the continued dominance of
iconic sites, symbolic historical venues and museums, and other
heritage attractions, I want to suggest that heritage is everywhere
– and I can think of nowhere where it is not evident. Even to-
67
tal effacement calls forth that which was there before, and where
this is only partial, absences tend to often be obscure – signs of
something that was there but exactly what may be indeterminate
(Edensor, 2013). Kevin Lynch contends that urban materiality is
characterised by the ‘accumulation of overlapping traces from suc-
cessive periods, each trace modifying and being modified by the
new additions, to produce something like a collage of time’ (1972:
171). The multiple temporalities of the city and individual build-
ings are embedded in horizontal and hidden vertical layers but also
inscribed onto surfaces, often traces from different eras that coin-
cide in a melange, a play of temporal juxtapositions that incites an
improvisational and fragmented account rather than a sequential
narrative. This fluid, fractured and composite material urban com-
position allows distant presences, happenings and materialities to
become more intimate in our daily surroundings than we might
expect, especially once we become attuned to the multiple traces of
other time-spaces. Thus across all sorts of space lie residual objects,
often indecipherable and the incomprehensible, that which evades
identification and haunts the normative criteria through which
things are assigned function and meaning. In response to these
traces, Michel de Certeau) identifies ‘the debris of shipwrecked
histories still today raise up the ruins of an unknown, strange city.
They burst forth within the modernist, massive, homogeneous city
like slips of the tongue from an unknown, perhaps unconscious,
language’ (1998: 133).
Now though, I focus on two kinds of sites, and focus on mate-
riality to consider the unnoticed heritage that spreads across space.
Firstly, I examine a particular urban materiality – building stone, and
secondly, I explore the suffusion of everyday space with a shared and
powerful heritage that is often overlooked.
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Building stone in Manchester
Stone is one element in dynamic, ongoing urban re-compo-

sition and emergence, constituting part of the city’s ever-changing
temporal collage. I use this to honour the numerous humans and
non-humans that have been integral to the ongoing production of
the city,and that continuously make, remake, interact and engage
with urban materiality.
Urban buildings are emergents mosaic of various temporali-
ties. Before and after its incorporation into a structure, stone under-
goes numerous transformations: during its geological and geomor-
phological formation and re-composition, through its removal from
a place by quarrying, by its conversion into a utilitarian entity by
stonemasons and subsequent incorporation as constituent in a built
assemblage, as it is eroded by human, organic, chemical and climatic
agencies, and when this leads to its replacement, restoration or in-
sertion into a different building.There are the traces of things – the
inscriptions and marks, the worked surfaces but there are also the
absences of that which was there …
This awareness of absence, can, according to Joe Moran, pro-
duce an ‘inarticulable feeling of pathos experienced in commonplace
environments’ (2004: 57). Material absence may be signified in nu-
merous ways: a gap clearly identifies that which is not there; a replace-
ment heralds the absence of an original, especially where it stands out
from its older co-constituents; a residue or trace reveals the absence
of that which caused it or to which it belonged; a thing may have
altered over time to become a shadow of its former self; a repaired
and renovated thing may contrast with its former appearance and
constituency; the disused tracks of an obsolete network that formerly
69
connected people, things and places testify to vanished material rela-
tionalities.To illustrate these points, I look at urban connections and
repair at one church in Manchester, St Ann’s.
Places have and continue to be produced and reproduced by
flows from innumerable other places. It is one way of defining a city, to
see how it has been persistently assembled by the materialities, ideas,
people and money that flow in from elsewhere. Stone supply chains
are one such flow into the city. They are provoked into being by a
range of factors including architectural fashion and style, building
techniques, cost, technologies of transport and quarrying and stone
masonry, and local politics in the sites of supply and destination. The
successive historical connections to these supply sites and the subse-
quent importation of new and different building materials contribute
to what Massey (2005) terms the ‘mixity’ of the city, further conjuring
up the city’s former constitution and the myriad connections that
have now disappeared.
St Ann’s Church, built in 1712,reveals how it has been suc-
cessively reconstituted by stone supplies from far and near, revealing
the spatially diverse sources of stone and the temporalities that such
connections evoke.I traced these stones back to the sites of supply. Its
original building stone originally came from local sources, primarily
Collyhurst, shut down 200 years ago. Then, as the industrial revo-
lution proceeded apace, and new canals and railways connected the
city to places further afield, more supply sites were available. The
development of the Peak Forest Canal made Derbyshire sandstones
accessible, such as that quarried at Darley Dale. This has been large-
ly closed for several decades but still supplies very small amounts of
stone.This tramway was constructed to carry the quarried stone to
the canal. Later, more extensive, denser transport networks across
the North-West and Midlands opened up other possibilities, includ-
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I
ing Runcorn and Hollington Stone. Runcorn quarry has been closed
for a hundred years and is now country park. Hollington remains a
working quarry. Because it was coated in black soot during the nine-
teenth century, it was not necessary to find replacement stone that
matched the colour of the Collyhurst stone that had become eroded.
Accordingly, the church is now a mosaic that testifies to the forging,
disappearance and revival of such connections.
Most buildings that have persisted even for a few years are cov-
ered with marks of numerous interventions intended to restore their
integrity. In other words, repair and maintenance continually strive
to keep absence at bay and fill the gaps that signify absence. In the
stone buildings of Manchester, the processes of decay and erosion and
are evident in the gaps they create and in the remedial action taken
to replace them. These repairs testify to the absences that have been
filled with different matter. Yet the numberless artisans and techni-
cians, masons and builders who have repaired these buildings are usu-
ally entirely absent from the historical record.
A battery of maintenance techniques have been used at St
Ann’s over the past three centuries (Edensor, 2011). Brushing, wash-
ing and steaming have been used to remove biofilms and the soot that
once coated the building, although the church has been spared the
terrible effects of sandblasting. Yet, the application of rendering on
the church to replace worn mortar and stone is extremely variable.
Some mortar is very hard, some soft, some coloured and textured to fit
in with the adjacent stone and some of different hue (Fig. 1). Some
infills have been crudely applied but elsewhere are neat. In several ar-
eas, the stone has crumbled at the edges because impermeable mortar
has diverted moisture to the back of the stone and it has decayed from
within. More recent mortar repairs use a permeable lime mixture,
which has not produced the damaging earlier consequences. Apart
71
Fig. 1
Repairs in mortar from different periods of repair,
St Ann’s Church, Manchester
from evident recent interventions, the age of most of these myriad

attempts at repair traced across the stone fabric of the church are of
indeterminate age, but they all testify to an ongoing effort to ensure
that St Ann’s remains an enduring fixture in central Manchester. The
church is thus much more than a site of ecclesiastical heritage in
highlighting the unheralded, endless contribution to maintenance
workers to the material stability and coherence of the city.
My walk to the dentist
I now want to look at my street and the roads adjoining it

to exemplify the everyday pervasiveness of shared heritage. In the
everyday surroundings of familiar place, heritage is ingrained into
every material entity, sometimes obviously, but often just a trace of a
forgotten event, process or fixture (Edensor, 2008).
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I
Fig. 2
Plaque commemorating Milson Rhodes,
founder of the clock tower, Didsbury, Manchester
As an experiment, on a short walk from my house to the local

dentist last week – less than a quarter of a mile – I decided to look out
for signs of an unheralded heritage. I preface this by saying that I live
in Didsbury, a prosperous suburb in Manchester.
There is a recognisable heritage here: what we might identify
as an official heritage is embodied in the clock tower, the library and
the war memorial. For visitors and those unfamiliar with the suburb,
and on websites and marketing, these key local iconic sites are flagged
up as distinctive features.
The local iconicity of the clock tower has been recognised in
a recently built pub, which has taken the name of its builder, Milsom
Rhodes (Fig. 2) a contemporary attempt to commodify a formerly
obscure figure, as sign of locality.
The war memorial exemplifies a serial form of material herit-
age that can be found in almost every village and town throughout
Britain, where similar designs in similar stone emblematically mark
military sacrifice in the two World Wars of the 20th century.
73
Fig. 3
Cobbles under tarmac,
Raynham Avenue, Didsbury, Manchester
But also, there is a profusion of less obvious elements of herit-

age, scattered across space and embedded in the everyday materiality
of the local space:
Outside my house, immediately lying under the road’s eroded tarmac-

adam, Cobbles persist (Fig. 3). The streets of course, originally served
as routes for the passage of horse drawn carts. I can suddenly imagine
the sound and smell of a hundred years ago.
There is a drainage grid nestling in the kerb that I have never noticed
before (Fig. 4). To me it testifies to the importance of Sheffield as
‘Steel City’ and the material elements of places that are brought from
elsewhere and resonate through the connections between places –
like the stone discussed above.
My street’s name: Raynham Avenue: Who was Raynham? A forgot-

ten local worthy? A military hero? The architect of the houses?
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Fig. 4
Drainage grid, manufactured in Sheffield,
Didsbury, Manchester
A new tram has recently been installed, the tracks superimposed on

the old suburban railway line that has been disused for 40 or so years.
A shift in temporal perspective summons up these former flows of
people across the same space.
1900 seems to have been a busy year in the construction of the suburb,
which must have been prospering at this time. A Baptist church, sure-
ly testifying to the importance of faith in what is now an overwhelm-
ingly secular society, was erected then, as was the local police station.
The police station is no longer manned, or intermittently, and for
me, it symbolises how, like other local institutions, such as hospitals,
has been rendered defunct, with the progressive centralisation of local
amenities across the city. In this sense, the localness of life has become
increasingly disembedded, in contrast to 1900 (Giddens, 1990).
The high street: I look upon it before entering the surgery: it now
the venue for estate agents, charity shops, betting shops, cafés, restau-
75
Fig. 5
Old advertisement,
Didsbury, Manchester
rants and pubs. In the 1950s and 60s, was the street primarily lined
with grocers, newsagents, butchers, cobblers and clothes shops?
The old advert: It is a banal observation that the postmodern city is

saturated with signs, yet such profuse signage was also prevalent in
earlier modern times. If you look at old photos of early modern Euro-
pean cities you will see a profusion of adverts. The old advert testifies
to an outmoded local business (Fig. 5).
Modern attempts to cleanse, banish ambiguity and order the

memory of space are always disturbed. In contradistinction to the
fixed memories of over-coded heritage and ceremonial space, and to
the imaginary linearities proposed by hegemonic and ‘alternative’
forms of heritage, here there is ambiguity, polysemy and multiplicity.
These signs can motivate us to celebrate the mysteries, heterogene-
ous sensations and surprising associations of the past in the present
and encourage a wanton speculation towards objects and places, en-
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couraging contingent rather than causal connections to be made in a

contingent, fluid, imaginative heritage. In this sense, memory is thus
not always articulate but is located in the habitual and the sensual,
realms typically divorced from sense making practices.
Such disparate fragments and the mediatised imaginaries, in-
voluntary memories and sensory impressions they provoke cannot
be woven into an eloquent narrative. Scrappy stories can only be
contingently assembled out of a jumble of disconnected things, oc-
currences, and sensations.
This kind of remembering implies an ethics about confronting
and understanding otherness. The alterity of the past, tactile, imagi-
native and involuntary, inheres in this everyday heritage.
References
de Certeau, M. & Giard, l. (1998). Ghosts in the city. In: de Certeau, M.,
Giard, L. & Mayol, P. (eds.),The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Living
and Cooking. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Edensor, T. (2005). The ghosts of industrial ruins: Ordering and
disordering memory in excessive space. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space, 23:829–849.
Edensor, T. (2008). Mundane hauntings: Commuting through the
phantasmagoric working-class spaces of Manchester, England. Cultural
Geographies, 15(3):313–333.
Edensor, T. (2011). Entangled agencies, material networks and repair in a
building assemblage: The mutable stone of St Ann’s Church, Manchester.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36(2):238–252.
Edensor, T. (2013). Building stones and the production of multiple
absences. Cultural Geographies, 20(4):447–465.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Jedlowski, P. (2001). Memory and sociology: Themes and issues. Time and
Society, 10(1):29–44.
Landzelius, M. (2003). Commemorative dis(re)membering: Erasing
heritage, spatialising disinheritance. Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space, 21:195–221.
Lynch, K. (1972). What Time is this Place?. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: Sage.
Moran, J. (2004). History, memory and the everyday. Rethinking History,
8:51–68.
Thomas, N. (1991). Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and
Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Vanja Larberg
Walk it. Unpack it.

Timothy Edensor and Mattias Kärrholm
Some hours before I attended the seminar of Mattias Kärrholm and

Timothy Edensor, I took part in a walking seminar called let’s
go outside. We walked in the urban district of Gårda, a part of
Gothenburg with numerous and contradictory stories, which also
sparked a lot of conflicts the last years. The walk was held by
architects who throughout their professional life have used urban
walks as a way of knowledge production and creating potentials
for meetings between different interests and perspectives. In this
form of meeting, a story from the inhabitants of a house takes as
much place as the story about the architect who planned it or the
concerns of the property owner. Somehow the hierarchies that are
dictating so much of the inside space of the office, are dissolved
on the street. As Timothy Edensor writes in his article: Out walking
different voices can be heard. This is true both of the individual
walk looking for traces and layers, but also when it comes to giving
a group of people more equal circumstances in the space of the
conversation. Partly I think this happens because we can’t use the
common ways that we have inside a meeting room to show our
significance – who we sit next to, at what end of the table, how
much time and space our voices are given. It is not possible to
control these things in the same way outside – and the hierarchies
get blurred. Partly it is also a literal shift of perspective – the people
talked about in the space of the planner; when you are out on the
81
street they are the life surrounding you, and you as a walking body
are one of them. Inside and outside is a question of power – quite
literally experienced when one of the buildings in Gårda, an old
bath from the 50s used by people from the whole city of Göteborg,
was proposed to be demolished and replaced by an arena giving
the city some more branding potential.
– The bath did not look good from the 23rd floor anyway.
– Well, come down to the street level and meet us there.
– Well, the economical flows darling.
But if the economical flows are not laws of nature? Far too often
the same old patriarchal ways of deciding what a value something
has is lingering. As a feminist it is an everyday experience that the
main story is hiding other stories.
But, as I have learned from a colleague who mediates conflicts–

when you deal with conflicting interests it is important to unpack
this main story, fold it out, provide a framework were its complex
web can be shown. Walking together is unpacking.
The two articles of Kärrholm and Edensor could also both be seen
as unpacking – unpacking to the point where the stories of St
Ann´s church and Stortorget in Malmö are unfolded among times
and groups of people and in that way distributed, made political.
Timothy Edensor´s image of St Ann´s church is a vibrant way to

unpack a story, and it paints an image of a living organism breathing
through different times, a spider that once stretched its tentacles
locally, then prolonged them further away – fetched different stone
to feed its centre, a centre strong enough through cultural and
social value to continue craving for material and to continue to
get its needs covered. The unpacked story that Edensor gives us
could be told in the form of a map with this geographical dimension
– where did the tentacles spread? – and a timeline holding the
different social groups that has put their time and effort into caring
for this organism in many different ways. It would be a map showing
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collective significance both in the terms of acknowledging the

actual efforts of human labour but also in the terms of showing a
place that has actually through centuries held a collective identity,
providing an anchor of the surrounding community. This image is
painted in text, but it could also be a visual map and in that form
provide a strong document to support another way of looking at
processes and paths behind and ahead of us.
When we enter Mattias Kärrholms research of Stortorget in

Malmö, the framework is shifting, there is no longer an image of an
organism getting its food through the centuries – rather I come to
think of Catharina Gabrielssons description in her doctoral thesis
To Make a Difference, of the public space as a form of media, but
a media were we, unlike news papers, radio etc have to do our
own judgement of which the story is that is being told of society at
this place. As Kärrholm writes we are no longer dealing with the
story of one community, but rather of a built structure, and “empty”
square without which the stories that might not yet have found their
own physical places and form, cannot emerge. We are entering
the commons that are on another scale level, the commons of a
society, the empty space that Catharina Gabrielsson describes as
the place that we need to actually be able to visualize that there is
such a thing as society. Unpacking the different compositions of
activities and groups set against this background, the specifics of
different societies emerge.
– But now you are packing their stories, not unpacking them?
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Seminar
III
Kenneth Olwig
Patricia Johanson
Staffan Schmidt
October
2013
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III
Kenneth R. Olwig
Heritage as common(s) – Commons as heritage:

Things we have in Commons in the Political
Landscape of Heritage
Abstract
Against the background of the historical link between the

development of the rural and the urban commons – and the link
between the commons, governmentality and heritage – I will raise
the question of whether it would be more appropriate to ask how the
commons governs us, than how we can govern the commons. I will
also ask why it is that the commons as a place is both the product of
discourse and a non-discursive place of discourse. The discourse in
question is particularly that of the res public concerning the things the
res public has as a common heritage. In this connection I will explore
why it is that the ecological imaginary and the cultural and artistic
imaginary of the commons determines that a true commons cannot
be scaled, much as the quality of an artwork cannot be scaled, accord-
ing to its size, or justice cannot be scaled according to the number to
which it is applied. This, furthermore, is why the commons should
be regarded not as a form of scalable space, but rather as chora (also
spelled choros) – to use an ancient Greek term meaning something
89
like the political landscape as a heritage, in the aesthetic, social and
ecological imagination, of place and polity.
Introduction
Joachim Frederik Schouw (1789-1852), an internationally re-

spected Danish bio-geographer, a founder of the Danish democratic
constitution, champion of freedom of speech and pan-Scandinavian
(Olwig 1980) once wrote (Schouw 1845):
Denmark’s nature is therefore not Scandinavian in the narrow

sense, it is more similar to the German than to the Norwegian
or Swedish. But then one should also conclude that the Dan-
ish people are more German than Scandinavian? This would
be so if it were the case that it were true that a people’s char-
acter is determined by or is significantly dependent upon the
nature of that land which the people inhabit. . . . With regard
to this subject conclusions have been drawn with a superfi-
ciality which would not be tolerated in any other science. . .
. [The character of a people] does not have its foundation in
the land’s soil or climate, it has its soil, its intellectual soil in
History, out of which it springs – has its intellectual climate in
Language, in which it lives and moves.
The same can be said of a commons. A commons has its soil

in history, out of which it springs, and its intellectual climate in
language and hence discourse. In this case there are two problems
with much contemporary discourse on the commons. The first is the
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widespread misconception amongst those interested in ecology that

a commons is somehow a physical thing that by its nature preexists
the community that shares it, and thus is somehow beyond history
and language. The second problem, which is pervasive in theoretical
social and economic discourse on the commons, is that the commons
is a scalable economic and theoretical phenomenon in which the
commons acts primarily as a timeless metaphoric ideal. This theoret-
ical commons thus has no concrete referent to actual practicing com-
mons, with the result that the theoretical commons easily becomes
a kind of Baudrillarden simulacrum, which is to say a copy that has a
pretense to reality, but which has no model, thereby risking bearing
no relation to any reality (Baudrillard 1988: 166-184).
In the following I will examine the practicing commons as an
expression of history, heritage and discourse, and on the basis of this
analogy I will seek to make some generalizations concerning the char-
acter of the contemporary urban commons. I will also, however, be
concerned with the relationship between the commons and the arts,
where the artistic genres linked to the commons are normally termed
“pastoral.” The pastoral is often misunderstood as being romantic and
superficial, but this is far from the truth. The pastoral can be exceed-
ingly realistic, and it has a long heritage as a seemingly innocent guise
behind which biting social criticism, contrasting ideals with realities,
can be made (Snell 1953; Marx 1964; Williams 1973; Olwig 1981).
The use of the pastoral as a vehicle for social comment and criticism
has a history going back at least to the pastoral poetry of the Roman
author Virgil (70-19 BC), who provided a key literary archetype for
subsequent pastoral writing (Curtius 1953: 18-19, 36), and who ex-
plicitly identified the pastoral with the commons, and with common
social and environmental concerns (Olwig 1984: 1-10). Virgil thus
described the pastoral environment as “having no fence or boundary
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stone to mark the fields” because there was no private ownership and
people labored to replenish a common store (Virgil 1946: Georgics
I: 151-2, p. 69). He also set his pastorals in Arcadia, an upland dis-
trict of Greece with a pastoral economy that was thought to be the
place where human beings first emerged from savagery as a civilized
human community, and the home of Pan, a symbolic cross between
a goat and a human like being. Arcadia was also known in Rome for
having been celebrated by the influential Greek historian Polybius
(?205-?125 BC), as a place of “common assemblies and sacrifice . . . in
common for men and women, and choruses of girls and boys togeth-
er,” which in turn fostered a relatively egalitarian model for a republic
(quoted in Lovejoy and Boas 1935: 345-8). These were ideas that
influenced subsequent political thinkers ranging from Montesquieu
to Thomas Jefferson, and which were linked by them to the pastoral
as both a socially and ecologically sustainable landscape ideal, as well
as an artistic form (Marx 1964).
The Heritage of the Commons as Constituted Historically
The intellectual heritage of the historical commons chal-

lenges the imagination because it flies against the presuppositions
of modern thought as it has developed in relation to the enclosure
of the commons and the enshrinement of private property as the
foundation of society. Historically, at least from the Middle Ages,
commons were not “owned” in the modern sense of salable private
property, but rather in a feudal sense by which the “lord” of the in-
alienable land, The Crown, the nobility or the church, was seen to
be the ostensible guardian of the common good for whom the land
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is held in inalienable trust (Olwig 2005). In England, for example,

this is still the case, to some degree, with regard to the crown, which
is a synecdoche for the state in a monarchy, as well as non-profit
institutions such as churches and The National Trust, for whom the
common good is in great measure a question of cultural and natural
heritage. In other instances, as with the noble lord’s manor, the ar-
able, farmed land has largely become private property. The English
commons, however, are still not owned as modern private property
because the “owner,” even a private owner, may have little or no
right to use the commons. This is because the use right, or right of
usufruct, to the differing shared resources making up a commons
belongs to diverse bodies of commoners (e.g. village farmers) ac-
cording to a heritage of diverse unwritten and unspoken customary
use rights (Rodgers et. al. 2011). The commons are thus not, as with
private property, defined according to the uniform bounded scalable
space of a cadastral map, but according to a multiplicity of spatially
overlapping and enfolded multiple-uses ranging from grazing by dif-
fering animals, to the collecting of different fuels, to the gathering
of varying foodstuffs like berries and mushrooms, to the hunting of
particular animals. Such activities grade off into recreation (walk-
ing, sports like football and golf which originated on commons),
esthetics (picking flowers) and even lovemaking – an activity that
has been almost synonymous with the pastoral landscape of the
commons since the time of Virgil. It is thus impossible to effective-
ly plot these intertwined uses on to the uniform, isotropic, bounded
and scalable space of a cadastral map – scale requiring a common
denominator that can be scaled up or down. And for this reason, to
this day, despite various attempts, the exact extent of many English
commons, for example, is still unclear, and it is still custom that
commons are not fenced (Rodgers et. al. 2011).
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The word “resource” comes from Old French dialect resourdre
meaning ‘rise again, recover’” (NOAD 2005: resource), and if the word
resource is used in this original sense, then it would arguably apply to the
use rights held in the commons. This is because the commons histori-
cally were a kind of extensive and relatively public landscape of repro-
duction existing in a form of dialectical relationship with the relatively
intensive and private landscape of agricultural production. The com-
mons thus could can be regarded as the place of reproduction and use val-
ue, both physical and social, where fields and people “recover,” or “rise
again,” and the commons therefore can be counterpoised to the inten-
sively cultivated arable fields of individual farms, as the site of production
and exchange value, though both are integrally related. Commons were
thus typically either multiply used meadow grazing lands, often close to
centers of farm dwelling, or vaster extensively and multiply used grazed
areas at the periphery of a farm village or hamlet. The meadows, in
particularly, were historically known as “the mother” of the agricultural
fields, and were often the most valuable lands, because the fertilizer pro-
duced by the grazing animals was absolutely vital to the productivity of
the intensively cultivated grain fields. As can be seen in the case of the
Indian holy cows, the value of the grazing animal need not lie primarily
in the slaughter of the animal, but can also be in the use of the animal
as producer of fertility and milk, a symbol of human and animal repro-
duction and reciprocity. The commons, however, were not just grazing
lands, they were areas of multiple use, where access to resources such as
mushrooms, berries and firewood was restricted primarily to subsistence
use, not for sale on the market. “Recreational” use, of course, was in the
days before professionalized sports for the re-creation of physical health
and community through the various pastimes.
The emphasis given to use rights to the commons, and hence
use value, contrasts with the emphasis upon exchange value identi-
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fied with enclosure, agricultural “improvement,” and private property,

which generally, unlike rights in the common, is salable on the open
market. Use rights in the commons, by contrast, are usually attached
to given farms and households. What this means is that both Garrett
Hardin’s idea of a “tragedy of the commons” due to individualistic
herdsmen seeking to maximize their private economic gain (Hardin
1968), and Elinor Ostrom’s notion of the commons in terms of a mon-
ey economy involving a common pool of resources (Ostrom 1990),
are off the mark – a subject to which I will return. The commons are
not fundamentally about the economics of agricultural production,
but about ecological, biological and social reproduction.
My recent correspondence with a Faroese sheep farmer illus-
trates the above point when he writes:
Jeg ved ikke om man skal have med får at gøre for at være en
rigtig færing, men mange færinger er meget glade for at være
med eller eje nogle får eller en andel i en hauge. Loven var
engang så at festejord skulle om muligt slås sammen til større
enheder, men det blev lavet om, for færinger vil hellere have
små enheder, så så mange som muligt kan være med. Ingen kan
alligevel leve af fåredrift her på øerne.
“I don’t know if one must have to do with sheep to be a real

Faroese, but many Faeroese are very happy to share, or to own, some
sheep, or [as a fellow] a portion of a pasture. The law was once that
all leasehold land should if possible be amalgamated into larger units,
but this changed, because the Faroese would rather have small units,
so as many as possible can join in. Nobody can live off sheep here on
the islands anyway [the name of the Faeroe Islands means “sheep”
(fæ) islands (øer)].”
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Customary Use Rights and Heritage
Use rights in the commons are fundamentally a question of

customary law. In English legal tradition common law is seen to be
founded upon custom (Milsom 1981). Custom begins as practice
(Bourdieu 1977; Thompson 1993), as when an individual or group,
year after year customarily walk a given route, eventually carving a
visual trace, a path, in the soil (Olwig 2002: 43-61); or, as when com-
moners gather firewood from a given wood on the commons, marking
that right once a year with a bonfire or by putting up a maypole, as
on Midsummer (Bushaway 1982). Eventually an unspoken under-
standing develops that the person or group has a customary right to
walk that path or use that wood, and if that right is challenged it
might be brought to court, where, if it can be proven that the path
had been walked, or the wood taken, for an established number of
years, they would be given a legal customary right to continue to do
so. In northern Europe such a court, particularly in the past, would
be called a thing or moot, an assembly taking place at an outdoor thing
place, which was often located on the site of a tangible physical com-
mons. It was here where people who knew their things would moot/
meet to discourse on things and legal cases (ting og sager) and thereby
shape the political, cultural and physical landscape (Heidegger 1971;
Latour 2005; Olwig 2013).1 In ancient Greece and Rome equivalent
meetings would have taken place at common places such the agora
(or in Athens the Pnyx) or the Roman forum, whose heritage con-
tinued at the town plazas and village greens of Medieval Europe. The
place of these meetings was identifiable with communality not only
in terms of law and government, but also artistically as these places
frequently were the site of the theater and public art and architec-
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ture. Such thing meetings, and the customary rights they prescribe,
provide a basis for common law, which is a law applying to a larger
jurisdiction, known in Greece as the choros or chora, ranging from a
county or landskap territory to a whole land or country. Such a law
might, for example, prescribe that it takes 20 years to establish a cus-
tomary right of way. This is a form of law that, like the commons itself,
is not based on boundaries defining what one cannot do, but rather on
a custom focused upon what you can do. Common law is, in principle,
a denial of scale, since it theoretically applies everywhere equally, as
does justice.
Not only humans, but also animals, establish what might be
termed customary rights, and humans may even have learned to do
this from animal ecology. Individual flocks of, for example, sheep or
reindeer thus establish a kind of right to graze given pastures on a
commons vis-à-vis the grazings of other flocks. In the case of sheep
these pastures are called, in English, their “heft,” and in the case of
reindeer they are called, in the Sami language, their “siida.” The own-
ers of the flock, in turn, establish their right to common pastures via
the hefting of the sheep or the siida of the reindeer. The word heft
derives from Scandinavia where it can have the same meaning as in
English, but where it can also be used in the sense by which a path or
pasture is (in Danish) “holdt i hævd.” On the one hand this has the
literal meaning of maintaining the land as grassland or as a path (e.g.
by preventing it from turning into bush or forest) – a sense used by
Swedish ecologists as in the book title Om hävden upphör (if grassland
management ceases) (Ekstam 1992). In terms of customary law, how-
ever, it is the practice of maintaining a pasture or path that gives the
use right to continue using it – which is to say that if you don’t use it,
or if you abuse it, you will loose it. The word can thus also refer to a
prescriptive right of usufruct, called a “hævdvunden ret” in Danish.
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In earlier times, such rights would be on of the things adjudicated
by the moot or thing, if there was a conflict or case. The philosopher
Martin Heidegger describes the working of the thing writing:
To be sure, the Old High German word thing means a gath-
ering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under
discussion, a contested matter. In consequence, the Old German
words thing and dinc become the names for an affair or matter of
pertinence. They denote anything that in any way bears upon men,
concerns them, and that accordingly is a matter for discourse (Hei-
degger, 1971, p. 174).
The thing was the meeting place of the people as a commons,
and it was thus appropriate that it often took place on a commons,
as the place of discourse. It is in this sense that society does not
govern the commons, but rather it is the people, as a commons, as
represented for example in the UK’s House of Commons, that gov-
erns the English and Scottish polity.2 The word thing in Latin is res,
and according to Heidegger the ancient Germanic meaning of thing
and that of res are parallel. Concerning the Latin word for thing, res,
Heidegger writes: “The Romans called a matter for discourse res . . .
. . Thing means, not the state, but that which, known to everyone,
concerns everybody and is therefore deliberated in public” (Heide-
gger, 1971, p. 174). Custom is a form of heritage shared in com-
mon, and like custom, heritage often is something that is “known to
everyone, concerns everybody and is therefore deliberated in pub-
lic,” using language, which itself is a kind of common heritage. Or, as
the anthropologist Stephen Gudeman puts it: “The commons is the
material thing or knowledge a people have in common, what they
share, so that what happens to a commons is not a physical incident
but a social event.’ And by extension, one could say that what makes
a people a people, or a community, is the knowledge they share, so
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the people, or the community, are themselves a commons, as in the

name of the UK House of Commons. It is therefore that: ‘Taking
away the commons destroys community, and destroying a complex of
relationships demolishes a commons” (Gudeman 2001: 27). It thus
can be said that: “The commons is a shared interest or value. It is
the patrimony or legacy of a community and refers to anything that
contributes to the material and social sustenance of a people with a
shared identity: land, buildings, seed stock, knowledge of practices,
a transportation network, an educational system, or rituals” (Gude-
man 2001: 27).
Though the ancient thing might seem antiquated and pre-mod-
ern, Bruno Latour, much in the vein of Gudeman, has made this gath-
ering a “non-modern” cornerstone of his theory as applied to contem-
porary social phenomena, writing (together with Peter Weibel):
It turns out that the oldest meaning of the English and Ger-
man word for “thing” concerns an assembly brought together
to discuss disputed matters of concern. Hence the choice of the
slogan ‘FROM REALPOLITIK TO DINGPOLITIK’ . . . . [We]
compare modernist with non-modern attitudes to objects: a
move FROM OBJECTS TO THINGS. . . . . there are many
other types of gatherings which are not political in the custom-
ary sense, but which bring a public together around things: sci-
entific laboratories, technical projects, supermarkets, financial
arenas – THE MARKET PLACE IS A PARLIAMENT, TOO
–, churches, as well as around the disputed issues of natural
resources like rivers, landscapes, animals, temperature and air
– THE PARLIAMENTS OF NATURE. All these phenomena
have devised a bewildering set of techniques of representation
that have created the real political landscape in which we live,
99
breathe and argue. Hence the question that can be raised in
respect of all of them is: they may be assemblages, but can
they be turned into real assemblies? (Latour 2005; Weibel and
Latour 2007: 99).
A custom like that of hefting is not only a form of heritage, it

also binds animals and people to place. In England the word heft is
thus used to refer to the way people identify with a particular place, in
which case a heft becomes a kind of heritage. The heritage connection
is direct in the case of The National Museum of Finnish Sami in Inari,
which is named, Siida. The things in the museum form a common
heritage which is gathered at the museum by representatives of the
Sami community who know their things concerning Sami heritage.
The relevance of the concepts of heft and siida to heritage
discourse has largely been lost, along with the original meaning of
thing and its relation to the politcal landscape that thing meetings
and agora have generated. This is due to what might be termed the
tragic double bind of the commons.
The Tragic Double Bind of the Commons
It is ironic that modern discourse on the commons has been

framed in terms of the very scalable cognitive space and mindset that
destroys the commons. This means that it is often virtually impossi-
ble, in the context of modernity, to engage in discourse on the com-
mons without destroying the commons in word, and potentially in
deed. This is the double bind of modern discourse on the commons.
To understand this double bind it is necessary to go into further depth
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on the history and meaning of enclosure. A commons, as has been

seen, is not fundamentally, a material thing, but the expression of a
polity acting in common, expressing its customs and heritage in prac-
tice and within the commons that is language and art.
The commons, historically, were largely destroyed through a
process known appropriately as “enclosure,” by which unenclosed
commons, originally shaped from within through a history of practice
and discourse, were framed, from the outside, within an abstract, un-
changing, absolute, cartographic, cadastral space, and thereby trans-
formed into individualized and reified exchangeable objects with,
and within, private properties.
The commons was thereby reified by being transformed from

an expression of history, heritage, language and discourse, to an assem-
blage of individual objective exchangeable things within an abstract
bounded and scalable space (Olwig 2013; Olwig 2013). This was a
constituent part of a larger process, occurring in the Renaissance, by
which smaller quasi-independent polities, like the Swedish Landskap,
or the English counties, were mapped and spatially enclosed within
101
the scalable space of the map, as territories within a centralized state
(Olwig 2002; Tang 2008; Strandsbjerg 2010). When the projection
of the map is moved from top down vertical, to horizontal, the land-
scape becomes framed and visualized as perspectival scenery as in a
painting, or a theater scene. When the landscape is frozen within the
space of the map, then the constantly evolving process by which cus-
tom establishes common rights and law, is frozen into fixed property
rights. Similarly, when the landscape is frozen as perspectival scenery,
as on a stage, then practiced custom, is transformed into performed,
costumed, tradition, performed repetitively on the landscape as if it
were a stage (Olwig 2013). Landscape art, poetry and gardening thus
developed at this time as a form of conspicuous private consumption,
or “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1984), that provided a way to show
off one’s landed estate, and hence one’s social estate (Aubin 1936;
Barrell 1972; Turner 1976; Bermingham 1987; Cosgrove 1993; Olwig
2002: 99-124).3
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In this way custom is transformed into an unchanging, repet-

itive, and objectified traditional heritage, which is easily commod-
itized as “authentic” (versus “inauthentic”) – thereby memorializing
freezing and enfeebling the heritage of common legal rights of custom
(Olwig 2013). As a result, heritage becomes an either authentic or
inauthentic tradition, belonging to a past that “possesses” us (Lowen-
thal 1996). The distinction between custom and tradition, which is
vital to the understanding of heritage, is brought out well in an often
cited, but rarely read (or understood), text by Eric Hobsbawm (please
note that the distinction between tradition and custom is not a dis-
tinction between the inauthentic and the authentic since custom, as
used here, is a legal term involving daily practice, whereas tradition
belongs to the realm of cultural capital):
“The object and characteristic of ‘traditions,’ including in-

vented ones, is invariance. . . . ‘Custom’ cannot afford to be
invariant, because even in ‘traditional’ societies life is not
so. Customary or common law still shows this combination
of flexibility in substance and formal adherence to precedent.
The difference between “tradition” and ‘custom’ in our sense
is indeed well illustrated here. ‘Custom’ is what judges do; ‘tra-
dition’ (in this instance invented tradition) is the wig, robe
and other formal paraphernalia and ritualized practices sur-
rounding their substantial action. . . . Inventing traditions, it
is assumed here, is essentially a process of formalization and
ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by
imposing repetition.” (Hobsbawm 1983: 2-3)
In Europe enclosure took place largely in the 18th and early

19th century in tandem with the land “improvement” that was in-
103
tended to intensify agricultural land use. Commons nevertheless still
survive in many countries, where they are now the object of “land
grabbing,” which is basically a form of enclosure in the name of im-
provement, often with a questionable environmental justification
(e.g. carbon sequestration or the production of bio-fuels to combat
global warming). The ideology behind enclosure, then as now, was
that of economic liberalism, which idealized private property, free
trade and economic exchange value. The contemporary modern dis-
course on commons was prompted in great measure by the publication
of Garett Hardin’s 1968 article in Science called “The Tragedy of the
Commons,” which was inspired, in turn, by early economic liberal ar-
guments for the enclosure of the commons (Hardin 1968; Hardin and
Baden 1977). Hardin, a natural scientist, with a right wing political
agenda, begins his analysis with the apparent example of an actual
historically existing commons, but in fact his analysis is based upon
mathematical/economic “logic” which he believes to have the uni-
versal validity of scientific natural law. The idea, basically, is that it
is rational for individual shepherds to act independently and ration-
ally according to their self-interest, leading to their destroying the
sustainability of the commons. Though Hardin apparently is writing
about actual, historically existing substantive commons, he quickly
moves to apply his mathematical/economic rationality to justify en-
closure and privatization through “mutual coercion mutually agreed
upon” as the solution to all matter of environmental and social issues,
including pollution and over population, which have nothing to do
with such commons. What we see here is a clever slight of hand by
which apparently actual historical commons are “enclosed” within a
rational mathematical “logic” in which it is tacitly assumed that the
commons is treated as a form of private property, an area of Euclidian
space, by each farmer making use of that property (Hardin 1968).
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Hardin’s article, which became gospel for many environmen-

talists, prompted a counter reaction from, among others, Elinor Os-
trom, an American political economist who eventually won a Nobel
Prize in economics in 2009 for her analysis of economic governance,
especially that of the commons. She believed that Hardin’s tragedy
would be obviated if eight “design principles” of stable local com-
mon pool resource management were followed, of which the first was:
”Clearly defined boundaries (effective exclusion of external un-en-
titled parties)” and the second was: “Rules regarding the appropri-
ation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local
conditions” (Ostrom 1990). What we see here, then, is that the first
step is to enclose the commons with boundaries, and the second is to
treat the commons as an assemblage of economic resources, objective
things, shared by humans acting according to an economic logic re-
quiring regulation to assure their equitable distribution. What thus
becomes apparent from the analysis of Ostrom, and many other writ-
ers about commons, is that even though they may oppose Hardin’s
tragedy model, they have essentially accepted Hardin’s framework,
and that of the economic liberals, which is that the analysis of the
commons essentially involves the application of a general, econom-
ic and spatial logic focusing on production rather than reproduction,
which is then applicable in a wide variety of contexts where people
are treated as economic men. In this way Hardin’s tragedy becomes
a double bind because even when seeking to counter it on one level,
on another level one is perpetuating the framework of enclosure and
privatization that gives rise to the destruction of the commons, both
in discourse and in practice.
The tragic double bind of the commons also applies to heritage
discourse. When the heritage of the social commons ceases to be ma-
terialized as a place, or choros, created and shaped by custom, and is
105
enclosed within the bounded space of scenery, the landscape becomes
a stage upon which people perform tradition. Custom then becomes
costume, and the individualized scenic objects within the landscape
become, like theater props, material things, like a maypole, that can
either be preserved in situ, or moved to a museum. In this way the
maypole, for example, is stripped of its customary legal importance
as a means of manifesting a use right to forest resources and is turned
into an object for display, a form of cultural capital. A modern propo-
nent of liberal progress might want such heritage moved to a museum
so as to get it out of the way. Others may oppose this, seeing it as
vandalism, wanting the heritage preserved on site in, for example,
a national park. But both are locked into a double bind because the
custom that created the landscape as the place of a polity, has been
subverted because custom is fundamentally not concerned with the
static “authentic” traditional properties of objects, or the properties
within which they are located, but with developing and changing
customary practices related to use rights. One way, however, to help
get around this double bind is to shift heritage discourse away from
objects and scenery linked to a rural past, and instead examine these
issues in terms of a contemporary urban present.
The Urban Commons
Concepts such as heft, hævd and siida, are expressions of the

heritage of grazing pastures, particularly commons. This is a heritage
which in the arts is called the pastoral, and which is one of the oldest
and most powerful artistic genres. Concepts like hævd and siida, in
turn, can help explain the attraction of the pastoral to the urban. The
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vast majority of urban parks are thus expressions of the pastoral aes-
thetic ideal, and many of them, such as London’s Hampstead Heath,
or Boston’s Commons, were pastoral commons in origin, whereas
others, such as New York’s Central Park (with its Sheep’s Meadow)
are the product of the artistic designs of a landscape architect, in this
case Frederik Law Olmsted. Olmsted’s work was firmly within the
American Jeffersonian tradition that linked the pastoral landscape to
political and environmental ideals (Marx 1964), and he thus was not
simply an architect or an artist, he was a socially and environmentally
engaged person who was an influential participant in the discourse of
his time on these matters (Roper 1973; Olwig 2002: 176-212). His
parks were intended to serve the social and ecological health of the
communities in which they were created, and they often became, as
with New York’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, or Bos-
ton’s Emerald Necklace, a heritage of community pride that is main-
tained through common use (Spirn 1984; Spirn 1995). In a wider
sense, artists and architects like Olmsted or Patricia Johanson (Kelley
2006; Wu 2013), are people who “know their things” and who man-
age to capture “that which, known to everyone, concerns everybody
and is therefore deliberated in public,” and their art, when successful,
thereby becomes a common heritage. Successful public art and archi-
tecture functions this way, and can come to encapsulate the common
heritage of a city, as is the case with New York’s Central Park. As with
all art works it is difficult to comprehend such works of art in terms
of scale. Just as a tiny Brueghel cannot be termed of greater or lesser
artistic value than a huge Rubens on grounds of scale, it is not the size
of public art and (landscape) architecture that determines its value
to the communality.
One should not, however, fixate only upon phenomena, like
city parks and public areas that descend from, or look like a pastoral
107
commons, as important as these are. It is critical to think of com-
mons in terms of the processes by which people and communities es-
tablish use rights to the city through their hefting and through their
discourse, both in word and art. As the anthropologist John Gray
has pointed out, there is a certain resemblance between the ideas
of Michel de Certeau concerning the way place is created in urban
settings, and the practice of hefting amongst sheep and sheepherders
(Gray 1999; Gray 2000). The same idea can be applied, in reverse, to
the practices of urban dwellers as described by de Certeau, to the de-
gree that the urban dwellers, in turn practice hefting. In de Certeau’s
analysis the rational laws projected upon the city by the “univocal
scientific strategies” of the Hobbesian urban state planner, are coun-
terpoised to the “anonymous law” of the pedestrian (Certeau 1984:
92, 94). de Certeau’s use of the term “pedestrian” plays on the word’s
double meaning in referring both to the commonplace and to move-
ment by foot. The essay is titled “Walking the City,” and a famous
epigram from Virgil’s Aeneid (I, 405), “The goddess can be recog-
nized by her step,” reminds us that the pedestrian is not necessarily
pedantic, but may well be the representative of divine principles
(Certeau 1984: 97). In the Virgilian corpus, the goddess in question,
is known to be the goddess of justice, thereby suggesting a pedestrian
notion of the just place that might be counterpoised to the top down
space of the Hobbesian state. Walking, for de Certeau, is a particular
example of the more general concept of practice, by which the urban
community is woven together into a complex fabric of places. It is a
practice that generates the text of the anonymous law of the every-
day life of the pedestrian urban community. It is through this trans-
gressive practice that, for example, a cross roads or town square can
become transformed from an anonymous location to a named place,
saturated with significance and historical meaning, such as “Place
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de la Concorde.” Through this practice location is “emptied out,”

“making room” for a “void” or “nowhere” that is liberated as “an area
of free play” so that it can be woven (like Place de la Concorde) with
“passages” of meaning, much like those knitted by Madam Defarge
in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens 2003). In this way
an emptiness is created that can be made meaningful and “habitable”
(passages being a word meaning both a literary passage and a literal
place of habitual passage) (Certeau 1984: 104-106). This happens,
for example, when people fill Times Square New Year’s Eve, thereby
transforming a traffic artery into a place of celebration. It is through
the pedestrian process of moving between such places that larger
landscapes are woven together – Times Square is thus part of a larger
fabric of places, like Central Park, that together form the landscape
with which New Yorkers (like myself and Patricia Johanson) identify
as citizens of the city. This is not the place of the rooted dwelling
peasant, however, but rather more that of Yi-Fu Tuan’s cosmopolitan
who, through movement in and out of places, develops a “sense of
place” capable of being reflected in the texts and representations of
artists (Tuan 1980; Tuan 1996).
The heritage of the urban commons can, according to the
above, be described not just in terms of areas, like parks or commu-
nity gardens, but also in terms of the “meshwork of paths and lines
made by humans and animals in their movements” (Ingold 2007; In-
gold 2009; Ingold 2011). This meshwork can include everything from
marchers in political demonstrations, religious processions and car-
nivals to marathon runners, dog walkers, parkeur practicing youths
(Andersson 2011), land occupiers (for gardening or political purpose
or both) and the street artists who fill the empty spaces of the city’s
landscape with their often politically motivated works. It is the sum-
mation of lines and places that makes the city our heritage, not as part
109
of the Hobbesian state, but rather as part of a res publica made up of
things known to everyone, which concern everybody and which are
therefore deliberated in public.
Conclusion
Against the background of the historical link between the

development of the rural and the urban commons – and the link
between the commons, governmentality and heritage – I have raised
the question of whether it would be more appropriate to ask how the
commons governs us, than to ask how we can govern the commons.
The commons, as in the very name of the English House of Commons,
is at least ideally the representative discursive common body of the
people that governs the res publica. Historically, this human commons
governed through mootings/meetings of the representative body of the
thing, which were concerned with the articulation of common custom
deriving from unarticulated practice, if conflict arose. Areas whose
resources were shared in common, particularly grazing resources, were
naturally places where things and cases of common concern would
take place. Symbolically, and practically, the thing place, along with
the agora and fora of ancient Greece and Rome, was often placed on
an open commons belonging to everyone and to no-one, and this can
explain why such places, not the least in Greece as a model civiliza-
tion, were also the site of artistic manifestations of common concern,
such as theater and public art (Olwig 2013). This is why the com-
mons as a materialized place is both the product of discourse and a
non-discursive place of discourse. The discourse in question has been
seen to be particularly that of the res publica concerning the things
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it has as a common heritage. This legal, cultural, ecological and ar-

tistic imaginary of the commons determines that a true commons
cannot be scaled, much as the quality of an artwork cannot be scaled
according to its size, because a legal, cultural or ecological principle
applies to the common interest as an indivisible “topian” whole that
cannot be enclosed within the isotropic geometric space of private,
segment-able property. This is why the commons should be regarded
not as a form of scalable space, but rather as chora (also spelled choros)
– to use an ancient Greek term meaning something like the political
landscape as a heritage, in the aesthetic, social and ecological imag-
ination, of place and polity (Olwig 2008). This heritage is perhaps
most clearly expressed in the common places where the res publica
materializes – places ranging from the ancient Greek agora and Pnyx
to the heritage of town plazas and village greens of Medieval Europe,
to the parks of Frederick Law Olmsted and Patricia Johanson. But it
should not be forgotten that the commons is ultimately the res publica
and the heritage of its political landscape as manifested by the pedes-
trian practices of its people.
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Notes
1. Moot is the etymological predecessor of the word meet. It derives from the
Old English mōt ‘assembly or meeting’ and mōtian ‘to converse,’ and is of
Germanic origin NOAD (2005). New Oxford American Dictionary. E.
McKean, Oxford University Press.
2. It is interesting that the room housing the UK’s House of Commons is not a
segmented space, like that of most continental European parliaments, with
fixed seats for each parliamentarian, but a common place with benches, to
which the governing and opposition parties have hefted to different areas.
3. Art itself was thus, beginning in the Renaissance, ripped out of its
customary context as an expression of the communality, as in church art,
and was put on display as the authentic (or inauthentic) work of individual
uniquely gifted artists and the montized possession of individual owners (as
at the Uffizi).
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Patricia Johanson
III
Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility

Petaluma Wetlands Park, Petaluma, California, aerial view,
370 acres which includes treatment and tidal wetlands,
and there are four miles of trails. 2000–2009
117
Fair Park Lagoon, Dallas, Texas,
“Saggitaria platyphylla”, gunite, plants and animals,
235 feet x 175 feet x 12 feet high, 1981–86
(The lagoon is five city blocks long.)
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“Pteris multifida”, gunite, plants and animals,
119
“Saggitaria platyphylla”, gunite, plants and animals,
(The lagoon is five city blocks long.)
120
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“Pteris multifida”, gunite, plants and animals,
Sculpture floods after heavy rain. This is a municipal flood basin.
121
Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility
Petaluma Wetlands Park,Petaluma, California,
Nesting Islands in sewage treatment ponds
122
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Endangered Garden,
San Francisco, California,
Picnic on Transport-Storage Sewer
123
Painters at the Petaluma sewage treatment facility
124
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Patricia Johanson
Reconnecting the Biological Commons
I grew up in Frederick Law Olmsted’s parks, and it would be

difficult to overestimate their influence on my work. Almost all our
family photographs were made in these parks, which are typically
filled with the upper echelons of society, as well as apartment dwellers
and the poor, who have nothing but the public landscape. Olmsted’s
settings were not only “aesthetic”, but also ”alive” – with trees, birds
and squirrels, fish in the lakes, crawfish in the brooks, and “children’s
plots” where vegetables were grown. A democratic cross-section of
the urban population met casually and amicably in picnic areas and
on playing fields, rowing ponds, walking and horse trails. Later, as a
researcher of American art, it was quite a shock to discover that these
landscapes had been designed and were not “natural scenery”.
The scheme I found most compelling was Olmsted’s plan for
Boston’s Back Bay Fens and Riverway, initiated in 1878— a public
landscape containing all the above features, that also linked frag-
mented sites, offered continuity to non-human species, and was struc-
tured around a complex solution to sewage and flooding. It seemed
miraculous to be able to solve major engineering problems by creating
a public park – especially when the underlying “infrastructure” was
125
partially based on natural processes. This “shared commons”, “for
the free use and enjoyment of all”, incorporated a balance of recre-
ation, scenic landscape, public and private transportation (parkway
and streetcar), sanitation (sewage amelioration and improved water
quality through wetlands purification), and flood control (natural
storage basins and enhanced water circulation by creatively connect-
ing a tidal area with two rivers and a brook). Known as “The Emer-
ald Necklace”, Olmsted’s design illustrates how aesthetic, social, and
ecological benefits can accrue from functional infrastructure, while
facilitating a dialogue between natural and cultural processes. (1)
As a young artist I began exploring these lessons in small
drawings. (2) The engineering purpose of “Moss Garden (Villi):
The Protective Sponge” (1969) is erosion control. Thus highway
hillsides are covered with planted gabions that provide an enormous
surface area for absorbing rainwater, while the sculptural configura-
tions block any direct route through the maze, slowing floodwater
and preventing gullying. The biological model for the sculptures is
intestinal villi, which provide an enormous surface area for absorb-
ing digested food, while aesthetically the landscape refers to the pin-
nacle mountains seen in Chinese paintings, with their wandering
paths, serpentine rivulets and deep ravines. And finally, this art and
infrastructure project incorporates bryophytes and moist habitat for
amphibians within a multi-functional public park along a highway
right of way.
Looking back over hundreds of early drawings it seems as if I
was trying to engage various communities in a dialogue with land-
scapes that were simultaneously aesthetic, ecological and functional.
These shared spaces were usually located at non-traditional sites –
along highways, atop landfills and skyscrapers, and in relation to a
wide range of industrial and municipal facilities. These “commons”
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III
were also designed in concert with natural processes, shared territory

with other species, and incorporated infrastructure.
“Living Apartment Houses” and “Cabbage City” (1969), envi-
sion the entire metropolis as a shared landscape, where people roam
over the topography of green, earth-sheltered structures, conducive
to social interaction, recreation, wildlife and agriculture. Totally veg-
etated cities also harvest water, enlist the earth for climate control,
and create microclimates as topographical buildings block and chan-
nel sunlight and wind.
“Tropical Gardens” (1969) replaces industrial cooling towers
with a park that mimics the thermal features of volcanoes. Super-heated
water from an electric generating facility passes through geysers, fuma-
roles and thermal pools, becoming increasingly cooler, and nourishing
oysters before returning to the facility for re-use. Industrial cooling wa-
ter thus supports food production and thermophiles (microorganisms
made visible by their vibrant colors) within a unique public landscape.
By 1981, when I was commissioned to create art for Fair Park
in Dallas, I shifted the focus to restoring ecological communities to
an urban metropolis, and using sculptural structures—paths, bridges,
islands and causeways – to provide access to living nature. The land-
scape, itself, was “functional”—designed as a food chain where plants
are meant to be eaten, and crustaceans, fish, turtles and waterfowl
eat each other. I also wanted to incorporate infrastructure, and so the
lagoon is not merely decorative, but part of the flood control system
for the Trinity River. Ironically, this engineered aspect— a detention
basin and weir that releases floodwater gradually—contributes greatly
to the aesthetics, as sculptural patterns are constantly reconfigured by
fluctuating water levels. The engineering also helps people visualize
natural processes, especially when the art is submerged following a
rainstorm and animals seek higher ground. At Fair Park Lagoon the
127
needs of humans, wildlife, and infrastructure all occur on the same
footprint, as when access paths are both deployed to prevent erosion,
and simultaneously configured as microhabitats.
“Fair Park Lagoon” has wide appeal because it fosters engage-
ment with the biological world. Living landscapes, though their
appearances may differ radically, are an “innate commons” because
“Landscape…is an intrinsic experience. Nobody is born knowing
about Baroque painting or the achievements of Le Corbusier, but
everyone is born into (and affected by) the natural world.” (3) Un-
trammeled nature has a life of its own. The structural framework of
Fair Park Lagoon may have become part of Dallas’ cultural heritage,
but transience and renewal continue within the natural systems, as
birth, growth, death, and plant succession occurs, animals migrate in
and out of the site, and ecological communities evolve. Living sys-
tems are a common heritage, but they cannot be maintained in place.
Biological nature needs freedom to roam.
In 1987 when I was asked to co-design a new $30 million dollar
sewer for San Francisco, my goal was to restore and frame living sys-
tems and make them available to the public. The sewer, itself, became
the “commons”, extending for one-third of a mile around Candlestick
Cove as a “bay walk”, with transitional sculpture providing access to
the intertidal life of marsh, mudflats, and longshore barrier spit. The
form chosen for the “art” was the endangered San Francisco Garter
Snake, whose linearity and myriad patterns meshed with the range of
habitats I wanted to create. The “head” of the snake, for example, be-
comes a twenty-foot high earth mound that protects butterflies from
cross winds, and allows them to inhabit a meadow filled with nectar
and host plants. The “head” of the snake also mimics the longshore
barrier spit and San Bruno Mountain, visually linking microcosm and
macrocosm. (4)
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A surprising obstacle to creating these “commons” is special

interest groups and agencies that advocate for “preservation” or the
primacy of one favored species. The “San Francisco Garter Snake”
was designed to move from the elevated bay walk into the mudflats,
where it transformed into a forty-foot wide band of shellfish substrate.
This firmer substrate would have attracted littleneck clams, the fish
and crabs that eat them, and a range of new shorebirds. It also would
have revealed the tidal cycle and allowed people to walk through the
intertidal zone on a “living path”, however this feature was opposed
by the Audubon Society and not built. A Native American later re-
vealed that U.S. Fish and Wildlife, a government agency, had for-
bidden his tribe from harvesting shellfish, as they had for millennia,
because “the resource belonged to the United States”. The shellfish
soon died from lack of attention, suffocating under bay mud. As with
predator-prey relationships, the interaction of species and judicious
use may be the surest way to perpetuate living resources.
The kind of shared landscape I try to create does not merely
provide human and ecosystem services – it is crucial to the transmis-
sion of the common biological heritage that links all human beings
and all living species. Contemporary biologists such as Lynn Margulis
argue that symbiogenesis, or cooperation is the primary agent of evo-
lution – not competition. (5) Recent research in many fields supports
this view. Who would have suspected that deep-rooted plants share
water with their shallow-rooted neighbors, (6) or that human beings
share 99 percent of their genome with the mouse? (7) Native Amer-
icans recognized their relationship and responsibility for all forms of
life, and understood that land, water, air, and their non-human in-
habitants were common resources that must be protected and shared.
(8) Ironically, just as the cross-linkage of major taxonomic groups and
the biological basis of sharing is being revealed, our common natural
129
inheritance is systematically being decimated by fragmentation, en-
closure, resource depletion and greed.
In 1994, working with Kristina Hill at MIT, I began an eco-
logical master plan for the Boston metropolitan region. Using sat-
ellite photographs, bits and pieces of public and private open space
were linked together and connected to natural waterways in broad,
continuous corridors, providing wildlife habitat, recreational trails,
improved water quality and flood control. The vision was to restore
natural systems, and give them the autonomy and territory needed to
manage their own life processes, without interference from human
vested interests. This “biological network” would become a commu-
nity resource, but would not be maintained as a cultural monument.
What is being abandoned is anthropocentric design.
I later created a similar plan for Brockton, Massachusetts
(1997-99) that would have reconfigured this deteriorating industrial
city within a matrix of self-sustaining and regenerative natural sys-
tems—interconnected waterways and restored forest. The goal was
to improve economic, ecological and social conditions for every-
one within a shared public landscape that was multi-functional and
productive. This commons would attract visitors, prevent flooding,
collect and store drinking water, filter pollutants, restore biological
richness, and provide recreational and educational opportunities.
(9) And, like a haplotype map, the plan featured all the city’s “land-
marks”. (10) The cultural thread that united disparate ethnic neigh-
borhoods with the landscapes and monuments of “everyday life” was
Rocky Marciano, the undefeated American boxing champion who
ran through the streets of Brockton.
“The Rocky Marciano Trail” consisted of three public sites—
the Marciano House, Father McNulty Park, and Battery Wagner, re-
lated to local Italian, Irish and African-American heroes and their
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III
neighborhoods. These magnet sites were in turn linked to the re-

stored biological corridors, juxtaposing cultural history with natu-
ral processes and infrastructure. One example: “Battery Wagner”, a
Civil War fort guarding Charleston Harbor, witnessed the defining
battle of the Massachusettts 54th Infantry. A local resident, Lemuel
Ashport, was a member of this regiment and his family connections
traced back to a black Pilgrim, and forward to Brockton’s first black
millionaire. The actual “Battery Wagner” has eroded into the ocean,
so the project becomes a memorial to this famous regiment. However
the Brockton site along Salisbury Brook has endured repeated prop-
erty-damaging floods. Since no engineering solution has ever met
with success, a wetlands park replaces inappropriate development,
and the “fort”—which serves as a tourist attraction and community
playground—is rebuilt every year as a construction jobs training pro-
gram for disadvantaged youth. (11)
To date, the most complete realization of my vision is “Ellis
Creek Water Recycling Facility”, also known as “Petaluma Wetlands
Park” (2001-9). (12) The project incorporates massive constructed
and natural wetlands into a multi-purpose park that processes sew-
age, grows crops, restores wildlife habitat and produces recycled wa-
ter. Three miles of public trails provide access for recreation, school
programs, nature study and tourism, while simultaneously contain-
ing pond water and furnishing truck maintenance routes. Despite its
grounding in “infrastructure”, this has become Petaluma’s most pop-
ular park, inhabited by legions of wildlife, including eight threatened
and endangered species that have chosen to make this their home,
fulfilling my goal of giving nature a life of its own while also serving
human needs.
Biological autonomy has been restored to the Petaluma site by
connecting it with surrounding ecosystems, while 45 acres of ponds,
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shaped like an endangered mouse, perform human services within
hundreds of acres of restored mouse habitat. Within each pond, is-
lands direct the flow of water as part of the sewage treatment pro-
cess, but also serve as protected nesting and refuge for birds, while
“Morning Glory Pools” creates habitat while cleansing stormwater
from roads and parking lots. “Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility”
supports many layers of synergistic functionality, and like all places
that are useful and utilized it has become a community resource of
familiarity and pride.
Since privatization and enclosure will probably continue una-
bated, the best strategy for perpetuating the biological commons may
be to promote ecological infrastructure, designed in synergy with nat-
ural processes, and weave these places together with existing remnant
landscapes. By creating such a network of public landscapes that are
multi-functional and shared with other species we help restore the
balance between nature and culture, while preserving the biological
processes on which we all depend.

III
Notes
1. For a complete description of the project’s elements and linkages and

Olmsted’s original plans, see: Fabos, J Gy., Milde, G. T. & Weinmayr, V. M.
(1968), Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.: Founder of Landscape Architecture
in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 57–74.
2. Wu, X. (2007), Patricia Johanson’s House & Garden Commission:
Reconstruction of Modernity. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and Collection.
3. Johanson, P. (1985), Architecture as Landscape. The Princeton Journal:
Thematic Studies in Architecture, Vol. II.
4. The original proposal for “Endangered Garden”, Candlestick Cove,
San Francisco, 1988, is reprinted in: P. Johanson: Public Landscapes
(exhibition catalogue), Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia, February
14–March 17, 1991.
5. Margulis, L. & Bermudes, D. (1985), Symbiosis as a Mechanism of
Evolution: Status of Cell Symbiosis Theory. Symbiosis, 1:101–124, and
Margulis, L. & Sagan, D. (2002), Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the
Origins of Species. New York: Perseus Books.
6. Yoon, C. K. (1993), Plants Found to Share Water with Neighbors. New
York Times, October 26.
7. Waterston, R. H., et al. (2002). Initial Sequencing and Comparative
Analysis of the Mouse Genome. Nature, 420 (December):520–562.
8. Lopez, B. (2007), Interview with Oren Lyons: The Leadership Imperative,
Orion, January/February:36–43.
9. Johanson, P. (1998), Brockton Reborn: The City as an Ecological Art
Form. Sanctuary: The Journal of The Massachusetts Audubon Society,
November/December:15–16.
10. A haplotype map (HapMap) catalogues patterns of small-scale variations in
the genome (the “landmarks”) as opposed to a complete genome sequence
that lists the order of every DNA base.
11. For a complete description of “The Rocky Marciano Trail”, see: Johanson,
P. (1999), La Ville Comme Forme d’Art Ecologique: La Trace de Rocky
Marciano. In: Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, 85 (Paysages en Ville,
Plan Urbanisme-Construction-Architecture, Ministère de l’Equipement,
Paris), December:171–175 (translated by Anne Querrien).
12. For the history and analysis of “Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility”,
see: Wu, X. (2013), Patricia Johanson and the Re-Invention of Public
Environmental Art, 1958–2010. Farnham: Ashgate.
133
III
Staffan Schmidt
Commons as Connectability

Patricia Johansson and Kenneth R. Olwig
When talking about space, the order, construction and organization

of space one can think of the positivist philosopher Ruolf Carnap
who in several books in the 1920s worked through spatial
concepts: three different concepts are in circulation – creating in-
between them, as he saw it, Futile Disputes that are not solvable:
1, Space as Rational, Pure structure as in Mathematics;
2, Space as Kantian an a priori category through which reason at
an insurmountable distance apprehends the world;
3, Space as Physical Space, the space of natural science.
This triad omits most if not all the interests I have in commons, and
how I regularly use it as a metaphor, a metaphor with interesting
properties that reflects on its users worldviews; from an interest in
distances and dimensions, to the interest in the epistemology of the
perceivable, to physical space as conflictual space.
Are we for instance here talking about commons as the

topographical space, or space as nature? Or, is it more likely
that we use the concept of the common as a cultured and social
space?
My main focus will be on physical space, but the question is open if

it is desirable, or even possible, to keep these different uses apart?
135
With so many others today I think that climate change makes it
undeniably clear that any separation nature/passivity – culture/
activity is unsustainable.
Since Carnap left out interpretation, the social, political,

economic and cultural space that we are in need of when
discussing commons, we have to go elsewhere to find theoretical
underpinning to support a language to talk about other equally
important perspectives.
Henri Lefebvre suggested a triad, that has become widely used

conceptual tool in the study of spatiality, in his seminal 1974 book
La production de l’espace (The Production of Space, 1991):
Perceived, Conceived and Lived Space.
What Lefebvre makes absolutely clear is that space is not neutral or

natural, that it sediments history, and that it is always produced as a
political space – space is politics.
Lefebvre underlines that space must be understood as always

contested, and that the conflicting interests will have material
effects, that will leave traces on the ground.
Lefebvre is presenting his readers with a grand narrative, that

following a Marxist and dialectical tradition understands space
both as a material state, a trace in perfect tense, what led up to
this – our – moment, and at the same instant, as a focal point of
something to come.
It must be underscored that what happens in physical space in

real time does not in any sense lend itself to a narrative without
representation.
It is therefore important that we acknowledge the risk that we might

be talking about differences, and conflicts that are only solvable on
an abstract and metaphorical level, but not in social and political
space. The historian Hayden White puts it this way:
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Real events should simply be; they can perfectly well serve
as the referents of a discourse, can be spoken about, but
they should not pose as the tellers of a narrative. [---] What
we call “mythic” narrative is under no obligation to keep the
two orders of events distinct from one another. Narrative
becomes a problem only when we wish to give to real
events the form of story. It is because real events do not
offer themselves as stories that their narrativization is so
difficult. (White, 1980:8)
Different narratives contest over every stretch of land, and even

though the facts on the ground could be topographically and
cadastrally determined, different use of land continues to exist
– and these and other processes of determination, themselves
represent different narratives.
Differently imagined and narrated spaces leads to different use of

space: it means that space can be analyzed as mode of political
thinking. So, an acute question here is what can be gained
politically from thinking with, about and through commons?
I will come to the examples in a second, but before that:
I would argue that one productive way of looking at commons is

through addressing the aspect of connectability: what and who
they connect – and what and who they disconnect, what this
connectability allows for, and aggravates.
If one applies Henri Lefebvre’s grand narrative and trifold tool

to the discussion on commons one gets a glimpse of a “mythic”
interpretation, which attaches romantic notions of nature and
freedom and body to the commons as autogestion, as appropriated
and lived space.
To this somewhat romantic interpretation it is vital to maintain that

commons are established without the need for borders except
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for specific social bounds and tacit understandings, that is,
disconnected from legislative, and ownership contexts.
In the defense of topographical and social commons their value

seem to start from a negation, connected to a rather widespread
interpretation of Lefebvre, that makes an insurmountable difference
between on the one hand “perceived” and “lived” space, and
“conceived” space on the other. Conceived space is pointed to
as connected to the foul play of planning from a distant top down,
from Brunelleschi via Machiavelli to your neighborhood’s next
development plan. Commons tacitly understood as “lived” space
making a real stand against modern culture, and its discontents.
A possibly interesting discussion on the mythos of a common,
connected to concepts beyond discourse such as essence and
imaginary, and not related to a political reality, and, if seen as an
expression of a political “left”, not dialectical either.
The common as a political trope, through which the social values

of inclusiveness and sharing are exemplified as failure or success,
is clearly something more desirable than the privatization of space
and collective stewardships as differentiated value production. The
commons standing up against the enclosure (Armiero, 2014). But
from the transient perspective, the perspective of the outsider, a
sans papier, a common, recognized as such from an inside, could
well be indiscernable from an enclosure.
One way to understand the function and discursive use of

commons with the help of Lefebvre is that it is completely inscribed
in the logic of the centralized power, the state, that is, a common
already fully socially and politically owned.
The political scientist Bo Rothstein emphasizes “the quality of

government institutions” (Rothstein, 2013a; 2013b), that is:
non-corrupt, well-operating public services and utilities is more
important to a people’s well-being than the forms and procedures
of voting, all the formalities of a representative, parliamentary
democracy. An institution is neither mine, nor someone else’s.
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III
What is mine in terms of freedoms and rights are connected to the

way institutions function, and the connectibility of an institution is
what makes it work, and work well.
A present and proliferate use of the concept of commons is related

to the heavily invested and highly tense relation to information
resources in a knowledge based economy. In this context appeared
The Pirate Bay, and its founders acting on the barricades of
internet openness as the communards of Paris 1870, and with
the same result: popular heroes to many, and to others the rightly
incarcerated villains of established society. Wikipedia is of course
the most well known example of a digital common, in which you
importantly are entitled to both creating and editing information,
and where your rights to do so are monitored by a huge online
crowd. Open source is another of these digital commons,
concerning software as well as licensing: the principle is that if you
improve a software at a digital common, it must be released under
the same license, securing its further freedom of use. A digital
common has to be interactive, that is, a radio or a TV would not
qualify, just as the smartphone is a hand held mirror reflecting a
persons place in the world.
In Kenneth Olwig’s manuscript Heritage as Common(s) (Olwig,

2013) there is a striking illustration showing a hand tearing off
a pre-modern agricultural landscape that unveils the industrial
landscape. I think it is a lovely image, still I would like to reverse it.
In 1968 one famous slogan was Sous les pavés, la plage (under
the cobbles, the beach) – to this illustration I would like to add
another slogan: Under Industrialism – land to live. If you dive
deep into time, reversing an image of the industrial landscape,
stratigraphically speaking as the floor of history, and instead as an
archaeologist tear of industrialism’s production landscape, there
will be traces, markings of another land use, defined by other
connectabilities.
So, if we instead look at the Common from a historical perspective,

one can in a Nordic context find it as early as in the first century
139
BC, where in the Pre-Roman Iron Age village of Hodde in West
Jutland a distinct area is established centrally surrounded by
farmsteads and other buildings – and if I look around on a weekend
cycling outing through the medieval villages in Scania where I live, I
will be able in all of them to detect round, oval or rhomboid stretch
of land, still not fully parceled and developed, a village common
surviving up until today.
The site of Hodde during the archaeological excavations

in 1971.
The archaeological map of the Pre-Roman Iron age village

of Hodde in the first century AD.
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III
An illustration of Hodde in the first century AD.
My modest claim is that commons are always connected to

ownership. Ownership that must not be confused with what it have
come to mean today, but something close to a right of use, that is
maintained by hävd, by customs.
But also, which is clear looking at runic stones placed at the border
between a restricted right of use, and a Common (for instance a
bridge) in late Iron age. The stones had the function to document,
manifest and secure inheritance, but needed to do so in public, at
the Common understood the intersection of different land uses.
This manifestation seemed to have been particularly important
when a woman was the beneficiary (Stockholms länsmuseum,
undated).
Nothing can be privately owned without connectability, and the

same is true for what is collectively owned, as commons, they must
both be understood in terms of what they connect, and what they
disconnect.
The form of these connections and disconnections vary over time

– but there are historical reasons for understanding these relations
as structurally stable.
Looking at the period in the 13th century when customary laws

were recorded in southern Scandinavia, transcribed in the form of
141
Provincial laws (for example Den Jyske Lov, 1241), it is obvious
that much energy is devoted to establish the both built and
socially constructed “toft”, a piece of land that defined the right
of use to a persons own land, the toft, and – and here is the
connection – at the same time and inseparably from the right
of use to the property of the village, the common (Hoff, 1997;
Schmidt Sabo, 2001).
The laws are unequivocal when it comes to commons: there must

be a connection between someone’s own land, and the village
common (the words used in the laws to describe the common
are among others “bygate”, “forten”, and “fortov”, the latter in
contemporary Danish meaning sidewalk) (Schmidt Sabo, 2005).
The conclusion is that there can be no privately owned land, if

there is not at the same time a common! And an effect of this
relation becomes obvious when a villager may own land/right of use
(a toft) outside the village at a place where this person does not
live nor anyone else, still this piece of land was mandated to have a
common (Schmidt Sabo, 2005)! The village common is collectively
used as a resource, much because the villagers one by one do not
have the need or the physical strength to put it under the plough,
but it is collectively used because to the villagers it is a physical
manifestation of the village as a coherent unit. At a certain point
in time, when and if the common is threatened, resisting outside
interest would be a sure sign of the presence of power. Thus Elinor
Ostrom’s (Ostrom, 1990) two first design principles of a common,
makes much sense to me; 1, “Clearly defined boundaries” – that is:
a common can only exist if it is delimited by those who have legal
and/or customary claims of ownership/right of use directly and
spatially connected to a common.
To appreciate the second of Ostrom’s design principles; 2, “Rules

regarding the appropriation and provision of common resources
that are adapted to local conditions”, we recall the early historic
examples in the Provincial laws, where individual right of use, and
the collective common are connected.
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As an example: In the sources it appears that a person with a

directly and spatially connected toft can by the villagers be granted
the right to use, but not to privately own, a piece of the common,
for example because of the needs of a growing family. A provision
makes it clear that this particular right of use to the common must be
hefted, that is continually used, or it will again become a part of the
common – it may be used, but not understood as a part of the toft
(Schmidt Sabo, 2005). The village common was inseparable from
the politics of the village, and a political decision making process, a
thing, involving both the villagers, the livestock, the farmland, grass
and water, et c. The issues in a village that which mattered, were
brought to the physical and conceptual common as a thing-place,
the place where things in common were produced. If I for a moment
make use of a design vocabulary, then a common represents and
”[I]ncludes the object of concern in design, the design object

and its many ‘representatives’, the design of things as matters of
concerns and possibilities of experiences. So design things are in
focus when inquiring into the ‘agency’ of not only designers and
users, but also of non-human ’actants’ such as objects, artifacts
and design devices” (Ehn, 2008:1).
Another example concerns the Pnyx of ancient Athens. Pnyx was

a space that to the extreme had clearly defined and politically
meaningful boundaries, not only as the City-State defined itself by
its adversaries, but also within itself, making the common space
the place for contest (Forum after the republic was substituted
by amphitheaters). Pnyx, and the Agorá are particular spaces,
but they become so as socialized spaces, drawing their historical
status from their social and political meaning, not as pieces of land.
Aristofanes highlights in an early play how the public space of Pnyx
was in need of limits to perform its political role as common ground:
after hearing the arguments, the Athenians were not always willing
to show their colors, so there were in fact civil servants who,
by means of a dripping red cord, herded the crowd to the vote
(Aristofanes, 425 BC). You do not want that misunderstanding of
the Common to become visible on your own toga.
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A common could be represented by a narrative, or an image that
bear more connectability than a document, and particularly a law,
which should and has to be unequivocal. If decisions have to be
made, a common could justifiably be related to both systems
simultaneously. A dispute involving a common could start from
the law, a legislative interpretation of the relation between singular
and collective rights to land, but it would not be fully acceptable
if a decision did not also involve the contextual sense of justice: a
sense of what is justifiable related to a group of people and their
values held in common. We could understand this judicial common
as, what could be called a “Grand Narrative” (Lyotard, 1979), meta-
narrative, or supernarrative.
The separation of powers in the US constitution had the

supernarrative that, in the end, conflicts could be solved in the
interest of the people. Common appears as “common defense”, but
the supernarrative, which typically has no specific claim attached to
it, speak of “a more perfect Union”. If you enter a common not paying
respect to the social supernarrative, you would be shouted at, as in
Athens: idiot! The common will be fenced off, without borders, by a
narrative most often kept in a black box. The common may therefore
appear as a shibboleth to a group of insiders. If you get it and act
accordingly, you are a recognized part of community. If not, as for
instance with someone not reared to follow certain practices and
revere certain traditions, you may be socially branded a barbarian.
Commons are necessary to define and delimit ownership, and

things that matter collectively. They are activated through their
connectability, which is inscribed in the web of laws, but their
social meaning is ultimately black-boxed, and given their orientation
through supernarratives, which, when connected to a place, to
nature, could also include non-human perspectives.
The reservation I have over a romanticized interpretation

of commons, is not a post-modern scepticism towards the
supernarrative, but against its qualities not always being
straightforwardly communicated.
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In this tug-of-war over the conceptual framing of commons,

Patricia Johanson’s work presents another, and promising,
relation to commons. As an artist, the content of the work is not
fully reachable through analytical means and classifications. Even
though it would be defendable from an art historical perspective
to categorize her work in the grand narrative of Land Art, it would
risk ending up measuring her contribution to the commons through
the “what is” question, demanding an answer related to a already
established canon. I think there is a multiplicity of likenesses
between commons and art, the varied use of images, because of
their connectability. In my opinion her work is democratic – all the
way down. A democratic attitude that does not stop at the socially
recognized limit of the anthropocentric world, but involves, in its
aesthetics, non-humans, humans, as well as the closely knitted but
uncontrollable forces of nature.
Most representations of commons are sociological and political, in

the sense that they seek both to explain and justify their existence,
reflecting individual worldviews, and proper and inappropriate
behavior in relation to them. The conceptualization of commons is
all to often contextualized as a static phenomenon under threat –
as the often used example of mistaken identity when Commons is
confused with Open Source leading to the “tragedy” of the former
– or by leaving out the question of ownership. Johanson does not
have that luxury, since fully integral to her work is the ability to build,
socially and physically, commons. What is particularly interesting
here is the common constructed in broad daylight.
In two books by Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics/

The Distribution of the Sensible (2004), and The Aesthetic
Unconscious (2009), there are two figures of thought that would
connect Johanson’s work to the work of the commons. Without
making the mistake of privileging art, Rancière argues that a
work of art (or rather: the impetus of a work of art) is a powerful
counteract to dominant forces in society, the “police”, which seek
to explain the present as static, and thereby to justify a standing
145
order. The connectability of a common, and the social and political
possibilities that a supernarrative open to, do not differ in terms
of imaginary and real opportunities, compared to what art (or its
impetus) is able to do. In the book of 2009 the philosopher argues
that a work of art has the potential to forego knowledge, that an
artwork in the same way as a concept, changes the flow and
dynamics of representational possibilities.
Johanson brings forth a practiced interpretation of Land Art based

on a dynamic, and inclusive view of what and who a common might
entail, the common as a thing. Looking at the larger forms that her
water sewage parks outlines there are reminiscences of hill figures
in England, something that aesthetics provide: a sense of a whole.
If in the process of competing the work money dries out, the figure,
as in one of her works, a mouse for example, will be left without head
or tail, which proves to be a forceful argument, since it would leave
a host of different stories and images spinning about unfinished
business. When a common, as a park, today seems to be freed from
a direct connection to ownership, it is because the common itself,
and the connecting land is in fact directly or symbolically owned
by a city, a state, or the state aka the crown. It means that that a
constructed sewage park may become a structurally stable common
with no need for site-specific historical antecedents: as long as there
are common and particular rights of use, inscribed in the logic of
power, it will work. Johanson’s method is important here, since the
slow realization starting with a visualized conceptual thing to gather
around, and when materialized and human- and nonhuman forms of
life gather around, it already and immediately act as a thing-place, a
place where things in common are produced.
During the seminar Johanson made a few points about her work:
her interest is to restore natural systems, she is not interested in
creating cultural monuments (such as the Land Art hero Robert
Smithson), and that she does not associate what she do to the
anthropocentric. The Kantian dictum “purposiveness without
purpose” (Kant, 1790) qualified by being “without any concept”
and the subjective experience of “necessary satisfaction” was still
fulfilled by Smithson, but Johanson’s leaves-of-grass democratic
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III
practice puts her at odds with the romantic canon, including the
artist genius. One observation tells the difference: If her structures
are shaped and changed over time, it should not trigger aesthetic
but functional restoration, and acceptance.
Asked how she is able to see her projects through, she gave
a practical answer that underlined the importance of walking
around, getting to know, presenting her project and its benefits.
Connecting a wide variety of stakeholders, from industrial scale
sewage cleaning engineers, to civil society actors and groups,
to redlisted and endangered species to the thing. Johanson
parallels the construction of a common that serve and satisfy the
technosphere, humans and non-humans alike, with a supernarrative
aesthetics that project imaginary possibilities to different
communities and organizations in society. A petition follows this
step from the electorate to the elected, and through the “quality of
government institutions” a much wider idea of commons becomes
a conceived possibility, that over time will produce and reproduce
connectability.
Johanson’s work enables an inclusive space, a common, which

connect and satisfy needs, and through a materialized connection
between institutionalized, collective, individual and corporate right
of use, exemplifies things to be followed.
In the end, all we have is (a) common.

References
Aristophanes (425 BC). The Acharnians.

Armiero, M. (2014). Enclosing vs. Occupy. The struggles over
commons and the making of the modern world. Key note speech,
Södertörn University, 7 February 2014.
Ehn, P. (2008). Participation in Design Things. Proceedings of
Participatory Design Conference (PDC), Bloomington, Indiana.
Malmö: Malmö University.
Hoff, A. (1997). Lov og landskab: Landskabslovenes bidrag til
forståelsen af landbrugs- og landskabudviklingen i Danmark ca.
900–1250. Århus: Aarhus University Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1979). La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le
Savoir. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Kant, I. (1790). Critique of Judgement.
Olwig, K. (2013). Heritage as common(s) – Commons as
heritage: Things we have in Common in the Political Landscape of
Heritage. Conference manuscript.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution
of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rancière, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics/The Distribution of
the Sensible. London: Continuum.
Rancière, J. (2009). The Aesthetic Unconscious. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Rothstein, B. (2013a). “Så förlorade Mursi folkets förtroende”.
Dagens Nyheter, 5 July. Online: www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/
forskare-sa-forlorade-mursi-folkets-fortroende/ (retrieved: 22
October 2013).
Rothstein, B. (2013b). “God offentlig förvaltning är Sveriges
största tillgång”. Dagens Nyheter, 13 October. Online: www.
dn.se/debatt/god-offentlig-forvaltning-ar-sveriges-storsta-tillgang/
(retrieved: 22 October 2013).
Schmidt Sabo, K. (2001). Vem behöver en by? Kyrkheddinge,
struktur och strategi under tusen år. Lund: Riksantikvarieämbetet.
148

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Schmidt Sabo, K. (2005). Den medeltida byns sociala

dimensioner. Stockholm: Riksantikvarieämbetet.
Stockholms länsmuseum (undated). Människor, händelser och
platser i Ingas och Estrids liv, www.stockholmslansmuseum.se/
faktabanken/mer-om-berattelsen/ (retrieved: 26 October 2013).
White, H. (1980). The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of
Reality. Critical Inquiry, 7(1), On Narrative (Autumn):5–27.
Images from the Pre-Roman Iron Age village of Hodde,

www.kulturarv.dk/1001fortaellinger/da_DK/hodde/images/
newest/1/451-hodde-torben-dehn-1971-jernalderland-1 (retrieved:
26 October 2013).
On the work of Patricia Johanson:

Kelley, C. (2006). Art and Survival: Patricia Johanson’s
Environmental Projects. Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada: Islands
Institute.
http://patriciajohanson.com/
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IV
Seminar
IV
Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen (STEALTH.unlimited)

Kim Trogal
Dougald Hine
November
2013
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Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen

(STEALTH.unlimited)
A Future in Common
– Jointly Constructing the “Real”
Suddenly it was there: the commons. With a mix of curiosity

and suspicion we noticed it rapidly capturing the urban sphere. Curi-
osity, as commons clearly provide a future horizon that gives place to
all of us who seek for collective modes of engagement. And suspicion,
as some of its ‘quick & hip’ incarnations leave an often ambiguous or
‘meagre’ impact if set in relation to the challenges in our contempo-
rary societies – not to mention on a global scale. How could commons
impact our life in a more substantial way? And what would such a
world, or city, look like?
At the start of 2011, we took the chance to unravel a small
piece of that puzzle. As part of an exploration led by artist Michelan-
gelo Pistoletto seeking the transformative potential of art to trigger
an urban ‘re-evolution’ in Bordeaux (as part of the biannual EVEN-
TO), we set off to imagine what a city in common could possibly be.
At that point, we had not yet been in touch with Peter Line-
baugh’s statement that something in common first and foremost re-
quires an act he beautifully captured in the word ‘commoning’, but
intuitively we knew that a city in common would have to be dreamed
up, made and governed by its citizens collectively. With the archi-
tecture center arc en rêve, and the Pula based architect Emil Jur-
can, we set out to imagine a different Bordeaux in 2030. A Bordeaux
in which the urban agenda for the future would have been entirely
155
re-written, but this time along the lines of its many emergent (if often
still fragile) collective initiatives that try to open a different way of
living in the city today. Empowered with the slightly dark and ironic
narrative capacities of Bordeaux-based writer and philosopher Bruce
Bégout, and brought to life by a dozen of comic artist, this utopian
endeavour explored how issues of citizenship, work, resources, energy,
and housing could be brought in common in a up to that moment
still un-imagined Bordeaux. There, suddenly it stood in front of us,
as a giant 80-meter-long illustrated narrative at the site of the cities’
slaughterhouse.
“Today, in the context of a lasting ‘financial’ crisis that increas-
ingly calls into question many other aspects of our society, it is once
again vital to discuss different futures, alternative paths, and solu-
tions. On the other hand, our experience of utopias in the recent past
makes us aware of the negative effects that ‘imposed’ utopias have had
on society. They teach us that it is not possible to materialize a utopi-
an society in space first, and then implement new ways of living in it;
quite the opposite, in fact.”1
It was the issue of housing where this vision most touched the
current grounds in Bordeaux. In the city we had met a handfull of
groups and co-operatives that at this very moment struggle to get
their plans for collectively initiated housing realised. Groups that ex-
hibit an impressive drive and intensity to not just imagine, but also
realise a different way of housing and living in their city.
“Happily and chaotically, they lay out the principles of their
project: long term land lease, joint investment and joint ownership,
shared administration, legal and accounting aid, equal weighting of
votes for members irrespective of initial investment, flexibility of
use and individual choice, etc. They take their inspiration from the
Castors, offering very low-cost communally managed housing (2.200
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IV
euro per square metre) and collective ownership of purchased lots and
buildings. This system of mutual help allows them to make collective
investments that single individuals could never afford. […] To avoid
speculation, participants agree to resell their share to the coopera-
tive at purchase price plus inflation, which means it is impossible to
make any profit.” 2 Still, on the scale of our dreamt-up commons, it all
seemed still a rather modest part of the urban challenge.
Merely two years later, in spring 2013, on an expedition to

meet some of the newly emerging urban commons in Europe, we hit
the outskirts of Madrid. There is hardly a place in contemporary Eu-
rope where the scale of the housing issue baffles one’s comprehension
to such extent. Here thousands and thousands of houses, recently
made or construction sites stuck somewhere halfway, stand uninhab-
ited, while Spain counters its worst urban crisis to this date. Each
day, evictions and mortgage issues drive people onto the streets, or
into suicide, as a result of the collapse of its economy following the
burst of speculative real-estate development schemes around the
country. “At the end of 2012, the Land Registry Information Service
announced that an eviction happened every 15 minutes through-
out Spain, which is outright alarming for a country with less than
50 million inhabitants.”3 Earlier, in 2009, we had seen already a bit
of the bizarre urban landscapes around Madrid, but this time the
immense scale of what was at stake unfolded in front of us. Entire
neighbourhoods, with hardly an apartment inhabited or a car parked.
The ground floors, once meant for shops or services, bricked-up. In
other parts, the perfect concrete skeletons of unfinished houses pro-
vide spectacular sights. Or you will encounter meticulously laid out
streets, complete with street furniture – but no apartment to be seen.
All in all, it is an estranging and gloomy experience. Following the
157
collapse of the “Spanish Miracle”, 3.4 million houses stand empty all
over Spain (2013).4 Still, people have no place to live.
The Spanish housing crisis meanwhile has exploded far beyond
being a personal issue. This year has seen massive protests in Madrid
and Barcelona, with thousands of people demanding that apartments
“owned” by banks that have been bailed-out from the people’s (aka
the State) budget to be transferred to the benefit of those that cannot
provide themselves with housing any longer. In Spain, access to hous-
ing has become a common issue. Much telling is the poster campaign
stating “You will not own a house in your fucking lifetime.” Clearer
than this we won’t get it.
But who tell us ‘reality’ has to be like that? Wouldn’t it be time
to create another ‘reality’ instead?
Over a century ago in cities across Europe, what we today

might call urban commons, in the form of co-operatives set up by
citizens, started to have a major impact on urban life and on what
eventually would become the Welfare State. For many the provision
of affordable housing was a sheer impossibility. With the co-opera-
tive movements on the rise, it became clear that the issue of housing
was to be taken into collective hands. In Amsterdam, a small group
of people had been preparing this cautiously. In May 1868, they
launched a pilot of the Amsterdam Peoples Journal (‘Amsterdams
Volksblad’), in which they outlined the blueprint of their endeav-
our. Six weeks later, in the first official number, its sheer simplicity
became clear: “The journal called the citizenry to establish a fund
to build houses; and with a payment of just 10 cents per week, 5.000
members, “supervised by a pragmatic friend of the people” [a co-op-
erative to be established], would have enough capital to start after
one year”5.
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IV
A daring idea, and something that caught the attention of the

citizenry as well as the establishment and police. Due to the detailed
reports of the last, we have a pretty good insight in how this idea came
into being on Monday 2nd of November 1868, when the Construction
Society for the Acquisition of One’s Home6 was established in café
The Swan on the Nieuwendijk in Amsterdam. The difficulty to gath-
er the capital was countered with a remarkable, although not perfect,
solution: members of the Construction Society would pay 10 cents
per week, and over a period of 50 weeks would raise enough capital for
a share of 5 guilders. Such a share would give access to a lottery, which
would give the ‘beneficiaries’ access to a house that meanwhile would
be build with the funds gathered. The rent of such a house would be
no more than 1 guilder per week – an astonishingly low amount –
and, those that would pay this amount for 20 years would become full
owners of the house. Although not everyone would have the luck to
gain such a house, those left without would share the pride to have
kick-started this remarkable initiative.
“For the men of the Amsterdam People’s Journal, that Mon-
day, November 2nd, 1868 must have been an unforgettable day. [...]
On 24 October the regulations of the established construction com-
pany to had been published in the People’s Journal, and the previous
day the population of Amsterdam had been called with placards to
meet on Monday night November 2nd.
The posters attracted the attention of the police and the pub-
lic and the meeting in café The Swan on the Nieuwendijk became a
resounding success thanks to all the fuss. Over 700 citizens, almost all
workers, flocked. They filled the hall and adjacent rooms, flooded the
large courtyard and had even to find a pitch on the street. [...] That first
night between 400 and 500 people must have become jubilant mem-
bers, but it did not stop. In the days that followed, few more hundreds
159
of citizens became members: on November 17, there were already
1145 members and in April 1869 over 2000 of Amsterdam’s workmen
would have been affiliated with the construction cooperative.”7
In the time until 1901, the year in which the first Law on
Housing would be introduced in the Netherlands, the Construction
Society would build already an impressive amount of 940 houses. The
success of this cooperative would pave the way for many others to
follow in The Netherlands – in a spirit that took hold in many other
European countries at that time. Eventually, over the period of many
decades, this co-operative housing movement would get absorbed
into the housing policies of the welfare state in the 1960s and 1970s,
when mass housing became an agenda for many European countries.
The arrival of 1980s libertarian Thacherite doctrine would herald
the end of this – and with great misfortune turn many of the earlier
co-operatives into privatised entities.
Today, the resources these commons provided have become
difficult to reach again, now in the last place pushed by the mortgage
crisis, austerity measures and existential difficulties that forced many
citizens out of their houses – and onto the squares. It is only now, al-
most a century and a half after the surge in co-operative movements
in Europe and the US, that such commons – in housing, land owner-
ship (community land trusts), and basic provisions like energy – are
shyly taking the scene again.
If we go back to Café The Swan, and situate ourselves amidst the

citizens in the overcrowded space on that night of the 2nd of November
1868, the confidence with which a few hundreds people decided to
push the reality of their lives towards a new horizon is overwhelming.
Today, things are different, obviously. We seem less convinced that a
different life is possible, or feasible, after all. Although we have tech-
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IV
nology and media on our sides, we seem less connected, less coherent.
The challenges are not less though, than over a century ago. Immanent
is therefore the question whether taking action in the existential do-
mains of our lives requires a true movement, a confident movement
that does not settle for less than reality transformed. For real.
Or in the words of Silvia Federici, who while discussing the
aftermath of Occupy Wall Street, said: “I don’t believe that today we
can have a strong movement which lasts, that does not directly deal
with a question of day to day reproduction, and the needs that peo-
ple have. Because the life for many people today goes just to having
enough to survive.”8
Finally, a century later such commons may have to get a dif-

ferent character too. The Construction Society built its success on a
lottery that gave the winning co-operant access to his (or her) private
real estate. Many of today’s commoners will have an understanding
that such an approach is vastly outdated – not in the last place due
to the speculative sides of real estate that plunged the economy into
the ‘crisis’ so recently. Our existential needs are not something to be
answered through a lottery of any sorts.
If today more open, more fluid, or in the words of Athens based
architect and theoretician Stavros Stavrides more ‘liminal’ commons
can take the fore in domains like housing, we would have a radical
breakthrough at hand. “I believe that space is not just another kind of
product – space cannot be simply public, common or private, which
is one level that connects space to commons – I believe that space is
also an institution of commoning, that space gives form to practices
of commoning, that rethinking space is essential in rethinking the
processes of commoning.”9 It would not just reinvent commons – but
housing too. A horizon worth living up to.
Notes
1. A. Džokić & M. Neelen (STEALTH.unlimited), and E. Jurcan

in “Once Upon a Future”, Bordeaux, 2011.
2. Ibid.
3. F. Masip-Valls in “The New Spanish Housing Crisis”. Online:
http://the-generation.net/the-new-spanish-housing-crisis/ .
4. Ibid.
5. From: “True friends of the people: The early socialist movement in
Amsterdam, 1848–1894”, by D. Bos, 2001.
6. Original: “Bouwmaatschappij tot Verkrijging van Eigen
Woningen”.
7. From: “True friends of the people: The early socialist movement in
Amsterdam, 1848–1894”, by D. Bos, 2001.
8. S. Federici speaking at the “Historical Materialism
Conference” in London, 2012. Online: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=TARD7LZouS8.
9. S. Stavrides at “Commoning the City: The Stockholm 2013
Conference” (April 11, 2013).
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IV
IV
Kim Trogal
Care of Commons, Care and Commons
In this paper I want to bring a feminist perspective and raise

issues of care that are related to commons. The importance of this
relationship has long been argued by feminists such as Silvia Federici,
Maria Mies, Maria Rosa Dalla Costa and historians like Peter Line-
baugh. I am an architect by training and so my interest in following
this work, is to develop an understanding of what makes commons an
ethical space; a space in which care labour and relations of interde-
pendency are much more acknowledged and valued.
To introduce the importance of ‘why care and commons’? I
borrow a quote from the political theorist Joan Tronto, who wrote:
Because the provision of care in human society has almost

always proceeded by creating rigid hierarchies (castes, class-
es) by which some are able to demand the services of others,
care has basically been of little interest to those in positions
of power. The exclusion of care from politics grows out of an
unwillingness to look at care on its own terms. […] care is a
complex process that ultimately reflects structures of power,
economic order, the separation of public and private life and
our notions of autonomy and equality.1 (my emphasis)
165
When you make ‘who is caring for who?’ central, you reveal
hierarchies, dependencies and exclusions. But you can also reveal
the geographies and spatiality of care, which function with exploita-
tion. In architecture, we are quite familiar with maps like this one. It
represents the city’s ecological footprint and illustrates the amount of
resources the city consumes and the physical area it takes to produce
and maintain those resources. In 2006, the total ecological footprint
for London was an area over 200 times the city itself.2 In architecture
however, we see much more rarely a map like this one, which shows
global rates of mother and infant mortality in childbirth. In 2005 a
study showed that midwives in London, are mostly trained elsewhere
and imported, like a commodity, and a large percentage come from
Ghana.3 This leaves Ghana with very low number of midwives and
a very high rate of infant and mother mortality. Many factors con-
tribute to this of course, but it is undeniably a result of our economic
model and lack of social sustainability, which is displaced to different,
poorer regions. A place without midwives cannot exist.
I wanted to point, not necessarily to this specific problem, but
to broader questions of value, relations of dependency and their spa-
tiality. Care is not only carried out by midwives and nurses, but all
who make our cities and regions liveable: teachers, cleaners, youth
workers, communities workers and so on. Across many disciplines,
and in architecture and geography especially, feminists have shown
how relations of care and dependency are structured along spatial
conceptions, such as the dichotomies of city/country, home/work,
public/private, so-called first-world/third-world.4 These dichotomies,
feminists argue, function with exploitative divisions of labour, specif-
ically care labour and reproduction.
My interest in commons then is precisely about understanding
another kind of space in which these relations could be reconfigured, with
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IV
different kinds of values. To explore this, I will try to discuss some of

the ways commons can be considered as a practice of care involving
welfare, relations of responsibility to others and to the environment,
as well as acknowledging particular kinds of labour. In the first part
I will follow historians of the traditional commons in England and
Wales, to describe some of the kinds of care that is involved. Whilst
this kind of ‘natural’ commons involves particular kinds of care la-
bour, in the second part I follow the work of feminists to show that
care (such as domestic work, subsistence practices) can also produce
commons and ethical relations to others. I conclude with some very
brief questions that came from our discussion at the Critical Heritage
Studies seminar with Stealth and Dougald Hine.
1. Care of Commons:
commons as a place of sharing
and responsibility to others and the environment
In thinking about what commons are, they are frequently

understood as shared spaces or resources that are neither public nor
private. They are shared or held in common, a form of ownership or
responsibility that is constituted through use rather than as a property
relation. Commons can be both material, such as a fishery or forest,
and immaterial such as language. The phrase care of commons is used
to signal a number of things. Firstly that commons need to be taken
care of and following Ostrom we know that whatever kind of com-
mons we are speaking about, all need a mutually agreed infrastructure
that must be cared for if it is to be sustainable.5 How this happens,
who takes responsibility and so on, are also questions of care. But the
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IV
phrase care of commons is used here to suggest association, and to

suggest that there are kinds of care labour belonging to commons and
commoning practices. These are the ones of responsibility, of sharing,
of reciprocity, of democratic organisation and of welfare.
As a term, commons often refers to common-pool resources,
usually physical resources that involve a cooperative or mutual form
of management.6 Commons, as millennia-old forms of place-man-
agement, have been criticised as economically and ecologically in-
effective forms of looking after the land. From Aristotle’s argument
that “that which is common to the greatest number has the least care
bestowed upon it”7 to Hardin’s essay in 1968 arguing that commons
are a “tragedy” doomed to degrade under individual desire for gain,8
there have been many arguments used to support the privatisation of
commons world-wide. In this context, Elinor Ostrom’s work shows
very well that commons are both workable and sustainable forms of
community governance. She shows that commons are not a free-for-
all, but rather are complex, cooperative forms of place-management
and regulation, which involve a great deal of collective care and re-
sponsibility.9
In order to understand what this meant, I began to look into
the history of the traditional commons of England and Wales, not
necessarily because they are in any way special or different, but be-
cause I encounter the traces of theses spaces in my everyday life, my
local parks and my mother’s allotment. These parks, like London
Fields, are still common land, but only as a name and today exist as
public (state owned) space. Historically, common land in England
was not public property in the sense that not everyone had equal,
open rights to anything there. Common was not “open access,” but
was land to which certain people had common rights, and therefore
common responsibilities towards. Whilst common land had formal
169
private owners (Lords), people (serfs) retained “common rights” over
this land, rights which are exercised in common.10
In England, the commons were essential to the reproduc-
tion of life, they provided access to meadows and grazing land, to
woods to gather timber and foods, to ponds and rivers for fishing,
to quarries and gravel pits, to resources of peat, coal, timber, loam
for fuel and building materials, as well as providing open spaces
to meet.11 They were part of a specific rural, peasant economy of
making do, sufficiency and creativity.12 Everything you would have,
everything you needed, from your bedding, to furniture, materials
for your house, energy, as well as a large part of your food, would
come from the commons.
According to Joan Thirsk, whilst the commons were extremely
variable geographically, they generally had four elements: arable land
and meadows for agriculture; arable land and meadows for grazing;
common pasture lands and “waste” lands where materials could be
collected; and crucially a democratic assembly space for “the ordering
and regulation of these activities.”13 Across these four types of spaces
certain rights and practices were associated:
agistment: the right to let your livestock roam

common of marl: the right to collect sand, gravel, stone,
coal, minerals etc.
estovers: the right to gather wood
herbage: the right to pasture your livestock
pannage: the right to let your pig roam
piscary: the right to take fish from a stream, pond etc.
turbary: there right to take peat, fuel for cooking
There were also rights of way and of access.
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IV
The practices these terms name such as ‘estovers,’ were also

part of the economy of the space, which was not a commodity econ-
omy but a reciprocal one. Following Linebaugh’s work, you find that
care of commons is not a private activity, but a collective one. He
describes instances of sharing responsibility such as maintaining ir-
rigation and fences, or examples of reciprocal exchange, such as by
allowing animals to use the pasture they are able to provide manure to
fertilise the soil; allowing pigs to roam at certain times allowed them
to eat acorns, therefore removing something poisonous to other ani-
mals, and so on.14 Individual families would have also shared some of
their surplus as in contemporary allotments today. Practices of taking,
such as estovers were regulated by seasons, and the number of animals
in pasture (stint) was regulated by mutual agreement. You could nev-
er take too much from that space that supports you.
As Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen write,
“commons presupposes a community,”15 no commons can exist as such
without a group to care for it. This historic commons presupposed
a rural community of peasants, who organised themselves through
a democratic forum. They were self-managed, self-governed places.
The rules of the space and any alterations to them were democratical-
ly agreed in annual, or bi-annual meetings held either in a Manorial
Court or at a village meeting.16 These rules were highly place and
time specific, for example:
[At Cartmel] villagers were not permitted to cut rushes on

Windermoor before 26th September; those with a meadow on
common were ordered to mow the same on 1st or 2nd July; and
no-one was allowed to gather nuts before Nutday, 1st Septem-
ber, or shear his bracken for thatching, bedding or burning
before Brackenday, 2nd October.17
171
Whilst there was a high level of restriction on individual activ-
ity, taking from the commons also meant taking responsibility. The
rules are agreed to protect the commons from degradation. The dates,
the quantities and so on that were regulated were vital to support the
commons, and its capacity to support human life in the future.
The understanding that no commons can exist without a
group to care for it is also expressed by Peter Linebaugh, who coins
the verb, “to common” as “the process that creates and reproduces
the commons:”18
To speak of the commons as if it were a natural resource is

misleading at best and dangerous at worst- the commons is an
activity and if anything it expresses relationships in society
that are inseparable from relations to nature. It might be
better to keep the word as a verb, an activity rather than as a
noun, a substantive. 19 (my emphasis)
Linebaugh thus articulates a quality of commons, that is not a

resource or set of rights, but rather as dynamic relations between people
and place, relations that are entered into through labour. Following
historians, you can begin to see commons less as a particular space
and more like a conceptual ‘world.’ They involved concrete things
and spaces (trees, pastures, forests, ponds and so on), but they also
involve certain languages, values and practices, that are tied to the spaces.
This world is at once a different economy and ethics, in which the
relations of care and dependency are much more acknowledged both
socially and ecologically.
So, whilst the commons were highly regulated spaces, it was
democratically organised towards maintaining an equitable place and
a sustainable one. The traditional, material (or ‘natural’) commons
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IV
have sustained and have been sustained by indigenous communities

for centuries. But it is a labour, and like care, it has a tendency to ‘dis-
appear’ in Western eyes. But as Dougald pointed out, viewing com-
mons as resources not only conceals this labour but also fundamentally
changes the ethicality of relations involved to ones that are no longer com-
mon. To view commons in terms of resources is to move away from an
understanding and performance of commons based on care (in Hine’s
words, friendship, which is also a care relation) towards one that is
more associated with a monetary economy and property relations.
The risk of the resource view is that it brings an accounting frame of
mind. Whilst we might want to name what we value, as Hine says, we
don’t start counting everything with friends.
Care of commons, following Hine then, involves a subjective
and ethical world, which it is quite easy to slip from. This world is
maybe also marked by our words. Although the language of the Eng-
lish commons is archaic, it interested me because we know that the
way we name the world alters our relationships with it.20 It reminds
us that we will need new words to name and perform new urban com-
mons as ethical relations.
The disappearance of the language of the commons is maybe
also relevant in understanding changes in our everyday lives, of which
these practices are no-longer a part of. Linebaugh and Federici draw
attention to these shifts in language, where a right of way became tress-
pass, ‘estovers’ became theft, or the right to fish became poaching.21
They argue that these changes in language are part of the biopolitical
process of enclosure, which enforced changes not only in the use and
logic (ownership) of space, but also of time and the rhythms of life.
Federici in particular shows how enclosure and the formation
of a labour market needed new rhythms to make a working day and
a working week the norm. She shows, for example, how commoners
173
had many fetes and festivals that marked certain moments in their
calendar. Many of these celebrations also needed to be abolished,
not only to prevent these subsistence practices but also to create new
kind of subjectivity, new ideas of work and time. Enclosing the space
broke ties to one another as well as to the space. The period of time
was described in my school history lessons as the “transition from
feudalism to capitalism,” it was as Polanyi, Federici and others show,
a particularly violent process.22 In England over a time period of only
80 years (1760-1844) over 4000 Acts of Parliament were passed to
remove all traces of common ownership of land and possessions.23
The shift in values, culture and of course the very organisation of life,
took real legal and physical force to erase.
Historians of the commons and this period connect the process
of the enclosures, as essential to the formation of a labour market.24
This process, as Federici and Maria Mies show us, also separated life
practices from ‘work’ and thus had quite specific effects for women as a
group, our notions of labour and care and the spatiality of dependency.
2. Care and Commons:

the importance of commons from a feminist perspective
and some urban examples.
Whilst commons is maybe quite a fashionable topic, there is

an important lineage that is maybe less discussed. This is the feminist
Marxist critique of the economy and whilst I won’t trace out this
whole history here, I want to acknowledge some of this work, and its
importance in showing how from the perspective of care and welfare,
commons have particular significance.
174

In 1972 Dalla Costa and James were part of the movement that
made the housewife and domestic work central to feminist politics.
Deploying Marxist categories, they showed that the first surplus and
thus the basis for accumulation begin with women’s work. This care
labour (like the historic commons), which appeared either as natural,
or as a service that exists outside of capital, is in fact economically
fundamental. They showed that the surplus value produced by the
worker relied on, and had an exploitative relation with, the unremu-
nerated, reproductive work that takes place in the home. Dalla Costa
and James, Mies, Federici and Fortunati showed that divisions of la-
bour, especially distinctions between waged and non-waged labour,
formed a vital part of the process of “primitive accumulation” that in
fact from a feminist perspective is continuous.
Whilst historians have connected the enclosure of the com-
mons with dependence on the wage and the formation of the work
discipline,25 this process brought the separation of labour from other life
activities, accelerating the separation of productive and reproductive
tasks. Federici makes clear that care was intimately connected to the
space of the commons. The tasks of the female serfs “washing, spinning,
harvesting and tending to animals on the commons were done in coop-
eration.”26 Care was a collective undertaking. She argues that in feudal
times domestic activities were not devalued, and reproductive and pro-
ductive work were not separate; all types of work contributed and took
place communally. ather she says, “it is in the money-economy that
housework and reproductive tasks ceased to be viewed as ‘real’ work.”27
These feminists show us that the social function of the historic
commons was important for women, as women had less social power,
less rights to land ownership, and were much more dependent on the
commons for their subsistence.28 Linebaugh explains that many as-
pects of commoning, such as estovers, were primarily women’s tasks.29
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IV
Whilst there are kinds of care that make commons, when you
make the everyday practices of care your focus, you can find that oth-
er kinds of spaces are made, with different kinds of economies. This
is precisely what Dolores Hayden looked at in her book, The Grand
Domestic Revolution. In her seminal work, Hayden pieces together a
lost history in architecture with numerous examples that demonstrate
how throughout the 1800s and early 1900s women and men experi-
mented with the socialisation of domestic work. In these cases domes-
tic work was organised within a collective, rather than on an individ-
ual household basis, and took place at the scale of: housing blocks or
estates; neighbourhoods; at municipal level or even at a national level.
As domestic work was socialised, new kinds of domestic workspace,
cooperative forms of organisation and architectures were developed:
In order to overcome patterns of urban space and domestic

space that isolated women and made their domestic work in-
visible, they developed new forms of neighbourhood organ-
isation including housewives’ cooperatives, as well as new
building types, including the kitchen-less house, the day care
centre, the public kitchen and the community dining club.30
In The Grand Domestic Revolution, there are examples of new

types of organisation and spatial organisation, public kitchens, day
care centres, cooperative laundries. In this case, design, architecture
and planning was very much a part of this movement. What can be
found in the collectively organised practices of care, in this case spe-
cifically domestic work, is that they produce different kinds of spaces.
To glance at this example of housing, which was cooperative
housing in Letchworth, there is perhaps not anything special to be
seen architecturally. But, on closer inspection, it becomes apparent
177
that it is very different to what we are familiar with and what the
majority in the UK, at least, would expect or demand for their own
homes. In some cases it is quite challenging, the plans look ordinary
until you realise there is no kitchen in each dwelling, it is elsewhere.
To live in these places means to live very differently, to the lives we
know and consider normal. You can also find examples of public kitch-
ens, like the London Distributing Kitchen, and collective dining facil-
ities, which were especially important and continued into war time.
The majority of the examples in Hayden’s book are no longer
in existence, but they are vital part of the history of collective spaces
of care. Today in the Netherlands for instance, you find cooperative
daycare centres, cooperative ‘elder care’ in Canada, as well as cooper-
ative services such as laundries, as well as commoning practices (like
gleaning, freeganism), or cooperation around other reproductive ac-
tivities especially urban agriculture or community energy projects.
By challenging the spatial separation of public and private
Hayden points out these practices also challenged the separation of
the monetary economy to what she called the domestic economy.
For a feminist project (and from the perspective of architecture) I
am interested in looking at the ways in which we can re-organise the
spaces of subsistence and reproduction. How these relations of care,
as part of our ethical lives, could actually inform our economies rather
than the other way around. This is something that potentially might
take place at many scales, microscopically, at the body, in the home,
in neighbourhood or across borders, to recognise many forms of work
and actions.
As Dalla Costa and James argue, communal facilities like pub-
lic kitchens, cannot be a spatial project alone, otherwise they simply
risk becoming the site of low paid work for women outside the home,
without actually challenging the notion of work or wage.31 What is
178

IV
maybe important in projects based around collective ‘shadow work’32

like childcare or domestic work, and subsistence work like agricul-
ture, is that they are potential commons. These spaces are neither
public nor private, nor only productive nor re-productive. They may
be sites for more reciprocal economies, new forms of sociality and
cooperation.33
The old rural commons, and the collective domestic practic-
es of the 18th and 19th Century are the kinds of commons defined
by territory, they exist within defined groups usually an associated
geographic community. In the case of collective care labour, there
may be a ‘common’ within it, but for instance, the public kitchens or
cooperative laundries trade at their edges. A common condition of
gift economies.34 So, how today, could we have commons and com-
munities which are not defined by territory?
Care for ‘a future in common’:

some questions following Stealth
Dolores Hayden’s book is still important and in 2009 the

Casco Office for Art and Architecture in Utrecht, began a long-term
programme of projects, research and exhibitions called The Grand
Domestic Revolution, A User’s Manual. As part of their research, they
interviewed Hayden to ask her if we could speak of a Grand Domestic
Revolution today. Her answer was no, as she argued that whilst there
are small interventions there is no movement.35 There is no feminist
movement today concerning domestic work as there was in 1970s.
Neither is there anything like the scale of the movement of the 18th
and 19th century that is documented in her book.
179
As I understand them, the question at the heart of Stealth’s pa-
per concerns precisely this, what would it take to have a movement again?
They bring inspiring examples of commons, both contemporary and
historical, and the contrast they raise between the two is stark. They
open up the question, why are the conditions different today than in
the past? What is different? Why do today’s initiatives seem so meagre
in comparison with the scale of problems at hand? The paper raises
some huge questions with not very easy or immediate answers.
Work on care, or commons, does not necessarily give us any
ready answers either, but it does perhaps offer some clues. One
thing that differs strongly from today, is not only our financial mod-
els but also our affective ones. Mutual aid, commons and friendly
societies, as the name of the latter suggests, imply friendship. These
groups had very high levels of trust and confidence, where friend-
ship is the basis of both. Through the historic example Stealth
bring of the 19th Century Dutch Cooperative, they effectively ask
us: ‘How, today, can 2000 people be friends enough to build 940
houses together?’ What they identify is the need to alter both the
affective and economic make-up of a place, and indeed suggest that
the two are tied together.
As Dougald reminded us, care is something that you cannot
buy. The economies of our ethical lives, of love, of friendship have
different kinds of rules and values to monetary economies. The way
our economies structure and inform our relations is not always obvi-
ous to us in everyday life. Our discussion together opened up (amongst
many things) some questions about how one can work to embed a dif-
ferent kind of economy in our lives. To help create economies that are
not above us, or outside of life, like the notion of market as Polanyi
says, but embedded in life and much more based around our ethical
relations of care and of friendship.
180

IV
Whilst the historic commons, as spaces of subsistence, provide

one example of what this look might like. Stealth ask what kind of
urban examples we might have, that are closer in time, and provide
more concrete help in creating new commons today. Urban practices
that offers an example, exists in the R-Urban network, initiated by
aaa in Colombes, Paris. This citizen-led project has developed strate-
gies to address material concerns of local agriculture and food produc-
tion, local waste and recycling and housing as well as actively working
to create closed economic loops, which are not only monetary but
diverse in nature, including things in kind, shared forms of ownership
and, importantly, governance. This is an inspiring complex, living
example of urban commons today.36
The work of Julie Graham, Katherine Gibson and the Com-
munity Economies group in Australia is equally inspiring.37 Their work
makes many suggestions of how we might perform diverse economies
in everyday life. From re-conceptualising work and work-time, to
property as commons and ethical modes of finance. Whilst R-Urban
is an ambitious urban project, with many community groups and lev-
els of activity, participation and governance, Community Economies
also suggests that changes can also begin with quite small (meagre?)
actions, for example, re-organsing the time of your daily routines. I
cite these two as references especially, as they are embedded in dif-
ferent kind of economy and logic, one which privileges our ethical
relations as the basis for our economic ones.
Stealth frame for us a ‘future in common’ as something that
must be both concrete and lived but also imaginary. Whilst commons
traditionally would have been a closed community based on geograph-
ic limits, the idea of commons as friendship, as I understood Dougald,
potentially opens up a way to think about the intimate ethics of our
relations as ones that are not only local, or place defined. To take
181
care seriously, suggests to work with both the material relations of
dependency to create new kinds of ethical-economic relations. In
what ways, can we find to further care and friendship to help build
such an imaginary?

IV
Notes
1. Tronto, J. (1995), Caring For Democracy: A Feminist Vision. Utrecht:

Universiteit voor Humanistiek, p. 12.
2. Environment Agency: London’s Ecological Footprint (2012), August
21. Online: www.environment-agency.gov.uk/research/library/
publications/115654.aspx .
3. Mensah, K., Mackintosh, M. & Henry, L. (2005), The “Skills Drain” of
Health Professionals from the Developing World: A Framework for Policy
Formulation. London: Medact (February). Cited in Massey, D. (2007),
World City. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 175.
4. Kanes Weisman, L. (1994), Discrimination By Design: A feminist critique
of the man-made environment. Illinois: University of Illinois. Massey
2007. This argument is also made by Mies, M. & Bennholdt-Thomsen,
V. (1999), The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy,
translated by P. Camiller. London: Zed, and Dalla Costa, M. & James,
S. (1975), The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community.
Bristol: Falling Wall Press Ltd.
5. Ostrom, E. (1990), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions
6. Ibid.
7. Aristotle (2000), The Politics – Book II: iii. London: Penguin Books, pp.
106–109.
8. Hardin, G. (1968), The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, 162 (3859):
1243–1248.
9. Ostrom 1990.
10. Hoskins, W. G. & Stamp, L. D. (1963), The Common Lands of England &
Wales. London: Collins, p. 4.
11. Everitt, A. (1967), Farm Labourers. In: Thirsk, J. (ed.), The Agrarian
History of England and Wales: Vol. IV, 1500–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 396–465.
12. Neeson, J. M. (1993), Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social
Change in England, 1700–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 4–5.
13. Thirsk, J. (1984), The Rural Economy of England: Collected Essays.
London: Hambledon Press, p. 36.
14. Linebaugh, P. (2008), The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and
Commons for All. Berkeley: University of California Press.
15. Mies & Bennholdt-Thomsen 1999, p. 163.
16. Neeson 1993, pp. 110–133.
183
17. Everitt 1967, p. 405.
18. AnArchitektur (2010), On the Commons: A Public Interview with
Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides, E-flux, 17 (August). Online:
www.e-flux.com/journal/view/150 .
19. He continues: “But this too is a trap. Capitalists and the World Bank
would like us to employ commoning as a means to socialise poverty and
hence to privatize wealth.” Linebaugh 2008, p. 279.
20. This aspect of performativity and our economies is raised by Gibson-
Graham, J. K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis/London:
University of Minnesota Press.
21. Linebaugh 2008.
22. Federici, S. (2004), Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and
Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia. Polanyi, K. (2001),
The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our
Time. 2nd Beacon Paperback ed. Boston: Beacon Press.
23. Kropotkin, P. A. (1987), Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Anarchist
Classics). London: Freedom, pp. 180–207.
24. See especially: Neeson 1993; Thirsk 1984; Everitt 1967; Hammond, J. &
Hammond, B. (1967), The village labourer: 1760–1832. A study in the
government of England before the reform bill. (New ed.) New York: A. M.
Kelley.
25. Hammond 2005.
26. Federici 2004, p. 25.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., pp. 68–76.
29. Linebaugh 2008, p. 125.
30. Hayden, D. (1981). The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of
Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 1.
31. Dalla Costa & James 1975.
32. ‘Shadow work’ is Ivan Illich’s term, which in fact excludes agriculture
and subsistence work, it is unpaid work whose “performance in the
condition for wages to be paid.” “I call this complement to wage-labour
‘shadow work’. It comprises most housework women do in their homes and
apartments, the activities connected with shopping, most of the homework
of students cramming for exams, the toil expended commuting to and
from the job. It includes the stress of forced consumption, the tedious
and regimented surrender to therapists, compliance with bureaucrats, the
preparation for work to which one is compelled, and the many activities
usually labelled ‘family life.” Illich, I. (1980), Shadow-Work. Cape Town:
University of Cape Town, p. 1–2.
184

IV
33. For inspiring examples of urban commons, see Petrescu, D. & Pectou,
C. (2015), Common Act: Reclaiming, Using, Designing and Making
Architectural Commons. Paris: aaa-Peprav (forthcoming) and Petrescu,
Doina (2010), Gardeners of the Common. In: Trans-local Act: Cultural
Practices Within and Across. Paris: aaa/ peprav, pp. 317–322.
34. Hyde, L. (2007). The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World.
Edinburgh: Canongate.
35. Choi, B. & Tanaka, M. (2010). You Ask Me If There Is Another “Grand
Domestic Revolution” Going on Right Now, and the Answer Is… An
Interview with Dolores Hayden. In: The Grand Domestic Revolution Goes
On. Utrecht, London: Casco Office for Art, Design, Theory and Bedford
Press, pp. 37–52.
36. See http://r-urban.net .
37. See Gibson-Graham, J. K., Camerson, J. & Healy, S. (2013), Take Back
the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
185
IV
Dougald Hine
The Friendly Society:
On Cooperation, Utopia, Friendship
and the Contrasting Logics of the Public and the Commons

Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen (STEALTH.unlimited)
We are looking at a photograph from Amsterdam, 1868, thirty or so

men in black and white. Even in the flesh, they would be black and
white: black overcoats with blacker collars, faces pale as November
and framed by various symmetries of facial hair, top hats like a
row of chimneys. Despite what the hats might suggest, these men
are workers, craftsmen, dressed in their Sunday clothes, outside
a cafe called The Swan. They stand formally, the members of an
association shortly to constitute itself as the Construction Society
for the Acquisition of One’s Home. On its first night, hundreds more
will join. By spring, the membership will have passed two thousand.
Their gaze presents us with a question, and the way I remember

it, our conversation in Gothenburg was an attempt to put this
question into words. Ana and Marc framed it for us first, with
images of abandoned, half-built housing blocks in a Spain where
someone is evicted every fifteen minutes. They traced a line along
which the cooperative associations of the early socialist movement
had been absorbed into the great public housing programmes of
the mid-20th century, only for their achievements to be liquidated in
the neoliberal decades that followed, leading to the current crisis.
Why is it, they asked, that we struggle to find the confidence to
remake reality that we see in the actions of these men?
187
Running through this discussion was a yearning for and an unease
with utopias. The shadows of futures past—made concrete in the
geometries of Biljemeer, Tensta, Novi Beograd or Park Hill—lean
over us. The drawings of La Città Nuova look so familiar, it is hard to
imagine the promise they once held. After the failure of the planned
utopia, can there be a utopia from below—something improvised,
emergent? Are our improvisational, networked ways of working
really capable of building anything strong and lasting?
Into this conversation, Kim brought another current of history: the

stories of the commons of preindustrial England and their enclosure.
Unfamiliar words evoke the strangeness of these ways of living with
each other and with the land. If the workers’ movements of the later
19th century mark the beginning of one story, they also belong to the
ending of another. As I have written elsewhere:
The history of the industrial revolution is a history of massive

resistance on the part of ordinary people. This resistance
fell into two phases: in the first, it was an attempt to defend
a way of living; in the second, which began when this way
of living had largely been destroyed, it became an attempt
to negotiate better conditions within the new world made
by the destroyers. What had been lost was a way of living
in which most production took place on a domestic scale,
interwoven with the lives of families and communities. Work
was hard, but it varied with the seasons and required skill
and judgement. Many of the basic needs of a household
could be met by its own members or their immediate
neighbours, not least through access to common land, so
that people were not entirely exposed to the mercilessness
of the market.
It is not necessary to romanticise the realities of pre-

industrial society: the intensity and duration of the struggle
which accompanied its passing are evidence enough. (In
1812, at one of the high-water-marks of this struggle, the
British government deployed 12,000 troops against the
188

IV
Luddites in four counties of England, more than Wellington

had under his command that year in the ongoing war
against Napoleon.) The relationship between this first
phase of resistance and the labour movement that would
arise out of its defeat has most often been presented as a
progressive development: the dawning of a new political
consciousness, and with it new forms of organisation and
effective action. Yet it was also an accommodation to what
had previously been fought against: the new division of
the world between the space of work, dedicated to the
sole purpose of maximising production, and the domestic
space, now dedicated to reproduction and consumption.
The sentimental idealisation of the home as a woman’s
sphere originates in this division, as established in Victorian
England. Behind this advertising hoarding lay the real
transformation of the home from a living centre of activity to
a dormitory, a garage in which the worker is parked when
not in use.1
The swelling of the cities was driven by the loss of earlier

possibilities for living with the land. (In England, the process of
enclosing common land was generally referred to as ‘Improvement’
by those who organised and profited from it.2) In the seminar,
Kim talked about the persistence and reemergence of customary
practices among the displaced, even in the new context of the city. 3
New laws were required to proscribe activities which, because they
took place outside the monetized economy, were illegible to both
state and market.
As the conversation went on, Kim brought us back around to those

men in Amsterdam. How could they trust each other enough to
realise a thing like the Construction Society together, to rely on
each other for something as fundamental as meeting the need for
shelter and living space? ‘Perhaps what we are really asking is,
how can two thousand people become friends with each other?’
(In English-speaking countries, the mutual associations of this time
were often known as ‘Friendly Societies’.)
189
By now, a set of words had started to form a constellation on
my notepad: friendship, utopia, commons, public, cooperative.
In the relationship between them was a provisional answer to
the question we had been circling around. What follows is a first
attempt at spelling out that provisional answer, though perhaps it is
best read as a rough sketch for a more ambitious project.
The connection between friendship and the commons had been

put into my mind by the Mexican intellectual and activist Gustavo
Esteva. During a conversation we filmed in December 2012, he
returned twice to the suggestion that friendship was the key to the
possibility of new commons. ‘If you want to abandon that feeling
of precarity, then it’s to rediscover that the only way to have a kind
of security is at the grassroots. With your friends. With the kinds
of new commons emerging everywhere.’ 4 Particularly in Europe,
particularly in the urban context, he emphasised, if we want to talk
about commons we should start with friendship. Since this is not
where people usually start, and since friendship hardly sounds solid
enough to be a starting point that will be taken seriously, these
comments stuck with me.
At the Commoning the City conference in Stockholm in April 2013,

I spoke about this, and suggested that one reason for starting with
friendship is that it gets us beyond the idea of a commons as a
pool of resources. Anthony McCann has observed that ‘resource-
management models’ of the commons mirror the arguments made
historically by the defenders of enclosure: these discourses, he
argues, ‘tend to work more in the spirit of a Trojan horse than
an analytic tool.’ 5 In contrast to the discourses of resource-
management, Ivan Illich made the distinction between ‘commons
within which people’s subsistence activities are embedded,
and resources that serve for the economic production of those
commodities on which modern survival depends.’ 6 To see the world
as made up of resources is already to have enclosed it in one’s
mind, to reduce it to a stockpile of raw materials to be exploited
for the production of commodities. Illich adds that the English
190

IV
language ‘during the last 100 years has lost the ability to make
this distinction’. Certainly, there is little left that is not considered
capable of being treated as a resource: the ecological crisis is
to be solved through total ecological accounting, while we rarely
think twice about the presence of ‘Human Resources’ departments
within companies and organisations. In this context, friendship is
an exception, one area of human experience where we still have a
shared language to express the sense that not everything can or
should be viewed as a resource: when someone we thought of as a
friend treats us this way, we say, ‘I feel used.’
There is another sense in which friendship illuminates the nature

of commons, as we come to the distinction between ‘commons’
and ‘public’, two terms frequently used as if their meanings overlap.
Instead of treating them as interchangeable, it might be more
helpful to think of them as characterised by two rather different
logics, founded on differing presuppositions and leading to
differing atmospheres.
A typical definition of something ‘public’—public space, the public

sphere—will emphasise that ‘access is guaranteed to all’, in contrast
to the private, which is by its nature ‘closed or exclusive’. 7 The twin
concepts of public and private are often seen as corresponding
to the collective and the individual. This is most obvious when the
terms are transposed to the political-economic structure of public
and private sectors—and so to a model of politics in which the
left is associated with the public and the right with the private. In
a deeper sense, however, both concepts rest on an idea of the
individual as possessed of certain rights that exist prior to and
override the social context in which she happens to find herself.
This kind of individualism was hardly thinkable much before
the 18th century, when the concepts of public and private took
shape. The high version of this story—the version that animates
Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man, for example—treats the
emergence of the public sphere in this period as among the great
achievements of the Enlightenment and, indeed, of human history. 8
191
There is a lower version to be told, however; one which sits less
awkwardly with the recollection that this was also the century in
which the enclosure of common lands reached its greatest intensity.
In this version, we might recognise—among other things—that public
space is, often literally, the subdued remnant of an older commons. A
striking late example of this is the enclosure of Kennington Common,
the site of the largest and last of the Chartist mass meetings in 1848;
within four years, legislation had been passed to create Kennington
Park, fenced and patrolled by guards under the command of the
Royal Commissioners. (The artist and Kennington resident Stefan
Szczelkun makes the fascinating suggestion that the curiously
anonymous monuments, lacking plaques or dedications, erected
during its emparkment seem to have been ‘placed strategically…
just far enough from the sites of public executions and mass rallies
to misdirect attention and focus from those emotive and resonant
sites.’ 9 There is an analogy lurking here to the anonymity and
seemingly random deployment of public art in today’s cities.)
There seems to be a paradox by which the concept of the public,

with its guarantee of access to all, is realised through the creation
of boundaries of a new hardness. In the case of Kennington Park,
we have a modern public space created through legislative and
physical enclosure. A more general example is the establishment
of public services provided on a basis of universal access, which
has entailed the hardening of the boundaries of citizenship which
form the practical limit to the ideal of universality. In contrast, if the
historical commons were unfenced, this never implied that they
were simply open to all. There were rights of use in the commons,
but these were not universal: rather, they were deeply specific, a
fabric of interwoven agreements, subject to an ongoing process
of negotiation. This is the customary law that Illich describes: ‘It
was unwritten law not only because people did not care to write
it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too
complex to fit into paragraphs.’ 10
The absence of any commitment to universality in the logic of the

commons sounds alarming, since—within the logic of the public—
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IV
the alternative would seem to be exclusion. It is here that the

example of friendship may help us discern the difference between
these logics. If I claim that I have a right to be your friend, this
makes no sense. The dance of sociability by which the possibility of
friendship is explored takes a multitude of forms, but it can neither
be rushed nor predicted.
The logic of the commons resembles the logic of friendship, in

that it is based neither on an a priori openness, nor a set of a
priori criteria which determine exclusion. The journey by which a
newcomer may be drawn into the web of relations which form a
commons—that ‘reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs’—is
determined through what happens between the people present,
rather than by the application of prescribed principles. The ideal of
a universal guarantee of access makes no sense here, yet nor is
there anything that resembles the erection of a hard boundary of
exclusion.
The logic of the public appeals to something higher and more

constant than the vulnerable threads of human relationships;
but in normalising such an appeal, it has a tendency to cut
through the fabric which those threads make up. The individual
possessed of a set of rights begins as a fiction, contemporary
and in other ways parallel to the figure of Robinson Crusoe
which has held such an enduring appeal for economists. 11
But such fictions have a way of coming to life: the attempt to
realise a society based on such rights has often framed our
highest aspirations for social justice, even if the reality has fallen
short, but it has also been accompanied by the creation of
societies characterised by an unprecedented individualism and
atomisation. We pursue the circumstances of loneliness, even as
those who study public health have started to describe it as ‘an
epidemic’. 12 The logic of the commons, according to which rights
are negotiated within human relationships, rests on another
understanding of the individual, one which is closer to that of
Raimon Pannikar: ‘I understand a person as “a knot in a net” of
relationships.’ 13
193
If it makes sense to distinguish the logics of public and commons
in the way that I have done so far, it is worth touching on a further
aspect of this distinction, in relation to ‘space’ and ‘place’. The
space of the public is Cartesian: an abstract, homogeneous,
measurable void which preexists its actual contents, just as the
individual (within this logic) is treated as preexisting the actual
context of social relations in which she finds herself. In contrast, the
commons is always somewhere, a specific place, just as its rights
and laws are specific. 14
In this sense, among others, the logic of the public is utopian—

literally, ‘placeless’—and this can be seen in one of the fullest
attempts to realise its ambitions, the commune movement of the
1960s counterculture. In many ways, of course, this movement
was an attempt to create a refuge from the kind of modern society
which we might more often think of as embodying the logic of the
public, but the refugees took with them certain core assumptions—
and these played a critical role in how their dreams went wrong.
Lou Gottlieb founded the commune at Morning Star Ranch in
1966, declaring it to be ‘Land access to which is denied no one’.
After Time magazine turned its spotlight on the hippie phenomenon
in July 1967, the numbers of newcomers arriving at the ranch grew
beyond its ability to cope: the site became overwhelmed, struggling
with open sewers and the hostility of the Sonoma County
authorities. In 1972, at the end of a series of court cases, all but
one of the buildings were bulldozed. 15 Iain Boal adds a speculative
twist to this story, pointing out that Garrett Hardin was writing
his ill-founded yet hugely influential paper, ‘The Tragedy of the
Commons’, in California in 1968 as the story of the Morning Star
court hearings was on the front page of his morning newspaper. 16
Hardin’s account of why commons are doomed to fail bears no
relation to the actual history of the commons, but it does resemble
what Boal calls ‘the tragedy of the communes’. 17 The essence of
that tragedy—as seen through the lens I have been grinding away at
here—is the attempt to realise, in its full utopian form, the promise of
universal access which is alien to the historical phenomenon of the
commons but intrinsic to the logic of the public.
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IV
One further example from the movements that came out of the
1960s counterculture illustrates the converse of the connection
between friendship and the commons, the suspicion of friendship
within the logic of the public. ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ is
a key text from the women’s liberation movement, drawing attention
to the ways in which abuse of power takes place within informal,
supposedly non-hierarchical groups. Running through it, however,
is a striking suspicion of friendship:
Elites are nothing more and nothing less than a group of

friends who also happen to participate in the same political
activities. They would probably maintain their friendship
whether or not they were involved in political activities; they
would probably be involved in political activities whether or
not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence
of these two phenomena which creates elites in any groups
and makes them so difficult to break. 18
Written in 1970, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ was an attempt

to learn from the failures of the innocence, which had guided the
experiments of the period to which Morning Star Ranch belongs. It
contains a great deal of painfully won insight. Yet there is a connection
to be traced between the way that friendship is problematised here
and a more general tendency to treat specific human relationships as
interfering with the equality of individuals, as envisioned by the logic of
the public: to avoid such interference, friendship should be confined
(or at least seen to be confined) to the private sphere. 19
The politics of informal groups to which ‘The Tyranny of

Structurelessness’ draws attention is real enough and—as Kim
reminded us during the seminar—an essential element of the historical
commons was ‘a democratic assembly space’ within which to resolve
the difficulties and disagreements that arise. 20 We might question,
though, whether friendship need really be so inimical to the social
fabric—and whether a logic according to which the key to avoiding
the abuse of power is to ‘break’ the connections of friendship is really
headed in a direction which we would wish to take.
195
How do we find our way back around to the question in the gaze
of those workers in Amsterdam, a century and a continent away
from the examples we have been considering? The thought
that occurred to me during the seminar, and that prompted
the scribbled constellation of terms on which I have tried to
elaborate here, was about the peculiar position of the cooperative
movement in relation to these differing logics of commons and
public.
There is always more than one story to be told about the origins
of a movement, but the story most often told about the origins
of cooperativism goes back to the experiments of Robert Owen
at New Lanark. The waterfalls that powered the imagination of
the Romantic poets also drove the first phase of the Industrial
Revolution which their more practical contemporaries engineered.
A short walk from the Falls of Clyde, which drew visitors such as
Coleridge and the Wordsworths, Owen’s mill town straddles the
mechanical and the visionary. Its founder belonged to the period
described by Karl Polanyi in which practical enterprises were
entered into in a spirit of intellectual enquiry, seeking to discover
‘new applications of the universal principles of mutuality, trust,
risks, and other elements of human enterprise.’ (By contrast, Polanyi
suggests, after the 1830s ‘businessmen imagined they knew what
forms their activities should take; they rarely inquired into the nature
of money before founding a bank.’ 21)
If the communards of the 1960s thought that they were walking

away from the top-down institutions of modernity, yet took with
them the essential logic of the public, Owen’s projects represent
a more wholehearted attempt to realise utopia on an institutional
scale. When his original investors at New Lanark grew tired of his
philanthropic experiments, he arranged for them to be bought out
by a group, which included Jeremy Bentham. The plans for a model
community at New Harmony, Indiana drawn up for Owen by the
architect Thomas Stedman Whitwell belong to the genre of the
panopticon, even if the reality of the settlement—which failed within
two years—was closer to the experience of Morning Star Ranch. 22
196

IV
His earlier proposal to put the poor into ‘Villages of Cooperation’

met with resistance from popular Radicals and trade unions for
whom, in E.P. Thompson’s words:
The Plan smelled of Malthus and of those rigorous

experiments of magistrates…who were already working
out the Chadwickian plan of economical workhouse relief.
Even if Owen was himself…deeply in earnest and dismayed
by the distress of the people, his plan, if taken up by
Government, would certainly be orientated in this way. 23
Owen was ahead of his time in many ways, yet the suspicion with
which his plans were viewed also anticipates the shadow side
of the real achievements of public provision as accomplished
in subsequent generations: the suspicion that what has been
achieved is not a liberation, but the rendering sustainable of an
exploitation to which we become naturalised.
To point out that Owen’s own experiments were, by and large,

failures is not to deny the significance of his legacy, but it could
prompt the question as to why certain ideas with which he
had been associated subsequently took on a life of their own.
Thompson makes the observation that:
Owenism from the late Twenties onwards, was a very

different thing from the writings and proclamations of
Robert Owen… The very imprecision of his theories…made
them adaptable to different groups of working people. 24
It was this passage that came to mind, as we sat in Gothenburg

trying to piece together the histories of the commons and the
public, and that led me to add the word ‘cooperative’ to the
middle of my scribbled constellation, somewhere between the
clusters ‘public, universal, space, utopia’ and ‘commons, specific,
place’. This is no more than a speculation, and clearly there
were a variety of factors and innovations by which Owen’s ideas
about cooperation as well as other experiments, some of them
197
predating New Lanark, fused into the cooperative movement that
took shape in the following decades. However, if we are trying
to answer the question put to us by the gaze of those workers in
Amsterdam—to understand the kind of trust which holds together
a Construction Society for the Acquisition of One’s Home, or a
Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, the equivalent of which
we struggle to find in our own experience—perhaps it is significant
that these associations were formed at a time when the practices
of commoning were still within living memory among the newly
urbanised?25 Were these self-organised institutions—organised in
response to the torn fabric of rapidly industrialising societies, and
which we can see as anticipating the vastly larger systems of the
following century—made possible because of the living memory of
older customary practices? If so, we could think of the cooperative
movement, conceived (at least by Owen) within the logic of the
public, but brought to life by something that could well be called a
heritage of commons.

IV
Notes
1. Hine, D. & Performing Pictures (2013), The Crossing of Two Lines, Stockholm:
Elemental Editions.
2. Polanyi, K. (1944),The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Chapter 3,
“Habitation vs Improvement”.
3. There are echoes of this in the third book of John Berger’s Into Their Labours
trilogy, Lilac and Flag (London: Penguin, 1990), where characters with roots in the
peasant village of the earlier books make their lives on the underside of a nameless
metropolis.
4. Hine, D. (2013), Dealing With Our Shit: A Conversation with Gustavo Esteva. Dark
Mountain, 4.
5. McCann, A. (2005), Enclosure Without and Within the “Information Commons”.
Information and Communications Technology Law, 14(3):217–240.
6. Illich, I. (1983), Silence is a Commons. CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter.
7. A huge literature exists on the concept of the ‘public’. This ‘typical definition’ is
based on Habermas, J. (1974), The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),
New German Critique, 3 (Autumn):49–50; Habermas, J. (1989), The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (original German publication 1962), p. 1.
8. Sennett, R. (1977), The Fall of Public Man. New York: Random House.
9. The University of Openness (2005), Communications of the Uo, 2 (Spring):12–13.
See also Szczelkun, S. (1997), Kennington Park: The Birthplace of People’s
Democracy. London: Working Press.
10. Illich 1983.
11. Grapard, U. & Hewitson, G. (eds.) (2011), Robinson Crusoe’s Economic Man: A
Construction and Deconstruction. London: Routledge.
12. Marche, S. (2012), Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?. The Atlantic, 2 April. For a
critique of the rights-based approach to social justice, see Esteva, G. & Prakash,
M. S. (1998), Grassroots Post-Modernism. London/New York: Zed Books, pp.
110–151.
13. Font, C. (1996), The New Innocence: Interview with Raimon Pannikar, Share
International, October.
14. For a fuller statement of this formulation of the distinction between ‘space’ and
‘place’, see Robert, J. (2003), Space (Manuscript). Online: www.pudel.uni-bremen.
de/pdf/space_1.pdf.
15. For the story of Morning Star Ranch, see Scott, F. D. (2012), Bulldozers in Utopia:
Open Land, Outlaw Territory and the Code Wars. In: Boal, I. et al. (eds.), West of
Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California. Oakland: PM Press. For a
firsthand account of open sewers at Morning Star, see Marsha in the D (2013), My
Very Short Stay in the Commune, 5 May. Online: http://marshamc1203.wordpress.
com/2013/05/05/my-very-short-stay-in-the-commune/.
16. Hardin, G. (1968), The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, 162 (3859): 1243–
1248. Although Hardin’s article continues to be widely cited, his argument has been
199
repeatedly demolished. See, for example, Fairlie, S. (2010), The tragedy of The
Tragedy of the Commons, Dark Mountain, 1.
17. “Concepts of Scarcity”, Iain Boal speaking at The Scarcity Exchanges, University of
Westminster, 1 June 2011. Online: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/06/iain-
boal-and-lyla-mehta-concepts-of-scarcity/.
18. Freeman, J. (1970), The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Online: http://flag.blackened.
net/revolt/hist_texts/structurelessness.html .
19. For a distinction between two different understandings of equality that is relevant
to this argument, see Lummis, C. D. (1992), Equality. In: Sachs, W. (ed.), The
Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books,
pp. 38–52.
20. Thirsk, J. (1984), The Rural Economy of England: Collected Essays. London:
Hambledon Press, p. 36.
21. Polanyi 1944, Chapter 10, “Political Economy and the Discovery of Society”.
22. Whitwell, S. (1830), Description of an Architectural Model From a Design by
Stedman Whitwell, Esq. for a Community Upon a Principle of United Interests, as
Advocated by Robert Owen, Esq. London: Hurst Chance & Co.
23. Thompson, E. P. (1963), The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor
Gollancz, Chapter 16.
24. Ibid.
25. For a comparison between the situation of common land in England, the
Netherlands and elsewhere, up to the mid-19th century, see De Moor, M., Shaw-
Taylor, L. & Warde, P. (eds.) (2002), The management of common land in north west
Europe, c.1500–1850. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers.
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Seminar
Lucia Allais
Philip Ursprung
Henric Benesch
Januari
2014
205
206

V
Lucia Allais
Making Pompeii Legible
An ancient city half-buried in a mound of lava. A global ar-

chaeological laboratory. A sinkhole for cultural funds. A cipher for
Italy’s cultural disarray. Pompeii may be all of these things, but it
is also a testing ground for the theory and practice of architectural
preservation. Since the Enlightenment, every mission to ‘discover’
the city has been followed by the invention of techniques to repair
and stabilize it.
Legible Pompeii, an installation at the 14th Venice Architec-
ture Biennale, describes and performs the problem of preserving Pom-
peii, through the design of two walls. One wall, called “Data Fresco”,
charts the history of the conservation techniques that were invented
and perfected in Pompeii. The other wall, titled “Souvenir Pile”, is an
experiment in conservation itself: made of ersatz Pompeiian matter
cast in resin blocks, it offers a material record of the site to the Bien-
nale public.
207
Fig. 1
Lucia Allais and MOS, Legible Pompeii.
Installation at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale.
Photograph by Katie Andresen
In the Fall of 2013 I was invited to curate a portion of the

“Monditalia” pavilion at the 14th Annual Venice architectural Bien-
nale, an invitation that provoked a fourfold reflection on preserva-
tion and curation as intertwined architectural practices.
The curatorial hypothesis for the Monditalia pavilion, as pos-
ited by Rem Koolhaas and Ippolito Pestellini of OMA-AMO, was
that Italy’s uniqueness resides not only in its local and regional cul-
tures, but also in its surprising hospitality to globalization. “Between
treasure and crisis”, they argued, Italy offers both a world of its own
and a way of being in the world, a “fundamental” ontology.1 This new
take on Italy’s oft-declared cultural exceptionalism was exhibited in
a linear itinerary that unfolded the geography of the Italian peninsula
along the Corderie building of Venice’s historic Arsenale complex.
Punctuated by massive brick columns, this seemingly endless interior
became a series of stations, each representing a site where this hybrid
cultural predicament could be detected, curated, and displayed.
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My chosen site, Pompeii, is paradigmatic of this comingling

between local and universalist appeal. The city has long been under
the joint tutelage of foreign archaeologists and regional authorities,
and has spawned a long tradition of architectural display, both on
site, and around the innumerable objects that have been exported to
museums worldwide.2
But in the last decade, Pompeii has become the object of what
can only be called a massive curatorial failure, manifested in a series
of tragic architectural collapses. No less than five high-profile struc-
tures have crumbled to a pile in the last five years. The latest, the
necropolis of Porta Nocera, fell to the ground in March 2014 after its
foundations were weakened by weeks of torrential rains.
Every time a Pompeiian wall crumbles, it is an entire recipe for
Italian cultural cohesion that apparently dissolves. This is because
preservation—that is, expert knowledge about how to conserve and
repair architecture—is one of Italy’s trademark fields of expertise, and
a crucial part of its global brand. In a phenomenon I propose to call
the Italo-globalization of preservation, conservation has been one
of Italy’s greatest postwar exports, with legions of foreign specialists
training in Italian institutes and sites, Italian heritage expertise dis-
patched on missions worldwide, and Italian theorists authoring in-
ternational heritage charters.3 Yet since the waning of the economic
miracle in the 1970s, a disjuncture has grown between the state of
Italy’s built heritage and the reputation of its preservationists abroad.
Pompeii exemplifies this dispiriting duality: neglect at home, respect-
ability abroad; spectacularization at home, sobriety abroad. [Figure 2]
But what does Pompeii’s state of preservation really tell us
about how Italian material culture deals with history, and how the
Italian built environment registers change over time? After all, Pom-
peii’s history reads as a veritable catalog of monumental threats.
209
Fig. 2
The House of the Chaste Lovers in Pompeii, 2012.
Photograph by Barbara Caffi. Creative Commons
The Roman city buried under lava in 79AD had already been
damaged by an earthquake in 62BC. The eruption of the Vesuvius
toppled walls and crushed roofs, but the flood of lava that ultimately
inundated the city also glued the site together for 17 centuries. After
the modern rediscovery of 1748, the list of destructions only grew
longer: dynamite blasting; spoliation; careless digging; massive earth
displacement; aerial bombing; overzealous restoration; under-main-
tenance; overgrowing; vandalism; tourist overload; torrential rains.
Despite this history of ruptures, the dominant narrative of Pompeii,
and of Italian architectural history as told to its millions of yearly vis-
itors, is one of continuity. Italian preservation practice is a tradition
that thrives on “re-integration”—that is, building the old through
the new.4
Of course, preservation is itself a curatorial practice (“the cura-
torial management of the built world,” as one textbook famously puts
it)5 and Pompeii’s keepers have been pioneers in making architectural
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history palpable to a visiting public: selective about what, and how,

to restore, forthright in their critique of their predecessors, they were
also deliberate in making their own interventions commentaries on
history. In this sense, they have worked out in empirical terms a dis-
tinctly Italian method that would be codified theoretically, much lat-
er, in the concept of “critical restoration” (restauro critico).6 Pompeii
is both an object and an actor in this complex lineage of architectural
and curatorial impulses
Architectural curating itself is also a newly vibrant mode of
practice, that has taken architecture by storm. Models, drawings,
and other traditional architectural artifacts are increasingly entering
museum collections alongside paintings and sculptures. At the same
time, a proliferating number of venues have offered designers and
theorists the chance to experiment with new modes of architectural
representation and argumentation, particularly suited to architec-
ture’s recent turn towards “research”, with its prevalence of data, new
media, and performative architectural installations.7
How, then, to re-present and re-curate Pompeii, not as a his-
toric site but as a contemporary architectural artefact? Three queries
guided the research phase of the project, and established the critical
method for working with graphic and architectural designers.
1. What do we see when we visit Pompeii?
Visitors to Pompeii are told they are seeing an exceptionally

well-preserved ancient city, and visualize the daily life of a Roman
town with technologies as diverse as audio-tours and light-and-sound
shows. But what they are really touring is a grid of more or less decay-
211
Fig. 3
Photograph posted to Flickr by Carolyn Conner in 2012.
Used by permission
ing walls, many of them bearing the marks of modern intervention.

Such marks remain indecipherable to anyone but the most special-
ized of architectural conservators. Who is the author of these ruins?
What is the logic that regulates this field of repairs?
Take a tourist photograph posted to Flickr in 2013. [Figure 3]
It displays an incredibly complex, layered architecture whose monu-
mentality is owed directly to its stratification. Each fragment in this
is apparently ad-hoc assemblage can in fact be dated and identified
with a specific conservation technique. On the left side of the image,
for instance, where a wall has been repaired, a line clearly demarcates
the end of the original Roman diagonal building technique, from the
modern pattern of horizontally-laid bricks. (This type of delineation
was invented in 1805). More generally, where frescoes have been
detached, the lacunae are filled in with blank stucco. (A practice
launched in the mid-19th-century). A column has been reconstruct-
ed in bare brick. (As was commonly done in the late-19th Century).
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Then there are the two roofs: one on the right, made of terracotta tile,
clearly intended to blend in with the local vernacular architecture,
but resting on a decidedly modern concrete lintel. (A combination
used by conservationists since the 1960s). The other roof, on the left,
is made of fiberglass and floats above a wall to which it is cemented
with metal poles. (This is later work, likely from the 1970s). Even the
rope, apparently an informal and timeless object, was most probably
added in the 1990s to replace more “modern” types of enclosure such
as metal gates. There have been eight phases of conservation in Pom-
peii; each has left visible traces on its architecture.8
Our installation offers, first and foremost, a legend for reading
Pompeii through these architectural techniques. Extensive research
into the site’s preservation history reveals a lineage of technological
inventiveness. Twenty gestures in particular have been identified, and
then diagrammed in a pictographic sequence by the graphic designers
Katie Andresen and Michael Seitz. We named this vertical strip of
illustrated conservation history “data fresco”, in a nod to Pompeii’s
own legacy in the history of the visual arts.
If this catalog of conservation techniques constitutes Pom-
peii’s technical legacy, its physical heritage lies in the building ma-
terial to which all of this expertise has been applied. To investigate
this material meant to follow an entirely different line of questioning.
2. What is Pompeii made of?
According to the GIS model currently maintained by the

archaeologists in charge of the site, Pompeii amounts to 24200 m2
of walls, 20000 m2 plaster, 17000 m2 paint, 20000 m2 roofing, and
213
12000 m2 flooring.9 This accounting, which focuses on two-dimen-
sional surfaces, evocatively conjures the millions of linear feet treaded
by tourist queues through the site every year. But the “fundamental”
building element of Pompeii—to echo the theme of the Biennale—
are the raw building materials behind these surfaces.
To answer the question of what Pompeii is made of, we settled
on one house, the House of Sallust, and set out to calculate its ma-
terial composition. Founded in the 4th Century BC, built out in 150
BC, uncovered in 1780, excavated in the early 19th Century, bombed
in World War II, and rebuilt in the 1970s, today the house consists
of no fewer than sixteen building materials. With a computer model,
we recreated the “recipe” for this Pompeiian architecture, as follows:
36.1% limestone/lava mix; 17.7% pozzolana (volcanic) mor-
tar; 9.5% concrete mortar; 10.0% limestone/tufa mix; 7.3% Sarno
limestone; 6.3% wood; 4.9% plaster; 2.2% reinforced concrete; 2.1%
terra cotta; 1.8% nocera tufa; 1.5% brick; 0.3% travertine; 0.2% sign-
inum paving; 0.1% aluminum; 0.1% pigment; 0.03% iron.
This formula, in turn, became the basis for a design brief for
the Biennale installation:
• Produce a “reconstruction” of the House of Sallust that con-

centrates not on its form, but rather on its material composition.
• Work with the materials of preservation
• Respect the original Sallust “recipe”, a matrix that conveys the
amount, age, and prevalence of various materials on the site
• Design something desirable, which can be “given” away.
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3. What makes Pompeii desirable?
If we are to start treating preservation as a type of experimental

design—as its more adventurous practitioners have been urging—
then the lines that have been neatly drawn between architecture’s
history, its design, and its preservation will need to blur.10 To become
a field of action, history cannot be thought in lofty and linear terms,
but rather as earthly and disjunctive. Concepts such as authentici-
ty and integrity can be recuperated, not as codes of ethical conduct
but for the suggestive aesthetic experiments they imply. And perhaps
most urgently, the professional wall that separates laboratory-trained
conservationists and studio-trained architects will also have to be
breached.
MOS Architects is a studio not usually concerned with “pre-
serving the past.” They are self-declared vangardists and self-con-
sciously keep up with latest technologies of design and fabrication.
But they have also developed a method that questions the formal bas-
es of established architectural languages, both modernist and vernac-
ular, often in order to achieve an architecture of material seduction.
Here, MOS designed a wall of blocks—we named it “Souve-
nir Pile”—where the usual relationship between preserving and pre-
served is reversed. Resin, that transparent material which holds to-
gether more of the built environment than the naked eye could ever
detect, is used as primary building material. Each block contains a
sample of Pompeiian matter: lava, mortar, cement, signinum paving,
plaster, etc. These are not original materials taken from the site—ac-
cording to Italian export rules, such a removal would violate heritage
laws. Instead, the blocks contain material substitutes, as close as pos-
sible to the original, but many of them processed several times: cast,
215
Fig. 4
Resin block from the Souvenir Pile.
Photograph by MOS. Used by permission
shaped, and fragmented, sometimes also colored and diluted. They

have been re-designed, but the methods used do not depart too far
from the practices that conservationists use to “preserve” the authen-
ticity of building materials. [Figure 4]
The Souvenir Pile consists of a thousand blocks and, in its to-
tality, recreates the proportions of the House of Sallust. For instance,
391 of the blocks contain a limestone-lava mixture, while only one
block contains “paint pigment”, in accordance with the direction
that only 1% of the house of Sallust consists of paint.
The blocks also bear design features that convey information
about the date of the material contained within, and its prevalence
on the site: blue resin tips for the most ancient Roman matter, pink
for the 19th Century repairs, and white for its more recent reconstruc-
tion. Circular dots embossed on the side of the blocks represent the
prevalence of the material they contain—the more dots, the more
abundant the material.
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Fig. 5
Lucia Allais and MOS,
Legible Pompeii installation a week after the opening.
Photograph by MOS.
But if each block is literally loaded with information, the vis-

itor is not meant to “read” it, but rather to desire it, and, eventually,
take it home.
Scientific data are usually extracted from preservation sites
to fix their meanings and stabilize their significance. In that sense,
data forecloses interpretation. In our installation, however, we use
the instability and discontinuity of data to open up possibilities. Our
design process was structured to exploit the inevitable loss that in-
formation suffers in transmission during the collaborative chain be-
tween research and making. The history of the House of Sallust lost
some resolution, so to speak, when the research team translated into
a transmissible “recipe”. The digital models designed by the MOS
design team, in turn, were subjected to further material contingency
when they were transmitted to the fabrication team, whose its casts
and powders, molds and accelerants muddied their parametric pre-
cision. The last step in this progressive “cooling” of the information
217
Fig. 6
A block in its new home, in Cambridge, MA.
Photograph used by permission
from the history of Pompeii, then, was the disappearance of the pile
itself at the hands of its visitors. [Figure 5]
The Souvenir Pile is designed to disappear over the course of
the Biennale, taken away block by block in an echo of the gradual
disappearance of ancient Pompeiian matter.
The device that regulates this dispensing is a thousand-page
calendar, each page indicating the number of a single block and the
date of its availability. A souvenir of the Biennale and of the Italian
cultural experience more broadly, the block is destined to be integrat-
ed into quotidian life. [Figure 6]
Legible Pompeii is an architectural project that stands on its
own, despite its fading outside referent. This fading referential struc-
tures echoes both the predicament of Italian material culture and the
disciplinary situation of architectural design as a whole. Indeed, as
more Pompeian matter disappears, the site becomes less deciphera-
ble, exposing a dilemma that resonates far beyond Pompeii. Archi-
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tectural legibility, today, is negotiated at the interface between visual

information and the matter of its conveyance.
To return to Italy’s predicament “between treasure and crisis.”
Taking a cue from the bejeweled vanity lights that Koolhaas and
OMA-AMO designed to frame the entrance of the Monditalia Pa-
vilion, we can perhaps hypothesize that the entire sequence of instal-
lations is meant to offer not an ontology but a mirror—for Italy and
also for everyone else—for contemplating what Martin Heidegger
called “the age of the world picture.”11 When contemporary heritage
has been theorized as a mirror, it is in psychoanalytic interpretations
where the success of tourist sites such as Pompeii is a symptom of
narcissism, and of the desire to “contemplate our own image” fulfilled
by mass-tourism and mass-media.12 But a Freudian reading is only
useful insofar as it helps us remember, as Freud might, that we destroy
what we desire. Such is the predicament of Pompeii, of Italy, and of
our installation: desire fulfilled at the cost of destruction. It is a very
high cost indeed.
Appendix 1: The Data Fresco
Fig. 7
Diagrams of conservation gestures at Pompeii, excerpted from the Data Fresco.
Design by Multimillion (Katie Andresen, Michael Seitz).
A Brief History of Pompeii (as a laboratory of conservation techniques)

Pompeii has suffered over 20 architectural collapses in the last 5 years, but this
state of emergency is only one episode in a longer history of destruction and
reconstruction. The site today is an open-air catalog of preservation experiments.
Vesuvian lava glued the site together for seventeen centuries. The first modern
excavation in 1748 upset this tectonic order and set off a chain-reaction of
opportunities and obligations. For the first hundred years, all work focused on
voiding and removal. The Bourbons burrowed, more or less blindly, in search of
clues and treasures, [Tunneling] taking anything portable, and expertly liberating
anything that was not. [Detaching]. During the 19th Century, Pompeii became
a place, with a distinct image and a reputation: [Varnishing] an artificial hillock
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where the ancient Roman experience could be accessed and purchased. [Voiding]
After Italy became a nation-state in 1861, digging was modernized, and modernity
itself reflected the image of a stratified landscape. [Stratifying] Excavation and
restoration were now undertaken in layers. [Sacrificing] Pompeiian bodies and
plants reemerged, [Casting] architectural fragments were repositioned, [Anastylosis]
frescoes re-fastened. [Anchoring] It was only a small step from there to the
expectation of legibility, and the distinction between ancient material and modern
intervention. [Differentiating] Anticipating much later preservation theories, a new
principle emerged: every monument should be a document of its own survival.
But in Pompeii, rules have always struggled to catch up to practice. By the turn of
the 20th Century, the focus had shifted to the pursuit of a complete streetscape,
[Street-Clearing] the Via dell’ Abbondanza, which grew more vulnerable with every
exposure. Modernism came to Pompeii (as to much of Italy) with fascism, and
through a belief in new materials, [Replacing] a faith in technology, [Upgrading]
and a fascination with typical urban and architectural forms. The archaeologist-
hero, Amedeo Maiuri, exposed whole new swaths of the city. Freeing facades from
the pressure of the encroaching earth, he couldn’t resist the urge to reconstitute
architectural volumes, [Disencumbering] and make the Pompeiian house visible
again, roof and all. [Reintegrating] Allied bombings produced yet more reconstruction
projects, ensuring that preservation would become a type of constructive design.
But two centuries of archaeological hubris were starting to fray. Old and new
aged at different rates. By 1961 a new sobriety set in. What could be reversed
was quickly attempted [Undoing] and the local vernacular (gates, posts, lintels,
signage) was reworked. [Reauthenticating] The floating roof grew into a symbol of
ethical intervention. [Barely touching] Since 1983 a new alliance has been forged
between speculative re-enactment and archaeological excavation, [Spectacularization]
both motivated by digital technologies. Virtual reconstructions have outpaced
physical protection. [Digitizing] The recent collapses have ignited the discourse of
sustainability, further transforming the city into a laboratory of decay that can
be managed by computer. (Pompeii was always a laboratory, but environmental
exposure now trumps human threats.) The realistic target for preservation is now
one city block. Quantification, both scientific and financial, is the order of the
day. But there was never a conservable city in Pompeii, only an unstable maze of
aggregate that could sustain an urban image through changing material ratios: lava
to limestone, grass to paver, old to new, built to unbuilt. In the Italian version of
modernization, a history of destruction has never been incompatible with the image
of continuity. Even if it is allowed to age gracefully, Pompeii will be a reconstitution
— a pile of matter organized by a mountain of data.
221
Appendix 2: Project credits
Research Team: Justin Fowler, Clelia Pozzi, Louise Decoppet, Frederik Bruggink;
MOS team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Griffin Ofiesh; Graphic design:
Multimillion (Katie Andresen, Michael Seitz); Fabrication: Benas Burdulis & Emil
Froege
Supporters: Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown; Princeton University School of

Architecture; Polytek Development Corp.; Anonymous; Princeton University:
UCRHSS; School of Engineering and Applied Science; Center for Arts and
Culture Policy Studies; Department of French and Italian; IHum; Digital
Humanities Initiative; Kara A. Hailey and Nicola T. Allais; Robert Edsell; Fiscal
sponsorship by The Storefront for Art and Architecture; Special thanks to Michael
Rock; Francesca Orsini.
l e g i b l e p o mp e ii@g ma il.c o m
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Notes
1. Koolhaas, R., “Monditalia”, cited in www.labiennale.org . See also

Koolhaas, R. & Pestellini Laparelli, I. (2014), “Monditalia: A Scan”. In:
Fundamentals. Venice: Marsilio, p. 355.
2. On Pompeii’s cosmopolitan history, see Hales, S. & Paul, J. (eds.) (2011),
Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today. Oxford/
New York: Oxford University Press, and Gardner Coates, Victoria C. &
Seydl, J. L. (eds.) (2007), Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii
and Herculaneum. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust. In the follow-up
exhibition Gardner Coates, V. C., Lapatin, K. & Seydl, J. L. (2012), Last
Days of Pompeii. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Trust, the authors count
that no fewer than 179 exhibitions on Pompeii were organized in the last
100 years, most of them travelling.
3. This expression, the “Italo-Globalization of Preservation” is the subject of
an ongoing research project, presented in preliminary form at the State of
Exception Weekend Special at the Biennale in August 2014. The history of
ICCROM and ICR might be consulted as a indicative of this phenomenon:
Jokilehto, J. (2011), ICCROM and the Conservation of Cultural Heritage.
Rome: ICCROM, and Micheli, M. (2008), L’attivita del ICR All’estero
negli anni 50. In: Bon Valsassina, C., Omaggio a Cesare Brandi nel
Centenario della Nascita. Firenze: Edizione Firenze, pp. 181–187. See also
Otero-Pailos, J. & Muzaffar, I. (2012), Preservation and Globalization,
Future Anterior, 9(1), Summer: iii–vii.
4. On Italian preservation, see Carbonara, G.(1997), Avvicinamento al
Restauro. Napoli: Liguori, and La reintegrazione dell’immagine (1976).
Roma: Bulzoni.
5. Marston Fitch, J. (1992), Historic Preservation: Curatorial Management of
the Built World. New York: McGraw-Hill.
6. See Carbonara, G. (1997), Il Restauro Critico, Avvicinamento al Restauro.
Napoli: Liguori, pp. 285–301.
7. A recent stock-taking of this revival can be found in Log 20: Curating
Architecture (Fall 2010).
8. Di Stanislao, M. (1998), Pompei: Tra Scavi E Restauri. In: Nenci, C.
(ed.), Restauro archeologico: didattica e ricerca 1997–1999. Firenze:
Alinea, pp. 82–85. See also de Simone, A. (2012), Pompei e il Restauro:
alcune considerazioni. In: Gambardella, C. (ed.), Atlante di Pompei.
Napoli: La Scuola di Pitagora Editrice, pp. 47–60.
9. This GIS is known as the SIAV, “Sistema Informativo Archeologico
Vesuviano” and is maintained through the Superintendency of sites by
223
Anna Maria Sodo. See www.pompeiisites.org. See also Guzzo, P. G. and
Guidobaldi, M. P. (eds.) (2005), Nuove ricerche archeologiche a Pompei ed
Ercolano. Napoli: Electa napoli.
10. In the USA they include Jorge Otero Pailos, author of The Ethics of Dust
(Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009), and David Gissen,
curator of The Mound of Vendome (Canadian Center for Architecture,
2014). See also Allais, L. (2013), Formless Keepers. In: Ricciardi, G. &
Rose, J. (eds.), Formless (Manifesto Series). New York: Storefront & Lars
Müller.
11. Heidegger, M. (1977), The Age of the World Picture. In: Heidegger, M.,
The Question Concerning Technology, translated by W. Lovitt. New York:
Garlan Press.
12. Choay, F. (1992), L’allégorie du patrimoine. Paris: Seuil.
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V
Philip Ursprung
Terrain Vague:
Common Heritage under Pressure
In March 2013, I took a seminar week to Greece with some

of my students, entitled “Ec(h)o-Logy: Greek Returns”. As our
hosts escorted us around the center of Athens, what struck me,
even more than the obvious symptoms of the economic crisis – the
shuttered shop-windows and empty offices, the absence of new cars
– was the depression of the people I saw in the streets. Compared
to my previous visit to the country, their gestures seemed slower,
heavier; even their voices sounded muffled. Our hosts told us that
the newly enacted property taxes on apartments and houses were
sapping their compatriots’ confidence in the future. It wasn’t just
that countless young people had lost their jobs that old people had
seen their pensions vanish into thin air; it was that the very back-
bone of social stability has been broken by these new taxes. What
had been, since the 1950s, a guarantee for the middle class, name-
ly the family-owned apartment, had turned into an insupportable
burden. Many people couldn’t afford to pay the taxes, and since
there were no buyers, neither could they sell their flats. With the
collapse of the value of real estate the Greeks were, quite literally,
losing the ground beneath their feet. The common heritage, the
227
essence of the postwar welfare state, so to speak, had been taken
away from the subjects.
Outside the city, we visited the old Hellinikon Airport, which
was shut down in 2001. In this enormous area, which is not accessible
to the public, we saw rusting hangars, parking lots, runways, as well
as some stadiums, already decaying, left behind by the 2004 Olympic
Games. The Greek government has handed over the entire prop-
erty to the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund, the coun-
try’s privatization agency, which tries to attract investors. The site is
ideally situated on the shore of the Mediterranean. But who would
want to purchase so much land at this moment? And if an investor
were found, how could one prevent the site from being privatized,
closing off what could be, for the people of Athens, one of the rare
public access points to the beach and a much needed park? What the
apartment was to the citizen, this huge tract of land was to society – a
threat, an obstacle standing in the way of a future. The common her-
itage of the private homes and the formerly public space had turned
against their users. They weren’t protecting them but were instead
haunting them in the sense of what Sigmund Freud called the uncan-
ny or “un-homely” (unheimlich). This heritage had become an aporia,
an impasse with no way out.
The only relief that we discovered in the midst of all that deso-
lation was a small patch of squatted land where a group of Athenians
had planted vegetables and flowers. In that desperate environment,
that little patch of ground, a source of hope and pride, seemed to
draw connections to both the mythical and the real agricultural pasts
of Greece, as if the people who tended it wished to symbolically re-
pair the psychological damage that affected their nation after it be-
came part of the European Union, a process that led to the uprooting
of centuries-old olive orchards and the destruction of small fishing
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boats. But subsequently we learned that the squatters had received an

eviction notice and that bulldozers were already waiting.
During my trip to Athens, I often thought of the art works
of the Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui. Based in Rotterdam, she is
among those artists who, during the last decade, have helped open
our eyes to the complexity of urban transformation and who have
shown us how connections between economy, history, and individual
biographies are made manifest in the terrain. I recalled her Guide to
Al Khan, the Guide to the Wastelands of the Lea Valley, and the Guide to
the Wastelands of the River Tevere, small booklets that conduct readers
through forgotten areas comparable to those I had encountered in
Athens. Unlike traditional travel guides, these works focus on the
periphery, shedding light on sites in transition that bear the traces
of an industrial past and are subject to new uses in the future. Each
features a plan that allows the reader to follow the path of exploration
through brief texts and simple black-and-white images.
Her guides to the peripheries of London and Rome deal with
areas that had been set aside for future Olympic constructions. It
struck me that the terrain I encountered in Athens was a mirror im-
age of these landscapes, because in Athens the Olympic games were
already over and the sites were already well on their way back to be-
coming a wasteland once again. I also thought of Robert Smithson,
the pioneer of Land Art, who in the late 1960s undertook excursions
to the hinterland of New York City, to forgotten areas of New Jer-
sey. Smithson took snapshots of parking lots, construction sites, and
old quarries and interpreted them as if they had been picturesque
Antique ruins discovered by an 18th-century aristocratic taking the
Grand Tour. In his essay “The Monuments of Passaic,” he highlighted
the specific temporality of such areas, observing that the construction
site he was contemplating seemed to contain “ruins in reverse – all
229
the new constructions that would eventually be built. This is the
opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into
ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.”
There are many names for such former industrial zones or
demolished residential areas: wasteland, fallow land, non-place, no
man’s land, entropic landscape, and so on. The most common term,
terrain vague, dates back to Marcel Carnés’s 1960 film of that name,
which was set in an undefined zone at the edge of the city of Paris
adjacent to the new social housing projects. The Catalan architect
and theoretician Ignasi Solà-Morales Rubió adopted the term in his
1995 essay, also entitled “Terrain vague,” in which he observed that
photographers such as John Davies, Thomas Struth, Manolo Laguil-
lo, and Jannes Linders were focusing on “empty, abandoned space, in
which a series of occurrences have taken place” in order to represent
the metropolis. In applying the term to these empty spaces, he noted
that the French word (Ben Vautier) vague combined the notions of
“void,” “uncertain,” and “wave,” and that the word terrain connotes a
more urban quality than does the English “land.” The meaning of the
term, then, wasn’t fixed and could support both positive and negative
connotations. In his words, it evoked “void, absence, yet also prom-
ise, the space of the possible, the expectation.”
In the years since Solà-Morales wrote those words, the concept
of terrain vague has not lost its attraction. Despite its vagueness – or
because of it – it remains a popular metaphor in the realms of art,
architecture, and city planning. It coincides with the experience of
deindustrialization, and of shrinking cities like Detroit, as well as with
the rapid growth of urban areas like Dubai. It can be applied to the
desolate industrial landscapes featuring in films such as Michelangelo
Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) or Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979).
Can we use it for the issue of critical heritage? And can we still use the
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term, in the way it was adopted by Solà-Morales, when we turn to an

examination of the results of the current crisis in Southern Europe?
Is it legitimate to apply the notion when discussing the proposed sale
of the Hellenikon airport?
I will argue that we need to revise our understanding of the
terrain vague. After all, the terrain vague, according to Solà-Morales, is
mainly an aesthetic phenomenon. In his view, it captured the viewer
emotionally and was thus better suited to the representation of the
city than such familiar motifs as buildings. Nevertheless, when he
comes around to explaining the reasons for this fascination, his in-
terpretation is vaguely psychological; he states that the terrain vague
corresponds to the “individual in conflict with himself”. In his words:
“The enthusiasm for these vacant spaces – expectant, imprecise, fluc-
tuating – transposed to the urban key, reflects our strangeness in front
of the world, in front of the city, before ourselves.” At the same time,
the terrain vague, in his view, embodies a promise. But he leaves open
two questions: for whom is it a promise and who, exactly, is “in con-
flict with himself?”
What Solà-Morales left out, I would argue, was the economic
side of the issue, as well as its historical context. In retrospect, we can
understand why he, as an architect, perceived the terrain vague as a
promise and why he saw his contemporaries as being in conflict with
themselves. During the boom years of the 1980s and early 1990s, all of
Europe was a construction site. Cities such as Paris, London, Berlin,
and Barcelona were recovering from the phase of deindustrialization
and recession. The transformation of huge vacant areas like the Parc
de la Villette in Paris, the Docklands in London, Potsdamer Platz
in Berlin, and the Parc Diagonal in Barcelona was the key issue of
architectural debate. It was an eldorado for architects. The vacant
lots were like gold mines, full of aesthetic and economic promise.
231
As competitions were held, architects understood that this might be
their last chance to influence the structure of the metropolis and keep
it from falling into the hands of real estate developers. (The urbanist
debacle of Postdamer Platz soon revealed just how legitimate was the
plea for architectural autonomy.)
Solà-Morales was well aware of the ambivalent role of architec-
ture, a practice whose “destiny has always been colonization, the im-
posing of limits, order and form” and which tends to destroy precisely
that cherished void by filling it in with built structures. But what he
wasn’t able to see was the role of photography in this process. To repre-
sent the city in the guise of the terrain vague does not imply an analysis
or a critique of the raw forces of capitalism, which drive the process
of urbanization. Rather, photography “naturalized” these forces and
turned them into an aesthetic phenomenon, an image, which could be
contemplated from a secure distance. Photography thus, without in-
tending to do so, was paving the way for the exploitation of the “void.”
Just as 19th-century landscape painters like William Turner aestheti-
cized the deadly potential of the ocean at the same time that the seas
were being domesticated by industry and commerce, so 20th-century
photographers such as Bernd and Hilla Becher aestheticized the raw-
ness of heavy industry in parallel to its domestication by the infor-
mation industry. These artists were, willingly or not, on the side of
those who profited from the process of transformation, whether it was
the 19th-century industrialists who exploited natural resources or the
postfordist entrepreneurs of the late 20th century who triumphed over
the primary sector. The aesthetic sublimation of the ruined industrial
zone veiled the power relations that were at play.
Just as the paintings of stormy seascapes produced a Natural
Sublime, the photography of the terrain vague produced an Industri-
al Sublime. But the question of whether these phenomena provide
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aesthetic pleasure depends entirely on the standpoint of the viewer.

Nature was anything but sublime for an early 19th-century farmer
who lost his job because the landlord had decided to raise sheep for
the new textile industry, and the terrain vague of a decaying Olympic
Park in our own present is anything but sublime for a young Greek
architect who is forced to emigrate in search of a job.
I would argue, then, that the terrain vague, in its ambivalent
position between void and promise, has roots in the aesthetic tradi-
tion of the Sublime. It sublimates aesthetically what is, at bottom, an
economic conflict. In fact, the crucial role of land ownership in the
history of capitalism has always been blurred. Karl Marx, in an early
note written in 1844, reflects on the romanticized notion of the sub-
ject’s identification with the terrain – and helps us to reflect on the
notion of the common heritage as well. In his view, this idea is rooted
in the feudal tradition, where the “feudal landed property gives its
name to its lord” and “individualizes the estate for him and makes it
literally his house, personifies it.” The personification of property, he
argues, also affects the relation of those working on the estate, who
“seem to be one with the land to which they belong.” In order to see
this relation clearly, it is necessary to abolish this romanticization.
It is essential that that which is the root of landed property

– filthy self-interest – make its appearance, too, in its cynical
form. It is essential that the immovable monopoly turn into
the mobile and restless monopoly, into competition; and that
the idle enjoyment of the products of other people’s blood and
sweat turn into a bustling commerce in the same commodity.
Lastly, it is essential that in this competition landed property,
in the form of capital, manifest its dominion over both the
working class and the proprietors themselves who are either
233
being ruined or raised by the laws governing the movement of
capital. The medieval proverb nulle terre sans seigneur is there-
by replaced by that other proverb, l’argent n’a pas de maître,
wherein is expressed the complete domination of dead matter
over man.
What Marx called for, namely the de-romantisization of the

identification of the subject and landlord with “his” land, corresponds
to Lara Almarcegui’s method of de-sublimating the terrain vague. In
her guides, we don’t simply encounter vanished wharves and decay-
ing huts; we also learn the fates of the people who lived and worked
there and were forced to leave. The images of decay offer visual pleas-
ure, they are picturesque, but they also offer real insight. In the aban-
doned village of Al Khan, where most of the ruined houses still bear
names, we hear about a “Pakistani grocer’s” and a place where “tea
was handed out to the taxi drivers in the morning.” In the Lea Valley,
we learn about a place where, for 42 years, an “ex-fireman and Royal
Navy veteran” had lived in an almost invisible house, before becom-
ing “the first person to be evicted as a result of the 2012 Olympic
plans, in 2007.” By precisely locating individual situations, the artist
cuts through the blurry surface of the sublime and collapses the aes-
thetic distance. She turns the terrain vague into a concrete site where
we can confront our own mirror image and come into sympathy with
our contemporaries. She introduces a human scale into the grandeur
of landscape depiction. She doesn’t simply exploit, doesn’t merely
confiscate data and images, but also symbolically gives something
back to those who have disappeared – for instance by writing down
the stories she collects from people, stories which otherwise would
have been forgotten.
Almarcegui’s guides propose an alternative to the colonialist
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perspective which is an inevitable feature of all travel and tourism

and which remains inherent in the relation to heritage. When Al-
marcegui conducts her readers through a ghost village near a boom-
town of the Gulf area, or through the wasteland of the suburbs of
Rome, those expeditions are closer to Robert Smithson’s excursions
than they are to, say, the 19th-century phenomenon of the bourgeois
flânerie or the 20th-century derive practiced by the Situationists. Both
those practices were more or less aimless drifts along the well-paved
streets of a smoothly functioning metropolis. Both, moreover, were
about consumption. Walter Benjamin makes this very clear when he
states: “The flâneur is the observer of the marketplace. His knowledge
is akin to the occult science of industrial fluctuations. He is a spy for
the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of the consumers.” Almar-
cegui’s guides lead us through dysfunctional zones, but they are highly
focused; they have much to tell us about production and labor and
the way things were once made. Their quasi-forensic, quasi-scientific
look refers playfully to disciplines such as geography, history, and ar-
cheology. They don’t try to conceal the discontinuous structure of the
sites and their history, but rather articulate that very discontinuity.
They don’t reduce the complexity of the facts into a narrative or an
image; instead they mediate, they confront us with issues that would
otherwise be difficult to see. They’re didactic in the sense of sharing
discoveries and laying their cards on the table. Viewed correctly, they
aren’t explanations; they’re manuals or tools. And they are an en-
couragement to act.
This leads me to back to our seminar week in Greece. How
can one prevent oneself from being a consumer of the heritage? How
can we prevent ourselves from exploiting the dimension of the his-
toric? This is a guiding question for all our field trips. From Athens
we travelled to Olympia. We did not only want to see the ruins of the
235
Antique site, but also re-enact the Activity Echo-Logy by the Amer-
ican artist Allan Kaprow. Echo-Logy was performed on the weekend
of May 3rd and 4th, 1975 by Kaprow with a group of participants in
the countryside in Far Hills, New Jersey. It was commissioned by a
Gallery. There was no audience. All that remains is a booklet with
the score and some photographs documenting the event.
1 carrying some downstream water

a distance upstream
bucket-by-bucket
pouring it into stream
transferring a mouthful of upstream water

a distance downstream
mouth-to-mouth
spitting it into the stream
2 sending a mouthed silent word

a distance upstream
person-by-person
saying it aloud to the trees
propelling a shouted word

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person-by-person
mouthing it to the sky
3 transporting a gas-soaked cloth

a distance upstream
(waving it gently in the air)
person-to-person
waving it gently until dry
carrying a bagged breath

each adding a breath
opening the bag to the wind
On the last page of the booklet, Kaprow explains the Activity,

stating that it is “concerned with natural processes. Water flowing
downstream is carried mechanically upstream, is dumped and flows
back. Some is lost among the way. More water is transferred down-
stream mouth-by-mouth, loses oxygen, is mixed with saliva and is
given back to the stream to be altered again.”
Today, only specialists know about Echo-Logy. It stands in the
shadow of Kaprow’s more spectacular Environments and Happenings
such as Yard, Household, or Calling, which made him famous in the
1960s. But Echo-Logy still resonates with crucial topics of our own
time, such as the issue of ecology, the limits of political action, the
topic of human labor and the issue of the common. The very title
237
raises the question of the relation between the past to the present,
and I therefore wanted to find out if this work of art is an art historical
document or something, which still is part of our own present.
On March 21, 2013, I reenacted Kaprow’s Activity Echo-Logy
together with my architecture students – our group was about 25 per-
sons – in small creek, just outside the Antique site of Olympia. The
reenactment lasted about an hour and took place in the afternoon.
We rehearsed the score and discussed how to solve certain details.
For instance, most participants were against the idea of literally ex-
changing the water mouth to mouth, and someone suggested that we
simply fill a cup of water and then pass along this cup by using only
the mouth. We had forgotten to bring gas with us, but since Greeks
are heavy smokers it was easy to find a refill for gasoline liters in the
nearby grocery shop. Two members of the group offered themselves to
document the activity with video and photo cameras.
During the reenactment, while I was waiting for the cup of
water to arrive, I had time to reflect on our field trip. By using the
metaphor of echo, we demonstrated our interest in the resonance
of the past in the present. We also referred to the antique legend of
Echo and Narcissus, known from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. After being
rejected by Narcissus, the water nymph Echo dissolves and remains
nothing but a voice without a body. Can one compare Europe to the
self-absorbed Narcissus and Greece to the rejected Echo, left to her
destiny? Would such a metaphor help us to locate our own position
within the field trip and help us see the change more clearly? The cup
arrived and I handed it over the next member of the group, eager not
to spill any water. Soon it would be poured into the stream, dissolved,
gone. The notion of entropy came to my mind. And I recalled what
we had seen and heard the other day in Athens, namely the loss of
the confidence in the future. Did our performance, standing in the
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cold water, eager not to slip, taking care of a tiny quantity of water,
mimic what was happening in the country on a much larger scale? Did
our action help to focus our view, would it lead to action, or would it
remain symbolic?
The next cup approached, and the students were giggling be-
cause it looked funny how I as their professor held it with my lips
and passed it on. The cup between the teeth, it became impossible to
speak. Echo came to my mind, the poor water nymph, who could only
mumble and mimic the sounds of what others said. Whose voices had
we heard during the trip? Was it observers from the North – includ-
ing ourselves – speaking about Greece, telling the Greek how to act?
Weren’t we just repeating what the politicians in the North were
saying and the newspapers echoed, namely that it was Greece’s own
fault? What about the voices of the Greeks? Everybody we met told
a different story, namely that they had done all right until the crisis
suddenly turned everything they had said and done into ruins. While
the group now started to send the whispered word from one to the
next, I remembered the muffled voices of the people in the streets,
mere shadows of the past, echoes of better days.
The plastic bag arrived, everyone adding a breath of air. The
bag inflated and the biggest fear was that it would deflate. Again, the
headlines of the newspapers came to mind, talking about deflation,
stagflation, withdrawn capital and the fate of the Euro. But next to
symbolizing the economy, the plastic bag containing our breath – psy-
che in Greek – also visualized how the group of students and teachers
had momentarily turned into a community. We had seen several such
optimistic communities in Athens. We met architects and designers
who reactivated a ruined office building in the old town of Athens,
we talked with the organizers of the Athens Biennale and made a
walk with the group Encounter Athens. What kind of community
239
were we? In the otherwise highly hierarchic realm of academe, we
had, at least for a brief time, acted as equal participants in a game.
Perhaps the students would remember this more than anything else,
perhaps it will resonate on the way they conceive their projects and
the people involved in architecture.
What kind of activity was our reenactment? And what was our
relation to the heritage? Were we producers, or consumers, actors or
observers? It reminded me of the concept of “immaterial labor” which
was developed among others by Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, and
Antonio Negri. According to Lazzarato, “immaterial labor involves
a series of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’ – in
other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing
cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and,
more strategically, public opinion. […] The split between conception
and execution, between labor and creativity, between author and au-
dience, is simultaneously transcended within the labor process and
reimposed as political command within the ‘process of valorization.”
Lazzarato’s definition reads like a description of Echo-Logy – both the
Activity performed in 1975 and our reenactment in 2013 – when he
states that immaterial labor “constitutes itself in forms that are im-
mediately collective, and we might say that it exists only in forms of
networks and flows.” The traditional separation between private life
and work dissolves, because the “fact that immaterial labor produces
subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how
capitalist production has invaded our lives and has broken down all
the oppositions among economy, power, and knowledge.” The par-
ticipants of Echo-Logy and the participants of the reenactment were
performing, so to speak, immaterial labor. Work and leisure, labor
and play blurred. My students, unlike myself, were not paid, on the
contrary, they had to pay a substantial contribution to the costs of the
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field trip. Together, we produced affects, social relations, networks,

experiences and to some extent corporeal proximity. But we also un-
dermined the process of immaterial labor and prevent our subjectivity
from being exploited. We constantly interrupted the productive cy-
cle by loss, misunderstanding, non-communication, non-sense. We
constituted subjectivity and immediately deconstructed it again. The
words were sent person-to-person, but too silent for us to hear and
then shouted “aloud to the trees” and thus, from the viewpoint of
productivity, wasted. The water was spat into the stream. The bagged
breath is “opened to the wind.” The movement was, as Kaprow had
put it in his text, always “back and forth.” Echo-Logy, as a work of
art in 1975 and as a reenactment in the realm of academe goes far
in accepting and articulating the current form of labor. But it also
demonstrates how difficult it is for capital to draw on values, which
are immediately shared and available to everyone for free. It is an
image for the precarious nature of the common, but also a manual of
how to strengthen and enlarge the common realm.
V
Henric Benesch
Future Echo-Logies

Lucia Allais and Philip Ursprung
i)
There are many accounts of the fate of Echo the nymph. One involves
the king and queen of the Greek pantheon – Zeus, the god of the
sky, thunder and lighting, known for his affairs with other women
– and Hera, the goddess of women, marriage and birth, known for
her resolute and vengeful way of dealing with Zeus shortcomings.
Another one involves an exceptionally proud and beautiful young man
named Narcissus, immortalized by Sigmund Freud, who made him
into a symbol of excessive love of oneself – narcissism.
They go like this:
1) Echo distracted Hera with her talk while Zeus had one of his
affairs. When Hera found out – Hera cursed her, leaving Echo only
being able to say what others just said.
2) Echo fell in love in Narcissus, who only loved himself. Waiting in

vain for him to respond to her love everything but her voice faded
away.
In both cases Echo is the symbolic and mythological vessel for the
sonic phenomena we call echo – a reflection of a sound arriving
243
at the listener some time after the direct sound. But at closer
examination, the two versions point at somewhat different although
connected characteristics of this particular phenomena. In the first
version – Echo being stuck in between Hera and Zeus – repetition
is stressed – Echo only being able to say what others just said.
Here the symbolic dimension is about Echo´s incapacity, lost in
love, to have a will of her own. It is about the reduction of (her)
agency. In the second version – Echo being left at Narcissus will –
it is all about fading and Echo being left only with her voice. Here
the symbolic dimension is about the loss of substance over time. It
is about the reduction of (her) body.
The notion of echo was indirectly brought to my mind by Philip

Ursprung and his re-enactment of Allan Kaprow “ECHO-LOGY” in
a creek outside the antique site of Olympia, that he described in his
paper. These connected yet separated aspects of the phenomena
echo – the loss of will and the loss of body – touches upon
something which is not only at the core of Lucia Allais and Philip
Ursprungs contributions but at the heart of the seminar-series in
full. I will do my best to in part debrief you about this particular
aspect and at the same time add my own voice to a long range of
excursions, comments and reflections.
Having said this I apologize for not reflecting upon Lucia´s and
Philip´s contributions in full. Instead I will practice a concept
introduced by Philip in the discussion following the presentation
– deixis – a linguistic concept that refers to words that cannot
fully be understood without additional information. That is words
or phrases that get their full meaning through their contexts. For
instance, words like “here”, “there”, “earlier” or “soon” does not
make sense in general but have to be fixed to a particular time
and place in order to make sense. And as such, the exercise you
now have before you, is to a large degree a deitic one, drawing
its meaning out a number of sources throughout seminars series,
some of which I have been able to pinpoint, whereas others, in a
more general sense, forms a larger context.
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V
ii)
Heritage is not my field. I´m an educated architect, with a PhD in

design and with the humble ambition to deinstrumentalize the way
space and place is dealt with when it comes to the actualization of
our shared spaces and places. As fuzzy as it may sound, this is still
my entry point to the realm of heritage – or more precisely to critical
heritage and the critical perspective on how the past is actualized
into the present. I´m saying this only to highlight the fact that I am
not a heritage scholar and that I, because of this, will deal with
heritage and critical heritage in particular, as a generic perspective
which you can apply on any field – as with the case of sustainability,
gender and so on – rather than heritage as subject matter of its
own.
The inquiry I am pursuing here, is besides Lucia´s and Philips

contribution, in particular fueled by the discussion that you find
in Session IV and the contributions from Stealth, Kim Trogal and
Dougald Hine (but also Session III). Among the many things
that were brought to the table was Peter Linebaugh´s notion of
“commoning” – stressing that every common needs a community
that cares for it. It is not far-fetched to conceptualize heritage
in the same way – namely that all kinds of heritage have to be
cared for by some kind of community that identifies it as heritage
and as something worthwhile caring for. In this sense we could
at least tentatively and for the lack of better worlds, talk about
this caretaking as “heritaging”. Not the act of making things into
heritage – or “heritagization” – but rather the act keeping the
heritage as heritage – of caring for heritage as heritage.
To think of heritage as an echo is to say the least – a cliché. Still, if

we take a closer look at heritage through the dualistic lens of echo
as presented here, the extrapolation of commoning into heritaging
becomes clearer. If we first view at heritage through the lens of
repetition / loss of agency – we can see heritage as a phenomena
which by means of various performances and techniques (i.e.
conservation) “repeats” that which are the key features and
245
characteristics of the heritage we set out to keep and protect. Here
we lend the heritage our agency (in order to compensate for its
lack of it). And secondly – looking through the lens of fading / loss
of body – a heritage which is note cared for (or loved as in the case
of Echo) – through acts of “repetition”, ultimately deteriorates, gets
lost in an entropic movement and at best becomes a shadow or
and echo of what it used to be.
What is particular important with Linebaughs contribution is that

he ultimately points at the reciprocal relation between commons
and commoning – that one is unthinkable without the other.
No common can be sustained by itself. And commoning needs
space, place and foci to be played out. But more importantly
– in perspective of heritage and heritaging – this reciprocity
has a dynamic character. The relation between commons and
commoning, or as in this case – heritage and heritaging – is not
fixed. Like any relation of care or love it is not only about keeping or
a preserving a status quo (what kind of love or care would that be).
It is about change and evolving together – in a respectful, loving
and reciprocal way. In other words – care and caring are not only
practices that change that which is cared for, but also, while doing
so, changes those who are doing the caring.
iii)
This reciprocity is also one of the key features in “Legible Pompeii”

the exhibition at the Annual architectural Venice biennale that is the
centrepiece of Lucia Allais contribution. The exhibition is comprised
of three parts 1)” What do we see when we visit Pompeii?”,
2) “What is Pompeii made of?”, and 3) “What makes Pompeii
desirable?”. The first part – that which is displayed, is not images
of Pompeii but a range of architectural conservation techniques
developed over the course of time at Pompeii – giving account to
Pompeii, as she writes, as a “global archaeological laboratory”. That
is Pompeii – not so much as an antique site – but as a driver of
heritage practices.
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V
The second part of the exhibition takes “What is Pompeii made

of?” very literary. Here the House of Sallust is showcased –
not as building but as agglomerate of a wide range of material
components such as: “36.1% limestone/lava mix; 17.7% pozzolana
(volcanic) mortar; 9.5% concrete mortar; 10.0% limestone/tufa mix;
7.3% Sarno limestone; 6.3% wood; 4.9% plaster; 2.2% reinforced
concrete; 2.1% terra cotta; 1.8% nocera tufa; 1.5% brick; 0.3%
travertine; 0.2% signinum paving; 0.1% aluminium; 0.1% pigment;
0.03% iron.” This “recipe” provides the basis for the exhibitions
third part “What makes Pompeii desirable?” where it is turned into
a thousand building blocks (made of resin) whereas 361 of them
contains limestone/lava mix and 1 of them contains aluminium and
so on. Together the blocks “recreate the proportions of the House
of Sallust” but, as she also states, they also are inclined to find
their ways into the pockets, bags and backpacks of the exhibition
visitors. Being, like the original site, gradually dispersed and
distributed throughout the world.
What we have here is not so much repetition as a reduced

version – an echo – of a “real” and richer phenomenon –
Pompeii, but rather a schoolbook example of the deleuzian
dictum – repetition is difference. With Deleuze repetition is not
a mechanistic doubling but an organic event – a becoming of
something slightly different. In the case with “Legible Pompeii”
– with the legend of restoration techniques (inherent but not
apparent for a wider audience), the secret formula (again
inherent but not apparent …) and finally, the re-enactment of
Pompeii´s millennia-long redistribution (remembered but not
experienced), it becomes clear how our care for Pompeii has
not been so much about keeping Pompeii but about changing
Pompeii (into a heritage) and in doing so changing our practices
and concepts as well . The exhibition showcases repetition, not
as mechanistic doubling or instrumental translating – but as
becoming-slightly different – as an opportunity and a act of care.
That is, as something to be explored and perhaps even in a more
artistic or curatorial sense – expanded.
247
iv)
This brings us back to an artist such as Allan Kaprow, brought to

our attention by Philip Ursprung, to which this understanding of
repetition as difference is nothing new but rather something at the
core of his practice. Going through the instructions for Kaprow´s
performance Echo-Logy (originally “carried out by a small group
of persons moving in the water of a stream in Far Hills, N.J. on the
weekend of May 3rd and 4th, 1975.”, and re-enacted by Philip
Ursprung and a group of architectural students in creek outside the
antique site of Olympia in March 2013), a quote by Heraclitus – the
ancient philosopher of change – comes to my mind: “No man ever
steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not
the same man.” In such a world, as envisioned by Heraclitus, but
also by Kaprow, there is no such thing as “repetition” – everything
is always – slightly different. The logic is even the reversed – the
“copy” is always “more” – and repetition is not an act of reduction.
It is rather, within this logic – an act of enrichment – where
Ursprungs re-enactment of Kaprow’s original performance is
not a lesser copy but a deeper expansion, stretching the original
performance into including more time, more sites and more
people. Following this heritage and commons, or heritaging and
commoning, would not be about mere keeping – but also about
enriching (in a careful way).
And when questioning, “What kind of activity was our re-

enactment? And what was our relation to the heritage? Were
we producers, or consumers, actors or observers?” Philip brings
us back to the logics of commons and the commons as sites of
reproduction and not only production – to the blurring of life and
work, of life and art, so rigorously separated by various market
forces throughout the past centuries. And is not the concept of
“immaterial labor” (as developed by Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo
Virno, and Antonio Negri) and as introduced to us by Philip as
“the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and
artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more
strategically, public opinion” – ultimately about acts of care which
248

V
brings us in direct dialogue with both commoning and heritaging

as something which “constitutes itself in forms that are immediately
collective” and which “exists only in forms of networks and flows”.
That is both commons and heritage as something that cannot be
fully accounted for nor fully capitalized by interests of production
(i.e. capitalism logics).
And in extension of this we might consider if not “heritaging” is a

particular form of commoning. A form of commoning replacing and
in part overarching those commoning practices of the past such
as: agistment: the right to let your livestock roam, herbage: the right
to pasture your livestock, pannage: the right to let your pig roam,
piscary: the right to take fish from a stream, pond etc., turbary:
there right to take peat, fuel for cooking – (just to name a few) – so
beautiful lined up by Kim Trogal in session V?
That is neither heritage nor commons are mere statics, an echo

of a past or a given order, but dynamic conduits, which enabled
by our care, also enables us to resist the hegemonic logic of
production. As such both these concept, one seemingly about
the past and the other one seemingly about the contemporary,
in the end are about the future to come. In such a perspective it
is urgent to acknowledge both commoning and heritaging (as
opposed to heritagization), not as acts of production but as acts of
reproduction and care – as, following Ursprung, Lazzarato, Virno
and Negri, acts of immaterial labor. Acts that give an impetus,
an echo, for others to (re-en)act upon, and care for in the future.
Because we know, keeping our Heraclitus in mind, that the river,
nor the wo/man, is never the same.
VI
Seminar
VI
Britt Baillie
Chiara de Cesari
Nina Gren
February
2014
253
254

VI
Britt Baillie
Heritage and the right/ the right to heritage
Heritage as Commons
Heritage is often regarded as a benevolent commons. Yet,

heritage is also at the core of conflicts about identity and territory.
Garrett Hardin (1968) argues that commons are dysfunctional and
unsustainable; suggesting that the only way to solve commons prob-
lems is for external authorities to impose full private property rights
or State regulation. He argued that when open access is established,
often as a consequence of the destruction of existing communal
land-tenure, the commons is subject to extreme degradation and
over use. This notion aligns with de Soto and Kasper who claim
that private property rights are the foundation of economic growth
(de Soto 2000; Kasper 2004). Implicit within this view is that ev-
er-increasing economic growth will lead to greater contentment,
happiness and possibly even a sustainable future. For many from
the Right, the perceived loss of private property rights to the State
leads to fear of what Kasper calls the Neo-Socialist Onslaught (Kasper
2004). Particularly in the current climate of recession, there has
255
been a fear from the Left that States would increase their privatiza-
tion of the heritage commons.
Elinor Ostrom seeks to disrupt some of Hardin’s presumptions
in her book, Governing the Commons (1990),in which she shows
that individuals can and often do devise ingenious and eminently
sensible ways to manage common commons for individual and col-
lective benefit. She defines communal property as held by an identi-
fiable community of interdependent users who are bound together
by ‘shared’ social norms which regulate their use of the commons.
Community is a difficult term to define in the commons context and
one that should be romanticised! These users often exclude outsiders
while regulating use by members of the community. However, the
process of heritageisation often puts these community users rights
at risk, as their commons are appropriated by politically or militarily
powerful groups, or impacted by other factors (such as rapid urban-
ization, land disputes, population growth, tourism) disrupt existing
communal management systems (Gonzales 2014). As heritage com-
mons traverse many communities and user groups they often require
more complex institutional structures, often involving government
coordination and enforcement than was required when the small or
‘close knit’ community retained control over the commons. If we
focus on those types of heritage which have tangible manifestations,
the most salient feature of this kind of commons is that their compo-
nents are under diverse property regimes—state, private, communal
or open access—both before and after heritageisation. When the
heritageisation process commences new types of users (tourists, her-
itage managers, commercial operations etc.), who did not use the
commons before, stake use claims (Briassoulis 2002). Heritage com-
mons can then become battlegrounds over different types of values
and uses.
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VI
Rights to Heritage
The question of rights to heritage is one that has recently res-

onated strongly amongst heritage scholars (Hodder 2010, Meskell
2010, Silverman & Ruggles 2007). Pejovich (1990) contends that
property rights are not physical things, but rather intangible relation-
ships between individuals surrounding scarce goods and their use. If
property is one person’s claim about something in relation to every-
body else’s claims about the same thing then property rights can be
broken down into various forms of ‘use rights’ including possession,
use, alienation, consumption, modification, destruction and manage-
ment. Recognition of communal rights over privately owned land
(such as the right to roam in the UK) are all based in recognition of
forms of property beyond liberal private property rights (Porter 2011).
The intangible and tacit qualities of heritage values mean that
they often are recognised only in the breach, absence or withdrawal.
When stakeholders feel that their ‘rights’ over the commons have
been violated, conflicts can erupt, in turn making transparent the
group’s assumed rights (Selsky & Memon 1997). The prevalence of
pluralistic, fragmented and shared-power contexts around heritage
commons creates complexity and uncertainty, and can cause acute
challenges. The more frequent or intense a particular use (e.g. tour-
ism) becomes, the more incompatible that use becomes with other
uses. Commons can suffer from ‘free riding’ when use is unrestricted,
investors are discouraged from improving or controlling their use or
from engaging in activities that would reduce overuse and destruction
of a given resource. Hence, resources can be overused and eventually
destroyed. However, public or community ownership (e.g. of power
stations) does not necessarily equate with universal public access. Al-
257
lowing universal access to heritage sites such as Lascaux or the Hal
Saflieni Hypogeum would endanger their microclimate ruining these
sites for future generations.
Particularly in developing countries, a strong preference for
conservation of the commons can be quite incompatible with a strong
preference for consumption or exploitation of the heritage commons.
Enforcing land use rules like zoning in the commons involves higher
administrative costs, less efficiency, less flexibility, and may lead to
unjust results for minority communities (such as gentrification (Fos-
ter 2011). Ostrom (1990) shows that overuse and conflict is likely to
occur where users act independently due to lack of communication or
inability to make credible commitments with other users.
In heritage, as with all commons, the issue of rights pertains
not only to contemporary rights, but also a consideration of intergen-
erational equity. For some communities, that this applies not only to
future generations who have the right to enjoy heritage in the man-
ner that people do in the present, but also to the past generations
who made the heritage and are entitled to be treated with respect
(in accordance with local tradition). If heritage is a public good, a
common, it begs the question of which public(s) should benefit from
it. To date, heritage has predominantly been in the preserve of the
economically and socio-politically powerful. Yet, a plethora of ideal
formulations for heritage now exist. One could suggest the greatest
good of the greatest number; inalienable rights; a wrong to one is a
wrong to all, or just insist that the State impose justice upon reckless
private interests (Harvey 2003: 940). Ideally, cultural heritage rights
should be based on ‘whether people are in practice able to participate
in sites and objects in such a way as to fulfil their capabilities, as long
as it also includes responsibilities to other communities with conflict-
ing interests.’ (Hodder 2010: 861). Implementing this in practice is
258

VI
often extremely difficult. In this context it is interesting to note that

heritage commons are increasingly being mobilised by the minority
as a vehicle for gaining community visibility and power (see e.g. De
Cesari 2008).
Heritage and the Right
The Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) (Smith 2006)

stems from a practice of preserving archaic monuments, which,
over time, have lost any divisive social meanings. It treats heritage
as—‘safely dead‘—valued for stable historic and aesthetic values.
However, many sites, objects and practices, which continue to have
contemporary use, do not fit well into this model. Therefore, groups
previously marginalised in the heritage management process are in-
creasingly pushing for heritage to be managed in tailored (as opposed
to one-size-fits-all), increasingly decentralised and inclusive fashions
which recognise more than just historical and aesthetic values as per-
ceived through the Western gaze. In other words, there has been a
shift away from ‘universal’ value to preservation for universal benefit.
The Getty Conservation Institute’s Values Based Approach
(VBA) to heritage management (Avrami, Mason & de la Torre 2000)
has sought to give local communities more of a role in heritage deci-
sion-making processes. Unlike the AHD, which employed the seem-
ingly stable norms of ‘masterpiece’, ‘intrinsic value’ and ‘authenticity’
to dictate what qualified as ‘heritage‘ or cultural property, the VBA is
based on the premise that values are not inherent in the monument,
but rather ascribed to it by its stakeholders (see also Smith 2006).
How and who defines what constitutes a ‘community’ or ‘stakehold-
259
er’ and which community/stakeholder’s rights trump another’s are
amongst the most difficult questions facing the field today. Demas
(2002:48) notes ‘while it is useful and frequently necessary to bring in
consultants, partners and collaborators... [in the VBA] there must be
one lead authority that coordinates all the efforts’. Though in theory
conservation professionals may be seen as one of the ‘stakeholder’
groups (under the supervision of the managing authority), in practice
they are the managing authorities themselves (supervising stakehold-
er groups) (Poulios 2010:174). In cases of conflicting values, which
result in disagreements between different stakeholder groups, the
VBA does not provide sufficient criteria and ways to set priorities
between them and indicate which ones to choose or favour.
In the VBA, all stakeholders can claim equal footing in deci-
sion-making. This stance leaves the door open for the possible misuse
of heritage by extremist groups. In addition, the ultra-relativism of
this model runs a risk of potentially devaluing the ownership rights
of descendant or ‘owner’ communities—as their status is in effect
‘reduced’ to equalise them with other stakeholders. Furthermore, the
concept of participation in the VBA has been criticized for being de-
signed to reflect the procedural requirements for heritage institutions
rather than to ensure genuine community participation. In the case
of conflict between differing stakeholders and between alternative
values, as is usually the case, the VBA gives heritage managers the
final say (Baillie 2013a). Back, that is, to the old AHD.
Perhaps Bell and Parmochovsky’s ‘anti-property easement’
scheme (2003), in which community members are vested with a for-
mal, but limited, legal entitlement to veto certain uses of the com-
mons is a more meaningful way to prioritise the needs of different
stakeholders in certain contexts. However, ‘insider’ group norms are
designed to maximise group welfare and do so at the expense, or ex-
260

VI
clusion, of non-group members. In turn, this can reify differences be-

tween the in and out group and entrenchment of the ‘insider’ group’s
power resulting in what Brigham Daniels calls the threat of ‘commons
cartels’ (see Foster 2011).
When control of heritage falls into the hands of the far-Right
ultra-nationalists, the recognition of multiple use values by plural
groups is rejected. The commons, possible sites of cultural agonism,
are often seized and placed under the homogenous control of the ‘in’
group. Those heritage commons, which do not fit the desired narra-
tive are retrospectively (ethnically) cleansed, destroyed, neglected
or neutralised. Heritage becomes a vehicle through which to express
territorial domination and to define new boundaries (Baillie 2013b).
The Right take it upon themselves to define what is universally val-
uable to conserve.
A fear of privatisation has dominated recent discussions of
commons. In this contribution, I argue that a pluralism of ownership
models can be positive. Indeed, often this pluralism leads to new and
innovative uses of the commons. Current heritage models fail be-
cause they often try to impose a one-size-fits all approach on the vast
diversity of heritage commons. Plural tailored community property
systems, which try to prioritise stakeholder and community needs
over a particular form of common, may have greater success. The real
danger to heritage as commons is when a particular group (in this case
I have highlighted the far Right) seek to monopolize the commons.
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VI
Chiara de Cesari
Heritage as Commons:
A Paradigm Shift?
There is an emerging trend in critical heritage studies to re-

think heritage as commons—a trend well exemplified by this seminar
series and book. This approach has clear analytic purchase, especially
given its potential to illuminate ongoing processes of commodifica-
tion and privatization of heritage, as well as heritage’s important role
in the context of the post-industrial economy and cultural capitalism
(see Yudice 2003). Building on this emerging trend, in this paper I
will reflect on ‘heritage-as-commons’ from an unusual perspective,
namely, the one offered by my long-term study of Palestinian heritage
in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Here, I will make
three related points: 1) there is a new emphasis on sharing heritage
in critical heritage studies and practice, as signaled by the ubiquity
of references to community and participatory heritage; however, 2)
these buzzwords, when put in practice, do not have a stable or pre-
determined meaning. This suggests that 3) heritage can be mobilized
both to defend and to enclose or privatize the commons: crucially,
there are different kinds of commons, and the making of a commons
can itself be a kind of enclosure, and produce the dispossession or
alienation of another commons.
265
Let me first introduce some recent discussions of heritage as
commons. For long, heritage scholars have worked on the basis of the
assumption that “simply, all heritage is someone’s heritage and inevi-
tably not someone else’s. … [Thus] one person’s heritage is the disin-
heritance of another” (Graham, Ashworth, and Tunbridge 2000: 93).
However, such understanding of heritage as property is increasingly
seen as the product of a form of Western hegemony in heritage (e.g.,
Byrne 1991) and of the dominance of a rather Eurocentric “author-
ized heritage discourse” (Smith 2006). Moving away from it, several
scholars have recently argued for a different notion of heritage as
common good, for understandings of heritage as something funda-
mentally shared among people (see Harrison 2013) or as something
created from within a web of entanglements, among humans but also
things (Hodder 2012). There is a growing sense that if you take away
the sharing of heritage, then the heritage of heritage, so to speak, the
core of the heritage, will fade away, leaving in its place just a reified,
commodified simulacrum of the resource itself, a sanitized heritage
deprived of its organic life as part of a living community (see, e.g.,
Collins 2008).
Not having the space to delve deep into this broader theoret-
ical shift, I will only briefly mention here some of its key dimension:
1) the ‘discovery’ of intangible heritage and its institutionalization
(e.g., at World Heritage level); 2) the growing visibility of other tra-
ditions of “past presencing”—to use Sharon Macdonald’s (2013) apt
term—and of non-Western, non-materialistic, and alternative ap-
proaches to heritage characterized by ethics of care as opposed to
ownership (see Byrne 2014); and 3) the failures and problems of both
private and public heritage management. Moreover, this new trends
in heritage studies should be situated within broader theoretical and
political constellations, shaped by post-Marxist thinking à la Hardt
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and Negri (2009) as well as concrete struggles over common spaces

and resources from Occupy to the Creative Commons movement.
Recently, Istanbul’s Gezi Park protesters went to the streets to defend
a piece of shared heritage, the park, against plans of the government
to replace it with a shopping mall and luxury residences to be housed
in a replica of the 19th century Ottoman barracks that had once stood
there. It is indeed the growth and visibility of struggles and protest
movements over heritage as commons that forced heritage studies to
confront heritage’s ambivalent role.
A recent discussion of heritage as commons is offered by Pablo
Alonso Gonzalez (2014), who theorizes heritage’s enclosure and the
capturing of the benefits of this common resource by private actors
as an important feature of cognitive capitalism. For Alonso Gonza-
lez, the privatization of heritage and its commodification/reification
necessarily entails its alienation from the original community of com-
mon ‘owners’ and thus the destruction of heritage and the shattering
of local communities. Already a few years back, Michael Herzfeld
(e.g., 2006, 2010) has talked about the uncomfortable relationship
between heritagization and the gentrification of historic urban areas
under neoliberalism, producing radical shifts in urban social geogra-
phies (the eviction of the former residents of newly heritagized and
gentrified neighborhoods) but also heritage destruction, namely, the
obliteration of the organic, living heritage of these neighborhoods
(see De Cesari and Herzfeld, forthcoming).
What is probably the most forceful statement in favor of view-
ing heritage as commons and the commons as precious heritage we
have a duty, as citizens, to defend, is the recent work of Italian classics
professor and public intellectual Salvatore Settis. Settis’s writings on
the commons is often in the mode of the manifesto, and originated
from his earlier scathing critique of the ongoing privatization and
267
related degradation of heritage that he sees as key development in
contemporary Italian politics—a critique which can be applied to
broader global trends beyond Italy. In his more recent books, and
especially in Azione popolare (Popular Action, 2012), he has devel-
oped a vision of heritage as common good and as critical site for the
exercise of citizenship rights today. Linking heritage to other strug-
gles around common resources such as water, Settis criticizes the Ital-
ian public management which in his view has basically facilitated
heritage’s enclosure and the capturing of its profits by private agents,
thus leading to its destruction. He pieces together a wealth of prolifer-
ating local initiatives—by actors such as civic committees and small
NGOs and associations—to protect heritage and the environment,
into a broader picture of citizens getting together and self-organizing
outside of traditional political structures to claim what David Har-
vey (2006) has called the “right to the city,” that is, citizens’ rights
to their living environments, to well being and also to heritage. For
Settis (2011), “the landscape, and the territory (however defined)
are a common good, with respect to which all of us—individually and
collectively—possess not only a passive right of use, but an active
right and duty to protect and defend. The community of citizens as a
whole … is in this sense a plural subject” (original emphases). Such
rights and duties coalesce into what Settis calls “popular action,” a
notion he takes from an institution of ancient Roman law “granting
citizens the ability to assert the claims of the public interest and the
common good, even when the State keeps silent.”
The Palestinian heritage organizations I have worked with
in the last decade interestingly illustrate such a popular action, be-
ing largely independent of (and often conflicting with) the current
Palestinian quasi- or proto-state, the Palestinian Authority (PA).1
The latter is an infrastructure of self-government established by the
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VI
so-called peace process in 1994 in those parts of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip from which Israel had withdrawn. In the past two decades,
heritage initiatives targeting the restoration and social reuse of the
urban heritage have been proliferating in Palestine, particularly in
the West Bank. Using funding from international donors, Palestinian
cultural heritage organizations, both NGOs and semi-governmental
organizations, have managed to restore and repopulate large areas in
the historic centers of the most important West Bank towns—in Jeru-
salem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah—and in an increasing number
of villages. In this respect these organizations are achieving much
better results than their ‘state’ counterparts at the Ministry of Cul-
ture and the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of the PA. Caught
between an outdated colonial legal framework and a substantial ina-
bility to enforce regulations under a patchwork sovereignty, the PA’s
agencies often cannot compete with the flexibility and dedication of
the NGOs.
Because of the failure of the peace process, the PA never de-
veloped into an independent state, and a peculiar mix of colonial
and neo-colonial power arrangements applies to the Palestinian ter-
ritories today. Therefore, the use of terms such as ‘state’ or ‘NGO’ in
this context could be condemned as meaningless or as obscuring the
reality of a continued occupation. Yet, in spite of its fundamental
powerlessness, the PA both looks and tries to act like a state—an
authoritarian one at times—and many people working in these her-
itage organizations not only identify themselves as members of the
Palestinian civil society but often clash with PA agents. Their vision
is one of committed citizens involved in the process of building up
from below the cultural infrastructure of the future state-to-come,
often in open antagonism to an increasingly delegitimized PA. The
strength of the Palestinian ‘civil society’ has thus produced a kind of
269
decentralized heritage management; however, the extent to which
these organizations represent their communities and constituencies
is a matter of debate.
Ultimately, Palestinian heritage organizations defend Pales-
tinian rights to the most important national common good, the land,
and to the “vanishing landscape” (Shehadeh 2007) of historic Pales-
tine, which are claimed daily by the ongoing Israeli colonization. In
the Old City of Jerusalem as in Hebron, the struggle is more immedi-
ate and pressing due to the aggressive presence and growing pressure
of Israeli settlers eager to colonize the area around two key religious
monuments at the heart of the conflict, the Haram al-Sharif/Temple
Mount and the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs. In both
cases, the restoration of large tracts of the ruined inner cities has
allowed several thousand Palestinians to return to live there, and has
hindered the further expansion of Israeli settlements. Therefore, by
preserving the historical Arab-Islamic character of the urban fabric
of Jerusalem and Hebron, heritage organizations help maintain these
cities’ ‘Palestinianness’ in heritage but also demographic terms. Also,
particularly in Hebron, the local heritage organization basically func-
tions as a social housing body, assigning the restored houses to im-
poverished families for a token rent and providing them with health,
legal, and social services.
To conclude, I would like to introduce a note of caution into
what I see as a rather celebratory tone in writings on heritage as com-
mons, heritage and community, and participatory heritage (see also
Waterton and Smith 2011). I have written about the ways in which
the Palestinian ‘heritage by NGOs’ works as a technique of govern-
mentality (De Cesari 2010, 2011) with heritage organizations carry-
ing out a variety of functions traditionally associated with the state—
thus pointing at the blurred boundary between involving people and
270

VI
governing them. Beyond Palestine, several scholars have emphasized

how different forms of self-management and community participa-
tion are key to the neoliberal restructuring of governance that took
place in the last decades, with the growing devolution of govern-
mental functions to civil society organizations (e.g., Ferguson 2010;
Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Miller and Rose 2008). Recent studies of
urban community organizing, in particular, have shown that “[w]e …
assume that expanding participation can be a source of democratic
renewal, social solidarity, and better decisions. Of course, some kinds
of participation can effect these changes, but other types do not do
anything of the sort, and, in fact, participation can simply reinforce
hierarchies, discipline public behavior into noncontroversial dia-
logue, and undermine social solidarity. Simply put, participation has
no inherent content. Different participatory technologies produce
different effects, and our conceptual and analytical efforts should be
directed at the question of what types of participation are desirable
and what effects we value” (McQuarrie 2013: 169).
A ‘participatory’ heritage can be mobilized to produce differ-
ent kinds of commons, but also to enclose them and to deprive a dis-
enfranchised community of homes, livelihoods, as well as their tan-
gible and intangible heritage. In Palestine/Israel, for example, both
the Israeli state and a vocal sector of its ‘civil society,’ namely, the
settlers, have widely used heritage and archaeology in their national-
ist-colonial project of land appropriation (Abu El-Haj 2001). What is
striking is that the settlers have claimed heritage as (their) commons,
and have produced manifold examples of collectivist management of
heritage—always at the cost of Palestinian dispossession. In occupied
East Jerusalem, the City of David represents such a case: this is an
archaeological park run by a self-declared non-profit organization of
settlers who have taken over Palestinian lands and now live right
271
amidst the ruins they help excavate and manage. Here, we see one
ethno-nationally-marked ‘civil society’ managing archaeological and
land resources in common while excluding another group with very
legitimate rights from their use and benefits. What kind of commons
is the one promoted by the City of David’s settler group?

VI
References
Abu El-Haj, N. (2001). Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice

and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Alonso Gonzalez, P. (2014). From a Given to a Construct: Heritage as
Commons. Cultural Studies, 28(3): 359–390.
Byrne, D. (1991). Western Hegemony in Archaeological Heritage
Management. History and Anthropology, 5:269–276.
Byrne, D. (2014). Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage
Conservation in Asia. New York: Routledge.
Collins, J. (2008). “But What if I Should Need to Defecate in your
Neighborhood, Madame?” Empire, Redemption, and the “Tradition of the
Oppressed” in a Brazilian World Heritage Site. Cultural Anthropology,
23(2):279–328.
De Cesari, C. (2010). Creative Heritage: Palestinian Heritage NGOs and
Defiant Arts of Government. American Anthropologist, 112(4):625–637.
De Cesari, C. (2011). Cultural Governmentality: Government through
Heritage Conservation in Old Hebron. Conflict in Cities Working Papers
Series n. 23. Online: http://www.conflictincities.org/workingpapers.html
(retrieved: 16 May 2014).
De Cesari, C & Herzfeld, M. (2015). Urban Heritage and Social
Movements. In: Meskell, L. (ed.), Global Heritage: A Reader. Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Ferguson, J. (2010). The Uses of Neoliberalism. Antipode, 41(1):166–
184.
Ferguson, J. & Gupta, A. (2002). Spatializing States: Toward an
Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality. American Ethnologist,
29(4):981–1002.
Graham, B, Ashworth, G. J. & Tunbridge, J. E. (2000). A Geography of
Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy. London: Arnold.
Hardt, M & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Harrison, R. (2013). Heritage: Critical Approaches. London: Routledge.
Harvey, D. (2006). The Right to the City. In: Scholar, R. (ed.), Divided
Cities: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2003. Oxford: Oxford University
273
Press, pp. 83–103.
Herzfeld, M. (2006). Spatial Cleansing: Monumental Vacuity and the Idea
of the West. Journal of Material Culture, 11:127–149.
Herzfeld, M. (2010). Engagement, Gentrification, and the Neoliberal
Hijacking of History. Current Anthropology, 51(S2):252–267.
Hodder, I. (2012). Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships
Between Humans and Things. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
MacDonald, S. (2013). Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe
Today. London: Routledge.
McQuarrie, M. (2013). No Contest: Participatory Technologies and the
Transformation of Urban Authority. Public Culture, 25(1):143–175.
Miller, P. & Rose, N. (2008). Governing the Present: Administering
Economic, Social and Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Settis, S. (2011). We the Citizens: English translation of chapter 7 of
Paesaggio, Costituzione, cemento: la battaglia per l’ambiente contro il
degrado civile (Einaudi, 2010). California Italian Studies, 2(1). Online:
http://128.48.120.176/uc/item/7c90g6dp (retrieved: 16 May 2014).
Settis, S. (2012). Azione Popolare: Cittadini per il bene commune. Torino:
Einaudi.
Shehadeh, R. (2007). Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape.
London: Profile.
Smith, L. (2006). Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge.
Waterton, E. & Smith, L. (2011). The Recognition and the Misrecognition
of Community Heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies,
16(1–2):4–15.
Yúdice, George (2003). The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the
Global Era. Durham: Duke University Press.
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VI
Note
1. An earlier version of this section has been originally published in my article

(2011), Heritage by NGOs: Why Heritage Restoration Makes Sense
Under Occupation, Anthropology News, 52(7), October: 15–17. Online:
www.anthropology-news.org. I thank the American Anthropological
Association for granting permission to reuse this material.
275
VI
Nina Gren
The Significance of Power, Citizenship and Trust
– A Comment on Heritage as Commons
/Commons as Heritage

Britt Baille and Chiara De Cesar
As a social anthropologist whose main field research has been

carried out in the Palestinian territories, what first came to my mind
when I was invited to this seminar about Heritage as Commons/
Commons as Heritage was indeed the many conflicts over
archaeological and religious sites, food items, interior decoration,
traditions, landscapes and social memory in that particular context.
However, I found out that these are not always considered the main
issues of conflict in the Israeli-Palestinian setting, but they remain
important in people’s everyday lives and continue to be acted
upon to dominate or annoy ‘them’ as much as to strengthen ‘us’.
Heritage reminds me of diverse incidences during my fieldwork.
For example, it reminds of occasions when Palestinians with either
despair or anger in their voices lashed out about the attempts of
Israelis to re-fashion falafel to an Israeli national dish, or to deny the
Palestinians access to Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem, or, even worse,
to undermine the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem by underground
archaeological excavations. At the same time, my interlocutors also
offered numerous evidences about their own Palestinian – not only
endangered but also ‘authentic’ – heritage. The desperation in their
accounts points at the seriousness of heritage in many situations
of conflict and war. Can “Heritage as Commons/Commons as
Heritage” be a viable way forward also in situations of war and
conflicts? It seems that the trend to re-conceptualise heritage as
277
“commons” opens up for new possibilities as well as new zones of
tension.
Here, I would like to discuss three main issues in relation to the

papers by Baillie and De Cesari. These are power, statelessness/
citizenship and trust. First, both papers evoke issues of power
and control. The question that came to my mind was who the
stakeholders are in the specific cases discussed. Who decides
on who can be a stakeholder and who is not a stakeholder?
Can stakeholders be self-defined or is it decided on basis of the
“traditional use” of the commons? I will take the example the Old
City of Jerusalem to clarify my questions. The Old City of Jerusalem
is a World Heritage Site according to UNESCO. As part of
its heritagization, this makes every human being a stakeholder.
However, as I understand Elinor Ostrom (1990), who takes an
anti-state and anti-centralistic stance, commons work best if they
are in local control within a small community. If Ostrom is right,
the recognition of world heritage sites as commons might be
impossible.
So let us instead say that every citizen holds a stake in the Old
City. In the case of Israel/Palestine, many people are still without
citizenship, i.e. the international law sees them as stateless.
That every citizen holds a stake in Jerusalem would thus not be
a fair solution (if we consider fairness important) -at least not as
long as “Palestine” is not an independent state. In other cases,
some citizens may be marginalized or treated as second-class
citizens, lacking political influence and resources due to poverty,
ethnicity, gender, etc. This leaves us with a third possibility that
sees stakeholders as “the locals”. But where are the boundaries
of the locals? Are the locals those people who currently live in
the Old City of Jerusalem or in the entire city of Jerusalem? For
how long does one need to live in a place to become a local? Can
international people who live in the Old City of Jerusalem, such as
monks and nuns, be regarded as locals? Are the Palestinians who
originally come from the Old City of Jerusalem but who have been
displaced by Israel to other parts of the city or to foreign countries
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VI
part of the locals? Are, for instance, the American Jews who made
“aliya” to the Old City of Jerusalem and settled there to be called
locals? Who defines the locals and their roles in relation to the
commons are indeed significant questions. Maybe we should avoid
referring to individuals and families as stakeholders and instead
discuss the right of collectivities based on religion, organization,
profession etc. In addition, we may need to ask what the role of
“conservation professionals” (for instance UNESCO, NGOs or
state authorities) is; are they stakeholders or do they supervise
stakeholder groups?
It is also more than likely that there are different opinions and power
discrepancies within a particular group of stakeholders. In the case
of Israel-Palestine, Jewish Israelis may have different interests as
well as lack of interest in particular Jewish heritages. For instance,
some Orthodox Jewish groups refuse to pray at the Wailing Wall,
which most Jews see as part of their religious and cultural heritage,
since that would be blasphemy before Messiah arrives and the
“true Israel” is established.
In sum, it seems important, both for critical heritage researchers

and practitioners, to analytically discuss influence and conflicting
interests as to fully understand power struggles and power
asymmetries in relation to a particular heritage. There are many
different scholarly approaches to power struggles and definitions
of power (e.g. Bourdieu 1991; Comaroff 1985; Foucault 1981;
Giddens 1981; Gramsci 1971; Guha & Spivak 1988). The
most important is not which definition or approach we use when
examining power in relation to “Heritage as Commons/Commons
as Heritage”, but that issues of dominance and subordination is
taken into account. We need to be aware that heritage might be
used both as a “protective shield” or resistance against dominant
groups, and as a “means of power” against oppressed groups.
Now to my second point: statelessness and state-building. As

I wrote above, statelessness can also be a crucial issue in the
management of commons in contexts where citizenship determines
279
who is a “rights-owner”. How can rights and duties in relation to
heritage be taken into account among non-citizens? In her paper,
De Cesari refers to Salvatore Setti who states that citizens both
hold rights and have duties in relation to heritage. These are indeed
intriguing thoughts, although Setti’s argument may be most relevant
to a European context with strong and well-established states. De
Cesari describes the Palestinians who work for NGOs to protect
heritage (in this case Palestinian old city centres) as acting as
“a kind of citizens”. This enactment of citizenship is interesting
and may complicate the way we think about state-building. Is
it even possible to establish a state (pictured in the long-run)
if its’ non-citizens perform as if the state already existed? Or is
such performance “as if the state already existed” beneficial and
enforcing actual statehood?
My third point refers to the issue of trust. It seems that the

commons depends on issues of trust to function successfully.
Trust carries connotations of honouring moral obligations and
implies respect of each other’s integrity. It may be defined as the
reciprocal belief that one’s interest would be taken into account,
that “the other” or others will respect agreements. However,
long-term conflicts, either violent or non-violent, tend to destabilize
social relations and divide communities. As anthropological studies
have noted, in some circumstances of violence and war, fear and
mistrust even cease to be acute response to danger and become
a more or less chronic condition of social life (e.g. Green 1995;
Dickson-Gómez 2003). Individuals’ and communities’ basic trust
– belief in the reliability of others – may dissolve after the ordeals
of war and political violence. Another concept closely related to
trust is political legitimacy. The latter refers to the trust people
have in their state’s administrative, political and legal systems.
Heritage may need a minimum of control mechanisms (either the
control is held by a municipality, an NGO, a ministry or UNESCO)
for its management to be considered legitimate. Does trust, or
at least a minimum of trust, need to be established between
different significant stakeholders before heritage can be treated
as commons? In other word, should trust, as an inter-relational
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VI
process, be in place before starting up a commons? Or is it

possible that a sense of trust emerges while treating a particular
heritage as a commons? Maybe it is not a question of either/or.
Finally, although the issues brought up here might complicate the
treatment of Heritage as Commons/Commons as Heritage, it is
still a fruitful way to approach heritage and to do research within
critical heritage studies. Social scientists might also benefit from
interdisciplinary collaboration with their research fellows who study
commons within the field of engineering and natural science.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Comaroff, J. (1985). Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South
African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dickson-Gómez, J. (2003). Growing Up in Guerilla Camps: The Long-Term Impact of being a
Child Soldier in El Salvador’s Civil War. Ethos, 30(4):327–356.
Foucault, M. (1981). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin
Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books.
Giddens, A. (1981). A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism Vol. 1: Power,
Property, and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin
Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Guha, R. & Spivak, G. C. (eds.) (1988). Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Green, L. (1995). Living in a State of Fear. In: Nordstrom, C. & Robben, A. C. G. M. (eds.),
Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective
Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Seminar
VI I
Feras Hammami
Evren Uzer
Sybille Frank
September
2014
285
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VI I
Feras Hammami
New commons and new heritage:

negotiating presence and security
After a long history of occupation, the State of Israel and the

Palestine Liberation Organisation decided in 1993 to initiate a period
of peace, through which they could negotiate an independent state
for Palestinians. Many foreign governments also agreed to support the
restoration of Palestine through the implementation of various infra-
structure projects and capacity building programs. The French Consu-
late General in Jerusalem has implemented a policy of cooperation in
the Palestinian Territories in respect to the fields of education, culture,
economy and finance, health, and humanitarian aid. During this pe-
riod of peace, the French Consulate founded four cultural centres in
the West Bank to promote cultural exchange through art exhibitions,
lectures, musical events, and language teaching programs. In February
1997, the French Cultural Centre in the city of Nablus invited the
artist Fleur-Marie Fuentes to use Art as a means to encourage cultural
exchange. After spending one week walking around the city (Figure
1) and listening to the stories of its inhabitants, Fuentes ‘felt how peo-
ple live with depressing and traumatic memories from the British Mandate
[1927-1948] and the Israeli Occupation [1948-present] … and therefore
decided to find a public space as a common ground for her project based on
287
hope and cultural exchange’ (Fuentes, in Assi, 2008: 7–8). She decided to
place a painting, titled ‘Return of Storks’, on the façade of Abdel Majid
Al-Sehany’s olive-oil soap factory facing the public square called Sahet
Al-Qaryoun, which is located in the Historic City of Nablus (HCN).
Fig. 1
A general view of the Historic City of Nablus.
Source: Author.
About four thousand years ago the city of Nablus was a Ca-
naanite settlement. The Romans re-founded the city in 72 AD, and
it was re-built several times in the following centuries by the Byzan-
tines, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and finally came to assume its
contemporary layout and appearance. Its long history as shaped by
these transient civilisations can be felt and observed in the stones,
alleys and the diverse spaces of the city. Today, the Ottoman archi-
tectural style dominates the general appearance of the city, as well as
its diverse religious, commercial, and administrative buildings and
public spaces. Walking through the city also allows the visitor to en-
gage with diverse forms of social and political gatherings, in addition
to economic and cultural activities (Figures 2–3).
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VI I
Fig. 2 & 3
Glimpses from everyday life in the HCN.
Source: Author.
The recent history of the HCN has been marked by rebellion

and invasion, particularly since the Arab revolt in Palestine (1936-
1939). The attempts of the British and Israeli forces to damage the
HCN have always faced solid resistance from diverse community
groups. Some of these groups are associated with political parties,
while others have been formed by ordinary residents from the HCN
and other places within the broader City of Nablus. The continuous
military incursions and resistance activities have contributed to de-
veloping a local culture of resistance in the HCN (Hammami 2012).
This became most evident during the First Intifada (Uprising against
the occupation 1987-1993) due to the intensified military incursions.
The different parts of the HCN tell stories of resistance to the strate-
289
gic targeting of material witnesses on the Palestinian presence, histo-
ries and collective experiences.
Al-Qaryoun Square has always been one of the significant
public spaces for the mobilisation of resistance. People used to gather
in the square for a common political cause, or for the commemoration
of their losses, locally revered as martyrs. For example, every time the
military forces invade the HCN, causing damage to its different areas,
the residents of the Al-Qaryoun neighbourhood would wake up in the
morning and gather in the Square in order to tell stories about their
experiences from the night before, to mobilise communal support for
healing, and to commemorate their martyrs. In addition to this polit-
ical significance, the Square has also formed a vital node in the social
and cultural networks of the city. Religious ceremonies, weddings,
Ramadan, and other cultural activities are some examples of the kind
of social and cultural activities that have always taken place in the
Square. These diverse activities have materialised through specific
relationships between the local community and the diverse socio-po-
litical and spatial spaces of the Square. Through these relationships
people attach diverse meanings and values to the Square beyond any
conventional valuation of its role as a public space.
Fuentes’s choice of the Square was influenced by her French
style of contemporary public art. She conceived the public spaces as
a platform through which she could use her art to communicate with
the public. To prepare the Square for the artwork of Fuentes, the Mu-
nicipality of Nablus repaired and plastered the external façades of the
factory facing the square. As the painting progressed, the residents of
the Al-Qaryoun Neighbourhood gradually realized what the painting
represented: a ‘local’ woman freely drying her washed clothes in an
open space with a clear blue sky and storks in the background (Figure
4). Inspired by the spring migration of white storks that the artist
290

VI I
had witnessed in Nablus, the painting symbolized the return of life to

the city after a long history of occupation and destruction. The de-
piction of the local woman who freely dries her clothes in the public
space was meant to signal the end of fear and the arrival of peace.
The fact that several olive oil soap factories are located around the
square, as well as the traditional use of olive oil soap for washing, also
underlay the artist’s choice of clothes-on-cables. In fact, olive trees
embrace religious and cultural symbolic values in Palestine, while
the olive oil soap constitute the city’s cultural identity and significant
part of its economy (Bontemps, 2012). Using these inspirations, the
French artist conceived her painting, and after four months of daily
work Fuentes completed her artwork. The French Cultural Centre,
together with representatives of the local government, inaugurated
the painting to officially make it part of everyday life.
Fig. 4
Sahet Al-Qaryoun, showing the painting.
Source: Assi (2008).
291
The message of hope that the artist emphasised through dis-
playing the painting in public and during the period of peace turned
the painting into a ‘testimonial art’ piece. The Return of Storks
resonated with people’s everyday life, creating a new affective en-
vironment that helped residents and ‘visitors’ alike to feel positive
about the future of the city. In this sense, it worked to enhance a new
common interest among the public that served to contribute to the
restoration of the city towards a better future. After the implementa-
tion of several internationally financed projects the message of hope
spread widely in the city, encouraging former residents and property
owners to return to the HCN from elsewhere in Palestine, and from
the surrounding region. They were encouraged to take part in the
rehabilitation of the city and the renovation of their own properties.
In this sense, the placement of the painting played an important role
in the reconstruction of the commons in the Al-Qaryoun Square.
With the outbreak of the Second Intifada on 28 September in
2000, the Israeli occupying forces caused extensive damage in many
areas of the Palestinian Territories as part of Operation Defence
Shield. In April 2002, these forces entered the HCN, damaging many
buildings, alleys and public spaces, and forcing many families to leave
their homes. During the first eighteen days of round-the-clock bom-
bardments, ‘184 people were martyred and 917 injured’ (UN 2005:
2–3). Most of the renovation work and restorations that had been
carried out during the period of peace were directly affected, includ-
ing the Al-Qaryoun Square. The destruction and killing in the HCN
continued without causing any direct damage to the painting itself.
However, the painting was intentionally covered with commemora-
tions and photos of martyrs. These photos are often displayed in pub-
lic spaces by the political parties that represent the martyrs or by their
families. Figure 5 shows how the pictures are placed as high as people
292

VI I
can reach on the facade of the olive-oil soap factory. The painting was
not completely covered. Some parts of the painting remain visible,
adding a new layer of history to the collage on the building’s façade,
and revealing new tensions within the spatial representation of ‘the
commons’.
In 2007, Fuentes visited the HCN. A male resident from the
Qaryoun neighbourhood said that ‘she [Fuentes] cried when she saw her
damaged painting’ (Interview August 2009). When asked about how
other people felt about the painting, he replied, ‘It was only the artist
who felt sad. We were neither involved in the painting nor in the inaugura-
tion’ (Interview, August 2009).
Fig. 5
Commemoration and Martyrs’ photos cover the painting.
Source: Assi (2008).
293
An analysis of placing and covering the painting in relation
to issues of “heritage” and “the commons”, opens up new discussions
on how governing the commons can be challenged by the way peo-
ple assert their diverse claims on the past in negotiating their pres-
ence in socially shared public spaces as well as by the temporalities
and intensities of these assertion. We tend to understand/conceive of
public spaces as places of shared experiences. But how can we under-
stand “sharing” in the making of a public space with multiple layers
of historical readings? Was the covering of the painting an active
performance of re-claiming the common heritage of the Square? Or
was it an expression of anger driven by the affective environment
of re-occupation? These questions are not limited to the case of
the Al-Qaryoun Square, but are also relevant to the growing con-
temporary phenomena of urban resistance that has challenged the
traditional modes of governing ‘the public’ in different parts of the
world. Examples of these resistances include those in Tahrir Square,
Cairo, in Bouazizi Square, Tunisia, in Gezi Park, Istanbul, in Husby,
Stockholm, in Madison, Wisconsin, in the Plazas del Sol, Madrid
Square, in Catalonia, Barcelona, in Syntagma Square, Athens, and
many others. Despite their differing settings, they seek to situate the
governing of the commons within heritage issues.
This paper investigates the remaking of socially shared public
spaces through resistance in the Al-Qaryoun Square in the Historic
City of Nablus, Palestine. A central argument here is that resistance
groups often integrate issues of, and claims over, heritage in construct-
ing new commons that eventually work as a safe zone where they can
negotiate their presence, sense of place and identity. The findings pre-
sented in this paper are extracted from a bigger research project that
started in 2007. Since then, I have carried out several field research
in the Historic City of Nablus, with a focus on heritage works in the
294

VI I
Al-Qaryoun Square and other selected places within the HCN. For
the Al-Qaryoun Square, I have interviewed several residents, local
community groups, shopkeepers, officials, practitioners and the French
artist. I have also visited the Square several times for direct observation
of everyday life. In the subsequent section I will discuss some of the em-
pirical findings in relation to ideas of “new commons” and “temporal-
ities”, going beyond the historically constructed enclosure on heritage
that constrains it within the three defined periods of time: past, present
and future. In the last section I discuss how the covering of the painting
symbolised a struggle over the re/construction of “(new) commons”
that was envisioned by some as the “safe zone” where alternative poli-
tics can be enacted for re/negotiating the self and the public.
New Commons:
beyond the heritage of past, present and future
It may be true that the first impression of a “visitor” when ar-

riving to the Square is that nothing happens there. It may seem like
an empty and hollow public space located within a densely built ur-
ban fabric. But this feeling will rapidly change once the visitor begins
to engage in the multiple layers of history that form the character of
the Square. As the visitor moves within the square, gazes the collage
on the facades of the surrounding buildings, and listens to the locals’
stories these layers begin to unfold, presenting the locals’ shared ex-
periences under the occupation and the shared values they developed
in association with the local culture of resistance to the occupation
(Hammami, 2012). These experiences and values seem to form a
common past that people rehearse in the Square.
295
The analysis of heritage works in the Al-Qaryoun Square
showed that this common past has often received little attention in
the official practices of space making. These practices, including the
placement of the painting, seem to have challenged people sense of
place and their capacity to rehearse their common past. In this paper,
this ignorance is discussed and explained in relation to two gener-
al enclosures: one in relation to heritage and one in relation to the
commons.
First, the ontological politics of heritage is often concerned
with the modes of existence in the future (Harrison, 2012), plac-
ing heritage in discursive and ideological enclosure that is structured
along the three defined periods of time: past, present and future. In
her thesis Uses of Heritage, Smith (2006) argues that ‘heritage is a
present-centred phenomenon and a discourse with material consequences’.
The mobilisation of the past in the present to provide a vision of
the future, seems to not only assimilate the multi-linear processes
of history into the linear production of social and cultural practic-
es, but also to reduce the pluralism of heritage into a common past
and future. What becomes critical here is the fitting of various tem-
poral realities and collective experiences in these three periods of
time. Apparently, such a reductionist approach discriminates against
the pluralism of the public, and thus can be a reason for protests to
form and develop. Such protests often work as sites of contestations
where bodies, symbols, identities, practices, and discourses negotiate
societal issues, or even pursue or prevent changes in institutionalised
power relations.
Within the field of heritage, Harvey’s analysis of the historical
process of ‘heritageisation’ shows how the processes of assimilating
the past began in the late nineteenth century, and that this period
of history was maintained as a reference for the valuation of social
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VI I
and political experiences (Harvey, 2001: 1–4). These processes are, as

Smith (2006: 22) puts it, ‘not only driven by certain narratives about
nationalism and Romantic ideals, but also a specific theme about the
legitimacy and dominant place in national cultures of the European
social and political elite’. Smith uses non-representational theories
(Thrift, 2007) to challenge these narratives and explore the ways that
‘life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday
routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive
triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unex-
ceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions’ (Smith, 2006: 13).
Her approach to heritage as ‘experience’ is in line with the argument
raised in this paper that heritage and the commons are deeply en-
meshed in everyday life.
Fuentes’ sensitive attention to people’s traumatic past, as well
as her positive interpretation of peace, did not rescue her from falling
into the trap of conventionality.
Her choice of the Square to communicate with the locals
through contemporary art helped her to express new meanings of
hope in the public. However, Fuentes couldn’t see the embedded ex-
periences of the locals within the square and its’ entangled surround-
ing environments. It is true that the period of peace brought new
meanings to the public, but this period of history is one layer of mul-
tiple layers of temporal realities that shape the history and character
of the Square. In addition, peace in the context of Palestine cannot
be benevolent in the sense Fuentes conceived of it. Her understand-
ing of the period of peace seems to have been based on the official
agreement between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation
Organisation. It is true that the agreement was signed in 1993 to initi-
ate peace and to stop the destruction. However, this agreement didn’t
filter into everyday life in a similar fashion. The healing process from
297
the long history of killing and destruction can never be time depend-
ent. Generally, peace and war are neither static in their development
nor definite in their beginnings and/or endings. They often overlap
in time and space creating spaces of contestations and conflicts. In
the context of heritage places where people often hold multiple and
conflicting claims on a shared past, these contestations and conflicts
become particularly evident. Any conventional approach to heritage
would therefore not have a sufficient capacity to perceive the diverse
temporalities of history and realities that shape people’s commons.
In this sense, Fuentes’s conventional approach to the public
space of the Square overlooked the emotional geographies that char-
acterise the Square, underlying the locals’ shared values and structur-
ing their ‘new commons’. Her approach can be compared with the
official narrative of the Square that views it through its early Roman
past, apparent Ottoman architecture, urban morphology, and capaci-
ty as an open public space located in a densely inhabited historic area.
Fuentes wanted to utilise the historic characteristics of this public
space to construct a bright future. She therefore regarded the associ-
ation of the commons with a traumatic past as a passive attitude that
should not be sustained. This was captured in an interview with her
when she was asked to explain why the painting was covered.
I am French with a Chilean background and understand the

Palestinians’ feeling of exile. But they insist on living in de-
pression instead of forgetting. They display the martyrs’ photos
in the public places to make the emotions of shock permanent
in their lives.
A group from the Fatah faction sitting in the Square provided

another explanation for the covering of the painting. As one said:
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VI I
The blood of the martyrs is in the walls and tiles of this square.
This painting tells nothing about that or about our pain and
miserable situation.
Both explanations are likely to associate their appropriation of

the Square with their experiences at the time of the event: the period
of peace for the artist and the period of re-occupation for the locals.
This brings the issue of temporal realities and temporal commons into
the discussion of how a conceived common past can be discursively
and physically projected within the politics of space-making. It is true
that the traumatic experiences of the incursions during the Second
Intifada have negated the message of hope. But the celebration of the
painting might have continued if the period of peace was sustained.
The killing and destruction have engaged the locals in an affective
environment through which they expressed their sadness and anger
by the covering of the painting. For some, the presence of the paint-
ing in the everyday life of the HCN embraces a symbolic practice of
a ‘colonial power in the local resistance’. In this sense, the temporal
commons of peace was dismantled to reveal the new commons of the
Square that is directly connected with the local culture of resistance
to the British colonial power and the Israeli occupation forces. The
commons, as explored in the context of the Al-Qaryoun Square, is
produced through struggles and collective experiences. To pose the
question of the commons is indeed to engage with, and recognise,
the socio-political character of our doing. This approach to heritage
and resistance in the public space of the Al-Qaryoun Square demon-
strates that we cannot seek the commons. It also reveals the pitfalls of
the current works on the commons that solely focus on the effective
modes of governing the commons as natural eco-social systems and
299
common-pool resources, such as fisheries or forests (Berge and van
Laerhoven, 2011: 161; Ostrom, 1990; Bluedon and Waller, 2006).
Second, these pitfalls relate to the enclosure that is I would
like to discuss in this paper in relation to the commons. It is gener-
ally associated with the contemporary enclosure movement of the
intangible resources of the commons (information, traditions, cul-
ture, knowledge, language) (Lessig, 2004), and more specifically with
‘temporal commons’ (Bluedorn, 2002). The latter was introduced by
Bluedorn (2002: 225–56) as a metaphor that emphasised human agen-
cy in the conceptualisation of time (cited in Allen et al., 2006: 357).
How the tangible and intangible public resources of the commons
are interlinked seems to have been swept along largely unnoticed by
the growing interest in the contemporary enclosure movement that
focuses on intangible public resources (Bluedorn and Waller, 2006).
In their attempts to avoid this enclosure, Hardt and Negri (2011)
argue that the commons cannot be seen only as the earth we share
but also include the languages we create, the social practices we estab-
lish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships, and so forth
(Hardt and Negri, 2011). Their approach to the commons stems from
the productivist ontology of Deleuze that enables them to rethink
the commons by exploring the ‘ongoing processes of construction/
deconstruction of the commons, of what is shared whether material
or intangible, necessary to sustain or shatter communities’ (Hardt
and Negri, 2009).
Their approach is helpful to uncover such processes that shape
what is locally conceived as the commons of the Al-Qaryoun Square.
The protest against the painting grew around the common interest of
not only reclaiming the past, but also to express anger for not being
consulted prior to the placement of the painting. In this context,
their reaction to the painting was negotiated amid the multiplici-
300

VI I
ty of relations between their hegemonic front (shared interest and

political cause) and their counter-hegemonic powers and discourses;
between utopian peace and actual trauma; and between forces and re-
lation of domination and exploitation and resistance. Affected by the
spatiality of the square and the intensity of emotions at the time of de-
struction and killing, the protests against the painting embraced and
developed shared values that are both temporal and long lasting. As
Harvey (2012: 73–74) puts it, the commons is ‘an unstable and malle-
able social relation between a particular self-defined social group and
those aspects of its actually existing or yet- to-be-created social and/
or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood’.
Indeed, the Square as a place helped in articulating these values, in
shaping the basic political dispositions of the protesters, and in help-
ing them form a cohesive political force. This reveals the significance
of spatiality in the construction of the commons. Along this line of
thought, the locals viewed their square as a platform where they could
meet each other to re-live and heal memories, and for unity.
When asked “What did you and other residents do after the
first incursion in April 2002”, a male resident said ‘we gathered in the
square to help those who lost their families or their houses’. In his response
to the question ‘When you arrived to the Square how did you feel
once you saw the painting’ the same male resident said ‘Nobody really
cared about it [the paining] and we covered it when we started the restora-
tion of the destruction’. From his response one can understand that the
covering of the painting was regarded as an actual restoration of the
Square, a symbolic representation of a re-claiming common past, and
a re-commoning of the common. The ‘re-commoning’ of the Square
through the relegation of the painting was later expressed through
new commemorations built at the bottom of the painting using mar-
ble and granite structures engraved with the names of the martyrs
301
(Figure 6). Some interviewed residents in this study associated their
presence in the square and the rehearsal of their common traumatic
past with these physical structures. Others used the names and photos
of martyrs that are engraved in the memorials to structure their nar-
ratives of their past in the Square.
Fig. 6
Physical commemorations built at the bottom of the painting
using marble and granite structures engraved with the names of the martyrs.
Source: Author
302

VI I
The fresh feeling of trauma and sadness at the time revealed

the commemoration of the death and the annihilation of hope and
the blue sky that frames it as an appropriate performance of the grief
in the commons. It also silenced any possible local disagreement
about the powerful presence of these commemorations in the every-
day life of the Square. The powerful presence of the martyrs’ names
and photos in the commons space of the square reveals any attempt
to remove the physical structures of the memorials as an attempt to
re-kill the deceased or to de-common the valuable common past.
While this powerful remaking of the common embraces violation of
the a possible multiple historical readings of the socially shared public
space of the Square, the diverse socio-political and cultural practices
(the actual covering of the painting, structures of commemoration,
engraved names and photos of martyrs, graffiti on the facades, so-
cio-cultural gatherings, mobilisation of resistance) that took place in
the square have contributed in the development of, what is called in
this paper as, the “new commons”.
Unfolding this new commons does not seem to be possible
without going beyond the two enclosures on heritage and on the com-
mons. Significantly, this helps us to explain ‘what happens’ (Thrift,
2007) in public spaces, and to make theoretical and political sense
of urban resistance. One of the important issues here is the uses of
the past in governing the commons: how heritage givens are (often)
put to work through novel assemblages of value creation, paralleled
by novel discourses about past identities (Gonzalez, 2013), in what
ways these heritage givens are acknowledged by current societies, and
how overlooking them is likely to challenge people’s identity, sense
of place and presence.
303
Security:
searching for the self in the commons
The initial assumptions that guided this paper are two-fold.

First, the covering of the painting as a local protest against the of-
ficial remaking of the urban public space can be better understood
when analysed in relation to ideas of heritage and the commons.
Second, what generally becomes exposed, proposed and politicised
by people on the ground generate new values, ideals and princi-
ples according to which ‘new commons’ might emerge. These new
commons, as argued here, are deeply enmeshed in issues of security
and everyday life. Protesters conceive of it as a ‘safe’ zone for the
negotiation of their multiple claimants, their rights to possess their
pasts in the socially shared places, and their collective and individ-
ual identities. This argument gains significance in heritage places
where the multiple layers of historical readings inevitably engage
‘the official commons’ in heated politics, articulating new identi-
fication with these places, as well as meanings of security based on
ideas of familiarity and recognition. The plurality and changeability
of heritage (Ashworth, 2011) and the openness of spatialities to
multiple claims and representation (Landzelius 2009) is here taken
to mean that any identification with heritage may create insecurity
of the self, as it does in society. This relates to issues of subjectivities
and subjectification, in the sense of how socio-political conditions
of in/security become embedded in public spaces and thereby pro-
mote new subjectivities as well as enable self-subjectification, albeit
within these conditions. In this sense, feelings of security or insecu-
rity cannot be ‘facts of nature’, but always require to be constructed
in narratives (Stern 2005).
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VI I
The covering of the painting can therefore be seen as a so-

cio-political practice of re-constructing the self in association with
the shared values the protesters attached to the Square. Their safe
zone enabled them to freely engage in the self-production of their tem-
poral/new realities in multifaceted and complex ways: through their
own organising processes, their interaction with the environments of
the Square, the multiple social, cultural and political networks of the
Square, and the broader historic context of the Holy Land. As a site
of contestation, the safe zone entailed perpetual negotiation, chang-
ing alliances and affinities, co-option and infiltrations, all contingent
upon particular spatio-temporal conditions. These negotiations end-
ed in, as Hardt and Negri (2011) put it, ‘the incarnation, the produc-
tion, and the liberation of the multitude’. In this sense, the protests
in the Al-Qaryoun Square or elsewhere can be envisaged as struggles
through the commons rather than for the commons. The problem is
therefore not the commons per se, but what happens in/through the
commons and why it happens in that way.
References
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org/quebec2008/…/77_pdf/77-k7ha-132.pdf (retrieved: 30 May 2011).
Bluedorn, A. C. & Waller, M. J. (2006). The Stewardship of the Temporal
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Smith, L. (2006). Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge.
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VI I
Evren Uzer
Commoning in Resistance:
Gezi Park Protests and “Yeryüzü Sofraları”
Back in May 2013, I was sitting at a café thousands of kilometers

away planning my trip to Turkey when I saw the outrageous images of
ordinary people being recklessly gassed, pouring down from my twitter
feed. They were trying to prevent construction of a yet another shop-
ping mall. “Just a few çapulcu1”said PM Erdogan when he mentioned
the growing events and the crowds after the images of the first gassed
protestors and the initial stages of Gezi Park clashes were first leaked
to the media. Çapulcu, Turkish for “looter” was quickly appropriated
by the protestors and used as “someone fighting for their rights”2. Oc-
cupation of this small yet one of the rare public green spaces in central
Istanbul began end of May 2013 after police brutally intervened in the
protests of a group of peaceful environmentalists. The mainstream me-
dia was therefore heavily censored and consequently twitter and other
social media and peer-to-peer networking became crucial for commu-
nication. As more and more people heard about what happened to
a group of protestors who were there to protect “a few” trees, crowds
reached up to thousands, which eventually lead to an occupation and
encampment in the Gezi Park that lasted for 21 days.
The Gezi Park protests fundamentally changed two things
(among others); 1) a mixed group of people, by resisting commer-
309
cialization and privatization of public goods, reclaimed the park as
their commons and 2) by introducing new practices of resistance they
presented an alternative way of dealing with conflicts related to the
past. After the police forcefully removed the encampment, practices
regarding these new commons have trickled down to other parts of
Turkey. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss how the daily
practices of the Gezi Park resistance contributed to the new commons
with a particular focus on to ‘Yeryüzü Sofraları’, a public and political
practice of communal eating in the breaking of fasts as reclamation
of heritage. The Gezi Park protests and the practices such as ‘Yeryüzü
Sofraları’, that is integral to the resistance have created a new com-
mons by;
• Reclaiming the heritage, by making different strata of the past

visible, even if only briefly; by building a recent yet common
historical narrative of the resistance and by offering a new way
of practicing an old tradition with yeryüzü sofraları;
• Reclaiming the public space, in Gezi Park and in squats and
garden plots (with edible plants), which had been created at
multiple locations after the encampment is over and in every
instance of yeryüzü sofraları;
• Reclaiming the politics, by creating direct means of communi-
cation, offering a platform of political alternatives to the cur-
rent government’s political Islam discourse;
• Reclaiming the economy, such as in Gezi Park where circulat-
ing money was replaced by barter and sharing economies, and
at yeryüzü sofraları in which instead of purchasing iftar men-
us, participants were encouraged to bring their own food and
share meals.
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VI I
Elinor Ostrom’s invalidation of Hardin’s seminal work on

Tragedy of the Commons3 that promoted enclosure for the wellbe-
ing of commons, states out that when collective institutions govern
the commons, they were usually more successful when they could es-
tablish their own rules, without interference from the state (Ostrom
1990, Ostrom 1999). She argues that the tragedy of commons could
in fact be labeled as “the tragedy of open access” and used to point out
that overuse happens only when there is no regulation of any kind.
Gezi encampment and following practices introduced new codes of
conduct for the use of the new commons.
Background
The planning application for the Taksim pedestrianisation

project, which includes the construction on Gezi Park was approved
despite the negative decision of Heritage Board and experts who
pointed out its negative impact on the environment (Ozaydin, 2012),
the problematic positioning within the framework of contemporary
heritage practice and philosophy (Akin, 2012), and the matter of
increased traffic that it would create –a problem it claims to solve-
(Kilincarslan, 2012, Gursel, 2012). Initial aim of the first protesters
was to prevent the construction machines from cutting down the
trees in order to build a shopping mall.
311
Fig1
Halil Paşa Artillery Barracks front façade4.
The design of the mall was announced to be in the form of

an Ottoman Artillery Barracks (Halil Paşa Topçu Kışlası) (Figure 1),
which from 1806 to 1939 stood in the same site as Gezi Park from
1806 to 1939. Behind the Artillery Barracks there used to be an Ar-
menian cemetery dating from the 16th century, which was the largest
non-muslim cemetery in Istanbul’s history. The cemetery5 was de-
molished in the 1930s and the tombstones were sold in 1939. It is
said that some of the marble stairs at current Gezi Park were made
from these tombstones6. Halil Paşa Artillery Barracks7 were heavily
damaged in 1909 and 1939 the courtyard was used as Taksim Stadium
for football matches until it the building was finally demolished to
become the Gezi Park of today (Figure 2).
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VI I
Fig. 2
Taksim Gezi Park; aerial view8
Gezi Park was envisioned by Henri Prost, a French urban de-

signer, as a part of societal modernization project of the Turkish Re-
public and was built within a continuous green strip (Akpinar, 2010).
This public esplanade, would be a symbolic space, aimed at reflecting
the modern face of the nation and of stimulating a mixed way of
living where men and women could socialize together. Prost, despite
being an avid conservation advocate himself, emphasized the mod-
ernization aspects of his project both for making historical parts of the
city – that had formerly deteriorated due to fires and/or neglect- more
attractive for the upper classes (Bilsel, 2007) and also providing space
especially to provide space for women who seemed to be the loco-
motive for societal transformation of the new reforms (Bilsel, 2010).
313
The protests in Gezi took their initial trigger from recent urban
transformation projects led by neo-liberal government policies where
the government acted in a private capacity instead of protecting the
public good. Urban projects in Turkey, mostly in Istanbul, had led
to social and spatial transformation and with increasing momentum
at the expense of displacing vulnerable populations. Rebuilding old
housing, which would withstand earthquake, a seemingly legitimate
reason for the Housing Development Administration’s (TOKI) pro-
jects, had, in truth, brought more wealth to the rich while impover-
ishing the poor by relocating them far away from their livelihoods
and social support networks. Such projects were supported by special
juridical arrangements that rendered the whole process non-negotia-
ble for other stakeholders and made TOKI, a government agency, the
biggest construction “company” in Turkey.
From May 27th to June 17th police aggression against the Tak-
sim Gezi Park protesters took 5 lives and 7822 people were injured9.
It was not unusual to see protesters whom had resisted teargas and
water canons in the evening but to be seen cleaning the streets in the
morning. Research10 on the profile of Gezi protesters made on June
6th and 7th with 4411 people at the park and at different hours of the
day indicated that the majority was there because of police brutality.
The median age was 28 years and 84% stayed there to protect civil
rights11. 92% of them confirmed their identity but denied that they
had any affiliation to any political party or group, which perplexed
government officials who were looking for recognizable leaders.
During the protests, in central Istanbul, a commune (Tak-
sim) independent from the government authority or of Hakim Bey’s
concept of Temporary Autonomous Zone, TAZ” was created. When
ten days later the encampment became semi-permanent, resistance
became more of a daily practice with daily routines. Volunteering
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academics gave lectures, a people’s open forum with a microphone

was set up12, and a feminist collective held a “cursing workshop” to
encourage slogans free from sexism, homophobia, and other habitual
prejudices. In these and other ways, the park acted as a platform where
people could both speak out and receive information. In addition the
physical space was transformed into a more permanent stage; there
was a health corner, a library of donated books, a food corner built
by volunteers with donated food where anyone who wished could get
free food and drinks.
The protesters experimented daily with new forms of resist-
ance. Humor was an important component of the slogans and graffiti
that gave an image of the Gezi events as being less harmful, despite
the barricades and burning car images that were spread by pro-gov-
ernment media channels. Graffiti that say “Do you want 3 children like
me?” referring to Erdogan’s earlier suggestion to families for having
at least 3 children or “You banned alcohol, people sobered up” referring
to recent ban to sell alcohol between 10 pm to 6 am are just a couple
of these examples. Stephen Duncombe argues for laughter being as
revolutionary and if it could be contributing to politics in the wider
sense and that it would be inclusive to those who compose and le-
gitimize governments (Duncombe, 2013). The Gezi protestors used
humor in social media and in the streets as a way of subverting gov-
ernment rhetoric and making it as inclusive as they could imagine. As
in Bakhtin’s carnival there was revolution within rebellion where the
protestors were infusing new meanings to things as well as expressing
their discontent in published form (Hart & Bos, 2008:5) in cleverly
thought cartoons in weekly magazines. Cartoon magazines have been
successful in caricaturizing the power and being critical albeit siding
anti government opinion, regarding these events and also in neutral-
izing tension.
315
The Gezi protests were unprecedented because of the bringing
together of the unlikeliest groups in alliances (nationalists, Kurds,
LGBT groups, anti-capitalist Muslims etc.) that could not have been
previously imagined. People overcame some of their deeply rooted
prejudices that created earlier conflicts in order to unite in a com-
mon cause. As a result of the scale of brutal police intervention, an
authoritarian government with their not-so-hidden neo-liberal pol-
icies and the reorganization of the private sphere in a Sunni Islam
driven model, and despite their heterogeneity and being a leaderless,
horizontal group, the protestors managed to keep together and retain
their subversive humor and spirit of newly found freedom.
Reclaiming heritage
Rodney Harrison draws parallels with the Occupy movement

that is a large scale protest against the inequalities created by present
uncertainties with the growing uncertainties in relation to heritage
and traces of the past since the past few decades of twentieth century
has seen us making a stockpile of materials with historic potential
(Harrison, 2013:3). We live in a present that contains strata from the
past. This is also often a past of contradicting layers and with the po-
tential for creating conflict, yet this might also be a part of a potential
reconciliation process as Ashworth and Turnbridge note;
If the perceived experience of atrocity is so deeply felt and

enduring through time, then a deliberate policy of interpre-
tation of events in order to arrive at a quite different position
is likely to be particularly difficult to pursue. However it must
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VI I
be remembered that contemporary reinterpretation can in-

volve reversing the atrocity perception: what was seen, as
atrocity suffered becomes atrocity committed on others. In
the field or in the museum, an atrocity interpretation may
need to be created before reconciliation can occur.(Ashworth
& Turnbridge :112)
During the events following the eviction but also partly during
the encampment period, participants highlighted the history of the
area from different perspectives. The Armenian Surp Hagop Cem-
etery from the 16th century used to situated behind the present-day
Gezi Park area where it remained until 1930s when it was totally
demolished. Some of the marble tombstones confiscated to be used at
different places including Gezi Park. Nor Zartonk a group of Arme-
nians of Turkey has created a memorial that read “You have taken our
cemetery. You won’t be able to take our park! Armenians of Turkey. Nor
Zartonk” in remembrance of this part of the history.
The atrocities from the history of the late Ottoman Empire
and Republican Turkey have created ideological, ethnic and re-
ligious conflicts and deep divisions between different groups. On
the surface at least the Gezi Park and Taksim Square protests have
proved otherwise. The feeling of solidarity has created a pluralistic
face of resistance yet these conflicts are not even publically recog-
nized that they still remain very rooted and reconciliation has not
taken place. Heritage researcher Eray Cayli, points out that the pro-
testors have dealt with this conflict by choosing to foreground their
short and recent shared past of resistance (Cayli, 2013) as they em-
braced resistance memories as their common past. Considering the
Armenian past in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, it
is quite obvious that events surrounding the Surp Hagop Cemetery
317
go deeper than the cemetery itself but even so acknowledgment,
acceptance and visibility can contribute to the healing process of
these conflicts.
Yeryüzü Sofraları as reclaiming heritage
The Ramadan13 began soon after the Gezi Park encampment

was forcefully removed and a grouping of anti-capitalist Muslims14,
took the initiative to propose a new practice, which they called Earth
Tables (Yeryüzü Sofraları). This conception stresses modesty and con-
viviality while eating on the floor (covered with newspaper) in a
public area during iftar15. Breaking the fast is one of the religious ob-
servances during Ramadan and traditionally a meal shared with your
family, neighbors and friends. Many Muslims believe that sharing
food and especially during Ramadan helping to supply meals to the
needy seen as a significant act of charity. In its basic form, its modest
undertaking and is far removed from conspicuous consumption as it
is practiced by some of those belonging to the economic elite. Spend-
ing significant amount of money for large iftar meals at luxury hotels
or restaurants or giving iftar meals to the public but making sure the
giver is given suitable publicity is contrary to the belief that it is not
appropriate to make a show of wealth.
Earth tables, like some of the other practices (public forums,
squats, occupying public spaces to create garden plots, etc.) contin-
ued long after the Gezi Park occupation. With its simple, yet strong
message of the community reclaiming a tradition, employing these
practices in public spaces combined with the powerful structure of
sharing and exchange it even spread to other cities.
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VI I
One of the activists (Melek Bilgili) attending the fast break in

2014 states;
“This is a table for the poor and for the people. When we told the
police that we were going to set our tables [on Istiklal Avenue], he
showed us a restaurant. But we are here precisely because we don’t
want to break our fast [at tables in expensive restaurants]. We break
our fast with bread, cheese and olives that everybody with them.
This is the meaning of the earth iftar,” (Hurriyet newspaper, June
29, 201416)
The Earth tables created the commons, a communality where

people extended their “families” by breaking bread together. It is im-
portant to mention that not all these people were actually fasting but
they still joined the meals to which they brought and shared their food.
These long tables created an opportunity to meet and mingle with
“the others”. One should also add that there is a deep religious-secular
division in Turkish society, in which mistrust is prevalent even when
the intentions held by both sides are genuine. Within the light of this
mistrust the unity that was created by the newly established commons
becomes even more meaningful. When Earth tables reclaimed an old
tradition to share with all who so wished, it not only reclaimed a
heritage from Muslim traditions and but also created its own culture
of resistance.
319
Yeryüzü Sofraları as reclaiming public space
The first earth iftar was organized on July 9th, 2013 and a long
newspaper tiled line on the ground was set out along Istiklal street17 a
1.4 kilometer long pedestrian street in Taksim very close to Gezi Park.
Every day some 2 million pedestrians pass through the street that
has always been home to numerous leisure shopping and commercial
activities. The last decade has seen changes in the nature of these
activities where functions changed towards an eating & drinking and
retail industry resulting closure of some of the last iconic places of
Istiklal (Emek Theater, Inci patisserie shop, etc.) with new shopping
malls and more corporate shopping and dining units replacing them.
These changes also meant fewer public events and street musicians
and that outdoor activities were heavily monitored. As with the
shopping mall and luxury residencies that were planned to be built
in place of Gezi Park, on Istiklal street alone there are two new shop-
ping malls. Individual shops encouraged strolling throughout a public
space whereas shopping malls promise to serve all needs in one place.
Consequently, an attractive public environment is thus replaced to a
semi-private area18.
Yeryüzü Sofraları and “politics that don’t look like politics19”
The AKP government with its ideology of political Islam, has

an agenda, as did governments in earlier periods and also during the
Ottoman Empire and they all used architectural representation as a
vehicle with which to leave a permanent mark on the city. In pio-
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VI I
neering the practice of earth tables and in opening the practice to

the public, the anti-capitalist Muslims made a strong political argu-
ment by presenting this modest way of practicing religion, and being
inclusive to the heterogeneous crowds that formed during the Gezi
protests.
Çapulcu was also just the beginning of number of new addi-
tions to the political vocabulary that were being defined on the open
microphone, meetings public forums and other “institutions” in Gezi
Park encampment and afterwards. According to Ostrom and Hess,
institutions and the regulations that govern the commons should be
shaped by the people who are participating within the commons’ lo-
cal conditions (Ostrom and Hess, 2007) Gezi Park protestors have
clearly expressed their desire for the expansion of democratic rights
and representation and experimented in new alternatives for political
discussion.
Yeryüzü Sofraları: reclaiming the food and economy
“No not everything is for free [in commons], but yes everything
may be shared. It is a place of reciprocities” (Linebaugh, 2014, p:19)
The Gezi Park occupiers did not need money in the park, as
people from outside donated food, clothing, and other necessities,
which were shared out at various park corners. Modesty is a part of
the Yeryüzü Sofraları and is a stand against the whole consumption
culture that exists. Anti-capitalist Muslims who initiated Earth tables
point out, instead of purchasing readily prepared food, prepare the
food yourself and bring it to a common table instead of purchasing
luxurious Iftar menus. By offering a seat at a common table and shar-
321
ing food, Yeryüzü Sofraları creates a profound human expression of
hospitality and a practice of commoning.
Conclusion
The Gezi Protestors have succeeded in their basic intention as

they have managed to stop the construction process for the shopping
mall. This success has also encouraged those who were participants to
go above and beyond Gezi, either with short-term projects that would
deal with daily problems in the city such as helping street kids to
get access to healthcare, shelter and education, organizing forums at
neighborhood parks and forming solidarity groups in new squats or in
long-term issues such as new government projects that threaten the
environment and causing more displacement such as third Bosphorus
bridge, Canal Istanbul project, reorganization of election rules and
procedures and spreading the ideas of Gezi to other parts of Turkey20.
Historian Peter Linebaugh explains the commons as being
“both a social relationship and a material thing; it is neither a com-
modity nor exclusively a ‘resource’”. (Linebaugh, 2014, p.140) As
with the Occupy movement, the establishment of the network or the
value of finding one another as a means with which to build up the
commons is an important gain from Gezi protests. From the heritage
perspective, we can perhaps call the remnants of Gezi from the herit-
age perspective as the embodiment of the intangible cultural heritage
of the civil rights struggle. As described at a recent New Yorker article
“Taksim Square is no longer just a tangle of people and plazas but a byword
for a clash of ideas, a movement, a battleground.” We also need to rec-
ognize and represent it as a site of heritage in the context of atrocities
322

VI I
committed against the Armenians, the Surp Hagop Cemetery and in

other contexts like May 1st, ‘7721 shootings and their importance as a
part of heritage narratives.
Linebaugh, unearths the political conflicts between the king
and the and the commoners in his Magna Carta Manifesto book and
depicts how 13th century commoners, compelled the king to acknowl-
edge their commons by sustaining their common practices such as
providing wood from the forest and building their village in the mid-
dle of king’s land and adding new practices (Linebaugh, 2008). The
rights for commons haven’t been given de facto but taken with col-
lective action based on common traditions. As Harvey puts it “ […]
public spaces and public goods contribute mightily to the qualities of the
commons, it takes political action on the part of citizens and the people to
appropriate them or to make them so.” (Harvey, 2012:7322) Public space
needs to be appropriated by people in order to become commons, by
civil disobedience or direct action methods while building a new lan-
guage, spatial and communal practices, as well as resistance practices
and feeling of solidarity. Regarding the Gezi, collective action and
civil disobedience in the public space, it built a commons for all who
participated, whether directly or from a distance. It was this commons
that became the basis of yeryüzü sofralari.
References
Akın, N. (2012). Yeni Tarihi Yapı?: Taksim Topçu Kışlası. Mimarlık

Dergisi, 364:27–28.
Akpınar, İ. (2010). İstanbul’u (yeniden) inşa etmek: 1937 Henri
Prost Planı. In: Altan Ergut, E & İmamoǧlu, B. (eds.), Cumhuriyet’in
Mekânları, Zamanları, İnsanları. ODTÜ Mimarlık Fakültesi Yayınları,
Ankara: Dipnot, pp. 107–124.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his World. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Bilsel, C. (2007). Remodeling the Imperial Capital in the Early Republican
Era: The Representation of History in Henri Prost’s Planning of Istanbul.
In: Osmond, J. & Cimdina, A. (eds.), Power and Culture: Identity,
Ideology, Representation. Edizioni Plus. Pisa: Pisa University Press, pp.
95–115.
Bilsel, C. & Pinon, P. (2010). From an Imperial Capital to the Modern
City of the Republic: Henri Prost’s Planning of Istanbul (1936–1951),
Istanbul Research.
Bozdoǧan, S. (2001). Modernism and nation building: Turkish
architectural culture in the Early Republic. Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
Çaylı, E. (2013). Taksim Square and Gezi Park Protests: Designing a
Common Present, Future, and Past. 2(4), pp. 36–44, Centre for Policy and
Research on Turkey (ResearchTurkey). London: Research Turkey. http://
researchturkey.org/?p=3477 .
Duncombe, S. (ed.) (2002). Cultural Resistance Reader. London & New
York: Verso.
Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2011). Commonwealth. Harvard: Belknap Press.
1248.
Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel Cities. London: Verso.
Hart, M. t’ & Bos, D. (2008). Humour and Social Protest. International
Review of Social History: Supplement 15.
Hess, C. & Ostrom, E. (eds.) (2007). Understanding knowledge as a
Commons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kılınçarslan, C. (2012). Taksim yayalaştırma projesi nedir?. Toplumsal
324

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Tarih Dergisi, 218(2):17–20.

Linebaugh, P. (2008). The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and
Commons for All. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Linebaugh, P. (2014) Stop, Thief! The commons, enclosures and
resistance. Spectre Series. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions
Özaydın, G. (2012). Taksim‘in üstü altına iniyor. Mimarlık Dergisi,
364:19–22.
Notes
1. Capulcu used by Prime Minister Erdogan at a public speech for depicting the
protestors at Taksim Square and Gezi Park. But word çapulcu was rapidly reclaimed
by the protestors both in Turkish and also Anglicized as chapuller and verbified as
chapulling, given the meaning of “fighting for your rights”. ”Just a few looters”
Prime Minister Erdogan’s speech June 2nd, 2013, www.independent.co.uk/
news/world/europe/just-a-few-looters-turkish-pm-erdogan-dismisses-protests-as-
thousands-occupy-istanbuls-taksim-square-8641336.html, retrieved: June 2014.
2. Tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968) states that collective institutions are always
doomed to fail, as self-interests always overcome collective ones, even when, in the
long-run, this may lead to counterproductive results, such as the destruction of
the shared resource (overfishing, overgrazing etc.). For this reason, the best way of
managing common pool resources is either privatizing them or putting them under
the control of the state (Hardin 1968).
3. In Public domain, Source: https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dosya:Taksim_
Top%C3%A7u_K%C4%B1%C5%9Flas%C4%B11.jpg (Public domain)
4. Due to cholera outbreak in 1865 and the proximity of the cemetery to center they
have stopped new burial.
5. Some of the tombstones of Surp Hagop Cemetary were said to be used in other
parts of Istanbul such as Eminonu. In 2013 during a construction work for Taksim
square, 16 of these tombstones were excavated (in Turkish: www.aksam.com.tr/
guncel/taksimde-ermeni-mezarlari-cikti/haber-220397.
6. Topcu Military Barrack was considered to be of little architecture historical
significance by experts and is only remembered with its Orientalist gateway. The
claim of the government to rebuild the barrack only refers to building as a resembling
façade.
7. Creative Commons license, source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sky_
view_from_Taksim_Gezi_Park,_Istambul,_Turkey..jpg
8. Data regarding death and injured people during Gezi protests are from the press
release made by Turkish Doctors Association in June 17th, 2013. 3 more people died
from injuries after being treated at the hospital.
9. KONDA Research Company’s research report on Gezi protesters: http://t24.com.tr/
files/GeziPark%C4%B1Final.pdf (retrieved: 8 November 2013).
10. Women made up 50.8% of the protesters, however, very few women were included
in the groups selected by the government to meet in the last days of occupation.
69% of the protesters learned about the protest via social media (Source: KONDA
Report).
11. This became a beginning for the neighborhood forums at various neighborhood parks
which went on after the encampment was taken away.
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12. Fasting month for Sunni Islam believers.

13. Anti capitalist Muslims (Antikapitalist Muslumanlar) is a pro-religous political
group with a left leaning agenda that has been against the Ak Party’s neoliberal
economic policies and its monopoly over Islam in Turkey. They became more visible
with Gezi Park Protests and contributed to discussions in relation to religion and
economic policies. www.antikapitalistmuslumanlar.org/.
14. Iftar is the time when it is permitted to break the fast (usually at sunset).
15. Hurriyet newspaper June 29, 2014, website edition, www.hurriyetdailynews.com/
anti-capitalist-muslims-hold-iftar-in-taksim-again-under-tight-police-surveillance.
aspx?PageID=238&NID=68419&NewsCatID=341 (retrieved: June 30, 2014).
16. This street which was a popular wandering venue during Ottoman period (named
Cadde-I Kebir, Grand Avenue) went into a decline period in 70s and became
popular again with a pedestrianization project and heritage restoration efforts on the
surrounding mainly early 19th century building stock.
17. Majority of shopping malls in Turkey have security check at their entrances and
guards can and do refuse people from entering on most of the time based on personal
judgment.
18. I borrow the phrase from Stephen Duncombe (2002).
19. Even tough social media, especially twitter has been widely used to reveal most of
the facts regarding Gezi protests and also used as a medium to announce citizen
broadcasts from the resistance, one should keep in mind that only 45.7% of Turkish
population has access to Internet (source: www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm .
20. In May 1st, 1977, in Taksim there had been a coordinated police-and-paramilitary
attack on a march at labor day which resulted 34 dead and over 200 injured
participants.
327
VI I
Sybille Frank
Resistance and Conflict in Relation to
Heritage as Commons: A Comment

Feras Hammami and Evren Uzer von Busch
The papers by Evren Uzer von Busch and Feras Hammami about
the role of public space and heritage in the conflict-laden creation
of a democratic commons are highly inspiring, politically relevant,
and thought-provoking. Before I start to comment on them, please
let me clarify two things: First, I would like to emphasize that I
have the utmost respect for the activists whose claims for more
participation in the political process gain center stage in the two
papers, and for the protesters’ joint initiatives to strive for a more
democratic society. The comments that I will make in the following
will explicitly refer to the way the two authors address their case
studies as scientists.
Second, the perspective from which I will be commenting will

be the perspective of a sociologist. Accordingly, I will look, as
sociologists typically do, at questions of agency which I would like
to define as the capacity of acting. Acting generally is a means to
exert power, and sociologists often ask the question of who has the
capacity to act, and why. Sociologists also look at power relations
in society and at the inequalities that may arise from them. Power
relations are of course strongly connected to questions of agency,
and may exist within, as well as between social groups. Last but not
least, sociologists like to reflect on the ways in which knowledge is
produced in society. This encompasses tacit everyday knowledge
329
as well as expert knowledge that is produced in certain spheres of
society – for example, in science.
In the following, I will use these three sociological perspectives (on

agency, on power relations, and on the production of knowledge) to
work out what links the two papers, and to present some questions
that they provoke. I will start with agency, the capacity of acting.
Evren’s and Feras’ papers obviously deal with questions of agency,
to be precise with agency in the political and in the public arena. In
both contributions, different categories of agents are constructed
and distinguished from each other. There are on the one hand
‘traditional’, on the other hand ‘new’ agents. The traditional,
‘conventional’ agents belong to the government. Feras reports on the
joint action of diverse foreign state governments and the Palestine
Liberation Organization that came to a peace agreement in 1993.
Following this, the local government of Nablus started to co-operate
with the resident French Cultural Centre on a local level. Together
they invited a French artist to create a painting in the public square
Sahet Al-Qaryon in the Historic City of Nablus. The action taken
by these traditional agents however remains opaque; the process
of selecting the artist, the formulation of her precise task, and the
content of the painting all seem to have been conceived of by the
local residents only during the process of the eventual creation of the
piece of art. In Evren’s paper, the national government, inviting capital
to build malls and housing, performs as traditional agent. Also in the
Istanbul case, the decisions of the government are being carried
out in a non-transparent way, yet it is obvious that the traditional
agent follows an entrepreneurial agenda. Important is the conclusion
that, both in Nablus and in Istanbul, there is no participation of the
local community in governmental decision-making. The government
as a traditional agent forms a coalition with art, or with capital,
respectively, but not with the people.
The new agents both papers introduce as taking a stand against

the practices of the traditional agents are the local community.
From Evren’s case study we learn that the new agents in Istanbul
are young, and that they network a lot through the social media.
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In both papers, the community seems to be a horizontal structure,

a movement without leader, a movement that, in opposing the
traditional agents, entails a new culture of resistance.
Both in Evren’s and in Feras’ paper, the traditional and the new
agents expose different postures. The traditional agents’ posture
can be characterized as a top-down way of decision-making.
Feras characterizes the traditional agents’ perspective on Nablus
as neocolonial: the artist’s and the government’s notion that
people should feel more positive about the present and the future
culminates in a joint strategy to educate the local community
through art. In Evren’s study, the traditional agents in Istanbul – the
national government and capital – share the conviction that people
should feel more positive about the present and the future through
consumption.
In contrast to this, the new agents adhere to a bottom-up way of

acting. Evren underscores that in the Gezi Park protests and during
Yeryüzü Sofraları, party affiliation, religion, ethnicity, and gender
did not seem to matter. People discovered that they shared the
same values and humour, irrespective of traditional social structure
categories. By the same token, Feras points to the unconventional,
inclusive, and common values the protesters share when they resist
the message of the painting ‘Return of Storks’ in Sahet Al-Qaryon.
As a last observation with reference to agency, in both papers

the traditional and new agents bring to the fore messages that
convey specific, but highly different, temporalities. The messages
of the old, traditional agents connect the present to the future by
proposing to use the present to build a better future. In Nablus, the
idea of peace, not war, and of hope instead of depression becomes
articulated. In Istanbul, it’s the promise of future prosperity and
wealth that should be attained through current entrepreneurial
state politics.
The messages of the new agents, to the contrary, connect the past
to the present. In Gezi Park, new layers of the past are being made
331
visible – as in the case of the Armenian cemetery – and claimed as
common heritage. In the case of Yeryüzü Sofraları a new practicing
of past rituals in the present and traditional ideas of modesty and
sharing are renewed and get connected to an idea of a society
without social divides. They are publicly displayed as a resistance
against current enclosures of, and lavishness in, the fast breaking
ritual. The community in Nablus also sees the past as relevant for
the present. They grieve for the dead, they voice the trauma of past
and present occupation, they reclaim the relevance of people’s
emotions. In doing so, they rally against the obsolete idea of
envisioning themselves as a silenced society.
Having worked out how the two papers construct different

groups of agents and different postures of agency, I will now turn
to my second perspective on the two papers, the production of
knowledge in science. The way in which the traditional and new
political agents – and their postures, as well as their transferred
messages and constructed temporalities – are described in
Evren’s and Feras’ papers shows clear sympathy for the actions
of the new agents. It is sympathetic to the will to give more power
to the people, to the testing of new forms of commoning for
expressing resistance and for reclaiming political agency in a smart
and peaceful way. I am sympathetic to the new agents as well. But
I think that there might be some pitfalls in telling the story like this.
I apprehend that this way of producing scientific knowledge might
analytically blind us for what I introduced at the beginning of my
comment as a third sociological perspective: It might mask still
existing, very specific power relations within and between social
groups. This perspective therefore directly leads to three important
questions the two papers provoke in my view, questions which
have not been asked too often in recent heritage research.
The first question is: Who are the new agents? Who exactly is
‘the public’, ‘the community’, or ‘the new commoners’? Of course
it is vital to study the power relations between the traditional
agents, the government, and the new agents, the political
activists. But there generally are very few studies on the power
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VI I
relations within the group of the new agents, within ‘the new
commoners’. Evren carefully draws our attention to the fact that in
Istanbul the new commoners are young, that they have complex
communication and media skills that they are well informed about
their civil rights and about diverse forms of civil disobedience,
which they consciously entertain to fight for their rights peacefully
in public space. Evren concludes that civil disobedience in public
space built a commons for all who participated. But who did not
participate and why, who was either voluntarily or involuntarily –
for example because he or she did not possess, or did not know
how to handle, a smartphone – excluded from these practices
of commoning? Also Feras’ paper raises this question when he
explains that the local residents congregated in Sahet Al-Qaryon
during the second Intifada, gradually covering the painting
‘Return of Storks’ that had been imposed on the square by the
government and that had advertised peace so wrongfully. But
who exactly was this ‘local community’? Did women, for example,
belong to the protesters as much as men?
Many of the very few studies on power relations within new social
movements I know of come to the conclusion that current forms
of civil disobedience and urban commoning are largely practiced
by the well-educated, networked, mobile and cosmopolitan
young urban middle-classes. Seen in this way, urban commoning
might offer a very specific social group an opportunity to express,
perhaps even to guise, their very specific group interests as
common interests. Such a reading might prove to be entirely
wrong in the two cases presented here. Nonetheless should we
generally remain alert to the possibility that there might be, among
apparent processes of inclusion, also strong forces of exclusion at
work, for example as to age, ethnicity, gender, skills, time budgets,
possession of specific goods, etc. – both with a view to access to
the group of new agents, and to the power relations created within
this group. For example, we should not forget that sharing always
implies that you have something to share, and that both sharing
and bartering practices require possession as well as specific
communication and negotiation skills.
333
Likewise, to frame the new agents as ‘the good guys’ may hide
away the fact that they are, like all of us, still governed by the
traditional agents: by neoliberal, sometimes also neocolonial,
states, and by capital. So my second question is: If this is so,
why do the two papers presented in this seminar put so much
hope in the new commoners, in their claims for more democracy,
for modesty and sharing, and for a less vertical structuration of
society? I seems that in doing so, the authors of the two papers
place the new agents who partake in new practices of resistance
in a position that picks up on what Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri (2004) have called ‘the multitude’. The multitude, according
to Hardt and Negri, is a free congregation of networked subjects
in neoliberal, capitalist societies who deliberately join forces in a
common fight for liberation from governmental repression, and
for democratization. From their perspective, the multitude bears
the potential of forming a revolutionary subject against neoliberal,
imperial and capitalist power. If this is so, are the new commoners,
even though they might arise from a quite privileged and educated
group of society, the forerunners of a social movement that may
eventually lead to global revolution?
Opposing Hardt and Negris vision of the multitude as a potential

revolutionary force, cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han (2014)
has argued that we live in a globalized and mediatized neoliberal
society in which the traditional form of repressive power – the
authoritative form of power exerted by the traditional agents – has
been transformed unnoticed long ago. According to him, repressive
power has been substituted by a more subtle form which he calls
seductive power, a power that is exercised by the deregulated
capitalist market. Han claims that the market has unobtrusively
turned all of us into entrepreneurial selves. As entrepreneurial
selves, we expose ourselves to the market at all times without
realizing it. We do so while adapting our lives to what the job market
rewards, while setting up our personal profiles on Facebook, and
while waving to the video-cube camera in football stadia. For Han,
neoliberal capitalism is a highly efficient system that uses the
alleged freedom of the individual to the effect that we individually
334

VI I
take the liberty to strive towards self-exploitation. As to Han, the

sharing economy is the most recent culmination of our permanent
self-exposure to the market. In his opinion the celebrated new trends
of sharing – of home-videos, private couches, entire apartments,
opinions on products and services, etc. – have led towards a total
commercialization of our lives. Since sharing nowadays generally
comes along with a process of mutual reviewing and ranking, the
praised new forms of commoning perfectly conceal an advanced
stage of the power of the market over your lives. If one follows this
interpretation, the new trends of sharing and bartering will never
blossom into a revolution against capitalism. On the contrary, they
express the ultimate reign of capitalism that has succeeded in
selling even communism as a commodity.
One might follow Han’s thoughts or rather the more optimistic ones
of Hardt and Negri in seeking an answer to the question of whether
or not commoning could be a solution to the world-wide dominance
of neoliberal states and deregulated capitalism. What I want to
emphasize is that all of them do offer different interpretations of the
power relations in which the new agents thrive for more democracy,
participation, modesty and mutual respect. As a consequence, it
becomes very clear that to put or not to put hope in the activities
of the new commoners is both an interpretation of their action in
the framework of wider power relations in society, and a way of
producing scientific knowledge by embedding an empiric case into
a wider theoretical context.
The last question that I want to raise is: Why we do not put our
hope in heritage? My provisional answer to this question is that we
might not opt for doing so because we have witnessed a critical
turn in heritage studies in the past years. This critical heritage turn
has brought politics, policies and ideas of inclusion to the fore.
These ideas are of course rightful and important. From a scientific
point of view, however, this has had the effect that most of recent
heritage research conceptualizes heritage as a means to reach
something else: as a medium to attain participation, inclusion, and
democracy. What might we gain if we turn this relation around and
335
reconsider to conceptualize heritage as an end in itself?
If we define heritage, as is broadly agreed upon inside and outside
academia, as a contested arena of the social production and
representation of a meaningful and mutually shared past in the
present, heritage is a commons by definition – it is the outcome of
a process in which different social groups engage in debates about
a common past. The more these groups entitle to be their common
heritage, the more of the past – be it disputed or canonical, be it
glorious or atrocious – they define as being their collective past in
the present and in the future.
If we turn heritage along these lines from a means to achieve

something else into an end, the most plausible means to learn
about and approach a ‘new’ past as a potential prospective
commons would be place: all heritage – be it tangible or intangible
– is localized in places. Place may perform as palimpsest, as
it did in the case of the Gezi Park protests where an unknown
layer of the past – the Armenian cemetery – was uncovered and
subsequently reclaimed as common heritage. But place may also
function like a collage, as in Nablus, where local residents started
to add pictures of the martyrs to the wall painting in a way that at
first did not cover the painting but rather filled the blanks between
the painted woman, her pieces of laundry, and the returning storks.
If we conceptualize place as a means that may bring about – in
its functioning as palimpsest, collage, archive, deposit, or else –,
public communication about what could be a common heritage, we
would be able to put both place and heritage back center stage.
Conceptualized this way, we might rediscover much of what got
tied up with the critical heritage turn in the past years: we might
rediscover heritage as a realm in which the new commoners would
be just one pressure group among others. And we might rediscover
heritage not only as a path to, but also as a realm of hope in itself
that links the past both to the present and to the future.

VI I
References
Han, B.-C. (2014). Psychopolitik: Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken. Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer.
Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New
York: The Penguin Press.
337
About the Authors
Sybille Frank is a sociologist who studied at the Universities of Bielefeld, Glasgow and at
the Free University Berlin. From 2000 to 2003 she worked as research fellow at the Social
Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB) in a German-Israeli research project and lectured at
the Free University Berlin; in 2002 she participated in the elaboration of the Partnerships for
World Heritage initiative (PACT) at UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre in Paris. From 2003
to 2008 she held a position as lecturer at the Institute for Sociology, Technical University
Darmstadt; from 2008 to 2011 she worked as research fellow at the Technical University of
Darmstadt’s interdisciplinary research cluster ‘The Intrinsic Logic of Cities’. In 2011, Sybille
was awarded the position of adjunct professor for ‘Sociology of Space’ at the Goethe
University Frankfurt. Since April 2012, she has been professor for Urban and Regional
Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Technical University Berlin. Sybille’s work focuses on
urban sociology, on the sociology of space and place, and on tourism and heritage studies..
Elizabeth Greenspan is a writer, urban anthropologist, and lecturer at Harvard University.

Her book, Battle for Ground Zero: Inside the Political Struggle to Rebuild the World Trade
Center, which chronicles the struggles among politicians, developers, architects, victims’
families, and activists to rebuild the site, was published in the fall of 2013 by Palgrave
Macmillan. She writes regularly about cities, real estate, and public space for both peer-
reviewed and popular publications, including Salon, the New Yorker’s Currency blog,
and The Washington Post, as well as American Anthropologist, Public Historian, and the
International Journal of Heritage Studies. Liz received a PhD in anthropology and urban
studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and a BA in anthropology from Haverford
College in 1999. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a journalist.
Christine Hansen is a Swedish Research Council scholar in the Department of History,

Gothenburg University. She is currently working on the environmental / social history project
‘People of the flume: adapting for fire in southeastern Australia.’ Her previous research was
with the Critical Heritage Studies seminar at Gothenburg University, examining Australian
objects held in European ethnographic collections.
Mattias Kärrholm is a Professor in Architectural theory at the Department of Architecture

and Built environment, LTH, Lund University, and a Professor of Architecture at Urban
Studies, Malmö University. He took his Ph.D. in 2004 with the dissertation Arkitekturens
territorialitet (The Territoriality of Architecture). MK’s research deals with territoriality, the
use of public space, urban design, materiality, actor-network theory, society and space and
everyday life. He has published articles in international journals such as Urban Studies,
Social and Cultural Geography, Cities, European Planning Studies and Space & Culture. In
2012 he published the book Retailising Space, Architecture, Retail and the Territorialisation
of Public Space on Ashgate. Current research projects include issues on time-space
planning, sustainability and the use of public space, urban walking, and on ‘the material turn’
in architectural research. Teaching includes courses in architectural theory, urban desgin and
sustainable urbanism.
Tim Edensor teaches cultural geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the

author of Tourists at the Taj (198), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002)
and Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, as well as the editor of Geographies
of Rhythm (2010) and co-editor of Spaces of Vernacular Creativity (2009) and Urban Theory
Beyond the West: A World of Cities (2011). Tim has written extensively on national identity,
tourism, industrial ruins, walking, driving, football cultures and urban materiality and is
currently investigating landscapes of illumination and darkness
Vanja Larberg is an achitect working on a commission on social sustainability, S2020,

within the municipality of Gothenburg. The aim of the commission is to strengthen the role of
the social dimension in urban development, through implementing new ways in the planning
process, for example the use of Social impact analysis. Identity: Urban walker with feminist
eyes. My hands: drawing stories about urban walkers, lead pencil, indian ink, watercolor.
Where? Standing next to a lime-tree, looking at the colors of the lichens on the branches,
thinking about what it is with trees that make people act politically. Business students
passing by on the walkway under the canopy, in the middle of a street lined with brick
buildings, a street that is a backbone and a strong configuration in social patterns, identities,
and dreams.
Kenneth Olwig was appointed as Professor in Landscape Planning with specialty in

landscape theory and history at SLU in January 2002. He was previously professor in
Landscape History and Planning at the Department of Geography at the University in
Trondheim (NTNU), Norway. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the
University of Minnesota, Department of Geography, 1977, where his advisor was Prof. Yi-Fu
Tuan, and where he also studied with Prof. David Lowenthal. He is the author of: Nature’s
Ideological Landscape: A Literary and Geographic Perspective on its Development and
Preservation on Denmark’s Jutland Heath1984 and Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic:
From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World, 2002.
For the past forty years Patricia Johanson’s multidisciplinary designs have combined art,
ecology, landscaping, and functional infrastructure. Johanson’s work has been seen in over
150 exhibitions worldwide, and her writings have been translated into twelve languages.
She is author of CREATIVE SOLUTIONS TO ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS, “Preserving
Biocultural Diversity in Public Parks”, and “The City as an Ecological Art Form”. Johanson
received an honorary doctorate from Massachusetts College of Art in 1995 and her project
drawings and models are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and Museum of Modern Art, Storm King Art Center, Dallas Museum of Art, National Museum
of Women in the Arts, and Dumbarton Oaks Contemporary Landscape Design Collection.
Staffan Schmidt is an artistic researcher and senior lecturer in Design in Theory and
Practice at the School of Arts and Communication, K3, Malmö University. He has worked
as lecturer in Art theory at Art academies in Scandinavia, Belarus, Lithuania, the US, and
India. His work takes its starting point in investigations of the built environment seen
in relation to socio-economic, political, and ecological shifts. These works are mostly
developed collaboratively, utilized video and photography as well as architectural and
spatial interventions, digital media, historical material and text. In 2008 he completed an
extensive series of exhibition projects entitled Spatial Expectations and received a PhD in
artistic research in collaboration with Mike Bode at Gothenburg University. His work has
been presented and exhibited at amongst other places: Kunst Werke Berlin, The Center of
Contemporary Art Vilnius, Secession, Wienna, Old City Hall Yamaguchi, Japan, Rooseum,
Malmö, Malmö konsthall, Gothenburg konsthall, The Sullivan Galleries Chicago, Theaterhaus
Jena, and at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm.
Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen practice since 2000 as STEALTH.unlimited. They act
internationally, between the fields of urban research, spatial interventions, curation and
cultural activism. They co-initiated “Who Builds the City” platform in Belgrade, “City in
Making” association in Rotterdam, and conduct research at the Royal Institute of Art (KKH)
in Stockholm, where they co-organised the conference “Commoning the City” in April 2013.
(http://www.stealth.ultd.net/)
Kim Trogal is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Architecture at Sheffield University.

Trained as an architect, she left practice to pursue PhD research, for which she was awarded
a RIBA scholarship. This work, ‘Caring For Space’ focussed particularly on new, ethical
spatial practices using feminist methods and concepts. She is currently working with Irena
Bauman and Doina Petrescu, researching urban resilience and civic-ecological practice.
Dougald Hine is a social thinker with a history of bringing ideas to life. He is founder of
the civic ideas agency Spacemakers and co-founder of School of Everything and the Dark
Mountain Project. His latest book, The Crossing of Two Lines (thecrossingoftwolines.com),
is a collaboration with the Stockholm-based artist duo Performing Pictures, published
by Elemental Editions in October 2013. He left England in 2012 and is slowly arriving in
Sweden.
Lucia Allais earned her Ph.D. in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture from
MIT, and her M.Arch from Harvard. Her dissertation, Will to War, Will to Art: Cultural
Internationalism and the Modernist Aesthetics of Monuments 1932-1964, chronicled
the emergence of a network of international agencies in the mid-20th Century to protect
monuments worldwide from the destructive effects of war and modernization. This study
uncovered new archival material on the maps and lists created by the Allied Air Forces to
protect art and architecture from bombing during World War II, and situated this episode in a
continuum of intellectual cooperation, from the League of Nations to UNESCO.https://soa.
princeton.edu/content/lucia-allais
Henric Benesch is an architect, designer and researcher with a particular interest in socio-
spatial, socio-temporal and socio-material aspects and formats of knowledge production in
the intersection between research, education and urban development. He´s been working in
a number of artistic research project with a focus the imaginary, collective and participative
aspects of our cities and their continouos becoming. From 2013 he has been working as
Head of Subject at the Design Department at HDK and as Coordinator for the Urban Cluster
within the Criticial Heritage Initiative at Gothenburg University together with Ingrid Martins
Holmberg. From 2014 he also works as Research Strategist at HDK and as member of the
working group at PARSEJournal.
Philip Ursprung is Professor for the History of Art and Architecture at ETH Zürich. He
studied art history, history and German literature in Geneva, Vienna and Berlin. 2005-2011
he was Professor for Modern and Contemporary Art, Universität Zürich; 2007 Visiting
Professor, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
New York; 2011 Visiting Professor BIArch, Barcelona Institute of Architecture. http://www.
gta.arch.ethz.ch/staff/philip-ursprung/curriculum-vitae-en
Britt Baillie is an Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Archaeology, and a founding

member of the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research, University of Cambridge. Her research
concerns the politicization of cultural heritage, memory and identity, religious uses and
concepts of space, and theories of destruction. She is the co-editor of (2013) Locating
Urban Conflicts: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Everyday, Palgrave, London.
Chiara de Cesari is an anthropologist and an assistant professor in European Studies

and Cultural Heritage Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She completed her PhD
in Socio-Cultural Anthropology on Palestinian heritage and memory politics at Stanford
University in 2009. She is currently completing a book titled Heritage Beyond the Nation-
State: Palestine and the Politics of Culture, and is co-editor of a collection on transnational
memories to appear in 2014. Her research focuses on heritage, memory and broader cultural
politics and the ways in which these change under conditions of globalization, particularly the
intersection of cultural memory, transnationalism and current transformations of the nation-
state. Her most recent project explores the making of a new European collective memory
and heritage in relation to its blind spots, with particular reference to the carceral heritage of
Italian colonialism in Libya.
Nina Gren holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Gothenburg. Her
thesis focused on Palestinian camp refugees in the West Bank and dealt with everyday
life and issues of resilience in a violent and uncertain political situation. She has carried
out research about Danes and Swedes with a Palestinian background and their diasporic
practices, while being a post doc at the Department of Anthropology, University of
Copenhagen. Gren has also carried out fieldwork in UN-run schools for Palestinian refugee
children, focusing on processes of gendered identity formations. Since January 2014, Gren
works as a researcher at the Centre of Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University.
Feras Hammami is a postdoctoral research fellow in Critical Heritage Studies, University

of Gothenburg. His research concerns cultural heritage and urban planning, with a specific
interest in the discussion of heritage politics in relation to identity, security, conflict and
resistance. He is the author of Heritage in Authority Making in Sweden, Palestine and
Botswana, Conservation under Occupation, and Culture and Planning for Change and
Continuity in Botswana.
Evren Uzer is currently a post doctoral research fellow at Critical Heritage Studies at the
School of Design and Crafts at Gothenburg University. She holds a PhD from Urban and
Regional Planning from Istanbul Technical University, Her research concerns heritage and
activism, resilience, resistance, participation and urban interventions. Prior to this position
she worked as a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute PSPD in New York City, as
researcher at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand and at Istanbul Technical
University, in Turkey. Her most recent project explores heritage activism and its relation to
building commons and communities, with cases from France and Sweden.
Ingrid Holmberg is senior lecturer at the Department of Conservation, University of

Gothenburg, since 2007. She has been acting director of studies for the BA programme
in Built Heritage for many years. Her research has i.a. concerned urban renewal & urban
history; heritagization of built environments and in particular the knowledge claims; places of
subaltern groups in heritage management; old buildings in the perspective of circulation of
meanings and materiality.
Göteborgs universitet
Institution för Kulturvård
ISSN 1101-3303
CURATING THE CITY

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Ed. Benesch, Hammami, Holmberg, Uzer

CURATING THE CITY

I S B N 978- 91-70 61- 6 6 4 - 8 ( pdf )

Copyright © 2015 the authors

P W R was invited by Plaquette to further visually explore the notions of heritage

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

Keeping things in common

During the past year the Urban Heritage Research Cluster as

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

For Session I Sybille Frank was invited. Through a sociological

In Session II Mattias Kärrholm investigates the relation be-

In Session III Kenneth Olwig problematizes the historical

In Session IV STEALTH (Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen) ex-

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

In Session V Lucia Allais explores issues of representation and

In Session VI Britt Baillie discusses issues of enclosure and right

In Session VII, with a slightly different setup, Evren Uzer,

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

Urban Commons and Urban Heritage

My paper will deal with the complex relation between Cities,

In recent times we have witnessed a rising societal and aca-

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

But what is the commons?

In his recent book on “Rebel Cities”, David Harvey defines

What are then urban commons?

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

stroying these diversified neighborhoods and everyday neighborhood

If we shift our attention to the lowest side of the triangle, the

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

Summing up, different social groups and various public and

Finally, on the left side of the triangle, the relationship be-

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

Ashworth, G. & Hartmann, R. (2005). The Management of Horror

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

Jeffrey, A., McFarlane, C. & Vasudevan, A. (2012). Rethinking Enclosure.

Urban Heritage Seminar series:

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

a wall. They saw it as a symbol of exclusion and secrecy, and were

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

more effectively? It barred homemade memorials and public expres-

A comment to the seminar of

There is no arguing with the dead, especially in the field of heritage.

I’ve noticed this lacuna of feeling within the literature of heritage

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

The pulse of intensity that waxes and wanes around heritage is

The triangle of terms and relations proposed by Sybille Frank is a

Of course corpses and sadness are not compulsory in the

Noticing the exchange between emotion and time, we can look

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

If time can diminish or shift emotional intensity, it can also help

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

The need for meaning, to be part of something larger than

So, if my improvised triangle (with apologies to Sybille Frank for

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage

On ‘crowd space’ as urban commons

The public is what is constantly appropriated, yet con-

The Main Square of Malmö, Stortorget, was inaugurated as a

Noortje Marres uses Walter Lippmann’s and John Dewey’s

Heritage as Common(s) – Common(s) as Heritage