Dr Colin McFarlane - The metabolic urban commons: informality and everyday Life

Duration: 28 mins 23 secs
Share this media item:
Embed this media item:


About this item
Image inherited from collection
Description: As an ideal and material space, the ‘urban commons’ is often understood in relation to either defence or to the production of new collectives. The commons is both something in need of defending, and a generative source for practising ways of living with difference, developing new forms of collective life, and collaboratively producing new urban resources and imaginaries. In this paper, I seek to stretch the geographies of the urban commons through attention to everyday metabolic processes that both defy distinctions of urban-rural and body-global, and which become known and politicised in often strikingly different ways. More broadly, the paper seeks an alternative engagement with both the ‘urban’ and the ‘commons’ and their conceptual and political relation. It does so in relation to research on informal settlements, especially in India.
 
Created: 2015-01-13 15:07
Collection: Shrinking Commons Conference
Shrinking Commons
Publisher: University of Cambridge
Copyright: Dr Colin McFarlane
Language: eng (English)
Distribution: World     (downloadable)
Keywords: Shrinking Commons;
Explicit content: No
 
Abstract: As an ideal and material space, the ‘urban commons’ is often understood in relation to either defence or to the production of new collectives. The commons is both something in need of defending, and a generative source for practising ways of living with difference, developing new forms of collective life, and collaboratively producing new urban resources and imaginaries. In this paper, I seek to stretch the geographies of the urban commons through attention to everyday metabolic processes that both defy distinctions of urban-rural and body-global, and which become known and politicised in often strikingly different ways. More broadly, the paper seeks an alternative engagement with both the ‘urban’ and the ‘commons’ and their conceptual and political relation. It does so in relation to research on informal settlements, especially in India.
Available Formats
Format Quality Bitrate Size
MP3 44100 Hz 249.75 kbits/sec 51.92 MB Listen Download
Auto * (Allows browser to choose a format it supports)