Resurgent Commons

Once dismissed as “tragedy,” the commons have been making a comeback. Amid intensifying social and environmental injustices in neoliberal regimes, scholars and activists have turned to the commons—historically, the shared ownership of land—as a way to express more just ways of living within and against the grasp of capitalism. Resurgent Commons reframes the commons by foregrounding relations of care and socio-ecological reproduction, while questioning anthropocentric formulations that would render the commons a set of available resources and the product of human cooperation. Interdisciplinary in nature, Tola’s book troubles universalist accounts of the commons by unearthing its ambivalent role in European colonial histories marked by racial and sexual violence and environmental destruction.

As central case studies, the book considers contemporary political projects that enact feminist, anti-racist and more-than-human practices of urban commoning in Rome, a sprawling built environment in the European South that is also a city of ruins. From transfeminist commons to struggles for repairing areas where industrial ruins and recalcitrant natures coexist, to encounters with indigenous perspectives from the Americas, resurgent commons enact forms of life that are at odds with dominant regimes of property and governance. The book shows how a reconsideration of a supposedly obsolete mode of shared ownership can enable new modes of inhabiting the earth.