The Practice of the Commons

Key characteristics and elements for the evolution of libraries as democratic infrastructures.

From Theory to Practice
A COMMONS Action Day in the pedestrian zone on Fokionos Negri Street.
The commons is, in the first instance, nothing more than a idealised dynamic, an intention, the willingness to create a life-in-common. Can we imagine a city that is different from the one we have known in the past, a city that is actually constituted by its inhabitants? Can we think of a “we” that overlaps with the “I”? Would you like to find out more about the Action Day and get an idea of the different projects and groups involved? How can we envision new forms of social change and novel ways of appropriating public space?

 

The coronavirus pandemic crisis has triggered a new wave of collective practices that gesture towards the same necessity as the “squares movement” (including the Arab Spring, the Indignados, and the Occupy movements): another form of social organisation is urgently needed. Different neighbourhood initiatives, movement-based campaigns, dispersed rhizomatic acts of solidarity, community-based management of urban and rural territories: all these processes and acts are spreading throughout the world, under the radar of dominant media, and usually bypassing market-oriented channels as well as directly or indirectly clashing with governmental priorities.
 

As spaces, libraries are the product of those social relations that play out inside them. How can we think of libraries as spaces that conceive of knowledge as a freely and openly accessible common good, that is, a commons? Here are some initial ideas from the library of the Goethe-Institut in Athens.

And we’re off! The Goethe-Institutes in Athens, Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia, Istanbul, and Zagreb are embracing the commons and trying to get to the bottom of what commoning means, how the commons movement sees itself in the various countries involved, and how we, as an institution, can open up to the commons.

Not least since the 2010 “movement of the squares” that took Greece by storm, public space has been at the heart of contestation against austerity policies of privatization and deregulation. Beyond protests, however, manifold groups and activities broadly related to the commons sought to re-appropriate what is “public” about space through various cultural and political activities, including performances, screenings, food kitchens, or neighborhood assemblies.

Even though the commons often involves natural assets, commoning is a process that is not always self-evident to people unversed in it. For this reason, we have put together some reading tips for you, almost all of them available via open access.

The “Bauhaus Meets Commons” events asked what the Bauhaus – one hundred years after its founding – would have to say to the Commons movement. Like the Bauhaus thinkers, the commons – or the “sharing economy” – creates an alternative to the established economic model and explores how we actually want to live, create, design and produce.
 

What exactly is the commons? How does the practice of commoning work? And how can the Goethe-Institut work together with the commons movement?
These were the questions discussed at the kick-off workshop for the Goethe-Institut’s regional project on the commons with experts and activists from Germany, Greece, Croatia, and Serbia.