Theorizing the Urban Housing Commons

Th eorizing the urban housing commons Don Nonini Abstract: Th is article theorizes the making and unmaking of the urban housing commons in Amsterdam. Th e article reviews the literature on the urban housing commons, sets out the analytics of use values and exchange values for housing, and situates these analytics within the transition from dominance of industrial to fi nance capital in the Netherlands during neoliberalization from the mid-1970s to the present. A vibrant housing commons in Amsterdam came into existence by the 1980s because of two social movements that pressed the Dutch state to institu- tionalize this commons—the New Left movement within the Dutch Labor Party, and the squatters’ movement in Amsterdam. Th e subsequent shift in dominance from industrial to fi nance capital has led to the decline of both movements and the erosion of the housing commons. Keywords: Amsterdam, fi nance capital, neoliberalization, New Left movement, squatters’ movement, urban commons Th is article theorizes the urban commons in the oretical approach anchored in an analytics for case of the housing commons of Amsterdam, theorizing the making and unmaking of the the Netherlands, from the 1960s to the present. commons. In the second section, I provide evi- Th e making and unmaking of urban commons dence for the existence of a housing commons like housing in Amsterdam can only be under- in Amsterdam in the mid-1980s. Th e third sec- stood if urban commons are theorized both in tions applies the theoretical concepts of the terms of their scaled political economy and of article to explain the making of the housing com- the everyday interventions of social movement mons—the particular developments in postwar actors, as their actions were channeled by but capitalism in the Netherlands from the 1960s also transformed the historically and geograph- to the 1980s that empowered two diff erent so- ically specifi c arrangements between classes and cial movements to transform the Dutch state the modern state that constituted that political to establish the housing commons. Th e fourth economy. section turns to how transformations in Dutch In the fi rst section of the article, I review ear- capitalism in time and space led to shift s in po- lier studies of the urban commons—a relatively litical dominance away from industrial capital new area of research—and set out my own the- and organized labor toward fi nance capital, such Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 79 (2017): 23–38 © Stichting Focaal and Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/fcl.2017.790103 24 | Don Nonini that conservative political elites came to power framework of political economy and sociocul- and began to erode the social protections for tural analysis, and grounded in specifi c empir- city residents of the housing commons. Th e ar- ical examples. Th is article seeks to accomplish ticle concludes with an assessment of the recent this task by fi rst theorizing the urban commons, literature in the study of the urban commons in then, second, illustrating some of the key pro- light of the fi ndings of this article. cesses that make urban commons possible and allow them to persist—at least for a long period of time, if not indefi nitely. Th eorizing the urban commons Recent articles on the urban commons begin to suggest the challenges in theorizing the ur- In the past two decades in anthropology and ban commons, but they do not go far enough other social science disciplines, a lively and pro- in tying the formation and persistence of ur- ductive exploration of the commons as an al- ban commons to contemporary capitalism and ternative to capitalist processes of production, contemporary states, to which they are surely exchange, and consumption has emerged (Bol- connected. For example, Amanda Huron (2015: lier 2002; Nonini 2007; Ostrom 1990; Ostrom et 963), drawing on her study of limited-equity al. 1999). Researchers have focused on the va- cooperatives in Washington, DC, contends that riety of commons, their modes of governance, urban commons are characterized by two traits and the preconditions for their existence and that distinguish them from rural commons. persistence. An increasingly prolifi c literature First, they are “enacted in saturated space … has come to substantiate the important claim that is already densely packed with people, com- that commons do indeed exist in a great vari- peting uses, and capitalist investment.” Second, ety of environments, social settings, periods of they are “constituted by the coming together of development, and political systems (Ostrom et strangers.” al. 1999). Maja Bruun’s (2015) very interesting and However, there has been one key shortcom- well-researched study of Danish housing coop- ing to this approach: almost universally, the eratives provides another example of the urban commons in question are rural. Within the social housing commons. Her argument about “open sciences, only very recently has it become possi- access”—that open access to the urban com- ble to think productively about the existence of mons must be seen as a “central social value urban commons, of the forms they might take, arising from democratic open societies” (2015: and of the conditions that make their existence 156)—should be noted. It appears to challenge possible. Initial conceptualization in sorting out the generalization in the commons literature the diff erent kinds of urban commons is an (e.g., Ostrom 1990) that the commons has been important start. Th e distinction by Ida Susser eroded when there are no rules that exclude and Stéphane Tonnelat (2013) between three outsiders from using it. kinds of urban commons has been particularly Turning to another approach, Martin Korn- helpful—they refer to commons around pub- berger and Christian Borch (2015: 8), in their lic services or goods, such as schools, housing, survey of urban commons in Europe, make transport or health care; around public spaces the important argument that “density and re- of interaction and encounter, such as streets and lationality are key factors in what constitutes parks; and around public artistic expression that the urban commons.” Th ey argue that the com- engages the creativity of city residents, such as mon property literature of Elinor Ostrom and murals and street performances. colleagues (1999) make a confused distinction While a signifi cant advance, these refl ections between “subtractive” resources within a com- on the urban commons need to be more fully de- mons (where one person using a resource sub- veloped theoretically within a broader political tracts from it being used by others, as in the case Th eorizing the urban housing commons | 25 of natural resources like water, timber, or fi sh- venues for public speaking, and so forth. Urban eries) and “non-subtractive ones,” like knowl- housing is one such key resource that, along edge or close proximity of city residents to one with other public goods and services and spaces another. Th ey claim that within cities, non-sub- of encounter (Susser and Tonnelat 2013), make tractable resource commons prevail, for exam- the production of these other forms of collec- ple, that consumption by one person of a park tive “resources” possible; this is indeed what or shopping mall does not decrease the value amounts to urban “collective consumption” these have for others but actually increases it, as (Cas tells 1983). Collectivities of people together when crowds come together for people to enjoy produce collective use values as products of the presence of others, or to observe what oth- their sociality—and they seek to gain access to ers are purchasing (Kornberger and Borch 2015: them wherever possible. 6). Kornberger and Borch go on to refer to the However, city life is not only about use val- urban commons as being a city’s “atmospher- ues but also about the exchange values that con- ics,” its spheres of sociality and connectedness temporary capitalism seeks to create. Broadly within networks (2015: 8–11). speaking, it can do so in one of two ways. Th e Finally, the literature on urban social move- one most familiar from interpretations of clas- ments provides valuable insights into how par- sical Marxism is the production of exchange ticipants in urban social movements think about value through the capitalist industrial labor pro- the commons and seek through their activism to cess, which involves the appropriation of surplus bring into being more just sharing of resources. value and its subsequent realization when the in- David Harvey (2013a) points to the collective dustrial capitalist sells “his” product, thus lead- eff orts that urban residents have long made at ing to his accumulation of capital (Marx 1976). “commoning,” and refers to the literature on What is less recognized, if at all, is the risk the “rights to the city” that inform social move- that surplus value once appropriated may not ments (and social movement theory). Maribel be realized, that is, a variety of structural condi- Casas-Cortés and colleagues (2014) and Don tions may make it impossible for commodities Mitchell (2003) provide other studies of how to be sold in such a way that their surplus value participants in social movements have sought can be converted to the money-form within cy- to bring about urban commons. cles of capital accumulation. Historically, this As I argue here, each of these approaches has oft en happened in periodic economic crises to the urban commons provides useful contri- because of overaccumulation and undercon- butions but has shortcomings when assessed sumption. As Harvey (2013b: 1–35, 379–394) in light of the more explicit theorization that has recently noted, realizing surplus value, in follows. addition to the sales of commodities by the industrial capitalist, implicates three other forms of capital, according to Marx in Capital, Volume Toward an analytics of the urban 3—rent capital, merchant capital, and money commons in an era of the rise of or fi nance capital.

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