7-10 NOVEMBRE 2012
Facultat de Geografia i Història - Universitat de Barcelona
Dimecres 7/11/2012
Dijous 8/11/2012
Divendres 9/11/2012
Dissabte 10/11/2012
Re-inventing Spaces of Commoning: Occupied Squares in Movement
Architect Phd., Assistant Professor School of Architecture (zoesm@central.ntua.gr)
Abstract
It is tempting to describe the squares movement in terms of a resurfacing of a long suppressed need to feel connected to other people through a common cause. Communities allegedly emerge from such processes of “feeling in common”, of being able to recognize defining similarities, of discovering and pursuing common collective identities. Equating community to the locus of a shared identity seems to be taken as a self evident empirical truth as well as a self evident law of social groupings. At the squares, however, a new way of experiencing and recognizing communities seems to have emerged. People, in their acts and manifestos, put an emphasis on the diversity of the participants’ social origins, on the plurality of their opinions, on the coexistence of different initiatives, on the multiplicity of expressions and performances. A common cause was indeed always evoked, not simply as a unifying core of different events, actions and discourses but, rather, as a potential activating source, which could give meaning to and align various initiatives. Communities formed in this way were not created because a shared “ethos” became a kind of coercive social glue but because people gathered in places in which possibilities of being in common were to be re-discovered. This kind of communities can be called communities in movement or emerging communities.
