Framing the Commons

Curriculum: Advanced Urban Seminar, California College of the Arts, Architecture Division
Date: Fall 2020 
Professor: Antje Steinmuller

This seminar offers a critical introduction to contemporary notions of the commons with the goal to stake out the shifting territory of architectural agency in their production. 

In the current context of rapid urbanization, widespread inequality, and financial and political crises, the commons have received new attention as more and more people search for alternatives to the increasing privatization and commercialization of urban space and resources. Sparked by a loss of confidence in the state as the steward of these resources and the free market as provider of goods and services, today’s interest in the commons is rooted in their promise of alternative ownership models, fair collective governance, and equitable distribution of spatial and material resources. 

This seminar reflects on the constituent components of the commons (a resource; users of this resource; and the practice of negotiating and governing this use) across its historical, contemporary, and utopian forms. Through theoretical texts and various realized and unrealized projects we will consider commoning practices across several territories: spaces of production (agriculture + manufacturing), spaces of reproduction (domestic environments), and spaces of recreation (parks + public space). Rather than idealizing terms like ‘community’ and ‘sharing’ as popularized by tech giants like Facebook and Airbnb, we will probe commons projects for their latent negotiations of boundaries and exclusion, and their processes of space appropriation and self-organization – reflecting on the role of architectural expertise in commoning practices.

Framing the Commons combines a seminar and workshop format. In the seminar component, students will write reading responses and contribute to discussions and debates. In the workshop component, students will produce analytical drawings of commons projects as part of a collectively assembled commons ‘cookbook’ that aims to link analysis with speculative strategies for changing ownership and resource distribution in cities today.

The seminar published its research to an Instagram account, @framingthecommons.
To see the full scope of work, go to https://www.instagram.com/framingthecommons/