Saving the urban commons - part 2

In part 1 of this essay, we saw how the world’s cities are being taken over by tech and capital, in a replay of the capture of the rural commons that happened ahead of the industrial revolution. We focused on “the smooth city” and “the smart city” as the two halves of a stealthy pincer movement driving the process forward.

In sharing this idea with friends, I have since realised that the concept of an urban commons is not self-explanatory. And it turns out that it is far from an agreed-upon concept in the world of urban planning either. The Heinrich Böll Foundation, an NGO furthering democratic and environmental goals, defines the urban commons as “civic spaces that allow for the free, unhampered exchange of ideas.” On the same page, the Foundation notes: “As cities are increasingly regarded as enterprises to be competitively managed in the pursuit of economic growth – now more than ever before – the commons takes on greater significance as a political process.” That quote dates to 2015, demonstrating that the urban commons has been recognised for some time in public policy and local government circles. But an exact definition still remains somewhat in the eye of the beholder. In my own research on the topic, looking at German and/or Berlin-focused websites, I found examples of urban commons ranging from public transportation to cemeteries and parks, all the way to artist co-ops and even private housing projects. But surely this is too broad a definition. In my mind, the most essential quality of an urban commons is that it is open to anyone, it is not a commercial space (i.e. you don’t have to buy anything to spend time there), and also that it is a place. So the extremes of public transport and private housing would not qualify; rather it’s places like parks, cemeteries or public squares, but also libraries and community gardens, where there is both a possibility of stopping over to sit down, as well as the opportunity to circulate and browse, which define the urban commons for me.

And that makes the link to the historical commons clearer. In the countryside, the commons included fields where farmers could graze their cows and sheep, forests where foragers could gather nuts and berries, and the wells and streams where everyone drew their water. They were resources needed by the whole community, and which the whole community was responsible for stewarding. I would say that a similar sense of responsibility for the urban commons is patchy at best, but that may also be due to a lack of awareness of them as shared resources.

That, unfortunately, is not the case for the forces of capital and control. Just as nature represents a “free gift” in the mind of OG capitalists, so too do the urban commons represent territory for the taking. And like classic colonialists, they have even given a new name to this new land they believe they have discovered: “urban infill”. It is a dreadful word that manages to ring in the register of waste management and Orwellian erasure at the same time. As usual for these types of business bros, the writer goes on to wax hyperbolic about a basic concept:

Urban infill is really a mindset focused on unlocking value that’s hiding in plain sight. It’s the practice of building new residential, commercial, or mixed-use projects on empty or neglected lots inside already developed areas.

“Empty”, “neglected”, “undeveloped” or “underperforming” are all forms of planting the colonial flag through language. A territory is deemed to be up for grabs the moment it is judged not to be productive for capital. It may be serving all sorts of purposes for the community’s residents, not to mention the plants and animals who live there, but in the vampire vision of capital, it is just another warm body waiting to be sucked dry.

And that is exactly why it is so important to save the commons. Apart from the essentially democratic nature of shared places in the city, I think their most underappreciated quality is providing a respite from the unrelenting pressure to be productive. Even those members of society who are not in the workforce comply with this directive in one form or another. Just being active on social media, for example, is a kind of work (which becomes more job-like the more active one becomes): promoting yourself requires the creation and curation of content, while supposedly “passive” consumption still requires the spending of time and attention to feed the algorithms with clicks and likes. Even retirees are increasingly expected to professionalise their post-working lives with scheduled activities and monetisable hobbies, to self-extract whatever added value may be latent in their lives with a product for the market.

And it is when you are online, on a platform, or in some kind of commercial space in the real world, that this productivity must be displayed: either through your personal appearance and/or by following the scripts of productivity in one’s speech and behavior. Whereas in the spaces of the urban commons, you are free to simply be you. Very few people would put on their most fashionable clothing to go to a library, for example, nor are many professional networking events held outside in a park. The essential accessibility of these places makes them kryptonite for situations or organisations that are premised on exclusion.

The quiet violence of exclusion is where the rationale for saving the urban commons aligns with an idea I’ve had for a while: namely, that weeds might show us a path to resisting the advent of techno-fascism as the larger threat behind the specific threat of the smooth city+smart city pincer.

I know, you’re probably thinking: Come again? Weeds?

Yes: weeds. It’s actually more accurate to call them wild plants, since they are defined by being undomesticated: following their own agenda instead of being at our service. At minimum, they are plants deemed to be in the wrong place. At their maximum peskiness, they sabotage human control of the food chain. In his book Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants, Richard Mabey notes: “Although they follow and are dependent on human activities, their cussedness and refusal to play by our rules makes them subversive, and the very essence of wildness.” Unlike food crops, which have had their strength and resilience bred out of them in the name of higher yield (ie productivity), wild plants have retained their genetic diversity, which is part of how they survive under adverse conditions. But that’s just one of their genius moves. In fact, they have a whole portfolio of strategies that provides a useful model for resistance to even the most daunting strategies of control and repression. For example:

• Laying down taproots - i.e. being anchored in deeply held values, and/or a sense of place

• Reproducing at scale - spreading your ideas far and wide

• Dormancy and delayed growth - being able to flex with circumstances, finding the right moment to make a bold move or, alternately, waiting and saving energy

• Growing in the cracks - finding opportunities at edges and in-between spaces and moments, territories that others don’t even perceive as habitable

That opportunism is not just limited to so-called waste ground and marginal places, but extends to inhabiting exactly those places claimed by empire as its most valuable territories: the plantations of monoculture commodity crops, government offices, data centers, the lawns of millionaires. Even with the full arsenal of the military-industrial complex aimed against them, from gene editing to strimmers aka weed-whackers, they just keep on keeping on. That pure “cussedness”, as Mabey calls it, may be their most potent medicine. How so?Containing, controlling and/or getting rid of the undesirables of society has always been a preoccupation of the rich and powerful. And while various methods have been used throughout history, from ghettoes and prisons to forced removals, the common flavor of them all lies in making certain people feel unwanted. Belonging is such a deep-seated need that deliberately withholding it spells an existential threat: both to someone’s social survival and, because we are so dependent on each other as human beings, their physical life as well. It’s a tactic that’s been used over and over again in the past, and will only be amplified by AI-driven surveillance and policing, but I believe that weeds can help us counteract both the curse of undesirability as well as the dictates of productivity. How so?
On one hand, weeds are useful to think-with as a metaphor. Their strategies of survival as outlined above could be mapped to all sorts of different human situations, from direct activism to quieter forms of creative living on the margins. They are guerillas in the classic sense, never tackling the enemy head-on but finding ways to sap its strength with feints from the margins, all the while keeping their own agenda alive underground.

That’s the classic military strategic view which I absorbed simply by virtue of growing up in the warmongering United States. I recognise it is a perpetuation of violence in its own right.

So I’d like to offer another, more peaceful take on the possibility of learning from weeds, and that is to work with them as allies, in the shared fight for Life against the death machine of capitalism. As a plant person myself, I believe that plant-human communication is not something strange or unusual, but rather that plants have been talking to people as long as we’ve both been on the planet together. Indigenous cultures have maintained this connection over time; it’s just industrialised societies, especially in the West, that lost it over the past few centuries. But now we are at a point in our planetary crisis where the plants are actively trying to get our attention. Consider the upsurge of Westerners undertaking ayahuasca journeys. Of course, you might say that it’s just a more exotic form of drug use and/or spiritual tourism, yet at the same time it’s notable to me that ayahuasca does not make for a particularly fun drug trip, and even more importantly: ayahuasca is a plant that communicates specific messages. I have not done it myself, mainly because I don’t feel called to (lots of other plants are already talking to me!) but this is a consistent theme in every ayahuasca encounter I’ve read or heard about: people hear the voice of the Mother, and she tells them things that change their lives in the direction of wholeness and healing.

My point is not for you, dear reader, to take an ayahuasca trip yourself but rather to simply sit with a common weed like plantain or nettle or dandelion and tune in to what they might have to say. Quiet your mind, listen and trust your imagination. Let me know what you see and hear!