Repair and reconstruction for urban commoning : The making of the liberated spaces in Naples

Abstract

Commoning requires repair. Where capitalist logics of accumulation, enclosure and exclusion produce abandoned space through the city, urban commoners remake that space to serve the needs of inhabitants. Without hiding the paradoxes and risks of repair, based on years-long ethnography in the Liberated Spaces in Naples, Italy, we demonstrate how repair and reconstruction produced the conditions for societal transformation in the city. We show how this was achieved through four connected processes that underpinned the making of these urban commons. In doing so, we develop a theoretical contribution on the relationship between repair and the commons as it affects: the role of practices of material repair of previously abandoned buildings in shaping the commons; the significance of memory reconstruction in reconstituting these spaces; the formation of social bonds and collective subjectivities through these practices; and the potential of repair in the urban commons to expand these practices and prefigure broader social transformation.