TORRE DAVID

Urban-Think Tank; Caracas, Venezuela
2012, 2 min 02 sec

Torre David, a 45-story office tower in Caracas designed by the distinguished Venezuelan architect Enrique Gómez, was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer, David Brillembourg, in 1993 and the collapse of the Venezuelan economy in 1994. Today, it is the improvised home of a community of more than 750 families, living in an extra-legal and tenuous occupation that some have called a vertical slum.

Urban-Think Tank, spent a year studying the physical and social organization of this ruin-turned-home. Where some only see a failed development project, U-TT has conceived it as a laboratory for the study of the informal. In their Torre David / Grand Horizonte exhibit and in their forthcoming book Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities the architects lay out their vision for practical and sustainable interventions in Torre David and similar informal settlements around the world. They argue that the future of urban development lies in collaboration among architects, private enterprise, and the global population of slum-dwellers. This film is a call to arms to architects and everyone – to see in the informal settlements of the world a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in the service of a more equitable and sustainable future.

VIDEOGRAMS OF A REVOLUTION

Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica, Romania
1992, 1 min 28 sec

History takes place before your eyes in Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s fascinating film covering the 1989 fall of the Ceaucescu regime in Romania. A radical, media-based chronology that condenses 125 hours of footage, Videograms of a Revolution carefully mediates perspective as it presents a picture of political turmoil as revealing and chilling as Eisenstein’s October. A recorded spectacle of dramatic, operatic and grotesque character.

LETTERS TO MAX

Eric Baudelaire, Paris
2014, 6 min 26 sec

Abkhazia is something of a paradox: a country that exists, in the physical sense of the word (a territory with borders, a government, a flag, a language), yet it has no legal existence because for almost twenty years it was not recognized by any other nation state. And so Abkhazia exists without existing, caught in a liminal space, a space in between realities. Which is why my first letter to Max was something of a message in a bottle thrown at sea.

 

BOSTON BEGINS REMOVING PARKING SPACE SAVERS

CBS, USA
2015, 3 min 3 sec

Boston is putting the breaks on people’s attempts to use everyday items to hold parking spots they’ve spent hours digging out from the snow. Anna Werner reports from Boston, where their removal is getting a chilly reception.

MAGNA CARTA AND THE COMMONS

Peter Linebaugh, Law of the Commons Conference, Seattle, USA
2009, 51 min 33 sec

Talk by Peter Linebaugh, Professor of History at the University of Toledo on “Magna Carta and the Commons” given March 13, 2009 at the Law of the Commons Conference at Seattle University and sponsored by the Seattle Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

 

ON REPLACING NEOLIBERALISM

George Monbiot, openDemocracy, USA
2017, 13 min 22 sec

Journalist and author George Monbiot on the task of replacing neoliberalism, reinvigorating democracy and averting climate breakdown.

Adam Curtis, Century of the Self

07. TRANSITION TOWN

A new way of storytelling creates a new way of being, a new ontology, a new way of belonging, of being together that maybe has the power to overcome the stories of “havingness” and greed. Maybe it’s a verb, rather than a thing.  Is multispecies awareness possible in connection to our biotope we all inhabit together. And what’s the storyteller and the artist’s role in all this?

How can we think beyond the “eroded present” of a failed neo-liberalism that a corporate culture has given us? How can we imagine that something different is around the corner when we are only defined as ‘homo economicus’, merely drilled into the role of consumer? The history of the commons is very much the history of enclosure, not only of our shared resources and valuables, but also the enclosure of our storytelling and our very political imagination of how we share this world.

What would those stories of belonging be? In a worldview that Garrett Hardin calls ‘the tragedy of the commons,’ individuals compete with one another to appropriate shared resources, thus beggaring one another to exhaust a scarce biotope. Economist Elinor Oström completely dismantled this market stereotype. She documented that for ‘thousands of years people have self-organised to manage shared resources, and users often devise long-term, sustainable practices and dialogue tools for governing these resources’. We could rather call it the ‘comedy of the commons and the tragedy of the market.’

Most of our communal spaces have turned into advertising billboards. How come that our public places have so intimately been enclosed? Our identity and collective memory, including the politics of media commons, are framed and defined by corporate advertising slogans. The urban imagination often merely mirrors the slogans of a corporatocracy. The antidote here is the emergence of alternatives, such as transition towns, community gardens, urban commons, electronic “free culture,” from open-source software and Creative Commons licenses to remixes, Web 3.0 and the reclaiming of urban spaces.

FURTHER READING & RESOURCES

 

Peter Lamborn Wilson / Hakim Bay, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (1991)

Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures & Politics of Cooperation (2012)

Richard Sennett The Fall of Public Man (1977)

David Bollier, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2009)

David Boillier’s blog:
— part 3: Property, Commons and Gift Economy

—part 4: The History of the Commons and Enclosure

—part 5: The Dynamics of Modern Enclosure / Governing the Commons

—part 7: The Deeper Magic of the Commons; A Beautiful Resistance by Gods & Radical Press

Juan Friere, From the Analog Commons to the New Hybrid Public Spaces (2008)

David Harvey: Rebel Cities (2012)

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1957)

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Are there no Alternatives? (2009)

 Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2004)

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (2009) + Multitude (2004)

Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for all  (2009)

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990) versus Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons; Science, May 1, 1968; pp.682-68.

Tony Judt, Ill Fares The Land (2011)

Ivan Illich, Silence is a Commons 

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning &
Black Study (2013) [ see chapter 2: The University and the Undercommons ]
http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-

Snider, J.D., “The Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy,” (2004),

 James Cuno, Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage (2008)

 Joseph Sax, Playing Darts with a Rembrandt: Public and Private Rights in Cultural Treasures (2006)

The TV Dinner, (2011)

ON THE HISTORY OF PROPERTY:

Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983)

Carol Rose, Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory and Rhetoric of Ownership. (1994)

C.B. MacPherson ed., Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions (1999)

Jeremey Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014)