Metropolitan geographies of urban commons: mapping socio-economic alternatives in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona

Abstract

Urban commons literature has seen extensive growth in diversity and theoretical sophistication; methodologically, however, it has been marked by a tendency to privilege in-depth case studies at the neighborhood or city scale. The place-specific articulations of urban commons as an alternative mode of socio-economic organization have rarely been studied at the metropolitan scale. This methodological choice, which reproduces bounded and administratively defined notions of the ‘urban’, risks neglecting interconnections across places as well as the complex enmeshing of ‘commons’ initiatives with other economic, social, and political processes.(...)