Mending the commons with the ‘Little Mesters’

The subjects of this paper are the ‘Little Mesters’ of Sheffield, UK. The Mesters are self-employed master craftspeople whose day-to-day work is dependent on repairing, recycling, and maintenance, in ways that are intertwined with the urban fabric, flows of goods, and collaborative manufacturing spanning generations. This long-established, yet fragile web of mutuality and reciprocal practices of repair by highly-skilled workers is under threat from enclosure, and yet, I argue, simultaneously offers possibilities for reclaiming the commons. Through collaborative mapping and activist work with a campaign group over eight years, I examine an instance of existential threat to a factory, Portland Works, home to Little Mesters. Through strategies of distributed design prompted by this threat, cultures and practices of repair have been harnessed, and repair has become politicised, dispersed and future-orientated, prefiguring the post-capitalist city. The enclosure of commons is particularly spatial and material, and therefore disruptive of certain more egalitarian forms of relating and organising; politically, economically, pedagogically and ecologically. I argue that practices of repair found in this instance offer possibilities to address such ruptures, through the ethical decisions they prompt, the assemblages they generate, or gestures of care they manifest. Repair is often conceptualised temporally, as an activity that returns something to a former state, yet I wish to assert its spatial and material agencies; as productive of spaces and relations, dependent on them, and potentially restorative of them. In doing so I claim its value to support the reclaiming of ‘common failures’, the amplification of existing instances of commoning, and the development of heterogeneous networks of commoners

The ‘Diverse Economies’ of Participation

This article begins to construct a theory of participation in architecture, urban design and urban planning as a range of practices undertaken across a landscape of economies that largely exists outside of the capitalist economy. These practices themselves overlap in terms of their material forms, bodily and mental activities with the practices undertaken by labour employed to produce the built environment within the capitalist marketplace. With respect to participation, our aim in articulating practices is to move away from a discussion of levels of participation and legitimacy within individual projects and towards an understanding of the organising, productive and reproductive work that is done in participating in the production of the built environment as part of an ongoing process of social change. They proliferate through multiple instances of performance and those who undertake them act as carriers of these practices, including forms of knowhow, understanding, motivational and emotional knowledge, creating resources through these acts of performance. The article contends that participatory practices are liable to be exploited re-presented or co-opted as commodified resources and this fragility limits the socially transformative potential of participation. Drawing on J.K Gibson-Graham’s conception of ‘diverse economies’, an alternative representation is developed to recognize the landscape of practices constructing alternative economic systems, and exploring means and methods of resistance to co-option or enclosure

Constituent relations across the city: Three perspectives from practice

What kinds of practices help us to explore, rethink and remake our co-relations? Constituent relations across the city: Three perspectives from practice. In this session, we propose speaking across and from three different spatial practices of which we are part,and which are situated in different socio-spatial conditions: a place of their own (an art/spatial research practice); Studio Polpo (the UK’s first social enterprise architectural practice); and Architecture Sans Frontières - UK (a non-profit aiming to make community development integral to architectural practice and teaching). By sharing moments of co-incidence from these practices that seek to co-otherwise we seek to show thinking and acting with co-ness is generative of creative, relational processes and resistant practices. Studio Polpo designs situated and collaborative approaches to create objects, structures, initiatives and research-led resources that enable transformative social change. To this end we self-initiate projects to support diverse economies of participation and exchange through spatial intervention. We have facilitated the collective ownership and/or management of a number of buildings and programmes, hosted events which protest the commercial use of city centres and propose more diverse ways of living and exchanging that activate more distributed networks of design. ASF-UK is a non-profit organisation with three main objectives: to increase knowledge and understanding of community participation amongst built environment students and practitioners (training and capacity building); to support community groups, civil society organisations and local governments by working in partnership and facilitating the involvement of built environment professionals (live projects); and to influence urban policy and planning processes by mainstreaming methodologies and practices focused on democratic and resilient city-making (advocacy). a place of their own operate as a collective, a couple, with our children, and through collaborations with others. In the Eile Project, we operate in the specific context of the geo-political border between the Irish Republic and the UK and enact an alternative ethics of spatial action through intra-actions and ‘kinning’. Eile's interventions, rituals and the audiovisual films we produce with them draw forth kinship, different alliances between organic and in-organic matter, non-human animals (the white cryptic butterfly, the lobster), and re-territorialize traumatic sites. Why this (co-) is an important question for us to carry out these kinds of practices? Or What kinds of practices help us to explore, rethink and remake our co-relations?N/

A sustainable future for local high streets

Response by the High Streets Research Network at Sheffield Hallam University to the House of Lords built environment committee inquiry into high streets in towns and small citie

Commoning Civics: Exchanges of Knowledge Beyond the ‘Civic University’

The revival of the ‘civic university’ agenda in the UK reopens questions concerning the framing, control, and application of ‘knowledge’. While universities in the UK increasingly have to justify their work through benchmarking systems, questions persist over how ‘excellence’ and ‘exchange’ are understood, measured and valued in the context of pervasive capitalism. Such questions lead us to a concern over how knowledges (and knowledge-related resources) are exchanged, between whom and to what ends. In this article we consider the interface between knowledge exchange and political agendas that position higher education as servicing the reinvention of the UK as a 'science superpower', and the implications for development of the concept and practice of the civic university. We do so by reflecting on our own, and universities', situatedness within civic contexts. We explore how ideas of commoning may help us frame civic 'impact' as a multi-directional process in which the university, as much as the city, is changed by encounters with new or differing constructions of knowledge, based on the 'slow work' of relationship building rather than top-down agendas

Locating and building knowledges outside of the academy : approaches to engaged teaching at the University of Sheffield

This article draws on three case studies, which illuminate a number of practical, ethical and intellectual issues that arise from engaged teaching activities within the curriculum. Projects from the disciplines of Architecture, English and Journalism Studies illustrate the possibilities offered by learning and teaching projects which emphasise public facing, co-produced knowledge as central components. It is argued that such approaches enable dynamic forms of learning to emerge, which work to expand the parameters of subject-specific knowledge while enabling the development of citizenship attributes and employability skills amongst students in ways that deepen, rather than dilute, intellectual rigour. The article locates these practical pedagogical reflections within theoretical frameworks offered by those working (largely in North America* on publicly engaged approaches to scholarship and seeks to draw connections with contemporary developments in learning and teaching in the UK. Keywords: civic university; engaged teaching; engaged scholarship; co-productio

Tools to create agency at Portland Works: The Craft of Commoning

This thesis is concerned with the tools required to produce Agencies of Commoning in a community of makers whose future was under threat from speculative redevelopment. The focus of this study, the Grade II* listed Portland Works is home to artists, musicians, metal workers, carpenters and hackers. In response to the threat of closure and the landlord’s intention to turn it into flats, over 500 people, including myself, came together to purchase the Works in order to continue it as a place of making. Implementing an Asset Lock that prevents it being demutualised and sold for profit, tenants, shareholders and volunteers run it for the benefit of the community, developing cultural, educational and manufacturing business activities. Drawing on the context of craftsmanship at Portland Works, I consider how the tools we developed enabled us to achieve and understand the social, political, democratic, economic and pedagogical agencies required to gather and form a community, produce and sustain a set of non-commodified resources and engage in the ‘Commoning’ processes of learning and democracy. ‘Tools’ frequently occur in research into Commons and participatory spatial practices, however in both activist and academic contexts there is little examination of what a tool is beyond that it is linked to action. In addressing the questions of what tools are, how they produce agencies, and the kinds of agencies that are required for Commoning, I make an original contribution to knowledge. Through actively participating in the co-design and co-production of a number of tools at Portland Works, including collaborative mapping, I explore design as distributed agency, bringing together the human and non human in the production of change. I argue that through the production of and reflection upon ‘tools’ a collective and nuanced understanding of the agencies required for commoning in this context can be produced. In suggesting in this thesis that Portland Works is an Urban Commons I am arguably making a bold claim. Not everyone involved in its production would necessarily recognise the term, or see it as such. Some would not show interest in this this as an idea, and perhaps others would disagree with it, at least as being a driver of the project. Those involved come from a range of political standpoints, social values, and concerns. But this is why I think it is of interest and worthy of academic investigation. Commons are not out-of-reach utopias, planned carefully beforehand by a homogenous group of people who understand in theoretical terms exactly what it is they should do, which tools to make and use, and which investigations they need to undertake in order to stake out their claims. Instead, they are something that is made through doing with others, sometimes falteringly, and always experimentally. The situation of being actively involved enables me to develop knowledge in this case. Through my involvement from the first days of the Change of Use planning application that would have seen many businesses close, through to Portland Works purchase, repair and development, the aim of my participatory research has been to take part in, support, challenge, critique, extend and at times, valorise our actions. Ten of those involved in saving Portland Works also took part in a collaborative mapping process that forms a key part of this research. In using this meta-tool we collectively recorded over 170 tools for Commoning. Their breadth and diversity tell of the massive mutual undertaking of those engaging in a diverse and creative socio-pedagogical process, leading to the transformation of a small part of the city, and those who have taken part in its remaking. The telling of the story enables a critical exploration of the tools required for communities to come together to safeguard their assets in ways that are equitable, just, sustainable and in solidarity with those holding similar concerns

Co-dreaming Climates: Public Space for More-Than-Human Socialities

In the face of ongoing but unevenly distributed planetary catastrophe and, in the words of Patricia Reed, an urgent need to “make inhabitable worlds in common”, I argue for listening as a mode of urban spatial practice that offers the opportunity to remake our relations with more-than-human others. Recent work in sound studies has explored the potential of listening to create mutuality, dissent and agency; here I am interested in how pedagogical tools can be designed to support these more radical modes of listening. Weaving essay writing with transcribed audio from a webtool that deploys field recordings and from staged conversations around food, I share experiments drawn from collaborations over the past two years. This is work developed as an architectural researcher, working with performance makers, sonic artists, urban curators, natural scientists, and community and cultural organisations who are seeking to make public space for climate. Through this transdisciplinary praxis, listening is deployed to produce personal and social affects, space for political encounter, and attunement to ecological relations. In coming together to listen, we sought to create spaces for co-dreaming climates, where climate is understood as in crisis, as atmosphere, and as potentiality