Nature and Commons as rationalities for the production of urban space

Abstract

The disastrous effects of human intervention and the depletion of natural resources due to their uncontrolled consumption and exploitation have guided the discussion on the urban and economic “development” model. The contradictions of capital, arising from its operating logic, have demonstrated an inability to ensure decent living conditions for the majority of the world's population. The coronavirus pandemic worsened this scenario and exposed the limits of the overexploitation of nature, workers, putting the civilizing project into question, on the verge of collapse. At the local scale, socio-spatial asymmetries and inequalities trigger environmental racism and the fragility of development models based on environmental exploitation, waste generation, extractive forms of territorial occupation, dispossession and deterritorialization of groups and populations. It is essential to debate the environmental, economic and social dimensions as synergistic, systemic and territorialized relationships. We propose to debate the commons as an alternative to capitalism, as it points to other shared/solidaristic ways of life. Territories of poverty already produce shared ways of life as forms of survival, and their spatialities differ from those provided by law. This set of relationships and practices regarding the inhabited, produced and lived space constitutes ways of reclaiming the world against enclosures that prioritize individuality.