(Un)common spaces of becoming in common: a feminist exploration of designing as/for commoning

This feminist practice-based research has a two-fold concern: firstly, to investigate the emancipatory potential of ‘(un)common spaces of becoming in common’ in the neoliberal city to foster civic agency, solidarity and care in our everyday lives in, against, and beyond capitalism; and secondly, how design and critical spatial practice can support such processes. Engaging a situated perspective (Haraway 1988), the idea of commoning is explored through a feminist lens of care celebrating the entangled interdependencies between and amongst human and more-than-human beings and contributing to a more diverse understanding of ‘the economy’ and our democracies. Bringing together feminist-Marxist and posthumanist theories vis-à-vis emerging design and spatial practice/research, I examined how these theoretical and practical frameworks can mutually support each other.

Commoning was both topic and means of this study, employing interviews with activists and theorists from diverse fields, practice-exchanges with local and translocal commoning practices, and the collaborative development of a locally embedded project called ‘Common(s)Lab Nachbarschaftslabor’ in my own neighbourhood Berlin-Neukölln. Between 2017 and 2020, the lab experimented with diverse formats and methods to collectively explore commoning together with fluid communities of practice, interest, and place through radical pedagogy, DIT-making, and co-designing.

This research shows the need for an expanded ‘indisciplinary’ design praxis which is both feminist, reflective and engaged, and presents a methodological framework to support and initiate practices and spaces of commoning as ‘infrastructures for agency’ to collectively work towards more desirable and interdependent futures: ‘designing as/for commoning’.