Laboratoire Crise et transition - Université Sorbonne Paris Nord / Labex ICCA, France
With a “primordial anchorage in artistic creation and making” (Henry, 2022), independent artistic and cultural venues, organized as cultural commons and anchored in the solidarity economy, articulate artistic, social and territorial issues. They are organized around a logic of action based on experimentation and organizational creativity, driven by collectives of users, professional or amateur artists, and developing practices outside the art world, with a diversity of partners. Together, these practices embody a collective control of use that makes these places emerge as “polycentric public spaces”, “a space of interactions generated by citizens speaking and acting together” (Laville, 2003). Organization as commons is experienced through the organization of space as a primary resource for embodying a diversity of citizen-based cultural practices (as opposed to institutional / industrial organization).
Faced with the increasing real estate speculation threatening their very existence, the commoners are organizing the collective ownership of those places, as a strategic tool for the long-term survival of cultural commons. Lacking a legal recognition as commons, they attempt to ensure that the citizen-based ability to control the use of those cultural places prevails over the centralized power logics that characterize public and private ownership modes, especially by organizing collective ownership via “solidarity collective landholdings”, inspired by models such as the community land trusts movement. Collective ownership is not itself devoid of ambiguity, and recomposes – rather than eliminates – these issues of power. Reducing control over use to a shared property – even if it is sufficiently diffuse that no personal power is fully established – does not protect against the new emergence of the powers of the “small owner”, and raises questions about the relationship of the commons to the long-term nature of real estate investment. This article analyzes, on the basis of case studies from France, the major challenge represented by the organization of a tool such as the solidarity community land-trust (“foncière solidaire”) to protect the cultural commons: what kind of organizational processes, rules and tools can equip communities to dissolve owner power in the collective ownership in order to defend a collective control of use? The aim is to shed light on the tension between proprietary tools and democratic issues at the heart of the cultural commons.
