In an article published in Relations magazine, Louis Gaudreau, professor at the work school at the Montreal University of Québec (Canada), identified collective ownership as a means of reappropriating the City (Gaudreau L. [2019], Se réapproprier la ville par la propriété collective, Relations n°804, 19-20).
While collective ownership endured for several centuries in rural areas in many European territories until the 18th century (notably in the form of common lands), the revolutions of the 18th century, particularly the French Revolution, had the effect of calling into question, even dismantling these collective properties in favor of individual ownership. Even today, individual ownership remains the major reference point for modern society, although vestiges of collective land ownership also remain and resist.
In cities such as Marseille (France), faced with the rise of speculative private investment in real estate and the privatization of public spaces, civil society is organizing itself to defend the common use of the city, even if this means taking on forms of collective ownership, inspired, for example, by the Mietshäuser Syndikat. (Germany. Examples include Dar Lamifa (a self-managed social center), La Déviation (an artistic and cultural venue) and Manifesten (a self-managed bookshop).
What are these practices and what are their effects on the appropriation of the city by its inhabitants? Are there other ways, apart from collective ownership, of encouraging common uses of the city by its inhabitants? As Louis Gaudreau suggests, could this be encouraged by local urban planning? Finally, are there any lessons to be learned from the history of rural land commons to anticipate the preservation of urban commons?
These are the points I wish to address in this paper.
