(Re)gaining the urban commons: everyday, collective, and identity resistance

Abstract

This paper examines the everyday, collective, and identity resistance mobilized by the urban poor to (re)gain their right to the commons and contest urban exclusion. Informed by the community of waste pickers at La Chureca, the city dump of Managua, Nicaragua, the paper, builds on theories of discard studies, urban commons, and Bayat’s everyday resistance. It shows, first, how deprived communities can create their own commons through quietly encroaching on public space and using such resources as waste. Second, it reveals how activating passive networks (e.g. spatial and professional solidarity, kinship) can be fundamental in commoning, by triggering intermittent collective resistance, giving rise to more permanent active networks (cooperatives and trade unions). Third, it shows how simultaneous strategies of collaboration with the state can be mobilized when necessary. Finally, it demonstrates how constructing a resistance identity becomes an important sociocultural mechanism for claiming access to the commons, on the basis of a heterogeneous configuration of territorial, environmental, professional, family, and spiritual identities. Resistance identity stems from and supports individual and collective resistance, to maintain access to the commons. We conclude that all forms of everyday, collective, and identity resistance are essential, and none alone is sufficient to (re)gain the commons.