The urban commons: a keyword essay

Abstract

This essay considers the urban commons as a keyword for urban geography, examining the changing meanings and usages of the term over time. We situate the increase in the term’s circulation–and its contested uses–in a broader historical conjuncture, focusing on its articulation with emerging social relationships and different visions for social justice. We trace some of the key ways that urban geographers and urban studies scholars are theorizing the urban commons and join an emerging call for greater attention to race, gender, and colonization in these analyses. We argue for disrupting singular histories of the commons that identify the enclosure of the British commons as the origin and paradigmatic case of primitive accumulation and consider how insights from Indigenous studies, Black studies, and decolonial theory render alternative genealogies of the commons legible, reveal the complexity of contemporary urban enclosures, and inform the actions needed to resist them.