give us space

Give Us Space Improving community well-being by enhancing performance and communication of semi-public space in the evolving public realm

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Analytical Tools

Semi-Public Space Conflicts and Alliances in primary Metropolitan Centres: Sylvia Park,

Mt Wellington, Auckland

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION – SEMI-PUBLIC SPACE

AND THE EMERGING SPATIALISATIONS OF RESILIENT

URBAN COMMONS.

Re-Thinking Associative Networks in the Age of Advanced

Translocalism, Transduction and Meta-Publicness

Manfredo Manfredini

[WORKING DOCUMENT GUS/SP4.2. Paper presented at the 12th Conference of the

International Forum on Urbanism: Beyond Resilience, Jakarta, 24 – 26 June 2019]

Contents

1. Abstract .................................................................................................................................. 1

2. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 2

3. Urban Commons as Performative Instances .......................................................................... 4

4. More-Than-Spatial Commons: Translocalism and Digital Augmentations for Both Physical

and Functional Redundancy .................................................................................................. 5

5. Understanding More-Than-Spatial Commons’ Pseudo-Civic Institutions ............................. 7

6. The Performative Paradox of Colonised Commons ............................................................. 10

7. Outlining A Topology of Commons’ Territories ................................................................. 11

8. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 15

9. Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. 16

10. References ............................................................................................................................ 16

1. Abstract

Engaging with the discourse on the challenge to resilience building posed by the crisis of inclusionary urban commons,

this paper submits that the translocalisation and digitally augmented networking of contemporary urban communities

have created a novel form of associative engagement that eventuates in transformative and metastable spatialisation

patterns. These patterns institute a novel type of commons with a highly redundant, persistent, robust and supple socio-

spatial relationality. This type is analysed to understand strengths of and challenges to its agency in reassembling the

fabric of urban communities by contrasting the commons’ colonisation, financialisation and displacement processes

enacted by opposing dominant hegemonic forces. Elaborating upon the critical urbanism tradition, this paper analyses

the spatial implications of the “right to the city” question, consistently concentrating on the dynamics of the relationship

between power relations and spatial production that have enabled the new commons to produce counterspaces within the

most segmented and commodified public realms. The proposed interpretation highlights the spatial conflicts emerging

from changing relationships between two antagonist forces: the abstractive spectacle of exclusionary domination and the

differential commoning of inclusionary reappropriation. The paper also proposes a typological articulation of the new

commons, discussing evidence found by the author in recent empirical research on semi-public space of representative

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Asian and Australasian metropolitan centres dominated by advanced shopping and lifestyle enclosures. Findings validate

our hypothesis showing the relevant presence of strongly networked, place-based, self-determined and metastable

common apparatuses. Concluding notes claim that, given the detected structural vulnerability of the new inclusionary

commons, there is urgent need to reframe the question of the commons through a better understanding of their recent

transformation. Specifically, more research on the radical changes in their spatial production is necessary to enable

projective spatial disciplines, such as architecture and urbanism, to efficaciously contribute to the affirmation of a

universal “right to difference” towards a democratic, resilient, and autonomous development of cohesive urban

communities.

Keywords: Public Space, Resilience, Translocalism, Urban Commons, Urban Mobility.

2. Introduction

In the increasing cosmopolitan condition of our cities, inclusionary urban commons grow their

civic status of stabilized institutions for encounter, dialogue and collaboration. Their non-

commodifiable and universally accessible asset facilitates processes of differentiation that engage

citizens in and contingently articulated collaborative practices. Their commoning of heterogeneous

values and paradigms, personalities and spheres of thought, and material and intangible elements

transforms antagonist in agonist relations, where conflicts became productive of and support the

creation of critically engaged associations (Connolly, 1995; Mouffe, 1999, 2008). By reclaiming,

defending, maintaining, and taking care of the “coming together of strangers who work

collaboratively […] despite their differences” (Williams, 2018: 17), they constitute free, open and

participatory networks for social, cultural and material production, recreation and creativity. The

networks favour a political mobilization towards the reappropriation of urban space that is

progressively alienated starting from the dispossession of its conception into closed circles of

expert managers (Butler, 2012: 141–143). They are free and independent associations that combine

spheres concerning multiple dimensions: a) the civic – regardinjg justice, law, and morality of the

political sphere b) the economic – including trade and exchange of goods and services c) the

cultural –concerning intercultural intellectual engagement and discourse. In short, they contribute

to the construction of a safe, healthy, resilient, pluralistic, and democratic society founded on

principles of freedom, equality and solidarity (Borch & Kornberger, 2015; Flusty, 1997: 11;

Garnett, 2012: 2012–2018). Creating context-specific organisational formats, these networks

generate “possibilities for self-forming publics to appear, to represent themselves, to be

represented” (Mitchell, 2017: 513), instituting an integral socio-spatial relationality that promotes

citizens’ participation, responsibilisation and conscious decision making (Villa, 1992). These

processes are effective in sustaining collectivities in the everyday query for political identity and

affirmation of citizenship, liberating their relationality from externally imposed constraints. They

empower local communities in their own relevant contexts, balance power structures, and

strengthen the exercises of the fundamental ontogenetic right of citizens to participate in the

creation of their own material, cultural, and social spaces.

The discussion of problems affecting these commons has progressively grown in the last three

decades and concentrated on the critique on the decay of their public agency (Hardt & Negri, 2009;

Harvey 2011, 2012; Lefebvre, 1996; McQuire, 2008; Purcell, 2002; Stanek, 2011; Susser &

Tonnelat, 2013; Sennett, 1977, 2008, 2018; United Nations, 2017). Fundamental references in this

discussion are theories on the modern crisis of political sphere and citizenship rights that have

addressed how the market economy has transformed public space into a pseudo-space of

interaction (Arendt, 1958) and how the passive culture of consumption has led the state and private

sectors to colonise the public sphere and alienate citizens from their political dimension (Calhoun,

1992; Habermas 1958). Key elaborations have addressed the specificity of the contemporary urban

condition of increased segmented publics and counterpublics (Benhabib, 2000; Fraser, 1990;

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Harvey, 2007) with critical stances individually articulating crucial questions concerning spatial

control (Dehaene & De Cauter, 2008a, 2008b; Foucault 1995; Harvey, 2003), privatisation

(Dawson, 2010; Lee and Webster, 2006; Low, 2006; Minton, 2012; Soja, 2010;), spatial justice

(Low & Smith 2006; Mitchell, 2003), socio-spatial segmentation (Dawson, 2010; Harvey, 2003;

Hodkinson, 2012), consumption and alienation (Debord, 1983; Firat & Venkatesh, 1995; Miles &

Miles, 2004), and selective deprivation of public space (Davis, 1990; Harvey, 2003; Mitchell,

1995, 2003; Sorkin, 1992).

Furthering this discussion, this paper provides innovative insights into one of the major socio-

spatial challenges to urban-resilience building related to recent the transformation of the socio-

spatial and technological frameworks of the commons: the development of both physical and

functional redundancy in emerging mobile and digitally augmented spatialisation patterns of

associative collaboration, vis-à-vis the augmented vulnerability of their infrastructure consequent to

its expanded control, displacements and financialisation. Arguing that their novel spatialisation

patterns have the potential to make the commons bounce forward from the crisis caused by the

withdrawal of direct state involvement and their subsequent private colonisation, this paper

explores the contribution of three processes concerning their modified frameworks: pervasive

translocalisation, recombinant transduction and publicness hybridisation. The focus on these

processes enables to disentangle the complex changes in power relations, which affect the exercise

of the Right to the City and the capacity of urban communities to reverse the decay of their political

agency.

7Hypothesising that the emerging commons distinctively transform the roles of their infrastructure

and activation decoupling presence (eventuation of the digitally augmented institution) and present

(fixed material infrastructure and activation), the paper claims that their traditional understanding

as geographically bound institutions requires a profound revision. A review of their description as

establishments instituted by performative enactments is proposed, recognising their metastable,

more-than-spatial status. Their production of more efficacious, robust, supple and redundant chains

of associations is discussed elaborating on a relational paradox found in one preeminent urban

laboratory type: the emancipatory ambivalence of augmented relationality in the semi-public space

of shopping-based urban enclosures: the most active and technologically enhanced nodes of the

city’s public life. Empirical validation of the hypothesis is provided discussing the findings of

recent comparative urbanism research on Asian and Australasian cities. This informs a tentative

deciphering of the emerging complex spatialities defining a primary spatial topology, which

elaborates on the Lefebvrian triad isotopia, utopia and heterotopia. The topology also articulates

the fundamental Lefebvrian opposition between abstract space and the differential counter-space

as variables of concurrent conflicting contexts of dominated exclusionary spectacle and

appropriated inclusionary commoning.

The speculation on the emerging topology of territorialisation patterns revolves around two main

ideas: Henry Lefebvre’s Right to the City, as recognition of citizens’ entitlement to “centrality” and

“difference” (1991, 1996, 2003, 2004; Harvey, 2008, 2012; Goonewardena, Kipfer, Milgrom &

Schmid, 2008; Mitchell, 2018; Purcell 2002, 2014; Soja 1998, 2000; United Nations, 2017) and

ANT and territoriology’s urban assemblage theory, as understanding of associative processes of

productive territorialisations on the basis of the logics of becoming, emergence, multiplicity and

indeterminacy (Anderson & McFarlane 2011; Brighenti, 2014; Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 2000;

Farías and Bender, 2010; Kärrholm, 2012; Latour 1999, 2005; Law, 2009; McFarlane 2011;

Merriman, 2012; Murdoch 1998). The analytical methodology developed from this framework

(Manfredini, 2017, 2018; Manfredini, Xin, Jenner & Besgen, 2017) was tested in the discussed

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studies by the author on Asian and Australasian cities. It enabled the detection of relevant spatial

instances pertaining to associative processes for the exercise of the Right to the City, and the

critical evaluation of the agencies that support or suppress their evolution. Its focus on material,

social and cultural practices of spatial control supported the evaluation of exemplary strategies,

tactics and acts of appropriation and association of established commons appreciated against

sustainability and resilience goals.

3. Urban Commons as Performative Instances

The inclusionary urban commons are constituted by two necessary components: infrastructure and

activation. The infrastructure is a coordinated and regulated assemblage of resources, which form

reiterable and non-specific concatenations. It includes wide-ranging systems of spaces, objects,

technologies, media systems, interfaces, and social relations that provide the concrete basis for the

institution of integrated civic nodes and urban amenities, such as central squares and community

centres. Its shared asset also includes less stable elements that combine material and intangible

components of social (e.g. practices, routines and networks), regulatory (laws, codes and rituals),

and cultural (codes, knowledge, techniques and creative expression) kinds in unstable discrete

“transductive” “sociotechnical assemblages” (Bollier, 2002; Corsín Jiménez, 2014; MacKenzie,

2006). Activation, the other essential constitutive component, is the institutive process that

transforms the latent or potential status of the infrastructure into actual and factual commons.

Various forms of commoning practices of appropriation, co-production, and sharing sustain this

performative process that combines concrete and intangible resources into stabilised institutions,

associating them to socio-spatial contexts in dynamics of clustering with different degrees of

operational persistence: permanent, recurrent or iterative.

Permanently operational institutions have uninterrupted activities and continuous support of

substantive resources. They include primary elements of the urban structure, mostly localised in

central areas, which deliver public services for cultural, psychological, physical and social

wellbeing in the form of libraries, multifunctional gathering spaces, activity centres and the like).

Their infrastructure includes the dedicated availability of physical (e.g. buildings and related

facilities and equipment), digital (information technology and services to support usage, operations,

management, and decision making), human (dedicated staff combining physical and digital

resources), and financial (e.g. long-term public funding) means. They are steadily kept in operation

by a mix of actors and routines that integrate actual and virtual presence and performance. Their

usage combines a wide range of activities of necessary (non-discretionary commitments, such as

home–work commuting), optional (discretionary behaviours, such as participating in public events)

and resultant (socialising activities, such as communicatively engaging with strangers) kinds (Gehl,

1996: 11–16).

Recurrently operational institutions have discontinuous activities that do require infrastructural

assemblages, similar to the permanent ones, but do not require (or do not comprehend) their

permanent availability. They are the sort with the highest diversity and occurrence. They are less

centralised and are often hosted by permanent institutions. They constitute regular collective

practices whose performance is massively enhanced by the use of locative digital media. Examples

of these instituted practices are the rituals of spontaneous spatial appropriation that make certain

urban spaces cyclically become mass-gathering places, rather than, mere movement spaces. A

renowned case is the Italian passeggiata: the daily collective evening stroll that takes place in core

urban places, such as Milan’s Galleria and Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, and is performed as a

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scripted choral action that turns a nodal movement space into a vibrant temporary stage for

interaction and self-representation (Cova, Cova & El Jurdi, 2017).

Iterative operational institutions are also relatively frequent as they eventuate from repetitions of

stabilised assemblage sorts in form of recursive associations of actants (people, material and digital

elements and practices) in more topologic than geographic kinds, which change spatial contexts but

maintain their distinctive patterns. These manifestations are characterised by the shift of venue

caused by independent variables. Instances of the passeggiata also belong to this group when they

present recurrent migration for social or environmental circumstances. Weather conditions (e.g.

rainy days or cold seasons) may shift them from outdoor to sheltered spaces; collective social

practices (e.g. summer holidays in seaside towns) shift them, from cities to towns. An important

manifestation of this kind is the growing phenomenon of aggregations in irregular and

unpredictable locations of translocal communities (e.g. gatherings of migrants in celebratory rituals

facilitated by social media networks).

4. More-Than-Spatial Commons: Translocalism and Digital Augmentations

for Both Physical and Functional Redundancy

Whilst functions, perceptions, and ownership of both tangible and intangible urban commons are

progressively multiple and interconnected (Carmona, 2010), their disruptive transformation into

agency-oriented institutions with complex spatialisation processes directs their “more-than-

property” questions (Williams, 2018) towards complex more-than-spatial issues. A major agent of

the transformation of the commons is translocalism. It affects urban society with a profound

transformational process involving patterns of socio‐spatial association and identity formation of

communities. New territorialisation patterns dissipate the traditional bounds of social networks to

continuous, discrete and fixed geographical territories. Networked actors with fragile affiliations

and distributed across multiple geographical levels establish alliances for creative collaboration,

open confrontation as well as struggles over a combination of intra-urban, inter-urban, inter-

regional, and even transnational scales (Brickell & Datta, 2011: 4–6; Greiner & Sakdapolrak, 2013;

Parr, 2015: 87). The mobilisation of communities and their atmospheres (Kazig, Masson &

Thomas, 2017) has a significant impact on their commons, transferring its complex dynamism and

dissolution of permanent localization constraints to them. The new degrees of freedom make them

translocal institutions with a topological process of actualization that is spatialised through itinerant

movements from the virtual to the actual. When the instability of their situated embodiments

becomes constitutive, it creates contrasting effects: on the one hand, frequent re-emplacements

require adaptation, appropriation and reassociation of their infrastructural constitution and

activation process, strengthening the factors of vulnerability regarding their management and

planning, as well as their cognitive (identity, perception, representation) and bodily (sensory and

rhythmic visitation) integrity. On the other hand, the redundancy generated by the multiplication of

potential availability and reconfigurability of infrastructural and activation resources, and the

amplification of self-organization capacity and inclination towards change, enhance the resilience

of communities, providing a form of dynamic rootedness that prevents their diasporic decay and

emancipating their associative processes from crises generated by local power unbalances.

The dynamic spatialisation of the material, social, cognitive and chronological elements of the

mobilised commons has introduced new forms of production of situated manifestations based on

contingent local–local events and on an efficient and efficacious networkability guaranteed by

information technology. Opportunistic logics of appropriateness (March & Olsen, 1995: 197–198)

are used by translocal networks to grasp context-specific circumstances, actualise their commons

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and catalyse the recombination of their infrastructure and activation. The power of the commons to

be actualised in embodiments situated where and when possible and relevant, choosing, selecting

and recombining local and remote infrastructural and activating actants, sustains their vital capacity

to fully associate meanings in evolutionary and dramatic becomings. Digital media and virtual,

augmented and mixed (VAM) reality applications provide situated collaborative instances with

enhanced transductions that grant access to the necessary social capital and the opening of the

public sphere. Transduction, intended as the original notion proposed by Simondon’s (2013: 32), is

a transmutative operation. It refers to operations implying the coming together of heterogeneous

forces in either progressive iterative or irregular processes that restructure a given domain into a

provisional unity through the diffusion of an exogenous activity (MacKenzie, 2006: 16). Through

digital devices and services, transduction enables an actualisation of a “metastable state” (Deleuze,

1994: 246), combining the heterogeneous potentials of local and tele-presences. By introducing

scalability in everyday practices, VAM not only makes it possible to retrieve and diffuse

information on the global scale, rather, most importantly, embodying, in particular situated

instances, forms of active presence of various actors and things, independently forms both their

spatio-temporal location and their belonging to pre-existing networks. The embodiments move to

act dialogues, encounters and collaborations that exponentially increase the intensity and

complexity of each productive, reproductive and recreational activity. The connections established

by each digitally enhanced transduction have high community-building potential, since they can

strengthen and expand the inclusivity and openness of the networks, supporting actor-centred,

multi-stakeholder, interactive and dialogue-based processes (Kitchin, & Dodge, 2015; Manfredini,

2017).

The VAM’s augmented transductions strengthen the decoupling of presence (the immediate) from

present (the simulated) (Lefebvre, 2004: 23, 47), making it possible for commons’ embodiments to

elicit only the former – i.e. actively engaged actants – whilst repressing the latter – i.e. the

insensitive displacing simulations. In other words, whilst the digital advances enable the activation

and diffusion of commoning practices that engage actants through presence and intensify their

incremental productivity and differentiation through both conflicts and alliances (Dekker &

Engbersen, 2014; Greiner & Sakdapolrak, 2013; Jost et al., 2018), they also favour the exclusion of

pseudo-engagement of fallacious mirroring repetition, hindering the homologation of social

meaning and the demise of identity (Lefebvre, 2004: 6; Manfredini, 2018). Most importantly, the

inversion of the relationship between immediate and mediated presence of the actants – the active

engagement of which in a collaborative occurrence is no longer dependant on their material

presence – expands the involvement potential of the networks and the continuity of their interaction

of over space and time, enhancing and maintaining cohesion in otherwise loosening scattered

communities.

Geographically, the manifestations of composite presences situated at the intersections of the

multiple analogue and digital components convey to the commons the translocal character of their

communities. The material infrastructure of each context in which they eventuate merges with the

immaterial one and enables swift transmutations and “tuning” (Coyne, 2010) of contexts and

related embeddedness. Adjustments depend on individual actors and involve iterative processes

that can be either fully recursive – as in scripted routines of theme park attractions – or articulated

by individual creative, occasional or chance engagements – as in alternate reality games that

employ transmedia storytelling. These transformational routines enact multiple transductions of

time/rhythm, things/actants, and places/ecologies that, ranging from augmented continuity to

kaleidoscopic antagonism, open the actual setting to potentially limitless spatial metamorphosis.

They have the capability to extend, re-frame or even entirely substitute the references of a given

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event. Extensions provide subsidiary supports that enable real-time integration and coordination

between multiple events, such as merging remote public forums with videoconference systems.

Reframing can reposition and reprogram entire environments, such as transforming a public park

into a political forum, with digital media as the core exchange platform. Supplantation can subvert

consolidated spatial conditions and practices, such as by gamifying a shopping environment with

augmented reality games (Manfredini, Xin & Jenner, 2017).

The increased degrees of freedom of translocal commons also relate to their temporal dimension.

The presence–present decoupling also liberates the commons from the cyclical rhythms externally

imposed by the organisations that control the permanently situated infrastructures and activations,

enhancing their dynamism and independence from homogenising collaborative frameworks. The

reappropriation of chronological articulation of spatialities also defeats the external dominance of

rhythms – one of the main causes of the atrophy of the public sphere – overcoming hindrances to

the integral immediate of presence, the core lever of any collaborative creative act.

Progressively becoming translocal, urban communities have instituted multiple spatialisations that

in the reshuffle of their collaborative associational social, material and chronological geographies

have generated new issues. The transformation has profoundly re-established their basic characters

of “eventalisation” (Pløger, 2010), permanent becoming, and multi-stakeholdership through a

disruptive process. The rootednessless threat of the new erratic canon requires major absorptions

and adaptations to relational mobility have paradoxically made situatedness even more relevant.

The actualisation of their commons is a passage from virtual to actual that entails a local

integration. Composite spatialities connect its actualised form with others at the global scale,

reframing the core characteristic of the space of place – nearness, the sense of belonging and

authenticity – in the socio-spatial synchronisation of the space of flow. The VAM’s decisive

contribution to translocalisation of the commons has introduced a place–time redundancy that has

further expanded their self-determination and overall resilience. However, this status has created

new challenges, since, with the establishment of permanent infrastructure (physical) and activation

(functional), the navigation through the new spatialities has had to overcome the difficulties created

by their multiple iteration, repetition, multiplication, and superimposition (Manfredini, 2018: 10–

12). The place–time self-determination of these fluctuating networks present daily challenges to

their commoners in the exercise of the power that the new degree of freedom offers to enable

effective communicative acting, mobilisation and deliberating capacity for individuals to

collaborate in networked autonomy and constitute multitudes with enhanced democratic capacity

(Bresnihan & Byrne, 2015; Hardt & Negri, 2009: 352). Foremost, personal involvement is required

to overcome the new threats, as demonstrated in the establishment of major political commons in

recent protests (Jost et al., 2018), such as in the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement (Fuchs, 2014:

83–87), and Gezi Park Movement (Manfredini, Zamani Gharaghooshi & Leardini, 2017).

5. Understanding More-Than-Spatial Commons’ Pseudo-Civic Institutions

The new form of spatialisation that reflects distributed, translocal, and transitional situatedness,

commoning, and incrementalism requires a profound re-thinking of the theoretical approach. A

framework for understanding their spatial production that combines physical, social and cultural

components with socio-spatial practices and rhythms is found in the Lefebvrian scholarly tradition

of the Right to the City. It provides specific critical methods that can be adapted to disentangle the

complexity of their translocal spatialities (Lefebvre, 1991, 2004; Soja, 1989; Stanek, 2011).

Specifically, it enables the apprehension of a fundamental political criticality of the contemporary

commons: how socio-spatial contexts within advanced neoliberal frameworks and multifarious

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virtual extensions redefine the power relations and collaborative processes of translocal urban

communities in a progressively hierarchical society. The dual perspective of the Lefebvrian

approach – which sees the space as both a socio-spatial product and as an ontological means of

production – is specifically efficacious in the analysis of current hyper-networked frameworks,

since its triplectic articulation – identifying lived experiences, routines and conceptions – facilitates

the detection of imbalances in power relations of conflicts that heighten the vulnerability of their

associative processes. Addressing the redefinition of power relations that impact on commons’

livelihood is central to understanding those contexts where the agency of their embodiments is

subject to neutralisation by commodification processes set up by powerful antagonistic forces. The

control enacted by hegemonic powers on the infrastructure of colonised commons favours their

deterritorialising agency against reappropriating representational commoning forces and can

compromise the struggle of the latter in freeing alienating conditions that hinder the exercise of the

Right to the City. Specifically, the Lefebvrian approach exposes the way the organisations that

externally govern these spatialities surreptitiously displace and decentre the social, political and

cultural forms of relationality, endangering the formation of adequate territorial claims and

associations of urban communities.

This approach also reveals the peculiarities of the basic conditions and equipment of the

infrastructure that supports the irregular local embodiments of advanced more-than-spatial

collaborative routines. These highly specialised environments offer both exceptional urban

qualities and state-of-the-art ambient technologies. Urban qualities include comprehensive

availability of urban amenities and services; prime accessibility, with both public and private

transport; high internal connectivity; and outstanding character, enclosure and referentiality of the

streetscape. Ambient technologies comprehend systems to guarantee optimal psychophysical and

relational environmental comfort. Digital infrastructure and services are particularly important to

support VAM-assisted local embodiments in creating suffused, spectacular, highly connective, and

immersive atmospheres with artificial intelligence implements, and the internet of things through

multiple user interfaces for fixed, personal handheld or virtual devices.

Resources deployed for the emplacement and maintenance of their infrastructure are extensive and

often come with critical trade-offs. The neoliberal devolution agenda of many city administrations

has favoured their externalisation to third parties that can afford to produce it. Large-scale

commercial organisations step in aiming at colonising the commons and commodifying them. They

provide and grant access to such a valuable infrastructure, compensating for the scarce equipment

of genuine public space under a strict condition: the isolation and economisation of specific

instances of cooperative citizenship. Since the commons’ infrastructure is introduced into semi-

public space to expand its patronage and revenues, its conception model is subverted. It no longer

pursues social wellbeing, rather – as we will discuss later – its surrogate: pleasurable and

participatory consumption. Overdetermined spaces with a marketing-engineered mix of functions

and rhythms, displaced relationality, disjunctive territoriality, enclosing introversion and filtered

accessibility, take the place of spatial indeterminacy with collectively regulated polyfunctionality

and eurhythmic, situated relationality, territorial continuity, integrative openness and universal

accessibility. Capitalising on this controlled infrastructural dominance, semi-public space has

rapidly expanded, casting separated and nested individual elements into an amorphous aggregate

for conspicuous consumption.

The most relevant of such elements are the integrated enclosures of shopping and entertainment.

They are larger bodies of displaced central places that constitute the primary structure of civic-

antagonist extensive rhizomatic networks that are a good representation of what Sloterdijk has

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described as agglomeration of technospheres: a foam made of spheres “layered over and under one

another, yet without truly being accessible or effectively separable from one another” (2016: 56).

Their urban domination has dramatically expanded the role and the problems of their predecessor:

the shopping mall. As ultimate anthropotechnical bubbles for controlled social activities

(Sloterdijk, 2011, 2014, 2016), these new “cathedrals of consumption” have furthered the

spectacularised (Degen & Rose 2012) internalisation of public space (Carmona 2010: 169), as

widely discussed in the last wave of literature on the “end of the public space” (Gosseye,

Avermaete & De Meulder, 2018; Kitchin & Dodge, 2015). Their multiple segmentation in adjacent

and nested anthropogenic islands (Sloterdijk, 2016: 457–465) has instituted redundant self-

referential circles, simultaneously strengthening and dissimulating the distinction between inside

and outside by iteratively defining the latter to include it via representation.

Within the foam of the novel consumerist spheres, various degrees of privateness are overlapped,

intertwined and mirrored, manifesting the multidimensional coextension of public and private in

today’s personal lives. The novel kind of space, previously described as “meta-public”

(Manfredini, 2017), nurtures and merges maximal consumption and maximal socialisation,

consolidating eventful assemblages of commercial, productive and recreational “inverted space”

(Dovey, 1999: 125–133) and up-scaling, which Rem Koolhaas defined as junkspace (Koolhaas

2002: 176), into an hyper-connective meta-civic system.

The augmentation of hybridity and ambiguity of these pseudo-civic networks steadily recombines

both the normative and performative frameworks of the opposing private and public realms. The

divide between the networks and the rest of the city in regulations and control practices of public

spaces has increased. Spaces operate as Foucauldian “disciplinary mechanisms” (Foucault, 1995:

170–194) for the perpetuation of hierarchy, dissymmetry and disequilibrium in power relations

through the establishment of enclosed, spaces that guarantee the invisible, yet uninterrupted, spatio-

temporal supervision, examination and normalisation of each visitor. The machines are segmented

in functionally coded areas that permit a full internal, articulated and detailed control through ever-

improving “techniques of subjection and methods of exploitation” (Foucault, 1995: 171). Specific

to consumerism space is the repression of any public agency that could rise from actions and

discourses of autonomous social associations. Hypervisibility of panoptical systems has

comprehensively integrated active and passive surveillance with both traditional (human

observation) and advanced (automated audience-detection devices) means. Disciplinary policies to

prevent “hazardous” events (e.g. gatherings and protests) progressively refine controls on customer

access and behaviour. Meticulous admittance regulations, micro-behavioural codes of conduct, and

restrictions are implemented with segmentational exclusionary precinct planning, which includes

deterrent regulations (e.g. playground ban on adults unaccompanied by children, and restricted or

supervised access of young people in licensed premises) and ingenious environmental technologies

(e.g. the teenager anti-loitering Mosquito alarm or the user-filtering bodily synchronization through

piped music). Their invisibility and camouflage produce reassuring realms with elitist segregation

and spatially flexible, incremental, informal and indeterminate appearance, which deceptively

avoid the over-determination that in modern commercial environments had to rely on explicit

threatening policing methods (Manfredini, 2017).

The implementation of digital control capacity has also multiplied the power of compromising

relationality. Comprehensive and coordinated public space narratives have been endowed with

advanced eventful and spectacular transductivity that manipulates relationality over space and time

– sometimes even using explicit theming after idealised historical models of cityness, such as in the

clustered and interconnected glitzy mini-city replicas of Venice, Paris and London in Macau by

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Sands Corporation. If the hyperspaces of the analogue simulations of the pre-digital age had the

capacity to produce glossy mirages that provided access to sublime realms, derealise reality and

transcend “the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself” (Jameson, 1991: 44), the

transductive power of the all-embracing digital atmosphere has transformed ambivalence into

hyper-valence and dislocated the individual through limitless cross-contextualisations between

concurrent and often contradictory layers. The experience of these layers is no longer exclusive,

enabling contextual navigation through multiple merged contexts, whilst granting simultaneous

shared access to same-place and remote othernesses.

The displacing effects of these networks exacerbate the socio-spatial fragmentation of the city

system and, given their capacity to capture and polarise large sectors of public life, profoundly

contribute to the deterritorialisation of its social spaces (Manfredini, 2018; Manfredini & Hill,

2018). The inclusion of fundamental public services, such as libraries or employment agencies, in

their exclusionary ultra-consumerist semi-gated spatialities leaves behind a large number of

communities and individuals who either cannot access or are not welcomed, constituting a further

threat to the sustainable development of the city.

6. The Performative Paradox of Colonised Commons

Whilst economic hegemonic players have advanced the colonisation of the commons, displacing

them within their semi-gated and ultra-consumerist networks, the structural order of their

infrastructure has redistributed duties and responsibilities in unstable hybrid ownership and

governance patterns involving the state, private corporations or third sector (Savas, 2000). In social

environments, the profound rearticulation of the public realm, brought about by the scalability

introduced by the amalgamated physical and digital spatialities, has been furthered by the

exponential growth of a phenomenon: participatory consumption. This phenomenon has pervaded

the commercial sector, intermingling its productive and consumption roles, orders and practices

(Belk, 2014; Manfredini, 2018; Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). Its impact on collaborative life has been

specifically relevant to the actant-ecology-rhythm activation systems of the colonised commons:

the socialisation of production has extended the contributor base and made the new prosumption

patterns an intimate mix of formal and informal elements that seamlessly combine the various

associational levels – the private, the parochial, the communal and the public (Manfredini, 2017).

The weakening of the external control, isolation and imperviousness of the physical and immaterial

barriers that affected the relational life in the foam technospheres that host the more-than-spatial

commons has opened extraordinary opportunities for its reconciliation with the civic component of

the city. The opening, though, depends on a performative paradox: the more the infrastructure of

colonised commons is developed with highly performative “spatialities of code” that attract

translocal communities and subjugate them to consumerism imperatives within the enclosed

environments of enchanted segregation and enticing distraction, the more their externalities reverse

the enclosing process and foster the decoupling of presence and enhance the resilience of mobilised

urban communities and of the institutions that guarantee their associative life. This inconsistency is

highly unstable, since it is generated by the uncontrolled externalities of the colonisation process.

The fissuring of the environments of the enclosures has opened unplanned paths towards their

reconciliation with their civic environments and propped up the regeneration of the commons onto

thoroughly emancipative institutions that positively engage conspicuous consumption with

participatory production. Their dominant players, on a mission to deeply restructure the global

economy on civil models based on economisation principles have produced total simulacra that,

whilst depriving the others through wasteful abundance rather than privation (Mitchell, 2018),

picture satisfaction to struck strong alliances with their counterparts. Leveraging on the pleasure of

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the mirage and the revanchism against alienating translocalism, they have progressively exploited

the technologically enabled participatory actions of the made-accomplice prosumer to enhance

their control power (Fuchs, 2014: 98–122) and used their free labour (Fuchs, 2014: 52–88, 98–122;

Miles, 2010; Ritzer, 2005) to swiftly shut any gap opened by the widening contradictions of the

advanced cognitive-cultural economy.

7. Outlining A Topology of Commons’ Territories

Based on the above-mentioned studies on East Asian and Australasian cities, a basic size-based

territorial topology of places with more-than-spatial associational processes has been outlined. The

classification considers the identified basic characteristics of the networked territorial production

over space and time, including infrastructural equipment, organisation and governance; activating

operations, dynamics of association and overall spatial production. The territories relate to

commons with stabilised structures and dynamic associational performances that involve diverse

core actants, such as individualities or instituted assemblages like public authorities, private

corporations or non-governmental organizations, as well as informal or spontaneous associations

(e.g. local interest groups and translocal grassroots movements). The size of each of these

associations is variable as is their structure, which includes centrally coordinated and

overdetermined, as well as distributed and self-producing, networks.

Drawing upon Lefebvre’s approach, to decipher the complex spaces of the new commons’

territorial production, a grid has been articulated. It reflects the conceptual opposition between

dominated abstract space – a deceptive space where use has been replaced with exchange – and

reappropriated differential space – a counter-space” that suspends domination and reinstates the

“space of the market” over the “market in space” (1991: 365–367). The separation of

homogenising and exclusionary apparatuses from differential and inclusionary ones shows the

threats to the development of differential forces within the abstract ones and the hindrances that the

former face to produce sustainable cities that are resilient, supportive of knowledge and awareness,

health and wellbeing, accountability and responsibility sharing, livelihood, and autonomy.

However, conscious of their spatial codomain, the separation has been used to underline how the

differential can develop from latent, peripheral and informal associations internal to the

consolidated hegemonic structures of wider institutions (Miles & Miles, 2004; Mitchell, 2017;

Zukin, 1991).

The dual grid has been further differentiated in the three different types of spatialities that Lefebvre

identifies as showing a fundamental spatial contradiction: “namely, the fact that the most

effectively appropriated spaces are those occupied by symbols” (Lefebvre, 1991: 366). These types

(Lefebvre, 2005, 37-40) are: a) Transductive isotopia – here intended as analogous place of

exclusionary deterritorialised spectacularisation through context-based transductions of the

everyday experience; b) Transductive heterotopia – here intended as liminal social spaces of

possibility where "something different" defines upterritorialising revolutionary trajectories through

inclusionary commoning transductions of the everyday experience; and c) Transductive utopia –

here intended as concrete realisation of an ideality-based differential reality produced by

inclusionary hyper-territorialising practices of the everyday experience.

Transductive isotopian apparatuses

Abstractive exclusionary transductive isotopias are either granular context-specific, median

segmentational or molar context-related institutions with a substantial or comprehensive public

function. The granular context-specific ones have mainly concentrated private ownership and

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activation with governance that overdetermines their usage, implementing integrated interdictory

and control strategies to filter and restrain users and create segregated and homogeneous parochial

spaces dedicated to specific commercial activities. These institutions are characterised by various

enhanced forms of surveillance that make them “prickly” (Flusty, 1997: 16–17) – where space is

designed and managed to make only some comfortable– “crusty” (17) – where space has hard

boundaries deploying physical or social hindrances to stop the undesired – secluded – where

boundaries are impervious to all but “club” members – or camouflaged – where hiding or

perception-deceiving tactics are implemented to minimise “disturbances” caused by spontaneous or

“incompatible” public activities. When the limitations include time, these institutions are either

impermanent – when their infrastructure is locally produced contextually with their activation, as in

the case of mobile structures – or have discontinuous routines – when they are accessible only on

fixed schedules, such as owners’ business hours. Conspicuous cases of “impermanent crusty”

isotopia are privately owned public spaces resulting from gross floor area concession schemes.

These are subsidiary spaces produced by planning incentives – designed to provide additional

urban space for public use without government expenditure through indirect compensation in

exceeding floor area ratios – which have diffused worldwide after their original introduction by the

New York City administration (Cuthbert & McKinnel, 2001; Dimmer, 2013; Kayden, 2000;

Rossini, 2015). Relevant cases of “impermanent prickly” commons are also found in quasi-public

spaces, as the main aisles of shopping malls, which, in countries like New Zealand, grant to owners

legally unchallenged private property rights, notwithstanding their public interest. There, total

spatial control is implemented with digitally augmented systems (with sensors, cameras, dedicated

security communication channels and the like), enhanced transduction (e.g. with cunning

gamification strategies that concentrate points of interest of AR games, such as Pokémon Go, in

central teenagers’ dedicated precincts; and with permanently updated AI-integrated panoptical

navigation, information, shopping and entertainment systems based on platforms such as such

Google Lens) and advanced participatory consumption (e.g. with unrestricted free WiFi access that

has compulsory individual registration and incessant communication through hyper-activated

accounts on mainstream social media services, such as Instagram and Facebook). Examples of

“discontinuous crusty and prickly” commons comprise commons appearing through the institution

of obstacles, gates or checkpoints. One of these is Auckland’s central-city Roukai Lane, a narrow

pedestrian street connecting two key movement zones, where densely distributed bar furniture and

planting boxes obstruct the crossing when bouncers are not on site to control access to the lane,

incidentally located within an alcohol-ban area (Auckland Council, 2018b; Manfredini, 2017;

Reeves, 2016).

The median disjoined isotopic institutions partially or entirely miss formal recognition (Kohn,

2004). They have comprehensive private ownership and governance that can stretch over an entire

statutory designated central urban area. Governing bodies micro-determine the usage of these

places through the implementation of behavioural control and surveillance strategies that discipline

users and “perfect” their social play. Conspicuous cases are the conceived spatialities of “fully

malled” metropolitan centres, which are major urban nodes dominated by the presence of a

shopping and entertainment enclosure (e.g. New Zealand’s Sylvia Park, a major Auckland

metropolitan centre fully occupied by the commercial centre owned and managed by the country’s

leading property investment company Kiwi Property Group Limited; Auckland Council, 2018a,

Manfredini & Jenner, 2015). Similar to the context-specific ones, these institutions have “prickly”

and “crusty” character where surveillance is completely managed by private organisations with

state-of-the-art technology (Arroyo et al., 2015; Halton, 1992). Time wise, these places have

discontinuous routines since they are accessible only at fixed times established on marketing logics,

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often differentiated by activity sector. These logics, which make these places civic antagonist,

enticing, introverted, comprehensive heterotopias, have developed refined strategies to deceive

their perception as solely consumerism sites. Typically, they emulate the stereotypical urban

structure of town centres, with traditional morphology, image, activity mix and a composite set of

urban amenities. Public offices (e.g. citizen advice bureau and registry office) and services (library

and army recruitment office) are strategically placed. Temporary street markets (farmers and night

markets), cultural festivals and creative events are carefully curated to make them lively, create a

sense of community and place attachment, yet remain compatible with the policies of the centres.

The molar context-related isotopic institutions have substantial or comprehensive recognition of

public function. They have combined public and private ownership, and centralised activation with

governance that overdetermines their usage, implementing integrated interdictory and control

strategies to restrain users and create homogeneous spaces dedicated to multiple commercial

activities. Although they comprehend opposing overdetermined parts and indeterminate ones, as

well as combinations of controlled and incremental production, closed and open systems, top-down

and bottom-up processing, they produce an ideality-based exclusionary territorial region at the

molar scale. Similar to their corresponding heterotopian cases, their governing bodies micro-

determine the spatial usage, implementing tight behavioural controls and surveillance strategies

that “perfect” their social play. Conspicuous cases of this class are segmented and “fortressed”

urban areas (Minton, 2012) that result from market-led regeneration through privatisation

processes. These include “jittery” spaces with high surveillance levels (Flusty, 1997: 17–18), such

as the retail-led mixed=use Liverpool One complex in Liverpool (Minton, 2012). Time wise, these

places are open at all times but have imposing control systems to filter access and guarantee

“clean” and “safe” environments. They are heavily policed and offer the image of places where

only selected sets of practices are permitted. Important variations of these spaces are business

improvement districts (BIDs): urban renewal programmes widely diffused in Western countries,

where relevant portions of governance of public space are transferred to voluntary non-profit

associations of local business organisations (Garnett, 2012: 2012–2018).

Transductive heterotopian apparatuses

Differential inclusionary transductive heterotopias are found as either granular or multidimensional

counter-institutions with comprehensive recognition of public function. The granular ones have

public or commoned ownership and distributed multi-stakeholder activation that enable the

development of self-organising, grassroots-based and socio-spatially embedded systems that

sustain spatial indeterminacy and foster incremental production. These heterotopias involve

dynamics of collective territorial appropriation that integrate multiple actors of very diverse social,

cultural, economic and institutional origins. They do not always develop stable socio-spatial

associations and routines since they typically rely on eventual daily territorialisation tactics and

medium- to short-term dynamics, sometimes post-coordinated. They articulate multiple forms of

synchronisation, which comprehend the reappropriation of rhythms of spatial production,

privileging the immediate, the becoming and the irregular over the mediated, rigid and imposed;

and the power of the individual over the power of the authority. Their focus on specific ecosystems

and eventual processes and bottom-up sovereignty driven by the sense of belonging,

accomplishment, excitement, and desire makes them particularly suited to debouch into disruptive

crisis, protests or celebratory events. Communication in the form of networked dialogue

coordinates multiple simultaneous actions and produces complex manifestations spatially situated

in nodal places of the system. These spatial instances catalyse creative forces present in the locale

and new technologies amplify their expression, dramatically widening their public reception and

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involvement. Noteworthy examples of the strengthening and expanding effects on national

translocal communities were found in mixed realities – both physically augmented virtualities and

digitally augmented realities. A representative case is an associative and associational institution

created in Christchurch, New Zealand, during and after the 2010–2011 earthquake series by

networks of non-governmental organisations such as Gap Filler (Bennett & Moore, 2017;

Manfredini, 2018).

The multidimensional heterotopic counter-institutions have little or no recognition of public

function. They have public or private ownership and mixed centralised and participatory activation

that comprehend opposing overdetermined parts and indeterminate ones, as well as combinations

of controlled and incremental production, closed and open systems, top-down and bottom-up

processing. Conspicuous cases are the experienced spatialities that oppose the above-mentioned

conceived ones within the semi-public space of “fully malled” metropolitan centres. Their

characteristics, as described in the previous sections, crucially relying on the digital space,

strengthen and empower the urban translocal communities (Manfredini, 2017; Manfredini &

Jenner, 2015), although democratic participation is subject to persisting limitations of access to the

digital sphere and its relevant media and growing exploitation of their action (Fuchs 2004). Time

wise, although these institutions have discontinuous embodiments within these places that depend

on the routines established by the centre management, they are almost permanently activated

remotely by displaced, yet digitally interconnected, users. Examples of this activation were found

in the analysis of activity on the most popular visual-based geolocated social media services in

New Zealand – Instagram – and China – Weibo – where a number in excess of 10% of the total

visits remained active over one year on the most active points of interest of the major shopping

centres of the countries (Manfredini, 2018; Xin et al., 2018)

Transductive utopian apparatuses

These are open, differential and inclusionary counter-spaces with mixed ownership and

governance and inconsistent recognition of public function. They are produced by structured and

stabilised initiatives coordinated by a variable mix of governmental or substantial non-

governmental/spontaneous organizations. They are stable, consolidated, sole and highly structured

systems based on processes of strong association to territories and networks. They also include

one-off events as part of the series that actualise iterative patterns of the same sort (Kärrholm,

2007: 445–446). These apparatuses are produced by place-specific, incremental semi-structured

territorial systems based on processes of a strong association between territories and networks

supported by strategic long-term conceptions. Their effectiveness relies on strategy implementation

that continuously reassembles actants’ tactical moves. Their action is triggered and led by an

agency (often an existing structured consortium of organisations) and is based on constant

activation involving both local and translocal individuals and groups in highly dynamic

associations. Although these spaces are composed of large-scale and permanent structures that

require long-term and high capacity planning, management and synchronisation of institutions,

operators and the public, they rely on everyday actions and practices with incremental dynamics.

Their setup and operation result generally from the assemblage of small-size elements and systems

of provisional or medium-term duration that are either concentrated in a single place or distributed

throughout urban areas. The incremental dynamics catalyse and strengthen voluntary associations

and grassroots movements towards the reconstitution and recombination of vital social networks in

rapidly changing environments. These systems are synchronised with daily and weekly routines

and aligned with the rhythms of public life, relational activity, recreation and

communicative/political action of specific habitats. A noteworthy example of the strengthening and

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expanding effects on global translocal communities was found in the mixed digital and physical

Gezi Park commons produced in Istanbul during and after the 2013 protest (Manfredini, Zamani

Gharaghooshi & Leardini, 2017).

8. Conclusion

This paper analysed the contemporary commons and detected an emerging type of commons

described as an institution with mobile, metastable, and metapublic spatialisation patterns

generated by digitally augmented processes. This new type is credited with the potential to produce

efficacious, robust, supple, and redundant chains of association that countervail the colonising

power of external hegemonic forces and prompt the overall commons to “bounce forward” after

their crisis driven by the withdrawal of direct state involvement. The effectivity of these novel

spatialisation patterns is attributed to their capacity to decouple their actants, separating productive,

autonomous, and non-mediated presences from constraining, dominating, and externally controlled

presents. This decoupling is associated with three major processes: pervasive translocalisation,

recombinant transduction, and publicness hybridisation. These processes are described as game

changers in communities’ relational life and identified as the origin of the subjection of the new

commons to a crucial trade-off: the concession of relevant degrees of independence and self-

determination against the usage of necessary infrastructure for the materialisation of the ultimate

embodiments of the commons. The trade-off involves the antagonist use of semi-public realms of

the advanced consumption enclosures that offer, at no direct cost, access to prime translocal and

transductive urban technospheres with outpacing centrality, relational hyper-activation, and state-

of-the-art technological equipment.

This inquiry, built upon the critical tradition of the right to the city, shapes theoretical instruments

to disentangle the changes in power relations that underlie the struggle of the new antagonist

commoning force for the collective appropriation of historical relationality of people, cultures, and

territories in all practices of everyday life. The way the new commons grow their counterspaces at

the core of the places that are responsible for the highest decay of their social agency and

progressive segmentation and commodification is unpacked and described. Accordingly, validation

of the potential counterdiscursive agency of the new commons is offered through the discussion of

the findings of recent comparative urbanism research on representative Asian and Australasian

cases. The new institutions are interpreted and classified adapting the primary Lefebvrian triad –

isotopia, utopia and heterotopia. This triplectic articulates the antagonism between abstract space

and differential counter-space to discern concurrent factors of dominating exclusionary spectacle

and reappropriating inclusionary commoning. The positive answer that the growth of

counterhegemonic forces found in this study both theoretically and empirically gives to the

research question comes with the warning that the multidimensional vulnerability of the new

commons constitutes a major challenge to the stabilisation and further development of the

emerging nondominative modes of relational and associative life. Since these problems specific to

the new impermanent, eventual translocal, transductive, and semi-public characters of the new

commons rely on a poorly investigated performative paradox, there is an urgent need of further

research to widen the understanding of their complex nature. The radical changes in the socio-

spatial production of these metamorphic institutions that the research discussed in this paper

tentatively ascribes to an emerging ambivalent complicity between irreconcilable antagonist forces

require more research. This would lead to a substantial reframing of the question of the commons

and their resilience concept, and enable projective spatial disciplines, such as architecture and

urbanism, to efficaciously contribute to the affirmation of a universal right to difference towards a

relationally augmented democratic, resilient, and autonomous development of urban communities

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where that paradox develops into – paraphrasing– a whole new order where the scripted spaces of

the chimerical, abstractive spatialities became meaninglessness structures (Jameson & Speaks,

1992) that organise and supportive the “demand” of productive desire (Manfredini, 2018).

9. Acknowledgements

This research is funded through the New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation and

Employment of programme Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities, National Science Challenge

contestable fund - Give Us Space project.

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