Lecture Performance: Stadtteilen

Vom gemeinen Gut als Tätigkeit und Verräumlichung

(Of the common good as activity and spatialization)

The lecture-performance was held on 19 January 2022 as part of the discourse series commons at the Staatliche Hochschule for Music and Performing Arts, Stuttgart.

The social topology of the city always touches on the question of participation in spatial structures. Within this, the issue of how spatial resources are used by a community is articulated. It is well known that the policy of privatization and individualization of urban space pursued since the 1970s has led to an increasing neglect of the common good by the public sector. However, the ideology which postulates that there is no society, people can do very well without the commons, there are no classes and the world is without conflict seems to have exhausted itself. The current housing crisis is a spatial-political crisis that has brought society to its limit. Devaluation of labor, urban sprawl and displacement of the lower and middle classes from the urban centers to the periurban peripheries make urbanization cover the country in different degrees of density and flight. The opposition of city and countryside, which is still always invoked in urban theory (even by Rem Koolhaas), has long since eroded. The territories that are excluded from the urban centers, small and medium-sized cities, denuded urban spaces, provide the places where the decomposition of the middle class takes place. Neither urban nor rural, they make visible the consequences of the spatial political economy of the free market. Against this background, the lecture takes up the question of the common good, which is currently often negotiated under the rubric of commons. Insofar as it is a historically oriented determination, I try to focus primarily on the praxeological constitution of the common good and its relationality. This is to add a spatial-theoretical dimension to the current debate on the commons.

 

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