An Atlas of Commoning

Places of Collective Production

The project An Atlas of Commoning by ifa questions prevailing social and political structures and searches for new forms of collective, yet pluralistic, governance, and aims to recapture and redefine the open and emancipatory space of "us" as a concept.

Companies such as Facebook, Airbnb and others, whose business models are based on the commercialization of social relationships, have transformed words like "community", "sharing" or "us" into empty concepts that no longer represent solidarity or a progressive social agenda, but rather form the basis for an emerging platform capitalism. This economic development is accompanied by a global political shift fueled by traditional community notions of identity and affiliation, exclusion and discrimination.

The project focuses on urban commons – here commons are to be understood as a set of practices dealing with the production and management of (material and immaterial) collective resources and spaces in general, rather than with the resources themselves, hence "commoning", the verb, takes center stage. It is a process that involves the spatial organization of the relationships between production and reproduction, ownership and access to resources. A process in which solidarity networks are created and individual and collective rights are redefined.

An Atlas of Commoning is an exhibition by the ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen in cooperation with ARCH+ Journal for Architecture and Urbanism.

Curatorial team

Anh-Linh Ngo, Mirko Gatti, Christian Hiller, Max Kaldenhoff, Christine Rüb (ARCH+), Elke aus dem Moore (ifa), Stefan Gruber (CMU)

Research partners

School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh and TU Berlin, Institute of Architecture, Prof. Rainer Hehl