Laboratories of commons: experimentation, recursivity and activism

Abstract

The urban public space, digital creations or the air, all of them are objects that have been traditionally thought within the dichotomous logic of the public and private property but in the last decade they have started to be considered as common resources. Commons is an old concept that has been recovered with intensity in the last decade; it refers to collective resources and goods that are governed collectively and whose property regime is different from the public and private. This article introduces the contributions to a monograph devoted to the topic of ‘Laboratories of commons’. Contributors discuss the diverse modalities of commons in different social domains like art, activism, the rural and the urban domain. This introduction contextualizes these contributions and identifies some of the issues that cross the different articles. In this exercise we introduce a tentative argument according to which the commons and the commons research take an exceptional configuration in Spain. Very briefly: commons are brought into existence as an epistemic object, an experimental domain quite different from the conventional conceptualizations that conceive it as a property regime or a type of good. This peculiar configuration gives a distinctive condition to commons in Spain that are different from other geographies; this is evidenced in a double shift: the emergence of new objects that are thought as commons and the location of their research in the domain of cultural and creative production.