Spatiality of the commons

Abstract

This paper aims at presenting commons research, an approach that has gained little academic attention in Hungary and its potential links with the disciplines dealing with the spatiality of society. After defining some key terms, an overview of the historical roots and improvement of commons research, and its changing emphasis resulting from alterations in its social, political, and economic context is presented. It is pointed out how related academic discourses, once dominated by views arguing for a unitary governance of the commons (by either the state or a single market actor), have tended currently towards supporting common forms of governance. Beyond referring to environmental phenomena, owing a central position in commons research from the very beginning, special attention is paid to social commons, and new research results that have necessitated a thorough reinterpretation of some main conceptual issues of the research tradition in this field. Using the example of the knowledge commons, the paper explains the analytical difficulties concerning the identification, demarcation, normative evaluation, and social constructedness of the commons. Some contradictions and challenges of an extreme privatisation of the commons as well as a radical “commoning” are also discussed. Thus, presenting as commons certain goods the common governance handles seems to conflict with the interests and views of the vast majority of society, even those not belonging to the elites.

In the second part, the paper concentrates on the spatiality of the commons. First, the focus is on the spatial boundaries and scale-dependence of the commons in order to identify the main difficulties of spatial governance, including an inefficient or even harmful interplay of relevant regimes of regulation. The second focus is on urban commons. Public spaces are investigated following the public security discourse and the notion of symbolic occupation of space with reference to planning issues. Examining basic urban infrastructures such as public roads, schools, or healthcare institutions, the problem of simultaneous under- and overutilisation of a given resource at different locations in the geographical space is illustrated. The same issue is discussed for the regional scale focusing on the spatial inequalities of basic education, which we consider not as a commons per se, but as the complex of education as service, physical infrastructures, and legal and financial mechanisms aimed at enabling that certain sorts of knowledge indeed become a commons. To underline the relevance of investigating social commons at the global scale, we explain some problems of access to results of scientific work, embracing arguments for, and criticism about, promoting open access publication forums.

A main goal of this paper is to identify relevant new issues for academic research in Hungary, whose analysis can contribute to a better understanding of the spatiality of the commons, a more sophisticated grounding of spatial theory in commons research, and an intensifying adoption of state-of-the-art research topics as well as the practical utilisation of related results in spatial studies in Hungary