Worli Commons UD 742, Spring 201
Worli Commons UD 742 Capstone Studio Assistant Professor McLain Clutter Spring 2014, Monday-Friday 1pm-5pm
The Common In their 2009 book Commonwealth, political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri forward a vision of a future global and democratic social organization built around the idea of the common. For Hardt and Negri, the common is a broad category. It encompasses the resources of the physical environment that we all share, the embedded value within our systems for material and economic development, and the networks of communication, information and affect that interconnect the increasingly globalized world. The realm of the common spans the material and the immaterial, the quantitative and the affective. As culture and economy become more standardized under globalization, so too does the breadth and expanse of the common grow around the world. Within this sideeffect of globalization, Hardt and Negri recognize an opportunity to eschew the regimes of privatized ownership that buttress the current and dominant modes of socio-political organization – projecting potentially emancipatory effects for the global poor, the marginalized and the under serviced. The metropolis is an immense “reservoir� of the common. Metropolitan centers are replete with evidence of collective labor embedded within the built environment, and are the nexuses of trade, culture, commerce and communication for our globalized society. Thus, Hardt and Negri identify the contemporary metropolis as a potential milieu within which a social organization around the common might emerge. With this assertion, one is prompted to speculate on ways of life in the contemporary city that challenge or subvert dominant regimes of property ownership. Urban design might play a pivotal role in such speculation.