Carving out the commons : tenant organizing and housing cooperatives in Washington, D.C. / Amanda Huron.

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Bibliographic Details
Published: Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, [2018]
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Series:Diverse economies and livable worlds.
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Format: Electronic eBook
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Summary:An investigation of the practice of "commoning" in urban housing and its necessity for challenging economic injustice in our rapidly gentrifying cities Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource--housing--that had been used to extract profit from them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them. In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban "commoning" through a close investigation of the city's limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism's totalizing claims over life.
Physical Description:1 online resource (215 pages)
Other format:Print version: 1517901960 9781517901967
Notes:Bib#: 2779851
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Series:Diverse economies and livable worlds
Language:English
ISBN:9781452956428
1452956421
Bib#:2779851