The Commons and its Tragedy: Introducing a Notion

Lecture 1
The Commons and its Tragedy: Introducing a Notion

?The commons? is one of these powerful tropes that pervades several fields of contemporary thinking and practice. In the first lecture we will probe into the thick historical and intellectual pedigree of this provocative conceptual frame, ranging from the enclosure movement in England to Garret Hardin?s famous parable on the ?Tragedy of the Commons? to Elinor Ostrom?s Nobel prize-wining work on common pool resources. We will explore how the concept of the commons has been semantically articulated and rearticulated, as it was developed in such a diverse fields as economy, politics and sociology.

This opening lecture will engage with the intellectual work of some of the founding mothers and fathers of the concept of the commons, looking into the work of economist Elinor Ostrom, ecologist Garret Hardin and philosopher Ivan Illich, but also into the approaches of contemporary thinkers such as Silke Konekfe and David Bollier who have defined the commons as a matter of ?shared resources? that allow us to conceive our everyday life beyond the dominant discourses of market economy and state intervention.

The intention of the lecture is to offer an introduction to the main perspectives and concepts that were recently coined and to construct a broader cultural and theoretical horizon from which to think the commons, as well as to start asking what these might imply for the field of architecture and urbanism.

Tom Avermaete is full professor of architecture at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. He has a special research interest in the public realm and the architecture of the city in Western and non-Western contexts. With the chair of Methods and Analysis he focuses on the changing roles, approaches and tools of architects. His research examines precedents -design attitudes, methods and instruments- with the explicit ambition to construct a critical base of design knowledge and to influence contemporary architectural thinking and practice.
Avermaete is the author of Another Modern: the Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (2005), The Balcony (with Koolhaas, 2014) and Casablanca -Chandigarh: Reports on Modernity (with Casciato, 2014). He is a co-editor of Architectural Positions (with Havik and Teerds, 2009), Colonial Modern (with von Osten and Karakayali, 2010), Structuralism Reloaded (with Vrachliotis, 2011), Making a New World (with Heynickx, 2012), Architecture of the Welfare State (with Swenarton and Van den Heuvel, Routledge, 2014) and Casablanca-Chandigarh: Reports on Modernization (with Casciato, Park Books, 2015).
Tom Avermaete is a member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journals OASE Architectural Journal and the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE, until 2015) and a co-editor of the Yearbook. Architecture in the Netherlands. Avermaete is the initiator of several exhibitions, amongst others In The Desert of Modernity (Berlin 2008, Casablanca 2009), How architects, experts, politicians, international agencies and citizens negotiate modern planning: Casablanca Chandigarh (CCA, Montreal, Canada, 2014-2015) and Lived-In. The Modern City as Performative Infrastructure (VAi/DeSingel, Antwerp, Belgium, 2015-2016).