Contra lo común

"Against the common" rewrites the history of urbanism from the perspective of the oppressed, delving into the drama of capitalist urbanization and the struggle of the popular classes to build more just and democratic places through their ability to organize space and convert it into a source of power, and exposes how capitalism and urban politics have evolved in their attempts to destroy this liberating potential. Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago traces more than three centuries of urbanization in the Western world to reveal the centrality of these strategies of dispossession in multiple processes of spatial change: from the privatization of communal land to the control of public space and daily life, restructuring of the metropolis and the production of suburbs to housing policies or the new dynamics of segregation, gentrification and regeneration linked to the so-called "creative city". But "the common is not only a disturbing specter of the past; it is also a hypothesis about the future". Conceiving history and planning as transformative projects, these pages also explore the possibility of a post-capitalist commons-based urbanization, in which the content and design of social space are defined by the people who inhabit it.