Commons Underground

The Commons Underground was taught by Nicole de Lalouvière, Irina Davidovici, and Janina Gosseye in the fall semester 2020 as the second instalment of the “The City Lived” seminar. In the context of this course, students employed the theoretical lens of the ‘commons’ to examine the ‘underground’ as a space within which public, private, and collective rights are negotiated and ultimately materialised. To probe this set of relations between the ‘commons’ and the ‘underground’, the seminar focused on built spaces, infrastructure, services and resources located under the surface and thus subject to different material and statutory regimes. The ‘commons underground’ present us with practices of cooperation, conflict resolution, and at times, oppression. Like most forms of commons, the underground brings forth recurring issues: access, ownership, maintenance, the drawing of socio-spatial boundaries, etc. All of these questions are relevant to the act of building in the underground. They also can be brought to bear on the limitations of subterranean spaces, including in their materiality, form, and dimensions. Beyond the surveyed space—described through ever-more sophisticated tools that measure, scan, and probe—the underground is the locus of commoning, a place constructed through lived experience and social practices. It is at once the subject of myth, a place of daily work, the result of technological expertise, and a medium of knowledge transfer. In the context of the seminar, the underground commons were considered in relation to various topics, including transport, sanitation, geology, soils, mining, defence, and heritage. Case studies were produced by the students as an attempt to build upon existing research into the commons.

This course took place during the Fall 2020 semester.