Women, Urban Commons and Everyday Life: updating interpretive categories with competent activists

Abstract

The research is embedded in the intense relationship between feminisms and the commons, aiming to reflect on the real and potential role of women in experiences of mutualism that nourish forms of collective life and paths of re-appropriation of spaces, resources, practices, and rights. By a situated approach, researchers decided to investigate these topics through the vibrant political landscape concerning urban commons and feminisms in the city of Naples (Italy), and to develop in a collaborative way updated interpretative categories as expressions of social, cultural, and political theorisation of everyday life involving key players on the local scene.

The well-known phenomenon of the commons and the multiplicity of practices developed under this umbrella offer the possibility to reflect on the interpretation of the multifaceted role of women in the city, capturing the rainbow of diversities and complex dynamics. In this context, a gendered vision is consistent with the theory of commons, perceived as an alternative to capitalist individualism and isolation, as it can give voice to a new debate on fairer and more effective management of resources and spaces.

Since women are the main players in care, productive, and reproductive everyday life sectors, their commoning concerns the quality of relationships, cooperation, and mutual responsibility. It also constitutes a counter-power both within domestic life and community life, and represents a real possibility to activate processes of self-valorisation and self-determination. Therefore, through the choice of the binomial 'women-urban commons' we are supposed to be able to reflect on a different gender perspective, bridging the personal sphere and the political one, on the one hand, activism with the reproduction of everyday life, on the other.

Following a season of listening campaigns, engagement and collaborative processes to address the complexity of urban regeneration processes in deprived and contested contexts, the research team activated a situated mutual learning process with a group of activists with specific professional expertise about the research issues. The co-design activities, which include focus group meetings, are aimed at obtaining shared results through interaction, discussion, and the systematisation of different theoretical backgrounds and experiences of competent activism.