More than Bare-Bones Survival? From the Urban Margins to the Urban Commons

Geoffrey DeVerteuil, Matthew D. Marr and Johannes Kiener

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2022, vol. 112, issue 7, 2080-2095

Abstract: We revisit the urban margins by recasting service hubs—conspicuous clusters of helping agencies in inner-city locales, designed to serve vulnerable populations—as both spaces of survival but potentially transformative, emerging as so-called cracks in the city. We undertake this recasting using the concept of the commons. Using case studies in London, Miami, and Osaka, we focus on the everyday practices of commoning and the role that service hubs play in the city as spaces of sustenance, care, and solidarity. The results are mixed: Service hubs enabled unfettered survival and operated largely outside of capitalism, ensuring that some spaces in the city remain decommodified and at the margins. The service hubs were also limited in their transformational capacity, however. These results contribute to a sense of commons at the margins, rethinking them more as an edge between capitalism and an existence separate from it, rather than presenting them as exclusively marginal in the sense of subordinated, excluded, and bordered.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2022.2044751 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:112:y:2022:i:7:p:2080-2095

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2022.2044751

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().