As part of the preparation of “Faire commun(s), comment faire?”, the 3rd National Forum of Intermediate and Independent Places, Artfactories/autresparts and La Déviation invite the actors from Marseille and elsewhere to a day of meetings and exchanges, entitled “Who benefits from the temporary? Common space practices and transitional urban planning – towards new arrangements”.
In the context of transitional urban planning, the issue of cultural wastelands and space occupations by collectives of artists and residents has returned to the public debate. However, the discourse on wasteland is expressed almost exclusively through the interests it arouses in terms of territorial attractiveness and land valuation; new actors have emerged, as well as new practices, where the more strictly political issues of cultural democracy and social emancipation are being erased. Would the focus of these practices thus shift from politics to economics?
Through the phenomenon of metropolization, the logic of territorial marketing and the discourse on creative industries, which are characteristic of the neoliberal movement to reorganize our institutions, new alliances between public and private powers are reconfiguring the figure of the planner and the forms of planning in our territories.
In contrast to this major trend, many actors in these occupation practices are working to constitute and declare them as common: urban commons, cultural commons, spatial commons, transformational commons, cooperative logics, self-organization… All these ways of formulating the work of the common manifest a double effort to keep at bay both public and private predations that threaten what still holds the possibility of a common world, at the heart of us.
What relationship should be maintained with other initiatives in the fight against the dynamics of appropriation of the City, in the field of commons and in terms of space occupation practices? How do the communes participate in the general interest? It is within this reflexive framework that the 3rd national forum of intermediate and independent places is being built. One of the major challenges is to find the place where we find ourselves with the other actors of the movement of Commons, to rebuild intersectionality (territory//culture social innovation///artistic experimentation).
Come and debate it on May 22nd!