The Long Struggle to Discovering Me by Amina Chitembo

The Long Struggle to Discovering Me by Amina Chitembo

An investigation of the practice of commoning in urban housing and its necessity for challenging economic injustice in our rapidly gentrifying cities

Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource--housing--that had been used to extract profit from them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them.

In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban commoning through a close investigation of the city's limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism's totalizing claims over life.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780995739611
ISBN 10	0995739617
Title	The Long Struggle to Discovering Me
Author	Amina Chitembo
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Diverse Cultures Publishing
Year published	2018-11-21
Number of pages	144
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.