Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C.

Author:   Amanda Huron
Publisher:   University of Minnesota Press
ISBN:  

9781517901967


Pages:   224
Publication Date:   13 March 2018
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you.

Our Price $150.00 Quantity:  
Add to Cart

Share |

Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C.


Add your own review!

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Amanda Huron
Publisher:   University of Minnesota Press
Imprint:   University of Minnesota Press
Dimensions:   Width: 14.00cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 21.60cm
ISBN:  

9781517901967


ISBN 10:   1517901960
Pages:   224
Publication Date:   13 March 2018
Audience:   General/trade ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you.

Table of Contents

Contents Introduction 1. What Is the Commons? Merging Two Perspectives 2. The Urban Commons: Contradictions of Community, Capital, and the State 3. Forged in Crisis: Claiming a Home in the City 4. A Decent Grounds for Life: The Benefits of Limited-Equity Cooperatives 5. Survival and Collapse: Keeping and Losing Housing Over Time 6. Commoning in the Capitalist City Conclusion Acknowledgments Bibliography Index

Reviews

Through interviews and historical research, Amanda Huron gives us an in-depth description of the formation of a housing cooperative in Washington, D.C. in the '70s and develops a theoretical structure enabling us to generalize this experience to other cities. It is a incisive book that speaks to a vital issue in contemporary politics and social theory. --Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation Amanda Huron illuminates new ways of thinking what social justice in the City can look like. Her writing is rigorous yet upholds the dignity of the people she studies and their attempts to stake out a right to their city. Carving Out the Commons will be a go-to both for academics and organizers in the coming years. --James Tracy, author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco's Housing Wars Carving Out the Commons offers deep and carefully researched insight into alternative ways to imagine, organize, and enact the urban commons that, if more broadly realized, could improve life for many. This important book should be read by students of the city as well as those trying to make it more socially just. --Nik Heynen, University of Georgia


Author Information

Amanda Huron is assistant professor of interdisciplinary social sciences at the University of the District of Columbia.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions
Latest Reading Guide

Aorrng

Shopping Cart
Your cart is empty
Shopping cart
Mailing List