Critical Urbanism and the Digitally Augmented City: Envisioning Urban Commons as Civic Assemblages in the Age of Networked Translocalism, Multi-Associative Transduction and Counterhegemonic Transculturalism

Abstract

This essay discusses problems affecting the contemporary of the urban commons by addressing the emerging spatialization of the relational infrastructures of urban communities due to the recent transformations of the technological framework. It sheds light on three key macrophenomena that are changing the nature of these institutions, translocalism, transduction and transculturalism, and drafts design strategies to foster their agency for the affirmation of equality and pluralism while guaranteeing social inclusiveness, cohesiveness, pluralism and differentiation. It answers the research question on how designers and planners can respond to the effects of these disrupting phenomena that redefine their roles, mission and instruments. It proposes a design framework for new commons operating in the reality–virtuality continuum. We envisage them as constituted by three intertwined components: a) a set of enabling relations, which constitute relational machines that establish dynamic, robust and efficacious connections between distributed and mobile actants engaged in commoning actions; b) a concrete infrastructure, which includes the constitutive elements that come together in meta-stable and variable context-specific platforms supporting the relational machines; c) a set of constitutive agents, which includes counterhegemonic pluralistic narratives of possible futures that foster social formations to subvert the existing abstract (i.e., postpolitical, conflict-free and antidifferential) spaces. Our proposal contributes to the discourse on the spatialization of radical democracy ideas, foregrounding the role of design in liberating the creative collective power of co-create dialogical utopian realms. These narratives through fabulation, allegory and parody devise possible translocal, transductive and transcultural spatialites for commoning and differentiation to foster the collective appropriation of the new ordinary.