The Politics of Commoning and Designing
Commons & community economies: entry points to design for eco-social justice?
fabio franz, bianca elzenbaumer
Sheffield School of Architecture, Leeds College of Art
bravenewalps@gmail.com
Keywords: eco-social justice, commons, community economies, vectors
Abstract
Many designers today (including ourselves) are experimenting with how their practice can engage in meaningful ways with the complexity of pressing social and environmental issues. Being very much concerned with the politics and power relations that run through such issues, in this paper we will explore what points of orientation the framework of the ‘commons’ and that of ‘community economies’ – seen from an autonomist and feminist Marxist perspective – can offer when working on socially and politically engaged projects. We mobilise these two frameworks as possible entry points through which eco-socially just modes of reproducing livelihoods can be fostered. Moreover, we will consider how they can encourage designers to more directly activate their skills to support human activities that move our societies towards eco-social justice.
This paper is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
→ download the paper (PDF)
Cite this paper: Franz, F., Elzenbaumer, B. (2016) Commons & Community Economies: Entry Points to Design for Eco-Social Justice? Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.
This paper will be presented at DRS2016, find it in the conference programme