This study of middle-class American families draws on ethnography and urban economic history, focusing on patterns of leisure time and household consumption and clutter. We trace how residential life evolved historically from cramped urban quarters into contemporary middle-class residences and examine how busy working families use house spaces. Our ethnographic sample consists of 24 Los Angeles families in which both parents work full time, have young children, and own their homes. Formal datasets include systematically timed family uses of home spaces, a large digital archive of photographs, and family-narrated video home tours. This analysis highlights a salient home-storage crisis, a marked shift in the uses of yards and garages, and the dissolution of outdoor leisure for busy working parents. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Clutter, Dual-earner families, Home spaces, Leisure time, Suburban history,
Recent scholarship has begun to reimagine the commons beyond its traditional meaning as a collectively owned and managed natural resource. Building on research that considers commons through the practices which produce and maintain them-commoning-this article analyzes how privately owned front and backyards participate in urban commons. Through ethnographic research in three neighborhoods of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the article shows how these commons are made in two key registers: through yards as shared territories and through everyday practices of sharing plants across individual yards. The article's central claim is that yards and the everyday practices which take place in and through them constitute one nodal point in the making of urban commons. In so doing, logics of private property come to be interwoven with logics of commoning. By finding a diverse range of common lives of yards, this article adds to emerging conversations about the nature of urban commons.
Over the last decade, there has been an expansion of scholarly and activist engagement with the commons. This interest corresponds to a growing quest for alternatives to capitalism in view of ongoing socio- ecological crises. As neoliberal capitalism intensifies enclosure of the commons, local actions to reclaim old commons and invent new ones to counter these processes are also on the rise. However, there are diverse conceptions of the commons, and pitfalls in their reproduction and in mobilizing this vocabulary in the dominant neoliberal individualistic culture. Our understanding remains limited about how spaces for commons and commoning practices can be expanded, as well as about specific practices, relations and imaginaries that support commons and subjectivities of being-in-common. This Special Issue on the “Commons, Commoning and Co-becomings” seeks to deepen our understanding of ‘actually-existing’ and ‘more-than- human’ commons in the world, and how ways of relating to them open up possibilities of responding to current socioenvironmental challenges and generating beyond-capitalist ways of life. Exploring commoning experiences in diverse settings, the papers assembled in this Special Issue illustrate the role that commons and commoning practices play in reconfiguring human-nature relations. Thinking with these papers, we draw attention to three interrelated areas: relational aspects of the work of commoning (practices, labor, care) in transforming our world and being transformed by it; the role of commons and commoning practices in generating subjectivities of being-in-common; and difference and divergences (or, un-commoning) that persist and emerge in commoning processes. We offer these themes as directions to better understand and enact the potential of commons and commoning for worlding—crafting, (re)producing—of a pluriverse of post-capitalist worlds and life in- common.
This paper provides a critical assessment of geographic research on yards and private gardens, with a focus on how geographers study people's engagements with more than human organisms and surroundings. Geographies have come alive as assemblages of lively materials, distributed agencies, and animated political and material flows. At the same time, there is renewed interest on the part of geographers to better take into account lived experiences and the embodied politics of difference. Relations between people and their everyday surroundings are central to these critical analyses. This paper examines one such potent realm of these everyday engagements: the yard. These are spaces intimately bound up with uneven geographies of residential development, as well as places of creativity, care, and failure. Contemporary environmental efforts increasingly enroll the yard or garden as a crucial interface through which to refashion relations between water, infrastructure, particular species, chemical inputs, and food systems. This paper identifies two themes within contemporary yard and garden research, as well as ongoing tensions. I argue that the familiarity of such spaces to Anglophone geography challenges and invites further methodological experimentation and analysis. Yards and private gardens also provide purchase on pressing questions of social inequalities, property, and nature. Thus, I identify two directions for future yard research: developing more experimental methodological approaches beyond a focus on lawns and better situating yards within broader geographies of inequity and the production of geographic knowledge.
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