Governmentality, the Local State, and the Commons: An Analysis of Civic Management Facilities in Barcelona

Abstract

This article deploys the Foucauldian concept of governmentality to study the political tensions that may unfold when commons are enacted through hybrid institutional configurations. We focus on civic management facilities (CMFs) that are located in the city of Barcelona. These are facilities owned by Barcelona City Council which, responding to organised citizens’ demands, are transferred to them so that they can develop their own transformative projects for the community. The hybrid institutional nature of these CMFs makes it impossible for them to avoid maintaining a relationship with the local state. Based on a survey to 51 CMFs, semi‐structured interviews with 41 grassroots members of CMFs and seven semi‐structured interviews with public employees and politicians, we argue that hybrid forms of commons lead to the development of political tensions. On the one hand, we show how the local state’s administrative procedures—to do with accountability and the use of public space—reshape the activities of the CMFs, leading to the depoliticisation of their transformative projects. On the other hand, the analysis also presents the strategies of resistance articulated by the facilities, which enable members to work towards the development of their transformative aims. We conclude that such political tensions cannot be resolved but must be properly governed in order to make the commons’ transformative project an enduring one.

The commonification of the public under new municipalism: Commons–state institutions in Naples and Barcelona

“…In both Naples and Barcelona, the formal cession of sociocultural facilities to community organisations took place thanks to a push made by the organisations that were already managing them. They demanded this management be formalised under the concept of common/s (Kioupkiolis, 2021; Pera and Bianchi, 2022). In both Naples and Barcelona, the remunicipalisation of (or attempt to remunicipalise) local public services, such as the water service, found support in local movements that were already demanding it by spreading the idea that water is a commons (Mattei, 2011; Serrano et al, 2012).…”

“…As part of the City Council’s sociocultural facilities network, the Centre Cívics under gestió cívica need to be accountable to the City Council, which limits their self-governing capacity (Pera and Bianchi, 2022). This explains why not all demands for self-government can be channelled into this model.…”

Caring and commoning in political society: Insights from the Scugnizzo Liberato of Naples

“…Recent research on the relation between commoning and caring focussed on the cities of Southern Europe, where new commoning practices arose in the political space opened by anti-austerity mobilisations (Varvarousis and Kallis, 2016). Responding to the surge in unemployment levels and cuts to welfare services caused by the ordoliberal policies imposed on indebted countries (Dardot and Laval, 2016), the commoning movements managed to weave solidarity networks between impoverished social groups and sparked discussions over political alternatives (Pera and Bianchi, 2021). In countries like Greece and Spain, new waves of political squatting transformed abandoned buildings into spaces of support for social resilience (Arampatzi, 2017; Sanchez, 2023).…”

Editorial: Social movements and sustainable urban commons governance

“…Studies along these lines have also studied and interacted with practical examples, such as water remunicipalization in Naples and elsewhere (Mattei, 2013;Carrozza and Fantini, 2016;Popartan et al, 2020;Turri, 2022); civic assets management programs in Barcelona (Pera and Bianchi, 2021); BIP/ZIP urban regeneration programs in Lisbon (Patti, 2017); community land trusts in England (Thompson, 2018) and elsewhere (Bunce, 2018). New Municipalism has been studied as an emergent political program around the idea of expanding such publiccommons-partnerships as a governance paradigm for the city (Thompson, 2021).…”