Geographical Knowledges and Property Regimes: The Past, Present, and Future of the CommonsKenny Stancil

Key Questions

What have been the roles played by certain kinds of geographical knowledge in the enclosure of common property resources and the establishment of private property rights, historically and in the present?

What kinds of potential might exist for critical geographical knowledges to contribute to the generation of new ‘commons’ that offer openings for a more equitable and democratic future?

Key Objectives

Develop understanding of what kinds of commons have been enclosed by whom, where, when, why, and how

Develop understanding of possibilities and difficulties related to contemporary and future sociopolitical struggles that seek to create new commons through the democratic appropriation and distribution of collectively produced surpluses

Politics of Geographical Knowledges

The Bowman Expeditions make evident the pressing need for geographers to reflect on the relation of geographical knowledges to broader processes of social change and to reconfigure the production of geographical knowledges to address—rather than produce—inequality and other injustices.

Geographical knowledge “can become the vehicle to express utopian visions and practical plans for the creation of alternative geographies” (Harvey 1984: 4).

Population, Resources, and “Scarcity” and a Marxist Critique

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Malthus Marx

“Tragedy” of the Commons and a Marxist Critique

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Hardin Harvey

Enclosures of the Commons: An Ongoing History

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Galeano Perelman Boal

Contemporary Potentials/Difficulties of the Commons

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Ostrom Negri and Hardt J.K. Gibson-Graham Bookchin McCarthy

Cartographies of the Commons

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“Competing with the cartography of capitalism, undermining its power to fix resources as open to capitalist appropriation and space as enclosed, will require a cartography of the commons” (St. Martin 2009: 493).

Grossman Wainwright

Bryan Wood

Creating and Utilizing the Commons

The damage resulting from the creative destruction wrought by neoliberalizing capitalism “can only be contained and reversed by the socialization of surplus production and distribution, and the establishment of a new common of wealth open to all” (Harvey 2012: 86).

Works Cited

Harvey, D. 1984. “On the History and Present Condition of Geography: AnHistorical Materialist Manifesto” The Professional Geographer 36(1):

1-11.

Harvey, D. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the UrbanRevolution. London: Verso.

St. Martin, K. 2009. “Toward a Cartography of the Commons: Constituting the Political and Economic Possibilities of Place.” The Professional Geographer 61(4): 493-507.