In this guest post, Dr Suraya Scheba (University of Cape Town), Dr Cian O’Callaghan (Trinity College Dublin), and Dr Andreas Scheba ((Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa/University of the Free State) discuss their research on Urban Vacancy, occupation and commoning, a project that was supported by a Seminar Series Awards grant from the USF.
What happens when urban spaces lie vacant, are reclaimed through occupation, or become sites of commoning? How do these processes unfold differently across cities in the Global North and South, and what can we learn from their intersections? These questions were at the heart of our seminar series, which brought together a global cohort of scholars to explore new conceptual and methodological approaches to urban vacancy, occupation, and commoning.
One central aim of the Seminar Series Award “Urban vacancy, occupation and commoning“, which took place from June 2023 to October 2024, was to convene a global cohort of scholars to advance innovative, conceptual, and methodological approaches around urban vacancy, occupation and commoning. In bringing these 3 concepts together, the core team members were interested in thinking about them comparatively across Southern & Northern geographies, and the temporal and spatial intersections between them. Furthermore, a key focus of the project was on supporting activist exchange and on providing staged training to ECRs over the period of 2023-2024. We were able to realise these commitments through the events, curating a supportive space for mutual learning and dialogue across cities and scholars, including early career researchers (ECRs), and our activist and NGO collaborators. In each of the cities, we engaged in workshops and, specifically in Vienna and Dublin, in one-day conferences. These engagements allowed us to reflect on theory and method, and to think with and across these contexts.
The seminar series was grounded in the contexts of Cape Town, Dublin, & Vienna, and looked to build on the respective existing efforts of the core team. The project comprised four events, which included a series of activities that took place over a 16-month period between June 2023 and October 2024.
Beginning with urban vacancy, as one of our conceptual and empirical entry points, we argued that vacancy has been inadequately conceptualised as part of urbanisation processes. Instead, we were interested in paying attention to vacancy, not only as wasted space and at the point of transformation, as it disappears, but as reflective of something which is lively and contested, as a significant feature of urbanisation. Through the dialogue between scholars and movements, we explored the ways in which vacancy has become more visible and politicised, in part due to a housing and homelessness crisis. The conversations highlighted the importance of looking beyond the surface of vacancy to understand the underlying governance, ownership, property, and development relations that lead to its production, maintenance, and politicisation. Furthermore, it was recognised that ‘vacancy’ as a signifier is insufficient in capturing the variegated forms of vacancy and associated challenges and responses. Finally, as an entry, we explored vacancy as potential sites of speculation on property, counter-speculation as urban imaginary, experimentation, politicisation, and inhabitation.
Relatedly, with respect to the occupation of vacant land and buildings, we were interested in the “conflicting rationalities” that these surface or make apparent, with reference to different valorisations of land and infrastructure. This is specifically significant in the context of global housing crises, where occupations of vacant property have become a more prominent feature across many parts of the world. In paying attention to these practices, we were interested in exploring ways that occupations may function as experimental & speculative projects – intervening into the present and potentially remaking urban land and futures, to advance modes and relations of commoning over time. In spaces of apparent emptiness or ruination, we were interested in exploring prefigurative modes of being together and bringing into being the ‘city otherwise’, with the potential to repair political life more broadly.
At the same time, as with ‘vacancy’, it was recognised that there is a multiplicity of occupation practices, material forms, and temporal dimensions. Specifically, a feature of our conceptual and empirical dialogue focused on the ability of occupations and alternative practices to endure. Here, the temporal dimensions of the urban were central in our engagements. Through comparative dialogue with scholars and activists, we were increasingly alerted to the precarity, sudden and slow violence, emergency deferral, ‘permanent temporariness’, labour and exhaustion associated with efforts to endure and advance alternative modes of being together. Ultimately, through the conceptual and contextual entry-points, we reflected on wider questions of city-making in situated and relational ways, recognising the contingency of urban claim-making.
A second central aim of the series was to contribute to the advancement of comparative urbanism. Here we were guided by scholars, such as Gillian Hart, who argues for a relational reading of space, to make broader claims about the urban. However, doing the work of comparison is complex. Hence, alongside the conversations in conference rooms, we found walking collectively to be a vital comparative method. This allowed us to reflect on specific sites in dialogue. Through each encounter, and in the act of collectively moving through the city, guided by one of the core team members, we were able to meander physically, but also theoretically and across context. This supported us in gradually finding our collective voice and surfacing threads that cut across the cities, through a focus on juxtaposition as opposed to looking for similarity.
A related aim was to search for methodological approaches to study these, with engaged scholarship emerging as one shared commitment, where we are each working with various social movements and campaigns around their struggles to claim belonging in the city. In bringing together scholars with activists and civil society organisations, engaging across Southern and Northern geographies, we focused on supporting collaboration between academic and civil society organisations from the outset. These organisations included Ndifuna Ukwazi & Reclaim the City in Cape Town; Community Action Tenants Union & the Irish Housing Network in Dublin; Kreative Räume, bike ‘n rails & habitat in Vienna. Engaging in this transdisciplinary and grounded sense, the conversation touched on specific questions around the potential for alternative housing models and the role of technical assistance and stakeholder partnership in addressing underutilised properties, toward social function. We also discussed the specific political and legal challenges of occupations and alternative practices, as key in shaping contingency. Finally, we engaged in discussions around facilitating exchanges between housing movements in different cities.
Ultimately, through advancing a comparative approach, we were able to engage in more expansive conversations, pushing against binary readings of Northern and Southern geographies, whilst remaining attentive to place-based theorising. Through each encounter we began to surface a conceptual vocabulary to support dialogue, including the following thematics: property-relations and the colonial roots of property making; the temporal and spatial contingency and precarity of urban claim-making; the inadequacy of a formal/ informal binary in thinking the urban across geographies, legal geographies as a site of struggle, and the potentiality and tension between speculative and counter-speculative urban practices, simply as a struggle over value relations.