The StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series are back with an amazing line-up of speakers from across Europe and beyond! This year we will focus on struggles over urban property while drawing on empirical and theoretical accounts from cities across the globe.
Governance systems should be designed with one purpose in mind: that of addressing the grave multiple crises of reproduction, both social and ecological while at the same time promoting good life for all. This of course implies deaccumulating capitalist social relations and to establish new social process of production, distribution and exchange that are in line with ecological and social objectives. Where do we start? From social reproduction itself, as the field of social cooperation that has the potential to be a recomposition field of multiple issues and subjectivities, and that if reclaimed in novel organizational and institutional forms through deep democracy and diffused governance, can re-articulate our multiple dependencies by redefining the quantitative and relational/qualitative aspects of social reproduction as a whole. In this talk I provide a framework that enables us to peek at a way to handle the complexity of governing a city as a commons, a complexity related to the need to articulate freedom and autonomy of the parts, with cohesiveness of the whole, in a context of de-accumulation (de-growth) of capitalist relations and processes, while seeking to address the quality of life of the city’s inhabitants and reducing the ecological impact of its operations. I will provide this framework through Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model as applied to the city under one fundamental assumption: that the city as a whole intends to put social reproduction as its key purpose and its inhabitant intend to govern it as a commons.
Part of the 2021/22 StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series 'Cities for People, not for Profit. From private ownership to communal stewardship'.
Massimo De Angelis is Emeritus Professor, University of East London. Until September 2020 he was Professor of Political Economy and Social Change, University of East London. For over thirty years, he has been researching, writing and teaching on issues around the commons, social conflict and contemporary capitalism and its many crises. His obsession is to think through the question of social change, of how we can collectively crack open the current mode of social cooperation hegemonized by capitalist rationality, and move to a post-capitalist society in which we can all live in dignity, mutual recognition and social justice, and construct models of social cooperation that are deeply democratic and respect the biophysical boundaries set by our planet earth. Massimo De Angelis is the founder of the web journal The Commoner in 2001, editor of the book series in Common for Zed Books, member of the Commons Observatory of the city municipality of Naples (2019-2021) and author of numerous publications, among which three research monographs, the last two dedicated to the question of the relation between commons, global capitalism and post-capitalist transformation (The Beginning of History, Value Struggles and Global Capital - Pluto 2007; and Omnia Sunt Communia. On the Commons and Post-Capitalist Transformation - Zed 2017).
He has been intellectually influenced by the work of Karl Marx, autonomist marxism, complexity theory and cybernetics. Massimo De Angelis has a degree in political sciences and a PhD in Economics, although neither of these two disciplines contained his curiosity and theoretical experimentation. He considers himself a social scientist with much interest in political economy and sociology in the broader sense, but without accepting fixed boundaries and often making incursions in many other disciplines (from psychology to biology, from philosophy to system dynamics) following his instincts, curiosity, research questions and desire to locate his specific investigations into broader intellectual context.