Commoning is the act of sharing and managing resources—cultural and natural—with minimal reliance on the market or state, and where each stakeholder has an equal interest. User-managed governance of the environments we inhabit—from land ownership, to buildings, to domestic spaces—enables residents to be key agents in how resources are distributed, valued, and maintained.The expansion of the noun ‘common’ to the verb ‘commoning’ entails the active participation in the mechanisms of sharing, including the shaping of rules that sustain the commons and exploring the emancipating potentials of sharing. As such, commoning is a practice that is continually evolving, made and remade by the subjects involved in the commons. Through an ongoing process of working together, negotiating, and organizing, these practices produce what is to be named, valued, used, and symbolized in common. Ultimately, these practices create forms of social life—highlighting new forms of living, working, and being in common. This lecture will focus on a series of design experiments by THE OPEN WORKSHOP that explore a range of commons—both in type and scale—that use architecture to catalyze and frame the mechanisms for commoning. Speaker Neeraj Bhatia is an architect and educator whose work resides at the intersection of politics and architecture. Neeraj is founder of THE OPEN WORKSHOP, a transcalar design-research office examining the negotiation between architecture, territory, and collectivity. Based in San Francisco, THE OPEN WORKSHOP is a licensed practice in California and Ontario. Their work on Collective Form has been commissioned by the Seoul Biennale, Venice Biennale, Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, amongst other venues. Select
New York City, NY; NYC