Board member, Empower DC
Member, UDC Faculty Association/National Education Association
Urban geography, urban commons, housing justice, D.C. history
| Carving out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C. Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C. began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource—housing—that had been used to extract profit from them, and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned and governed by them. In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban commoning through a close investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce, and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly-held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism’s totalizing claims over life. This is the second book in the Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds Series. 
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| Theorising the Urban Commons: New Thoughts, Tensions, and Paths Forward A review essay of three books that take up the urban commons: Dellenbaugh, Kip, Bieniok et al. (eds.), 2015, Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market; Borch and Kornberger (eds.), 2015, Urban Commons: Rethinking the City; and Ferguson (ed.), 2014 Make_Shift City: Renegotiating the Urban Commons. |
| Struggling for Housing, from D.C. to Johannesburg: Washington Innercity Self Help Goes to South Africa In the early 1990s, a group of housing activists from Washington, D.C. traveled to Johannesburg to help start the first housing cooperatives in South Africa’s history. These activists were from Washington Innercity Self Help, or WISH, a community-based group that directed much of its work towards helping low-income tenants purchase their buildings from their landlords and form limited-equity housing cooperatives – collectively owned housing that, because of restrictions placed on resale prices, would be affordable to poor people for years to come. For WISH, limited-equity co-ops were one solution to displacement -- and they also served as a structure within which people could learn small-scale democracy that could pulse out into their surrounding neighborhoods, and enable local people to be empowered in their city at a larger scale. This paper tells the story of when WISH was invited by a group of Johannesburg tenants to help form housing cooperatives, and theorizes this trans-Atlantic organizing work as a form of what Cindi Katz calls countertopography. |
| Working with Strangers in Saturated Space: Reclaiming and Maintaining the Urban Commons The commons is increasingly invoked as a way to envision new worlds. One strand of commons research focuses at the local scale, on small groups in “traditional”, mostly rural societies; this research asks how commons are maintained over time. Another strand focuses on the commons at a global scale; this is political research that asks how commons can be reclaimed from a capitalist landscape. Here, I bridge these two approaches by theorizing the commons as reclaimed and maintained in the context of the city, through examining the experiences of limited-equity housing cooperatives in Washington, DC. I argue that the urban commons is marked by two distinct traits: it emerges in space that is saturated with people, competing uses, and financial investment; and it is constituted by the collective work of strangers. The challenges of reclaiming and maintaining an urban commons are substantial, but the need for them is urgent. |
| Creating a Commons in the Capital: The Emergence of Limited-Equity Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C. The limited-equity cooperatives that emerged in Washington, D.C. in the 1970s and '80s were a form of the commons: a resource that is governed collectively by its members, and is used not to extract profit for a few individuals, but to support the lives of a group. The commons are a dignified basis of survival for poor people who are largely cut out of capitalist markets, an alternative to both market- and state-oriented approaches to managing resources and sustaining life. In Washington, a housing commons arose when two historical factors came together in the 1970s: the return of Home Rule and a wave of gentrification and tenant organizing. With low-income residents threatened with expulsion from their communities and even the city, activists and their supporters generated the political will that led to the creation of a housing commons in the form of limited-equity cooperatives. |
| Claiming Space in the Air and on the Block: The Geography of Microradio and Struggles against Displacement A radio wave appears to be fleeting. It cannot be seen or touched, apparently ungrounded, an ethereal presence detached from the earth. Yet radio in its smallest forms can be deeply connected to the land. The particular geography of microradio can be a powerful tool for fighting for the right to be in a certain place: the right to stay put over time, to create culture, to dwell. Here, I examine the case of one contemporary microradio station in its struggles against neighborhood displacement, and consider the possibilities for the future. |
