property

Property concerns exclusive rights to the access and use of a resource, the possession of an object or territory with a right to exclude others, or the ability to dispose of or exchange an owned object. The particular property regime that has, for at least the minority world, become a ‘common sense’ is a private and individualized notion of property that is manifest in legal title and state enforcement.

I explore three sites that I was involved in commoning in a post-industrial working class neighbourhood in Montreal: a garden on a city-owned plot of land, a mural on a stock-corporation-owned viaduct and a community-owned industrial building “expropriated” from a capitalist developer after a 10-year grassroots campaign. In each of these sites new property relations were forged, ones where a commoning-community manages the space and benefits from how the space has been shaped.