Biennial commoning: opening, reusing and sharing the city at the architecture festival

Abstract

This article explores how architecture festivals might act as sites of commoning when they commission 1:1 scale works that open up public spaces in the city. Informed by a broadly Marxist stance in urban studies and critical geography, it looks at two consecutive ‘live demonstrations’ of urban agriculture, built on disused industrial sites at the 2013 and 2015 editions of Shenzhen's Urbanism\Architecture Bi-City Biennale (UABB). Called Value Farm and Floating Fields, they not only exposed how matters of social justice are inseparable from ecological sustainability but also indicated how the recurring nature of such festivals can beget an ethos of commoning, where commoning is construed as a perennially re-enacted social practice or process, never a fixed or finalised project. Notwithstanding all the faults of large-scale biennials (which sacrifice autonomy in exchange for public or private sector support, and often lead to soft forms of market-oriented regeneration), it is suggested that the architecture festival can call a time-out on unthinkingly habitual and inequitable modes of city-making. This can make space for self-organising, experimental, and creative alternatives, pitting visions of a more collective urbanity against an impoverished paradigm that has capitalist enclosure as its basis.