[Un]Common Ground: Co-Creating the Vision for the City’s Ground Floor

What do we share in common among each other and what are the [un]common experiences and identities that must be considered and preserved? Can a common ground be established in pursuit of uncommon needs that mark the divergent missions of various interest groups? Is there even a possibility for the “commons” in our radicalized, alienated, co-opted, gentrified, and post-truth world? These are some of the questions that occupied a group of academic practitioners from Urban Works Agency at California College of the Arts through a series of courses and research projects that revolved around the enigmatic topic of the commons. In this paper, we will unpack the most recent investigations and discoveries that emerged from three consecutive urban design studios focusing on the ground floor of the city as the datum upon which the urban commons can emerge or be reclaimed. At the conception of this three-year project, we were searching for overarching principles or codes for commoning, learning from worldwide precedents, where public space was generated as a common good. As the research evolved in close dialogue with community partners, it became more and more clear that the notion of “common good” as a homogeneous abstraction was a fiction, just like the notion of a generic “public”. Instead, the commons should be seen as an emergent amalgamation of agonistic desires, practices and capacities that is meaningful only as long as it maintains its heterogeneity.