Commoning property in the city: the ongoing work of making and remaking

This chapter explores three sites of 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 ten-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. Each community is engaged in a continuous process of making and re-making as it is confronted with powerful forces that seek to enclose or uncommon the property it has taken responsibility for. Commoning is thus always about struggle-negotiation, and a commons is more durable if its commoning-community is able to adapt to changing contexts, to push back against exploitative and oppressive forces, to build on historical commons and traditions and to make strategic yet ethical choices about enrolling a diversity of actors into its midst.