Inhabiting the Common: Urban Poetics in Lefebvre and in the Theory of the Commons

Abstract

This article stems from a research project that aims to identify the convergences between the Right to the City, as formulated by Henri Lefebvre, and the theory of the Commons, developed by authors such as David Harvey, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Christian Laval, and Pierre Dardot. Based on the distinction between habitat – understood as the technical-morphological configuration of urban space, often associated with private property – and inhabiting, conceived as a collective political and poetic practice, the article articulates these theories to critically reflect on their implications for the production of cities. A theoretical-comparative method of a critical-interpretive nature is adopted, aimed at identifying conceptual resonances and dissonances among the authors mobilised. The objective is to reconceptualise inhabiting as a poetic practice of the common, understanding the common – “a third level” that strains the relation between the public and the private – as the foundation of the right to the city and as a principle of a possible-impossible urbanity, expressed through collective and creative practices (praxis and poiesis). In dialogue with the theme of the call, the results indicate that inhabiting the common constitutes a multilateral horizon of emancipation, capable of challenging preexisting institutional structures and fostering insurgent forms of self-management and co-production of urban space.