It has become in recent times quite fashionable to talk about “urban commons”, and it’s clear why. What we traditionally conceive of as “the public” is in retreat: public services are at the mercy of austerity policies, public housing is being sold off and public space is increasingly no such thing as it used to mean. Public cuts and private exclusions are beating back the spaces, resources and services that are held or used in common. We’ve relied on the state to maintain common assets as public goods, but this is undermined by austerity economics. A politics of the commons is about mobilising against cuts and closures, and defending sites of common use that remain. It’s also about creative acts of “commoning” that go beyond the state – in occupations and (in)formal appropriations, autonomous social services, pooling of land and resources – to provide access to shared spaces, economic and social goods. However, the urban commons framework is more than a legal tool to make proprietary claims on particular urban goods and resources. Rather, the utility of the commons framework is to raise the question of how best to manage, or govern, shared or common resources. Such acts of commoning – however small in scale – help to reconfigure an urban ecosystem; that most fragile balance of public and private space that is so easily overturned by property and land speculation. The most prominent sites of this contestation are efforts by city residents to claim important urban goods—open squares, parks, abandoned or underutilized buildings, vacant lots, and other urban infrastructure—as collective, or shared, resources of urban communities. The assertion of a common stake or interest in resources shared with others is a way of resisting the privatization and/or commodification of these resources.

These interventions matter because of the realities they create in place – housing, workplaces and social infrastructure, childcare and play spaces, open and green spaces, meeting places and markets, information exchanges and political venues. At a larger scale, they underline the fact that a lot of what happens in cities falls outside the formal public or private economies – in self-help and mutual provision, non-market exchange, sweat-equity investments and voluntary labour, caring work and doing favours. This is about capturing economic values without commodifying them, and building social solidarities in the act of making space. The dogma of belief in investment and growth as the solution to urban problems is finally being questioned. The change is coming not from “above”, from established parties or major interest groups, but from a plethora of smaller initiatives by tenants, citizens, local residents, and users which brings about the question; What is it about the absence of commercial pressure in the city that so many people approve of? Could this become a model for the future?

Unlike any other major German city, Leipzig is characterized by street upon street of Altbau apartment buildings constructed around the end of 19th century. Nevertheless, in the same period Leipzig has lost more than 100,000 inhabitants, of this 50,000 due to Sub-Urbanization, which has had serious consequences for the city's development. Despite recent growth in the population since 2001, approximately 45,000 apartments are still vacant. Leipzig, with its burgeoning alternative scene, has been compared with the German capital. It could be that Berlin refugees are coming to Leipzig not only to get away from its negative aspects, but also to be at the cool new place. Berlin was once the darling of the alternative scene in Europe. But the German capital has experienced an extended process of gentrification that has jacked up rents, pushing out many of the people who made it cool in the first place. Leipzig is smaller, more relaxed, and more intimate - yet brimming with cultural vitality. The only thing that's missing, some locals say, is the mix of international cultures that can be found in Berlin. But as Leipzig continues to remake itself, that may come as well.