Metropolitan geographies of urban commons: mapping socio-economic alternatives in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona

Urban commons literature has grown in diversity and theoretical sophistication. Methodologically, however, it has consistently privileged in-depth case studies at the neighborhood or city scale. This approach reproduces bounded and administratively defined notions of the “urban” and risks neglecting the interconnections between “commons” initiatives and wider economic, social, cultural, and political processes. Moreover, the place-specific articulation of urban commons as an alternative mode of socio-economic organization has rarely been studied as a metropolitan process. In our study, we combine the Marxist, institutional, and environmental justice traditions of urban commons scholarship to advance debates beyond methodological “cityism”. The paper offers a discussion of methods and insights from the assemblage of a database of over 1,100 geolocated citizens’ initiatives in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona in Catalonia (Spain). Through a reflexive approach, we identify a subset of 364 urban commons across social and solidarity economy practices, social innovation, and peer-to-peer production, and analyze their prosumer approach, transformative socio-environmental orientation, and capacity to provide alternatives to the state and/or the market. We conclude by arguing for the need to move beyond the municipal scale to address complex and interconnected territorial processes of emergence in social movements and policies for urban commons.