The Rise of the Common City

Front matter

Urban Notebooks

Louis Volont, Thijs Lijster & Stadsschriften Pascal Gielen (eds.) Cahiers urbains

THE RISE OF THE

Part 2 Cultural Building Blocks For The Commons Chapter 5 - Reinventing Community Through Commoning

Stavros Stavrides

CHAPTER 6 - URBAN COMMONALITY AND ARCHITECTURAL SINGULARITY: A SPINOZIST FRAMEWORK Gokhan Kodalak

CHAPTER 7 - PROBLEMATISING FEMINIST LITERATURE ON REPRODUCTIVE LABOUR AND CARE ETHICS FOR CULTURAL COMMONING: INTERSECTIONALITY AS A STRATEGY

Lara Garcia Diaz

Part 3 Cultural Intersections Between Market, Government And Commons

CHAPTER 8 - ARTISTS AS ORGANISERS: CULTURAL COMMONING AND HEGEMONY IN THAILAND

Lara van Meeteren & Bart Wissink

CHAPTER 9 - INTERLOCKING VALUE CYCLES IN MUSIC ORGANISATIONS: TOWARDS ORGANISATIONAL AND CREATIVE COMPLEMENTARITY Arne Herman & Walter van Andel

CHAPTER 10 - CULTURAL SPACES AS DRIVERS FOR PARTICIPATION: TOWARDS A EUROPEAN PARTICIPATORY GUARANTEE SYSTEM FOR COMMONS

Maria Francesca De Tullio

CHAPTER I! - FOR A CO-IMAGINATIVE POLITICS: BETWEEN EMOTIONAL CLUSTERS AND POLITICAL DECISIONS. AN EMPIRICAL OBSERVATION OF THE CREATIVE EUROPE PROGRAMME

Giuliana Ciancio

CHAPTER 12 - CAPTURED IN FICTION? THE ART OF COMMONING URBAN SPACE Hanka Otte & Pascal Gielen

CONTRIBUTORS

Preface

COMMONING CULTURES BETWEEN MARKET AND STATE

Pascal Gielen, Thijs Lijster & Louis Volont

During the 21” century the city became a cultural factory. The urban environment acts as a magnet for artists, creative professionals and cognitive workers. The city not only offers them inspiration but also more professional opportunities for work and assignments. The high density of cultural institutions, cafés, creative hubs, and other ‘places to be’ provide freelancing creatives with the necessary networking opportunities to stay on the job. It was sociologist Richard Florida who at the turn of the millennium pointed to a new social segment of creative workers as a driving engine for economic growth. Cities who manage to attract the creative, artistic, bohemian type, one reads in The Rise of the Creative Class, will thrive economically. The link with deliberately gentrified ‘cultural quarters’ becomes significant.

However, this urban working environment also means that the boundaries between private and public life, friends and colleagues, leisure time and work become particularly cloudy. Moreover, the capitalisation of culture generates cutting competition between creative professionals and friends, between artists and lovers. In other words, the creative city is also a crabs’ basket that threatens sustainable creativity and thus the dynamics of a culture. The consequences are now well-known. From burnout on an individual level to gentrification that makes the city unaffordable for creatives: the creative engine starts to sputter. Today, the creative city appears to be biting its own tail.

Hence this volume’s rationale: in direct contrast with Florida’s rise of the creative class, we explore the rise of the common city. Following from the research project Sustainable Creativity in the Post-Fordist City, carried out by the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO, Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, University of Antwerp — FWO- Odysseus) between 2016 and 2021, we investigate in this book whether culture can play a role other than an economic one. We do this, among other things, by declaring culture as common again, as an initially and fundamentally shared good, that in fact can be used and made by everyone for free. Inspired by Elinor Ostrom, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Stavros Stavrides, Silvia Frederici, Margaret Kohn and Massimo De Angelis, we explore the value of commoning practices for culture and the city. In doing so, we are guided by the hypothesis that a common culture offers better guarantees of sustainability than a purely market- or government-driven culture. Better formulated: when commoning practices are given their own place alongside the market and the government, they can guarantee greater sustainability together with that market and government. After all, cultural dynamics are only possible by sharing. In this book, we understand culture in a broad anthropological sense as a socially shared sign and meaning system, with which people can give meaning to their (urban) environment and their own lives. Creative work and art keep these cultural dynamics alive by consciously intervening in such processes of meaning. They can, for example, question, redraw or simply confirm meaning-making processes, habits, values and norms. In other words, creatives not only decorate our urban environment and not only entertain our leisure time, they also deeply affect our lives and our being, including the identity and quality of life in a city. That is why culture is too important to be left to the market and the government alone. Culture belongs to everyone. In the first place, this is the civil community that supports and nurtures processes of meaning-making.

In this book, however, we do not only approach culture as a resource, we also look at how cultural practices are used by civil societies to generate and maintain the commons. In other words, we not only examine the value of commoning practices for culture but also the value of culture for commoning practices. What is the culture of the commons? What cultural strategies, norms and rituals do commoners use to define a common space between government and market? To put it in classical Marxist terms: we see culture not only as a superstructure that reflects the relations in the substructure. In contrast, we understand culture in the tradition of Antonio Gramsci, namely as a force actively intervening in social power relations. The Rise of the Common City highlights this power of culture from three perspectives. 1) What is the role of culture in defining and appropriating urban space for the commons? 2) What are cultural building blocks for commoning practices? And 3) how do cultural actors mediate the commons vis-àvis governments and market players?

In the first part, Spaces of Commoning, we open with these three perspectives in our introductory chapter Cultural Commoning in the City. Thijs Lijster, Louis Volont and Pascal Gielen discuss the problem of culture in the creative city and examine how commons can play a role in this setting. We also point to some pitfalls for urban commoning strategies. However, cultural players generate a very specific space between the private and the public domain which can ground commoning practices. We call those bases semi-public spaces that provide trust and urban intimacy, enabling civil action and the development of commoning practices. In The Activist Commons and How it Changes the City, Gideon Boie then describes how culture functions in the city of Brussels in generating commoning space on three levels: as accommodation for the creative industry, as urban gardening and in spontaneous citizen movements. According to Boie, the street ultimately forms ‘the real locus of the battle for the commons: In The Tendency Towards Enclosure, Iolanda Bianchi examines this situation for Barcelona.

She understands the space of the commons as an inherently dynamic game between openness and closure. However, cultural organisations have the quality to manage such a porous space. To conclude the first part, Tian Shi and Ching Lin Pang analyse how square dancing generates common space in urban China. What is particularly striking about their contribution Intercultural Conviviality and Cultural Commoning is how the basis for commoning can also be laid with almost a-political or with limited activist intentions. That may be the most important conclusion of the first part: through semi-public and porous spaces, artists and cultural organisations create a social atmosphere of trust, conviviality and urban intimacy from which the commons can emerge.

With the contribution Reinventing Community through Commoning, Stavros Stavrides opens the second part of the book: Cultural Building Blocks for the Commons. Stavrides points to the importance of a collective culture of sharing based on the power of creativity, in which aspects such as playfulness, ceremonial acts and ‘mistica rituals’ play a crucial role in enabling ‘being in common” Inspired by the philosopher Spinoza, Gokhan Kodalak continues this cultural line. In Urban Commonality and Architectural Singularity, Kodalak emphasises the importance of bottom-up work, ‘singular potential, ‘cultural formations’ and ‘confluent rhythms’ to arrive at a ‘wild dance of unlikely alliances. Kodalak contrasts this form of commonality with generic classifications such as community within the nation-state. A culture and architecture of the commons is based on singular modes of life and commonalities in which the boundaries between culture and nature, people and things are lifted. Lara Garcia Diaz ends this more theoretical second part with Problematising Feminist Literature on Reproductive Labor and Care Ethics for Cultural Commoning. Both the ethics of care and feminist theory mainly build on Eurocentric, middle-class values. Garcia Diaz articulates this as a ‘cultural imaginary’ in which the portrayal of reproductive commoning relies heavily on ‘women’s family-oriented care. According to her, we can learn a lot from intersectional theory in which at least gender, social class and ethnic origin are related to each other, in order to rectify this cultural bias of the commons. Part 2 teaches us that the commons must always relate to specific cultural values, customs and traditions of thinking, doing and being. However, these can both underpin and undermine commoning processes. That is why the careful study of commoning cultures is important.

Finally, the third part Cultural Intersections between Market, Government and Commons examines how cultural commoners relate to the market and the state. In Artists as Organisers, Lara van Meeteren and Bart Wissink illuminate the counter-hegemonic potential of art and culture in Thailand. In their relationship with the state and the market, artists can reproduce as well as disarticulate the given hegemony. Van Meeteren & Wissink conclude that cultural commoning can indeed ‘load’ civil society action but immediately specify that ‘the direction of that action and its position vis-avis hegemony and the related inclusiveness of social practices varies. In other words, the common is an ideologically flexible concept. However, commons, market and government do not always have to live at odds. With Interlocking Value Cycles in Music

COMMONING CULTURES BETWEEN MARKET AND STATE 9

Organisations, Arne Herman and Walter van Andel demonstrate that artists can also deal with different systems pragmatically. According to them, the interaction between traditional government-subsidised orchestras and innovative market or commonsoriented music organisations even form the precondition for a sustainable creative system at the macro-level. On the basis of her analysis of European cultural policy, Maria Francesca De Tullio reaches in Cultural Spaces as Drivers for Participation a similar conclusion. A government can also support cultural and creative commons through a Homes of Commons certificate. However, to counter the threats of a so-called ‘common fix’ (De Angelis) and of ‘common washing, a commons policy must be inclusive and bottom-up. De Tullio takes inspiration from Participatory Guarantee Systems of agroecological movements to develop such a policy. Mutual aid and peerreview instead of external (governmental) control form the basis for the success of such a commons policy. In For a Co-Imaginative Politics, Giuliana Ciancio examines how such a policy could be developed for the Creative Europe Programme. The collective imagination of EU officials and cultural actors plays an important role in mediating between top-down policies and bottom-up initiatives. Like van Meeteren and Wissink, Ciancio emphasises the role of emotions in such a commons politics. To conclude part 3, Hanka Otte and Pascal Gielen analyse the relationship between cultural commoners and urban authorities. In Captured in Fiction? they argue that the success of these negotiations depends on the interplay between the stakeholders and the forms of participation they represent. But even more important, success depends on the local government accepting and recognising deliberative and agonistic forms of participation, rather than just the model of a traditional representative democracy. The main take-away of part 3 is that the sphere of cultural commoning is never a purely autonomous one. Invariably, the cultural commoner interacts with at least two other institutions of social life - the market and the state — in configurations that may range from friendly cooperation to agonistic opposition.

Through the cross-fertilisation between political philosophical insights, cultural theory and concrete empirical examples, The Rise of the Common City emphasises the importance of culture for urban commoners. Culture is not the superstructure but the substructure of commoning practices. After all, commoners rely in the first place on the giving of meaning and especially on the potential of re-articulating forms of society, economic systems and political decision-making processes. Words, signs, images, sounds and colours are more than symbolism and more than ornaments for a city. They can also push against the world efficiently and intervene in the urban fabric. That is why they are indispensable for the rise of a common city. As the commodification of the urban commonwealth continues apace, we sincerely hope that this book may serve as a signpost for activists, artists, commoners and academics, as they pave the road towards a more just and equitable urban society.

It remains for us to thank a few organisations and people that have made this book possible. That is in the first place our patron, the Flanders Scientific Research Fund (FWO), who generously supported the CCQO’s quest. Furthermore, we have great respect for the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA) and the University of Antwerp, who not only welcomed our research team with open arms and accommodated us beautifully — they also followed our research with great enthusiasm. Given the project’s interdisciplinary and, admittedly, sometimes unconventional character, such support is not always obvious nor evident for an institution of higher education. We also want to thank our publisher, ASP Editions, as well as the reviewers, for realising this book. Finally, we would like to express our great respect to the artists, authors, creative professionals and policy makers who sometimes ‘served’ as a case study or as ‘research object’, but also reflected together with us and above all, inspired us enormously. They only increased our belief in the importance of cultural commons. To put it succinctly, the future of culture will be common or there will be no culture at all.

Pascal Gielen, Thijs Lijster & Louis Volont

COMMONING CULTURES BETWEEN MARKET AND STATE 11

PART |

SPACES OF COMMONING

CHAPTER | CULTURAL COMMONING IN THE CITY

Thijs Lijster, Louis Volont & Pascal Gielen

In recent years, an extensive number of works have appeared in the field of urban studies that investigate the city as a commons (see e.g. Borch & Kornberger, 2015; Dellenbaugh et al., 2015; Harvey, 2012; Kirwan et al., 2015). We build on that discussion but will particularly emphasise the cultural dimension of such commons, where we understand culture both in the narrow sense as artistic production and in the broad sense as the shared sources, practices, and experiences of meaning-making. We could also say: the urban commons, for us, primarily signify a specific mode and site of culture.

In this way, we connect the discussion on the urban commons to discussions on commoning in artistic practices, and on so called ‘cultural commoning’ (e.g., Borchi, 2018; Dockx & Gielen, 2018; Gielen & Lijster, 2015; Mollona, 2021). We presume that, in principle, commoning always has such a cultural dimension, since, in Hardt & Negri’s words (2009: 139), the commons are “not only the earth we share but also the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships, and so forth”. Moreover, in order for commoning practices to emerge one also has to understand and experience something as commons.

Reversely, one could argue that any cultural or artistic practice has a ‘commoning’ dimension, in the sense that culture is always the result of practices of sharing, handing over (e.g., to a next generation), remixing, appropriation, reinterpretation, etc. Even the most ‘autonomous’ artists use forms or languages that were passed over to them. However, while this implies indeed that any form of cultural production is also a form of ‘commoning’ we are particularly interested in those artistic practices and cultural organisations that not only originate, but also result in the recreation and sustenance of commons, rather than, for instance, producing commodities in the service of the cultural and creative industries.

In this introductory essay, we will first lay out what we mean by cultural commoning practices and why they are so relevant in our contemporary capitalist world. Next, we will argue how these practices are particularly significant in cities. We will then describe cultural commoning in terms of the creation of what sociologist Alan Blum (2001) called “urban intimacy”. Finally, we will point to some pitfalls and threats of contemporary cultural commoning practices. These will also be the subject of several of the contributions in this volume, which identify and analyse the different forces that threaten the contemporary common city, and explore possible strategies to counter these threats, as well as the agents of such strategies.

FROM CREATIVE CAPITALISM TO CULTURAL COMMONING

Many sociologists and philosophers have observed and analysed a shift in the capitalist modes of production occurring since the 1970s, evolving into what is alternately referred to as post-industrial, post-Fordist, or cognitive capitalism. As has been first and most extensively described by Italian post-operaismo thinkers (e.g., Tronti, Virno, Negri, and Berardi) capitalist production and labour have become increasingly governed by ‘immaterial’ ‘performative’, or ‘biopolitical’ processes, meaning that they find their fulfilment not in some concrete end product but rather originate in, and revolve around, intangible sources like knowledges, information, affects and signs. This is not to say that there are no longer any material processes and products involved; obviously, capitalism continues to produce an abundance of material commodities, especially in non-western countries, which moreover are often produced under the most mind-numbing Fordist conditions. However, the point is that these processes are moved and governed by ideas, knowledges, information, etc., while the material endproducts gain most of their value through immaterial (symbolic) factors like status and storytelling (well-known examples are the iPhone or the Nike-sneaker). At the same time, labour, especially in the western world, revolves increasingly around language and communication. Job growth, also low-skilled and low-paid jobs, occurs mostly in the service industries. As Paolo Virno (2004) once observed, while chatter used to be prohibited on the work floor, today chattering is our work.

One consequence of this shift has been that creativity has become one of the most important values of the contemporary work ethic. Urban sociologist Richard Florida famously described the ‘rise of the creative class, while the ‘creative industries’ became the spearhead of many governmental economic programmes and policies in the western world. More importantly, the ‘discourse’ of creativity became dominant, or what one of us has called an ideology of ‘creativism’ (Gielen, 2013). Creativity was no longer considered to be a unique and rare quality of the artistic genius (a romantic fantasy that obviously had its own problems), since now each and every one of us has the potential to be or become creative, from the manager and teacher, to the ‘barista’ and the ‘sandwich artist. Stronger still, there is even an imperative to be creative, one needs to be creative in order to realise one’s value. Or as Oli Mould (2018: 12) has stated: “Being creative today means seeing the world around you as a resource to fuel your inner entrepreneur. Creativity is a distinctly neoliberal trait because it feeds the notion that the world and everything in it can be monetised. The language of creativity has been subsumed by capitalism”.

The immaterial sources as well as outcomes of contemporary production are dependent on sharing practices and free circulation. ‘Information wants to be free, as Stewart Brand’s famous phrasing goes, which is precisely the reason why a lot of our contemporary labour time is spent on meetings, presentations, and communications. It even flows over and continues within informal settings, dinners and parties and at home (after all, one never knows when one gets a good idea, or encounters the next project). Work, even more than in earlier times, is always a form of cooperation, even though that cooperation sometimes happens in isolation, from behind one’s laptop. As Hardt and Negri (2017: 93) write: “The one never produces. We only produce together, socially”. In other words, contemporary production relies on what Hardt and Negri call the common, i.e., a shared resource of wealth. Not only are phenomena like language, information and culture principally shared and owned by all, but in contrast to ‘natural’ phenomena (like forests, drinking water) these ‘artificial’ commons depend in their very being on sharing and circulation. A language or an idea that is not shared is not only worthless but also meaningless. In this, however, lies precisely the fundamental contradiction of contemporary capitalism, since it constantly needs to reify, individualise, and enclose the products of common labour in order to monetise it. While Steve Jobs is put on a pedestal as the exemplary creative entrepreneur, and while Apple is aggressively defending its patents in court, their most successful innovations would not have been possible without the publicly funded research of anonymous scientists, designers and engineers (cf. Mazzucato, 2018). The question is whether this contradiction implies that this form of capitalist production is fundamentally unsustainable and must eventually collapse (as Hardt and Negri seem to suggest), or that it is rather the key to its success, as it continually creates the conditions for the sharing practices that it feeds from. We will return to this issue later.

As, among others, Massimo De Angelis (2014) and David Harvey (2012) have argued, the ‘commons’ should not be considered in terms of a particular type of resource or ‘goods’ but rather as a social relation and as an activity. In other words, one should speak about commons as a verb rather than as a noun, of commoning rather than of commons. What this also implies is that there are no objects or goods that in principle are either private property, or commons. Rather, this depends fundamentally on the way we relate to these objects or phenomena. ‘Commoning then is a process of sharing and opening up some object or activity, retracting it from capitalist exchange, and which runs counter to opposing forces one could call ‘enclosure’ ‘commodification, or ‘privatisation’ (although, as we will see, not all forms of de-privatisation are necessarily forms of commoning).’

1 This also means that speaking in terms of ‘reclaiming’ the ‘expropriated’ commons (as for instance Naomi Klein does, 2001) is not without problems. After all, this implies that certain goods once were the rightful property of someone else, namely of an original community, and ‘essentially’ belong to that community. Not only does such a conception of the commons hold on to the idea that possession is more fundamental than practice and activity; moreover, there is something reactive, if not to say romantic, in this discourse. It implies a kind of return to a harmonious state of nature, and a rather rosy picture of an original community that probably never existed in the first place; not least because such original communities, as for instance Sylvia Federici (2019) points out, were often organised patriarchally and thus do not necessarily deserve to be romanticised.

This leads us to the point of the aforementioned focus on cultural commoning. In an earlier publication, Gielen & Lijster (2015: 20) have defined culture in the broad, anthropological sense as “a socially shared reservoir or repertoire of signs”, in which we emphasised that ‘signs’ does not refer to a mere semiotic game but to the act of assigning meaning. In other words: culture revolves around practices in which meaning is given to our lives and to our (urban) environment. The relationship to ‘commoning’ is obvious, since giving meaning or cultural significance is something that one can never do in solitude; it depends on sharing meaning, on interpretation, or as we earlier wrote: “Culture is kept alive by people — by repetition, adaptation, actualisation, interpretation and criticism — and is therefore continuously in development” (Gielen & Lijster, 2015: 21). In that regard, one could say that culture necessarily consists in commoning practices. Reversely, one could argue that each form of commoning has a cultural dimension, in the sense that commoning is not only the sharing and governing of some resource but also depends on the understanding and seeing something as a common. In other words, in the practice of commoning there is always an intangible, imaginary or aesthetic moment, in which we sense and make sense of the world in a particular way.

Apart from this broad understanding of ‘cultural commoning, we can of course also talk about it in a somewhat more restricted way, namely as commoning practices taking place within the sphere of arts and culture. Further on in this chapter we will zoom in to some of such practices in the cultural sphere. In particular, we will look at cultural commoning in an urban environment, since, as we will argue below, the city is an important arena where commoning practices meet and often clash, with opposing forces of commodification and enclosure.

URBAN ENCLOSURES

We live in an era during which for the first time in history more people live in urban areas than in rural ones, which brings along all kinds of demographic, architectural, cultural, and ecological challenges. Against this background, the city has become a particularly pressing issue and topic of interest for contemporary scholars of the commons (Harvey, 2012; Stavrides, 2016). What is the place of the commons in the city, and what is its relation to culture?

The history of the modern city has of course been closely intertwined with that of capitalism. The city has been an engine of capital accumulation in modernity: metropolises like London and Paris arose out of industrial capitalism, which expropriated the peasants who moved to the cities, ending up as wage workers in factories. Moreover, in contemporary ‘cognitive’ or biopolitical capitalism, which is all the more dependent for its production on communication, creativity, and the exchange of knowledge, ideas, and cultural expressions, the urban environment itself has become the primary motor of production, a site for both extraction (rent, real estate) and exploitation (labour). What the factory was to the industrial proletariat, Hardt and Negri argue, the city is to today’s workers: “The metropolis itself is an enormous factory of social production and reproduction, or more precisely, it is a space produced in common (looking backward) that serves (looking forward) as the means of production and reproduction for future instances of the common” (Hardt & Negri, 2017: 149).

A city is more than the built environment. It is also what one might call a ‘social medium, a platform that conditions forms of life, and which is, conversely, shaped by collective ways of life. In his book Building and Dwelling, sociologist Richard Sennett (2019) distinguishes between ville and cité: the first term refers to the built space, i.e., the city as a configuration of bricks, concrete, glass and steel, and of buildings, streets, squares and parks; the second term refers to how the city is experienced and lived, how and where people dwell, work and relax. As already indicated, these two dimensions of the city — ville and cité - have a strong influence on each other: how a city is built, organised and designed, strongly determines how one experiences it, who is going to live there, and what kinds of activities are likely to take place. If, for example, living, working and leisure in a city are functionally separated from each other, you will not see (or hear) a lot of children on the street in the business district and no partygoers in the residential areas. This also makes a city an arena of different and sometimes conflicting interests: accessibility for wheelchairs or pushchairs versus extra places on the terrace; parking space for cars versus parks and trees; a music festival versus Sunday rest; walking and playing safely versus being able to get from A to B quickly. Each of those choices is based on a political consideration, whereby some interests — and the population groups that have them - take precedence over others. In short, the city signifies a particular way of living in common, with all the problems that go along with that.

However, just as the digital ‘social media are now dominated by a handful of monopolists who determine what we get to see and experience online, so the city and urban life is threatened by enclosure and privatisation. In his book Capital City, urban geographer Samuel Stein (2019) even speaks of the ‘real estate state) a state that is governed by, and for, real estate investors and entrepreneurs. That is “a political formation in which real estate capital has an inordinate influence on the shape of our cities, the parameters of our politics, and the lives we lead” (Stein, 2019: 5). This influence of capital on our living environment is clear enough: house prices and rent are driven up, neighbourhood populations are changed by gentrification, and the look and feel of cities are ruined by tourism and advertising.

An often-made mistake is to consider these processes as some kind of natural order of things, a tragic but ultimately unstoppable process. Film maker Spike Lee, who himself grew up in Brooklyn, once said that gentrification is not something that happens but something that is done to people. Indeed, at the basis of gentrification processes lie conscious political choices and planning policies, made in the interest of capital in order to make cities profitable. In this process of the ‘financialisatior of the city, houses are first and foremost treated as investment objects in a global real estate market. Sometimes they are not even inhabited anymore, just used for speculation; a city like London has tens of thousands of empty houses belonging to the superrich (Sassen, 2014).

Wherever value is produced in common, extraction and exploitation lurk. These can take place in various ways, and do not only involve the built environment, the ville in Sennett’s terms, but also life in the city, the cité. Value in cities is created not only by bricks and concrete, but also by connections to public transport and other public facilities (schools, parks), the presence of cultural venues, entertainment, bars and restaurants, and finally also by rather intangible things like the ‘atmosphere’ or ‘vibe’ in a city or neighbourhood. That atmosphere, however, is again determined by the people who live there, what they do, by life on the streets and in squares, and so on. In short, a city and its value is made by its population, but just as tech giants make a profit from the information and attention the users generate, real estate entrepreneurs skim the profits from the lives that the residents lead, the vibes they are generating. We now know this to be an unsustainable, self-defeating process: a neighbourhood that is socially and culturally diverse and valued for its lively atmosphere becomes attractive to real estate and to new, wealthy residents, causing housing and rent prices to skyrocket, so that the ‘original’ residents are driven away and with them precisely the socio-cultural diversity and vibrant atmosphere that started the process in the first place.”