Michael Hardt and the Urban Common: The City as Everyone's Work

The urban common is the concept with which the American philosopher Michael Hardt, a professor at Duke University, and the Italian Antonio Negri describe the wealth that cities produce collectively, knowledge, culture, networks, languages, spaces, and that contemporary capitalism captures to turn into rent. They developed it in Commonwealth (2009), the third part of the trilogy begun with Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), with a thesis that has marked critical urban studies: the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the working class, the place where it produces and where it can resist.

Common, public and private: Hardt and Negri's distinction

Hardt and Negri distinguish the common from the public and the private. The public is what the state manages; the private, what the market owns; the common is what is produced and shared without belonging to either. Traditionally these were natural goods, water, forests, pastures, and today they are above all socially produced goods: the knowledge accumulated in a city, its forms of cooperation, its neighbourhood life, its public space. In the knowledge economy, they argue, production is increasingly cooperative and less dependent on capital, and that common is the material basis of a new politics.

The metropolis as factory of the common and the rent that captures it

The city is at the centre of the argument. If the factory gathered workers and organised their labour, the metropolis gathers the multitude and organises its cooperation: encounters, exchanges, affects, ideas that circulate through streets, squares and networks. Capital extracts value from that cooperation through rent, rents, land prices, intellectual property, platforms, without producing it. Gentrification is the perfect example: the neighbourhood becomes desirable because of what its residents created together, and that value is appropriated by developers and owners who expel those who produced it. Hardt calls this the corruption of the common.

From Tahrir to Sol: the squares as assemblies of the common

Collective resistance is born in the same place. Hardt and Negri read the occupied squares of 2011, Tahrir, Puerta del Sol, Zuccotti Park, as assemblies of the multitude reclaiming the urban common in the very space where it is produced: self-organised camps with kitchens, libraries and committees that prefigured another way of living in common. In Assembly (2017) they extended the analysis to later movements and to the question of how such insurgencies can last and become institutions without losing their horizontal character.

Harvey's critique and the relevance of the urban common

The proposal has been as influential as it has been criticised. David Harvey, in Rebel Cities (2012), adopted the idea of the urban common but warned that without institutions and without the state the common is fragile, and that Hardt and Negri's multitude is too abstract to explain who struggles and why. Others point to the optimism about cooperation in the knowledge economy, which coexists with platform precarity, and to the distance between the squares of 2011 and the political results they left. Hardt has replied that the common is not a utopia but a fact that already exists, and that the question is who governs it.

For urban studies, the urban common offers a vocabulary for naming what movements already do: self-managed gardens and social centres, right-of-use housing cooperatives, care networks, tenants' platforms, regulations such as Bologna's that allow spaces to be managed in common. Hardt and Negri invite us to see the city not as anyone's property but as everyone's work, and to ask, before every renewal, every platform and every closure of a square, who produced the value that is being captured.