Wednesday, 29 November 2023 

3-5 pm 

Aula Ovale Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali, Vico Monte di Pietà 1, Napoli

 

Title: Waste As Commons And Commoning As Critique To The Property Question

 

Speaker:  Patrik Zapata, School of Public Administration, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

 

Abstract: 

 

Commoning communities are emerging all over the world to take care of the unsustainable amount of waste that our societies are producing. These commoning communities question by their practice sustained economic growth and counterattack the commoditization of the urban. Commoning communities create spaces that, contrary to Elinor Ostrom's original ideas, are not isolated but rather open and porous, permitting not only more open access to the commons but also flows between the commoners, market, and state. In this chapter we contend that waste commons not only provide an alternative to the market and the state; it can also create passages promoting the overspilling of the commons beyond the boundaries of the commoning community and of different types of property whether private, or state-owned, or open access. We argue that waste as a commons offers a critique to address the property question Waste as common property (and not a strange mix of private property and public responsibility that is a mere extension of private property), opens up alternative understandings of the human relationship with the physical environment, and thus for environmental policies to tackle the challenges of the Anthropocene.

 

Bio:

 

Patrik Zapata is a professor in Public Administration at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research interests concern the management of cities, sustainable organizing, waste management, informal economy, and language in organizations. Patrik Zapata's research has been published in journals such as Accounting, Organizations and Society; Urban Studies; Cities; Urban Geography; Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space; Environment and Urbanization; Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space; Environmental Politics; Habitat International; Journal of Change Management; Journal of Cleaner Production and Public Administration and Development.