Speaker
Description
This paper critically situates the notion of ‘commoning accessibility’ within the wider context of the changing European welfare state. In many peripheral areas across Europe accessibility is under pressure due to the privatization and deregulation of public transport, the enclosure and commercialization of public spaces, and the withdrawal of services such as healthcare. Recently, the notion of ‘commoning accessibility’ (CA) has been introduced to account for the various ways in which communities mobilize and organize themselves to (re)claim accessibility as a common good. For example, through setting up community transport and shared mobility schemes or collective efforts to create and maintain place-based social, cultural and care amenities. Drawing on fieldwork conducted on CA practices in rural and peripheral areas in the Netherlands, this paper asks under what conditions commoning can play a critical and transformative role in improving access to important services. Whereas on the one hand the notion of commoning carries the potential of radically transforming planning and policy paradigms by denaturalizing private ownership and recentering values such as sociality and care, CA practices are also – inevitably – a product of larger policy conditions and agendas. Indeed, it could be argued that the need for these practices is very much shaped by the increased transferal of government responsibilities around public service delivery to citizens, as part of changing configurations of the welfare state. This paper speculates about how to retain the critical potential of commoning accessibility as a concept when understood as part of this wider trend towards the responsibilization of citizens.
