Local Cultures – Global Spaces

Abstract

This paper frames everyday participatory practices in urban neighborhoods as prefiguring alternative futures at the scale of everyday life. Narratives around transitions and sustainability tend to be dominated by market-driven ‘smart cities’ and ‘green technologies’ on one hand, and top-down managerial governance from local authorities on the other, which ultimately seeks as far as possible to maintain ‘business as usual’. Against this, everyday practices in self-organized community spaces offer genuinely transformative potential by providing space for participants to ‘act otherwise’ in the present, expressing and manifesting their needs and desires around how to live together in the future. The work draws on ongoing ethnographic research and participant interviews in self-organized ‘buurthuiskamers’ (neighborhood living rooms) in the Netherlands, seeking to understand the personal and collective motivations for, and meanings of, participation. Collective actions are read as either implicitly or explicitly challenging ‘official’ narratives of the future by, for example, experimenting with sharing and circular practices, new forms of sociality, and the way energy is generated and consumed. Given the space to ‘act otherwise’, what do people choose to do, and what potential futures does this facilitate, stimulate and make viable? Finally, how do these direct, embodied experiments interface with, influence or clash with governance, policy and decision-making around urban transitions?