Formally called “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” the 2014 Umbrella Movement was a civil undertaking that dominated Hong Kong’s urban landscape for a period of 81 days. This period of unrest expressed a collective spatial claim across the entire Hong Kong territory. With the streets as the primary medium of protest, the protesters barricaded bridges, flyovers and any available form of accessible spaces within their collective and material body of protest. The extraction of political debate away from the private realm, from the containment of a widespread interiority, brought political difference within the urban arteries of the world’s third densest city.

This chapter approaches the commons as processes of re-politicizing urban space. We examine the material realities that catalyzed the Umbrella Movement to explain four key aspects. First, we outline the premise of collective actions and the discourse of the commons, before linking their emergence to the spatial particularities of territories and in this case, Hong Kong’s Special Administrative Region. After that, we explore the notions of interiority and exteriority, not as fixed spatial terms but as animated and interchangeable conditions whereby culture and technology merge to allow for the (un)folding of affective and transformative practices of commoning technicities. It is through a folded and membranic understanding of the relation between the interior and the exterior that we posit the importance of the Umbrella Movement as an urban event: its attempt to re-politicize the urban by bringing its interiorized past in touch with an exteriorized future.@en

Contemporary commoning practices are emerging from the failure of a vast array of neoliberal systems and models. Arguably, these practices hold the potential to actualise an in-between niche, which the public and private domains alike have been unable to encompass and express. As such, they invite us to rethink the meaning of the public/private dichotomy. Commoning practices simultaneously respond and give rise to differentiated social and materials forms and relationships, which result in a variety of geopolitical ecologies and new understandings of citizenry.

Issue 16 of Footprint offers an array of diverse insights into contemporary commoning practices. Emanating from different angles of enquiry and theoretical perspectives the articles included here investigate the question of the commons through the re-conceptualisation of different subjectivities. New understandings of the empowering potentials and latent agency of self-organised urban movements, i.e., are approached by means of in-depth analysis and critical assessment. The spectrum of possibilities opened by differentiated political practices and strategies unveil renewed types of legitimacy. Furthermore, critical evaluations of spatial initiatives display emerging socio-spatial bodies, thus questioning the role of autonomy across a spectrum of scales and thresholds of negotiation. Ultimately, the analysis of and speculation on the mechanisms of contemporary commoning re-configure urban reality through the realisation of new materialities.@en