154 | ILDC

In independent India, the urban is a legacy project of colonisation, postcolonial, decolonial and neoliberal experiments. To this end, land and water ecologies have undergone transformations under different planning regimes that have come to govern society and ecology. This panel discussion serves as an expansive forum to explore the land use and land tenure legacies of urban commons and the possibilities they hold to reimagine urban futures in India. Today, urban commons emerge as a vital nexus for advocacy, practice, research and policy. Such a layered mandate encourages us to focus on historical contexts and contemporary challenges simultaneously as they secure, shape and occupy our imagination and spatiality. At its essence, this conversation embodies a collective effort to unpack the complexities of urban commons, exploring its intersection with issues such as land use and land tenure, rights paradigms, service-consumption-creative economies and relationship between human and non-human life in the city. Through this panel, we can focus:

How people in the city engage with urban commons? Looking at lived experience, the everyday-ness of living in urban commons. Sub-questions: what are these urban commons (land and water), what sort of tenure and user relationships (and how those are changing) do people have with these commons, and what is urbanisation doing to them? This could serve as a critical introduction to urban commons in Indian or perhaps South Asian cities.
We can examine urban commons through a cultural and political economy lens, exploring how shared spaces evolve across multiple scales (neighbourhood, local, city-level, regional, national, planetary). It considers the interplay between organised and informal experiences of commons, highlighting how regulatory frameworks, urbanisation and economic pressures shape access, use and governance of these spaces. The discussion addresses how do communities navigate the tensions between collective use and commodification? In what ways do cultural practices and local knowledge sustain or transform urban commons under contemporary developmental pressures? With regulations and urbanisation as processes, what sort of pressures are commons under today? and where do people -- their culture -- find themselves in this political economy of the city?
We explore the ‘life’ of urban commons in Indian cities, shifting the focus from narratives of decline to the ways these spaces are actively produced and sustained by everyday practices. It examines urban commons as sites of knowledge production, cultural engagement and social interaction, particularly through embodied practices such as sport and play. Drawing on research on gendered access, formal and informal sporting spaces and the politics of inclusion, the presentation considers how formal playing fields, informal play areas and spontaneous sporting cultures coexist and interact. How do embodied practices like sport shape and animate urban commons? In what ways does informality differ across sports, and how is it spatially and socially embedded in the city? How do gender, social norms and care work influence who participates in and shapes these commons? We see urban commons as living, evolving sites of cultural and social exchange.
Spotlight two different faces (active destruction and passive neglect) of the same crisis of the urban commons in cities: how urban commons are undermined by state inaction, collusion and disregard for law. The structural patter of ‘governing’ urban commons as it exist in a fragile legal state where judicial protections are undermined either by direct encroachment or by administrative apathy; both forms result in ecological erasure, loss of community rights and weakening of democratic accountability.