| landscape and the idea of commons
COMMONING THE LANDSCAPE
Rahul Paul
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| The article examines ‘commoning’ as a critical lens in landscape architecture, foregrounding socio-ecological relationships, collective practices, and embedded knowledge systems. Through academic case studies sited in rural, semi urban and urban realms, it argues for landscapes as spaces of resistance, resilience, and shared cultural-environmental sustenance against neo-liberal urbanization and ecological erasure.
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Commons in Landscape Architecture
Defining what constitutes Commons remains a murky territory. The scholarly evolution of the term—largely focussed onissue of ‘access and shared resources’— does not quite comprehend its totality in the Indian, and by extension in the Global South context. If the term is reduced to its basic understanding, Commons are ‘collective practices that create and sustain a community and its ecological bases’. They exist as a dynamic and collective resource—a variegated form of social wealth —that is deeply rooted in inseparable relations of nature and culture, governed by emergent customs. (Gidwani, Vinay; Baviskar, Amita; Urban Commons; 2010).
While the academia and practice of landscape architecture is deeply rooted in the idea of natural resources and systems, it has evolved to avoid and overlook that natural resources are managed by communities, tied to customs, and shaped as practices to support the productive (sustenance), the reflective (sacred), and the daily (cultural) in an asymbiotic manner. Historically, this lens of separating natural resources from human practices, deeply rooted in colonial practice, is one of the reasons for the erasure of Commons—both spatially and performatively —from our lived experiences. But equally, this attitude has precipitated postindependence, in the fields of planning and design, as an exploitative tool in shaping cities within the neoliberal market. Situated within this premise is the opportunity of investigating commonalities through the domain of landscape architecture.
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