A Potential Toronto | Launch: Thurs. 27 Sept. 2007

A Potential Toronto
Initiated by Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (TSCI)

27 Sept. - 10 Nov. 2007
Toronto Free Gallery
660 Queen Street East [map]

Fear disciplines. Capital divides. States order. Creativity sells. Cynicism saturates. Against the persisting ethos of the 'Common Sense Revolution' are dots that puncture the city's territory. Where are they? A Potential Toronto is an event series and exhibition spotlighting alternative economies, minor spaces, and organizing strategies. What experiments and proposals are out there for democratizing space, cracking constraints, and co-operating differently? What works, and why? What blocks an alternative from flourishing? What concepts help us think through it? Exploring these questions, A Potential Toronto is a preliminary step in a longer-term counter-cartography project which would render currents of radical energy visible, audible, and tactile.


LAUNCH: Thurs. 27 Sept. 2007
6:30pm: Opening for 'Common Sense Revolution' / 'Toronto's Urban Unconscious'
7:30pm: 'A Potential Commonism' - A talk by Nick Dyer-Witheford
PARTY TO FOLLOW


'A Potential Commonism' - A talk by Nick Dyer-Witheford [author of Cyber-Marx]
It has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Does the widespread interest in 'commons' by environmental, labour, and open-source activists draw a new line of fight and flight pointing beyond capital? Nick Dyer-Witheford presents a talk on the concept of commonism.

'Common Sense Revolution' - Scott Sorli
This information graphic tracks Ontario welfare income for a single person against the number of homeless who have died on the streets of Toronto over the past two decades. The year 1995 is particularly striking, the year that welfare income begins to plummet, the year that homeless deaths begin to jump, the year that the Harris Conservatives were first elected.

'Toronto's Urban Unconscious' - Adrian Blackwell, Tina Chung, Andrea Gaus, Davide Gianforcaro, Kim Ligers, Andrea Macecek, Graeme Stewart, and Geoffrey Thun.
Projects from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design

This design research project focuses on Toronto's Western Rail triangle, an area of urban fabric that suffers from both social and physical isolation from the rest of the city. We argue that this territory acts as Toronto's urban unconscious, divided from other spaces by ravines, railways, highways, and industrial fabric. These seven architecture and urban design projects make use of the area's existing potential to imagine useful and pleasurable spaces for daily life.

** EVENT SERIES DETAILS TO FOLLOW:

COMMONS READING GROUP [begins 1 oct.]
WOMEN AGAINST POVERTY COLLECTIVE [11 oct.]
YOUTH [18 oct.]
BORDERS + MIGRATION [23 oct.]
ABANDONED HOUSING: USE IT OR LOSE IT [29 oct.]
ORGANIZING [1 nov.]
QUEER PUBLICS [9 nov.]
WORKER CO-OPS [10 nov.]

Commons | Reading Group

Call for Participation
Part of A Potential Toronto

Mondays, 8-10pm, Oct. 1 to Dec. 3, 2007
Location TBC

Free, but spots are limited. To sign up, contact: shiri.pasternak@gmail.com

Copies of readings provided.

Facilitated by Shiri Pasternak

What are the commons and why has the idea emerged again, everywhere, in popular culture and political theory? What kinds of questions does the concept of commons seem to answer amidst the clamour of social and environmental crisis today? This reading group will approach the commons by asking questions about the nature and histories of enclosure. We will be asking: How do property regimes affect social order; how do they foreclose or fuel commons and common space? What is the relationship between sovereignty, property, and the commons? We will also look at the way the concept of the commons is being co-opted by neo-liberalism and competing hegemonic regimes and explore the relationships between information commons and place-based commons.


Week 1
Cole Harris. "How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire" (2004), Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94:1, 165-182.

Nicholas Blomley. "Law, Property, and the Spaces of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid" (2003), Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93:1, March 2003, 121-141.

Week 2
Farshad Araghi. "The Great Global Enclosure of Our Times: Peasants and the Agrarian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century," Chapter 8 in Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment, eds. Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster and Frederick H. Buttel. Monthly Review Press Books, 2000.

Week 3
Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite. Information Feudalism. "Introduction." Earthscan Publications Ltd., 2002.

Watch, if you can: Sonic Outlaws - documentary film by Craig Baldwin

Week 4
John Willinsky. "The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science," First Monday, volume 10, number 8 (August 2005).

Week 5
Margaret E.I. Kipp. "Software and seeds: Open source methods," First Monday, 10:9, (September 2005).

Week 6
Anthony McCann. "Enclosure Without and Within the 'Information Commons.'" Information and Communications Technology Law 14(3):217-240, October 2005).

Week 7
Constantine Caffentzis. "A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the Crisis of Neoliberalism and Question of the Commons."

Michael Goldman. Privatizing Nature: Political struggles for the global commons. Chapter 1. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Week 8
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies. The Subsistence Perspective. Chapter 6, "Defending, Reclaiming, and Reinventing the Commons." Zed Books, 1999.

James McCarthy. "Commons as Counter-Hegemonic Project." Capitalism Nature Socialism. 16:1 (March 2005).

Week 9
J.K. Gibson-Graham. A Postcapitalist Politics. Chapter 5, "The Community Economy." University of Minnesota Press, 2006.