A double movement of enclosure and commons: commoning Emek movie theatre in three acts

The article focuses on the relationship between the urban renewal project that led to the demolition of the Emek movie theatre, located in the center of Istanbul, and the commoning struggle, which emerged against the enclosure of the site. The enclosure of the site was a pioneering project intending to control, regulate, and tame socio-spatial relations, curtail ‘unruly’ cultural practices and expunge the history and cultural memory of Beyoğlu district while the commoning struggle stood against not only spatial eviction and social expulsion from the center of the city, but also defied physical, social and cultural marginalization—that is, being decentered from the urban center. In reading this case, I develop a dialectical argument in which enclosure, led by capital and facilitated by the state, unavoidably engenders forms of resistance, which in turn propitiates new forms of commoning. The dialectics of enclosures and commoning practices is understood in three interrelated ‘acts of contestation’: property-making, subjectification and imagination. The first act of property-making relates to the ‘past.’ It discusses how everyday uses of public spaces can become a zone of contestation, problematizing violent histories of the making of state and private property and proposes common property as an alternative. The second act focuses on the ‘present’ of commoning movements and considers how they produce non-capitalist value practices against the process of capitalist subjectification endorsed by the spatial regime of enclosure. The third act, namely imagination, looks at the practices that, while resisting enclosure, also challenge the impossibility of imagining a future different to that of capitalism. As a final act, the article proposes that an emergent culture of the commons is being built even though local commoning struggles seem to fail in the short-term.