More than Bare-Bones Survival? From the Urban Margins to the Urban Commons

We revisit the urban margins by recasting service hubs—conspicuous clusters of helping agencies in inner-city locales, designed to serve vulnerable populations—as both spaces of survival but potentially transformative, emerging as so-called cracks in the city. We undertake this recasting using the concept of the commons. Using case studies in London, Miami, and Osaka, we focus on the everyday practices of commoning and the role that service hubs play in the city as spaces of sustenance, care, and solidarity. The results are mixed: Service hubs enabled unfettered survival and operated largely outside of capitalism, ensuring that some spaces in the city remain decommodified and at the margins. The service hubs were also limited in their transformational capacity, however. These results contribute to a sense of commons at the margins, rethinking them more as an edge between capitalism and an existence separate from it, rather than presenting them as exclusively marginal in the sense of subordinated, excluded, and bordered.