Abstract

This paper rearticulates the concept of the urban commons based on the existing discussions on the commons and the urban as well as the historical experiences around community and the state in the Japanese and Korean contexts. The widely accepted grammar of the commons premises community, resource, and practice as the basic components of the commons. This is, however, not only strongly connected to the image of traditional commons but also reinforcing the dualist epistemology. The urban is not a bounded territory but a planetary process that erases differences between the rural and the city. Building on Lefebvre’s discussion on the urban, the paper argues that the urban common is the common embedded in the labor process of our era, where production and exploitation of surplus occur in the whole society beyond factories. As the commons is constantly captured by capital, the urban common also appears to be the biopolitical struggle over the dominant form of life. Nangok Heemang Medical Cooperative, as the example of the urban commons in Seoul in the 1970s, demonstrates how the condition of the urban commons, where one must encounter others, facilitates the process of becoming, i.e., subjectivation.