A Common Man, A Common City, And The Path Towards A Common Accord

These are simultaneously physical, social, cultural, economic, and political in character. The urban ecology of our cities is shaped by planning and people into public, private, and common imaginations, experiences and memories.

But what does common mean? It is both a thing and a process. Whereas land and water, as physical things, have received substantial attention in ‘placing’ arguments for urban commons, commons as a process is a non-place. In our dominant understanding, commons or any imagination of urban commons only comes about when it becomes a place, i.e., when it comes to planning and policy. 

Understanding Urban Commons

In a place-based understanding of urban commons, we often imagine or construct particular sites that are things to be owned, managed, beautified or protected -- as a bounded, mappable object. However, urban commons are lived and produced. In that sense, commoning is not about a place but about a practice of negotiations, relationships, and steps through which people make space livable and meaningful.

So, commons are not just physical sites, but non-places, too, as they are continually becoming (a process). The non-place commons emerge in the cracks and interstices of formal planning. These non-places [in bureaucratic eyes] are unnamed, unrecognised, unzoned, and still they are where urban citizenship is performed.

In that sense, commoning creates its own spatiality through people coming together, negotiating access, or sustaining a shared resource makes place happen. This reverses the planner’s logic: it is not the place that defines the commons, but the practice that makes it visible as a place of belonging. The non-place is not absence -- it is the potential to view our cities differently. The non-place of the commons is a zone of becoming, of re-inscription, where people reclaim fragments of the city and inscribe meaning, livelihood, and community into them. The practice of commoning transforms non-place into a lived place.

Common City For Common Man 

The relationship between a common man and a common city is a political tension. The common city is not a place waiting to be inhabited; it is produced through the practices and claims of common people who continuously make and remake its spaces. In that sense, the common exists simultaneously as place and non-place: as both territory and relation.

The place of the commons is visible in the material city -- lakes, parks, drains, vacant plots, beaches, forests, and the many in-between spaces where collective life unfolds. But its non-place quality lies in how it escapes the formal imagination of planning: how it is continually made, unmade, and reconstituted by people who are not always recognised as citizens, owners or legitimate users.

The common man inhabits these non-places of planning, not because they are invisible, but because the formal city refuses to see the social labour and moral reasoning that hold them together. So, the common man is not a passive subject of urban development but an active agent of communing, transforming leftover, marginal or degraded spaces into sites of life, labour, and belonging. These acts of commoning create spatialities -- forms of urban citizenship that continually redefine what the common city is.

Indian Situation 

The Indian urban condition cannot be understood outside its historical legacies of colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal. The colonial planning rationalised land and water as extractive assets, and postcolonial regimes bureaucratised them under state control.

While neoliberal urbanisation has commodified commons under market logics. In these transitions, the common man has remained both the inheritor and the resistor -- working through these regimes to reclaim fragments of space, service, and ecology as livable commons. Today, commons are not just pre-urban, and rather are active frontiers of urbanisation itself: sites where the tensions of the city such as growth, exclusion, ecology, and democracy, are negotiated daily.

The figure of the common man is a powerful entry point into understanding the Indian city, but it is also a reminder of our blind spots. The commons we imagine are often the commons of men of visibility, voice, and livelihood. But the commons that sustain the city are also made through care, silence, and relational labour. So, to reimagine the urban commons is to expand who counts as ‘common’ and therefore, what forms of life and labour count as urban.

What Lies Ahead

We should engage consciously with colonial, postcolonial, decolonial, and neoliberal legacies to recognise how they continue to inhabit the moral and spatial logics of our cities. The lives of people and planning today is not free of these inheritances.

We should demand that planners and researchers accept a slower temporality that values dwelling, storytelling, and hesitation as much as execution. It is a temporal scale that does not see local knowledge systems to be extracted but sees communities as their own authors, writing their urban future -- and in the process, expanding the grammar of planning.

The city’s commons are never neutral grounds. The commons are saturated with the hierarchies that have structured Indian social life. The neoliberal city reproduces these boundaries through the aesthetics of order and aspiration. Therefore, civility just becomes a new vocabulary for exclusion, and communing must re-politicise civility to ask whose comfort defines public order, whose bodies can rest and whose presence is rendered out of place.

This brings us to the question of citizenship, where looking at cities through their commons shows claim-making in its visible forms. Therefore, commons present a chance to have an urban future through a process of belonging -- and are beginnings of a more just and plural urban future.

(The writer is a research scholar. Views are personal.)