Multispecies Commoning

This walk embarked from the social centre and moved in broad strokes through the surrounding area passing by construction sites, urban forests, public parks, housing developments, playgrounds and the suburbs. The event was inspired by the rich history of Sweden’s People’s Houses (Folkets Hus) and People’s Parks (Folkets Parker) as spaces for political dissent, rest, commoning and land stewardship. Throughout the walk, two guest facilitators led site-specific scores, storytelling circles and discussions that prompted participants to reflect on these hybrid spaces and artificial landscapes.

By walking and consciously taking note of the lives surrounding the social centre, Multispecies Commoning wanted to ‘open up’ the walls of Medborgarhus to include in our understanding of a community the more-than-humans that live with us and invite the locals participating to consider who is involved or not, and why, in the decisions around space, home, access and commons in this specific area of Stockholm.

The aim of Multispecies Commoning was to raise awareness about how housing insecurity and loss of natural habitats are intertwined by intra- and interspecies hierarchies and inequalities, and consider how and why multispecies ecosystems and interspecies relations could be part of just and regenerative urban planning.

Alen Ksoll works as an educator, librarian, and researcher working with transformative pedagogies, speculative fiction, queer futures, and multi-species ecologies. In developing public programs and holding spaces for knowledge exchange, he proposes workshops, exercises, and games experimenting with models of being together otherwise. In tandem with Rosa Paardenkooper, he runs School in Common, an ecosystem of projects, a collective of collectives, and a gathering of more-than-human friends based in Stockholm. School in Common works around spaces for learning, dreaming, imagining, and being in common, fostering collaboration, mutual recognition, and support.

Helen Runting is an urban planner and architectural theorist. She is a founding partner in the Stockholm-based architecture office Secretary, a practice dedicated to the capacity of architecture to facilitate a dignified life at the scale of the population. Helen engages in research and theory writing from the space of practice, often through self-initiated, collaborative projects. Current research interests include housing as infrastructure, the logics and aesthetics of real estate, and the spatial implications of the concept of wellness. From the essays that comprised her PhD, Architectures of the Unbuilt Environment (KTH, 2018) to Secretary’s award-winning 14 495 Flats: A Metabolist’s Guide to New Stockholm (Secretary, 2021), her work invokes affirmative notions of biopolitics and regulation in order to insist that another, more supportive, (built) environment is possible.