An investigation of the practice of “commoning” in urban housing and its necessity for challenging economic injustice in our rapidly gentrifying cities Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource—housing—that had been used to extract profit from them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them. In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban “commoning” through a close investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism’s totalizing claims over life.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the First International Workshop on - operative Buildings (CoBuild’98) – Integrating Information, Organization, and Ar chitecture, held in Darmstadt, Germany, on February 25–26, 1998. The idea for this workshop and actually the term “cooperative building” was created during the activi ties of initiating the consortium “Workspaces of the Future” for conducting an inter disciplinary R&D program in cooperation with partners from industry. We discovered that there was no appropriate forum to present research at the intersection of informa tion technology, organizational innovation, and architecture. The theme “Integrating information, organization, and architecture” reflects the challenges resulting from current and future developments in these three areas. In the future, work and cooperation in organizations will be characterized by a degree of dynamics, flexibility, and mobility that will go far beyond many of today's develop ments and examples. The introduction of information and communication technology has already changed processes and contents of work significantly. However, the de sign of work environments, especially physical work spaces as offices and buildings, remained almost unchanged. It is time to reflect these developments in the design of equally dynamic, flexible, and mobile work environments. The papers of this volume show that this is an interdisciplinary endeavor requiring a wide range of perspectives and the utilization of results from various areas of research and practice.

This book provides a concise introduction to and overview of the growing discipline and practice of Appreciative Inquiry (AI). If you are intrigued by the prospect of mobilizing rapid, positive change with multiple stakeholders in a human system that is important to you, this book is for you.