Introduction to the themed section: ‘commoning the future’: sustaining and contesting the public good in North Africa

Résumé En

Struggles over housing, land, and forms of mobility have been mainstays of both academic and popular coverage of North Africa in recent decades. As we firmly enter a period of accelerating crises linked to global forces, it remains important to document and reflect on how these issues are played out through local protests and debates over public goods and shared futures in the region. As such, this issue brings renewed attention to existing and emerging practices, ideas, spaces, and actors involved in shaping and contesting both old and new commons, and different understandings of the public good. Our goal is to better attune scholarly attention to emerging social dynamics and political agendas, especially in the aftermath of stalled revolutions and the ongoing privatization of space across the Maghreb region. Grounded in long-term, qualitative research conducted in Morocco by a combination of early career and established scholars, this collection of articles address how ‘commoning’ practices are enacted, contested, or recuperated and mobilized by various actors at different scales. The territorial manifestations, social entanglements, and discursive production of commons and collectivities emerge as ongoing processes crucial to both the reproduction as well as contestation of social orders and trans-local planning and governance regimes. The contributions gathered here are the outcome of conversations and work presented in November 2018 during the symposium Urban Space and the Common Good organized by the guest editors at the Netherlands Institute in Morocco (NIMAR), with the collaboration of the Leiden University Center for Islam and Society (LUCIS).