Mapping political knowledge: urban commons in democratic Athens

This research will provide an interdisciplinary and innovative approach to thinking about political knowledge in democratic Athens by focusing the attention on a highly topical issue: urban commons, which can be defined as collectively shared spaces, resources, or concerns, of everyday city life. Thus, this project will contribute the first application of the theory of the urban commons to the analysis of the relationship between diverse spaces of the Athenian polis and distinct strategies of political knowledge dissemination.It will start from the premise that the debate on the commons is not unprecedented. In fact, in Thucydides account of Pericles Funeral Oration, Athens is said to be openly shared as a common resource ( ). Following this idea, and in line with recent works on the city as a commons, the first hypothesis of this project is that the Athenian polis can be considered a commons in itself, managed by ordinary citizens who participate in the daily political life of direct democracy, but also by the rest of the inhabitants, who develop practices of commoning in those spaces where people of different legal status can interact.Relying on the relevance of space in social sciences as defended by the spatial turn, the project will address a second hypothesis: (that) the urban commons of democratic Athens are essential for the dissemination of political knowledge, and that its management (including the rules for its use and the commoners who are included or excluded from it) determines the degree of diffusion of that knowledge. Thus, the main objective of this study will be to map and analyse different strategies of political knowledge management, associated with the openness or enclosure tendency of the shared spaces under consideration. As a result of examining the coexistence of opposed strategies of knowledge distribution in classical Athens, this research will offer a new perspective on dissent in democratic Athens.