With our project we intend to install a co-research process. We conceive it as both a theoretical practice and a political move to articulate collectively with the territories we study. We share our views on the importance of research in tune with the processes of social self-organization, so that it becomes a potentially transformative tool of the cities we inhabit.

We connect the urban commons developed in different places so that the groups and people that give them life may meet. A connection that offers a permanent transit between reflection and action, while generating propositional questions in an articulated way. Our research in action is not reduced to a singular expression of a group or a collective. We conceive it as a network of folds and interstices, grouped in order to collectively reclaim urban commons.

While facing a striking and historical land privatization of urban hills, along with a growing social control carried out by local governments over public use spaces – with which communities live –, the urgency of what is considered ‘urban commons’ should be re-visited and studied. As a starting point we mainly ask ourselves what is the power of the common in cities overwhelmed by the commodification of their spaces? What new practices of communalization arise around the defence of urban natural spaces? What are the potentialities and risks within the emergence of these practices in urban hills?

The research objective is to reflect on the hills as urban commons articulators, making visible the variety and simultaneity of social practices around them, in order to collectively re-appropriate them as natural common spaces of the city. We use participatory and audiovisual methodologies to investigate how they appropriate and construct shared narratives around the hills. Using reflective photography and testimonial content, we intend for people and organizations to be interested in reflection-action exercises and collective construction around urban hills.

We have taken the notion of common as an axis to guide our research, with special interest in its application in urban areas, aiming to move forward from a physical perspective to a space policy. The commons study addresses different disciplinary spheres, from the germinal economy contributions of Elionor Ostrom, through political philosophy with the theoretical reflection of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, to the proposals of Peter Linebaught from his historical perspective. However, we commit to a relational view of two activist and academic referents, David Harvey from geography and Stavros Stavrides from architecture. These authors, in their respective books: “Ciudades rebeldes”, (2013) y “Common Space: The City as Commons”, (2016), suggest a reading in which the urban commons are shared and free spaces, that they do not depend on an authority that controls them and that they are managed or claimed by a collective despite their differences.