Redefining sharing and collaboration in contemporary urban contexts through the exploration of Grassroots Collaborative Assemblages (GRACOLAB)

• Applicant: Dr. Dimitrios Pettas
• Subject Area: Operations Management and Computer Science for Business Administration ; Human Geography
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 522024181

Since the 2010s, the notions of sharing and collaboration have re-emerged as popular buzzwords, predominately in association with digitally mediated activities in the context of large-scale corporations and post-welfare urban policies. In parallel with those developments, both longstanding and new-found grassroots initiatives and networks (e.g. co-working spaces, hacker and maker spaces, platform cooperatives, alternative consumption networks, social and solidarity economy initiatives, collaborative housing arrangements), coined grassroots collaborative assemblages (GCAs) here, have built upon - now partly digitally mediated - sharing and collaborative practices. Main rationales include alternative ways of organizing labour, welfare provision, and, more broadly, social reproduction and everyday life. GRACOLAB will focus on the landscapes of labour and housing and their transformation within GCAs. Building on a relational comparative approach and an innovative methodological toolbox, GRACOLAB will reshape old and open up new lines of research within ongoing debates about sharing and collaboration in urban social geography and urban studies, by shedding light on the practices, interactions, and transformative capacities of grassroots collaboration and their broader implications. The overarching aim of the project is to grasp and analyse the networks, operation and outreach of grassroots collaboration and the transformation of the grassroots collaborative landscape through the incorporation of digital means and practices, focusing on the spheres of both production and social reproduction. This aim will be met through i) the building of an analytical and methodological framework that will bring together the concepts of assemblage theory, diverse economies and commons theory and will enable a multidimensional delineation and analysis of grassroots collaborative networks and outreach and ii) the exploration of the commoning practices and diverse economies involved in the emergence and everyday operation of grassroots collaborative initiatives and the interactions of the latter with broader circuits and actors of the market, the state and the urban commons. A specific focus will be placed upon the role of digital mediations in the aforementioned aspects of relevant networks’ operation, focusing on the reappropriation of digital means which have up to now been used for the extraction of surplus value from sharing. The qualitative, territorial and space-transformative characteristics of relevant networks will be explored through a multi-sited, relational comparative research across the highly diversified socio-economic and cultural contexts of Athens and Berlin, adopting a combination of inductive and deductive research approaches

• DFG Programme: Research Grants