Abstract:
In a world governed by capital relations, urban disasters have become opportunities to extend a geography of capital marked by inequality and dispossession. However, abnormal times can also be revealing times, when people start to see what was previously not visible, and question what was given. The experience of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and the rebuild that followed has seen the resurgence of grassroots communities in devastated areas across the city. One such community is Pita Kaik. Motivated by a collective conviction, that in place of economic imperatives, the needs and desires of people must be central to rebuilding, Pita Kaik engage in practices of collective labour and acts of generosity that constitute the performance of social relations premised on equality. These performances reconfigure the spaces in which they are performed into spaces in common, displacing a logic that reduces land and labour to mere exchange values. The practice of community is predicated on what Jacques Rancière identifies as the presupposition of the equal capacity and intelligence of anybody. By behaving as if equal, by speaking where they are accorded no legitimate voice, and occupying spaces they should not be, communities rearrange the borders of what is doable, sayable and possible within the situation of disaster. Through their narratives on community, nature and speaking, Pita Kaik residents collectively construct a commonsense that runs counter to capitalist logic, grounded on what can be called a communism of intelligences. It is argued that this dual practice of community can be defined according to Rancière’s conception of logical revolt. Revolt appears in the function of community as that which makes sensible the part of those excluded from the rebuild process, dividing the social whole as it supplements it. Simultaneously the practice of the collective intelligence of anybody transcends geographical particularities and temporalities, and this is the logic upon which the revolt of the community of equals is premised. The practice of community in disaster is a practice of placing one world within another, of experimenting at the boundaries of the possible. Thus community constitutes the starting point for a new geography of emancipation.