Contested Commoning: Urban Fishing Spaces and Community Wellbeing

This paper analyzes how the more-than-human elements and relationships of urban fishing—piers, bridges, fish, social interactions—constitute spaces that offer the possibility of affecting community wellbeing. In particular, it applies theories of commoning to questions of how urban fishing spaces might affect the social and material dimensions of wellbeing. The paper argues that approaching ideas of community wellbeing from a commoning perspective enables deeper analysis of the ‘messiness’ and contradictions that can arise in accounting for the complex socio-natural interactions that affect wellbeing. The paper examines these questions via a case study of urban fishing in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. Employing survey, interview, and field research, the paper asks how urban fishing spaces support processes of commoning that could lead to increases in wellbeing, while also highlighting where disruptions in the ecological, physical, or social spaces involved in commoning might decrease wellbeing. The paper finds evidence that commoning can increase community wellbeing in concrete ways (e.g., by contributing to collective food security, knowledge-sharing, exposure to economic and racial diversity, and shared experiences), but that these processes and infrastructures are simultaneously precarious and subject to social strife, changes in legality, and ecological contamination which can decrease wellbeing. The paper suggests that particularly for geographies of urban wellbeing, adopting a commoning lens is useful for better parsing how the elements of and challenges to wellbeing are intertwined, and where possibilities might exist for addressing these challenges. The paper contributes to theoretical discussions about the characteristics of commoning, links between commoning and socionatural wellbeing, and shifting understandings of urban space and infrastructures of care.