Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market Edited By Mary Dellenbaugh, Markus Kip, Majken Bieniok, Agnes Katharina Müller and Martin Schwegmann Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag AG, 2015. ISBN: 978–3–03821-495-3; £22.99 (pbk

SOCIAL POLICY & ADMINISTRATION, VOL. 50, NO. 7, DECEMBER 2016 However, Dean recognizes that social rights – whether for established citizens or recent migrants – will for the most part continue to be framed in a national context. Here constitutional frameworks, and written constitutions (lacking in the UK context) are needed to protect social rights – along with the relevant monitoring bodies. These national frameworks may take different forms, for example Social Charter, Bill of Rights and Human Rights Commissions – and Guy Standing’s notion of ‘occupational citizenship’ rights or the more recently proposed ‘charter for the precariat’ are all vehicles for promoting rights in the new global order. Even with such national/international frameworks in place, however, it is usually down to the determination of welfare rights workers and legal experts that we have to thank for advancing social rights in our societies, ‘social legislation is but the means, not an end’ as Dean reminds us (p. 159). With growing political debate over income rights (‘citizen’s income’, ‘basic income’, ‘participation income’, etc.), I would have liked to have seen more discussion of these concepts and the related philosophical debates and the references underpinning them: do those who spend their days surfing have a right to be fed or only those who make a social contribution? That said, Dean’s new book offers an accessible introduction to rights-based approaches in social policy, and students of social policy may want to add this book to their reading lists. Christopher Deeming, University of Strathclyde REVIEWS Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market EDITED BY MARY DELLENBAUGH, MARKUS KIP, MAJKEN BIENIOK, AGNES KATHARINA MÜLLER AND MARTIN SCHWEGMANN Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag AG, 2015. ISBN: 978–3–03821-495-3; £22.99 (pbk). Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market was conceived at a time when the urban commons urgently presented itself as a lens through which the zeitgeist of crisis, resistance and solidarity could be read, which took on global reach through the crash of the capitalist financial banking system and the imaginary stoked by social and political movements and collectives from the Arab Spring to Occupy, ‘right to the city’ movements and beyond. This collection of short essays accommodates and investigates a range of theoretical, thematic and geographical perspectives and reflections on urban commons and commoning, and seeks to explore how ‘the historically and geographically specific urban condition has shaped the experience, development, and preservation of commons’ (p. 13) at the level of everyday social 878 © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd SOCIAL POLICY & ADMINISTRATION, VOL. 50, NO. 7, DECEMBER 2016 production and collective appropriation. It brings together research from a wide range of traditions and spatial settings and, in sum, manages to pool and pull a considerable amount of the sociological field into the realm of the commons and commoning. The authors highlight the weakness in the existing theory of the urban commons against increasing exploitation in and of the city shaped by demographic shifts, migration and special forms of enclosure. The book is positioned to form a critical dialogue with Elinor Ostrom’s work on ‘governing the commons’ and the normative categories of Community (second part), Institutions (third part) and Resources (fourth part) which still holds a prominent position in commons research. Despite its compact and succinct style and format, it nevertheless formulates a sensitive and astute framework with regards to spatial considerations and the work of Henri Lefebvre in particular, and subscribes to an ontological openness urgently necessary if ‘the urban’ and new urban commons are to hold any significant meaning in future research and therefore avoids proffering prescriptive structuralist and descriptive teleological arguments and cases. The scene is set in a transformational Berlin before venturing out to the communities of Begum Bazaar in Hyderabad, India, a housing collective in South Korea, and homeless tent encampments in the USA, followed by institutional considerations in the production of public spaces and commons in Chile, alternative agency via Costa Rica, contesting urban planning in Berlin and insurgent acts of Being-in-Common regarding the Spanish housing situation. Through an internal dialogue informed by the critical urban perspectives in the first part, the cases guide us to reflect on the nuances and complexities in reproaching the emancipatory potential of spatial appropriation and reproduction. The examples detail the numerous and contigent practices and mechanisms of appropriating physical space. It is here that laws and regulations (e.g. state space) intersect with cultural practices and the daily rhythms of negotiation and everyday micro-practices, which in the Indian case, in particular, seeks to maximize the use value of the street, whilst still excluding certain groups. The housing experiences, for example, reveal a dynamic social relationship that is configured and reconfigured; an immaterial terrain of affect, knowledge and language, and ultimately, conceiving of individuals as resources and the commons as continually ‘becoming’ if they are to exist at all. The final part considers the future for decommodified and self-organized housing in German-speaking Europe, reconfiguring energy provision back in Berlin, and, strikingly, in place of a typical conclusion, the closing contribution to the urban commons discourse develops a Marxian critic of the capitalist city to ‘reclaim the past’ and the social surplus of today as a product of the historical accumulation of yesterday’s dead labour. We are warned that urban commons ‘when conceived as ends in themselves, [...] risk becoming a sideshow to the struggle demanded by the concept that animated them’. It serves to question the dominant battling tone of much of the language produced around urban commons and the failures of the past when, as several of the cases show, many people are more concerned with ‘finding reprieve in the cracks opened by neoliberalism’s overreach’, © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 879 SOCIAL POLICY & ADMINISTRATION, VOL. 50, NO. 7, DECEMBER 2016 and the most basic survival, than instigating direct action and conflict with power. This volume shows how elastic, ambiguous and unsatisfactory notions of the commons and commoning have become today. The case selection is valuable in challenging the current knowledge production on urban commons, not through comparison per se, but rather, through specific historicized accounts of contemporary ‘common’ moments in different contexts, raising new questions and opening up the spatial-social field for further research beyond the themes covered here. Ryan Jepson, University of Vienna REVIEWS Women Rough Sleepers in Europe: Homelessness and Victims of Domestic Abuse BY KATE MOSS AND PARAMJIT SINGH Bristol: Policy Press, 2015. ISBN: 978–1–4473-1709-8, £70.00 (hbk). Based on data collected from a two-year EU-funded project ‘Daphne’, Women Rough Sleepers in Europe modestly attempts to fill the literary void on research into gendered issues of homelessness, aiming to equip homeless service-providers and challenge policymakers. Split into seven chapters, the book examines the scope of women rough sleepers in four European countries: the UK, Hungary, Spain and Sweden, and results are presented in a comparative format – with both qualitative and quantitative data, and policy information drawn from small sample sizes within each country. Following a clarification of the European definition of homelessness, Moss and Singh seek to explore three distinct areas of women’s homelessness: the causal mechanisms of homelessness (why?); specific experiences of women on the street (what?); and the impact this has on their access to services (how?). They utilize data from the case countries to demonstrate the homogenous nature of homeless service provision, and the resulting neglect of specific gendered issues. Such issues discussed include women’s ‘invisible’ occupation of public and private spatial boundaries, their societal and legal responsibilities regarding both childcare and ‘homemaking’, and the prevalence of interpersonal and structural violence within homeless women’s lives. This raises many complex and important questions throughout the text which would, at times, benefit from a deeper exploration. In Chapter 3, Moss and Singh include a brief literature review for each case country which suitably frames their subsequent qualitative and quantitative data, and further highlights the need for more research into their chosen topic, due to the overall lack of reported literature in all four European 880 © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd