Held in common: science fiction and collective spaces

The world is on fire and our walls do not shelter us. As an architect confronted by the crises of architectural futures this author turns to the spaces of science fiction (sf) to act as critical companions, those who imagine alongside us in sf CoFuture narratives “of solidarities for possible futures” (Chattopadhyay 2020:339). This article is impelled by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M-Archive (2018) to address architecture’s complicity in injustice and iniquity, and guided by sf narratives that depict alternative futures of common space: Harry Josephine Giles’ Deep Wheel Orcadia (2021); M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone (2022); Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing (1994) and Becky Chamber’s Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018). These imagined worlds are held alongside spatial theory, architectural practice, and acts of collaborative making to consider the commons as a site of collective possibility. In 2023 these fictions were shared in two public workshops, written onto pieces of fabric alongside scholarly works and personal experiences, and combined to create a patchwork quilt. This quilt is both source and method for this article, an act of collective making used to explore the commons as place and practice. Similarly, each of the article’s four sections draws together fiction, making, theory and practice to address an interlinked aspect of the commons: acts of commoning; common land; commoner; and commonwealth. Throughout, it extols the possibility of sf as a site of collective action, potent and present, through which we might imagine and construct architectural CoFutures.