This issue of Making and Breaking sets out to re-imagine culture beyond individualised consumerism and personal preferences indexed to the ability to pay. Kirsten Ross recovered the idea of “communal luxury” from the shattered remains of the Paris Commune. It evoked not just collective consumption (of services or infrastructures) but the possibility of a social fabric charged with aesthetic experience, with art and beauty for the many, not for the few. Demonised and ridiculed after 1990, when creative entrepreneurship and startup culture triumphed over the supposedly grey conformity of the public sector, what happened to collective popular culture? If we are to establish art and culture as something essential to democratic citizenship and human flourishing, then we have to take the risk of re-imagining the possibilities of collective culture.

The world whose contours Fisher tries to explore in his talk is one in which the collective creation and/or enjoyment of aesthetic experiences would be at the very heart of the project of progressive politics. The sense of luxury that is being evoked here has nothing to do with individual privilege based on scarcity (I can have this because you don’t!). Rather, it is a sense of cultural abundance, of luxuriating in practices of caring, sharing and enjoying together. The reason why currently there is so little of this, Fisher argues, is not a bug in an imperfect economic system but the central feature of the political project of neoliberalism.

Kate Oakley recalls her childhood experience of growing up on Liverpool’s Anfield Road, a block away from the famous football stadium. She reflects on the phenomenon known as “three-quarter time,” i.e., “when halfway through the second half of the match the gates were open to let supporters out and, if you were close enough, and we were, you could go and watch the final quarter of the match for free.” As she beautifully shows, this memory interrupts the contemporary reality of the neoliberal everyday.

In Swampwall: Communal Luxury in Dark Matter Mode, Gregory Sholette shares the memory of his late brother Patrick, who worked in a factory in Northeast Pennsylvania, where he and his co-workers “spent their work breaks attaching newspaper clippings, snapshots, spent soda cans, industrial debris, trashed food containers and similar bits and pieces of day-to-day detritus to one wall of the plant. The question that emerges from his argument is what it would take to elevate such practices from a state of “commonplace invisibility” onto the well-lit planes of communal luxury.

Emma Webb reminds us that historically, the struggle for emancipation in all its different forms would have been unthinkable without its strong cultural dimension. Translating a powerful heritage into a highly innovative future trajectory, her contribution provides a fascinating account of an organisation that has the ambition of being on the cutting edges of contemporary art practices while being truly embedded in the local community and committed to a radically progressive political agenda.

Milan’s famous social centres, it seems, have acquired a new role as hubs in a network of progressive decommodification. Stepping into the breach left by a withdrawing welfare state, they organise practices of communal luxury that might as well turn out to be countercultural training grounds for alternative forms of urban life.

Laura Ager, Elena Boschi and Shaun Dey describe the formula of the Radical Film Network Festival/Unconference very much in terms of communal luxury: “free spaces + free films + free labour = free film culture.” One of the fascinating aspects of such an activist festival is the way it can unlock the (perhaps otherwise hidden) potential of local infrastructure by distributing its events across spaces that may otherwise not be natural partners, such as university and squats. From Ager, Boschi and Dey’s contribution, one gets a real sense of what can happen if 90 participants from all over the world descending on a city to share their passion for film in an act of genuine (non-commercial) engagement with that urban environment and its inhabitants.

Letizia Chiappini’s Collective Pleasure against Platform Dystopia opens with a sneer at the hilarious attempt of a grocery delivery platform to expand their commercial care (read: market) by offering to add a sex toy to her bag of groceries. What does it mean, Chiappini asks, that a delivery platform basically proposes to become my lover? Taking this question as her point of departure, she invites the reader on a rather intimate exploration of the intersection between urbanism, technology and (female) sexuality.

In Financing Non-Extractive Urban Planning – A Berlin Practise, Andreas Krüger shares his experience as a social entrepreneur and activist developer in the German capital. His contribution focuses on the development of Berlin’s Moritzplatz, the now famous counter-project to the corporate depredation of Potsdamer Platz, and the ongoing transformation of a derelict electric power substation in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg into an area hosting culturally driven entrepreneurs, social projects, artists and involving the local community.

The stubborn application of Australia’s model of low-density urban sprawl has led to a situation whereby the natural foundation of Shepparton’s initial welfare – the periodic flooding of the land that produces its richness and fertility – has been transformed into a natural disaster. From his current post at the Melbourne School of Design, Hill and his students now work together with locals to develop initiatives that could help turn the tide in Shepparton. While these initiatives can profit from experiences generated by the current renaissance of cooperative and communal housing in Europe, their most important source of inspiration is the knowledge of and relationship with the land cultivated by First Nations.