Forming Life in Common

Commoning is the act of sharing and managing resources—cultural and natural—with minimal reliance on the market or state, and where each stakeholder has an equal interest. User-managed governance of the environments we inhabit—from land ownership, to buildings, to domestic spaces—enables residents to be key agents in how resources are distributed, valued, and maintained. This lecture will focus on a series of design experiments by THE OPEN WORKSHOP that explore a range of commons—both in type and scale—that use architecture to catalyze and frame the mechanisms for commoning.

Biography

Neeraj Bhatia
California College of the Arts, Professor
THE OPEN WORKSHOP, Founder

Neeraj Bhatia is a licensed architect and urban designer whose work resides at the intersection of politics, housing, infrastructure, and urbanism. He is a Full Professor at the California College of the Arts where he also directs the urbanism research lab, The Urban Works Agency. Bhatia has also held teaching positions at Columbia GSAPP, Harvard GSD, UC Berkeley, Cornell University, and Rice University.

Neeraj is principal of THE OPEN WORKSHOP, a transcalar design-research office examining the negotiation between architecture and its territorial environment. Select distinctions include the Emerging Voices Award (2024), Canadian Professional Prix de Rome (2019), the Architectural League Young Architects Prize (2016), and the Emerging Leaders Award from Design Intelligence (2016). THE OPEN WORKSHOP’s design-research has been commissioned by the Seoul Biennale, Venice Biennale, Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among other venues.

Bhatia is co-editor of books Architecture Beyond Extraction (JAE 79:1), Bracket [Takes Action], The Petropolis of Tomorrow, Bracket [Goes Soft], Arium: Weather + Architecture, and author of New Investigations in Collective Form and Pamphlet Architecture 30: Coupling — Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism.