Commoning through Disaster: Some Notes from the Field of the Flooded Suburbs of Valencia

Disasters can bring overwhelming emotions and ineptitude to those who suffer from them. During a brief stay as a volunteer in Valencia’s flooded suburbs after the DANA ( depresión aislada en niveles altos , or in English, isolated depression in upper levels) in November 2024, I experienced those overwhelming emotions and its consequences on me and my ability to be effective in helping local people. Although disasters are mainly moments of despair and loss, fieldwork experiences through disaster assess that commoning processes can help overcoming those feelings and emotions. Following Armiero’s work on structural wasting relationships and other critical essays on disaster communism, this contribution focuses on how commoning processes can contribute to disassembling day-to-day injustices and turn crises like floods into opportunities for imagining more just socioecological relationships. Moreover, bearing in mind climate change (CC) as an evermore contemporary variable, this contribution suggests that climatic disasters are always a combination of climatic and sociopolitical variables. Consequences of disasters are not equally endured by populations. Unjust structural conditions (e.g., economic, social) expose lower classes to disaster more than others. Armiero’s wasting relationships are, along with CC, the main cause of losses and destruction in disasters, creating people and places that are more exposed to disaster. On that note, this text finds that commoning also represents a way of addressing extreme climatic events, as its main characteristic is the abolition of those wasting relationships that expose commoners to disaster, along with the creation of new and more just commoning relationships.