The Right to the Urban Market: Al-Wehdat Architecture of Compromise Between Commoning, Relationality, and Re-Enchantment

Al-Wehdat open market, originating in a mid-20th-century Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, has evolved into a vital urban common and a paradigmatic case of Everyday Architecture of Compromise. It demonstrates significant economic, social, political, and cultural dynamism, leveraging the relational and solidary capacities of a disenfranchised migrant community to build resilience and assert their Right to the (negated) City. This paper examines how the market’s mode of production responds to intersecting geopolitical, economic, and democratic crises. Employing a constructivist, conjunctural urbanism approach and scene-based analysis, we situate Al-Wehdat market within discourses on urban commons and relationality. Our theoretical framework draws on Hannah Arendt, Gilbert Simondon, and Ash Amin to reconceptualise the Right to the City as the Right to the Open Urban Market. We foreground customary territorial communing as a counterforce to corporative commodification, as essential in the struggle for urban justice, differential individuation, and immanent re-enchantment. Findings, presented through vivid market scenes, show how everyday interactions, creative material arrangements, and rich collaborative imagination sustain these commons. Thematic analysis identifies patterns in community relations, materiality, infrastructure, and acts of repair that sustain the regenerative capacity of key everyday relational, political, techno-material and convivial practices. We conclude by advocating for community empowerment policies that recognise the centrality of everyday relational individuation in shaping inclusive cities amidst polycrisis in the Global South.