David Harvey is a renowned urban geographer who has written extensively on urbanisation and social justice. He has explored the history of neoliberalism and the very practical issues of organising revolutionary politics.

Recently at Teatro Valle Occupato in Rome, we spoke with David Harvey about the ECF Princess Margriet Award laureates, Teatro Valle Occupato and Teodor Celakoski and how their cultural activism engages different citizens and communities in reclaiming the public sphere as a space of commons.

The commons is a concept for describing sustainable, dynamic sets of social co-operation that manage material (water, nutrition, energy) or immaterial (knowledge, language, digital, cultural) resources. In Harvey’s view, the laureates present exciting examples of cultural movements that produce new spaces of commoning: encounters that make room for new meanings, new collective experiences that explore the possibility of developing a different kind of world, different forms of value to those given in the monetary calculus.

The ECF Princess Margriet Award is an annual award given to European artists and thinkers whose work shows the potential of culture for an inclusive Europe. Award Laureates are change-makers who produce an exceptional work in highly divergent fields including the performing and visual arts, literature, music, film, cultural activism and media culture.

The European Cultural Foundation is delighted to announce the Sixth ECF Princess Margriet Award laureates for 2014 – Teatro Valle Occupato from Rome and Teodor Celakoski from Zagreb. They will be presented with their awards in Centre for Fine Arts BOZAR in Brussels on the 18 March 2014.