We revisit the urban margins by recasting service hubs—conspicuous clusters of helping agencies in inner-city locales, designed to serve vulnerable populations—as both spaces of survival but potentially transformative, emerging as so-called cracks in the city. We undertake this recasting using the concept of the commons. Using case studies in London, Miami, and Osaka, we focus on the everyday practices of commoning and the role that service hubs play in the city as spaces of sustenance, care, and solidarity. The results are mixed: Service hubs enabled unfettered survival and operated largely outside of capitalism, ensuring that some spaces in the city remain decommodified and at the margins. The service hubs were also limited in their transformational capacity, however. These results contribute to a sense of commons at the margins, rethinking them more as an edge between capitalism and an existence separate from it, rather than presenting them as exclusively marginal in the sense of subordinated, excluded, and bordered.

我们重新审视城市边缘，重新塑造服务中心——位于市中心地区的显眼帮助机构集群，旨在为弱势群体提供服务——既是生存空间，又可能具有变革性，成为所谓的城市裂缝。我们使用公地的概念进行这种重铸。通过伦敦、迈阿密和大阪的案例研究，我们专注于公共共享的日常实践以及服务中心在城市中作为维持生计、关怀和团结的空间所扮演的角色。结果喜忧参半：服务中心实现了无拘无束的生存，并在很大程度上在资本主义之外运作，确保城市中的一些空间保持非商品化并处于边缘。然而，服务中心的转型能力也有限。这些结果有助于感知边缘的公地，将它们更多地重新思考为资本主义和与之分离的存在之间的边缘，而不是在从属、被排斥和边缘化的意义上将它们呈现为完全边缘。