golf course autogestion 

MArch Thesis 
Sept 2025-April 2026

This thesis is a provocation & critique of the hegemonic enclosure of urban space, proposing instead a counter-paradigm rooted in the political and material construction of play and worker self-managment as commons. The commons as defined here refers to collective stewardship, care, and decommodification of land in the face of the alienation and repression of the capitalist apparatus. This is operationalized by the expropriation of three private golf courses: Lambton Golf & Country Club, Rosedale Golf Club, and the Toronto Hunt Club.

This land is now governed by the fictional Worker’s Council Land Trust, which embarks on the journey of collective building and living on the land. The people of the Worker’s Council operate horizontally, building and producing and playing together outside of the capitalist framework that surrounds them. The structures shown here are the built expression of this, creating an island where their collectivity is the boundary of the sea of enclosure outside of these lands. Ultimately, this work argues that by replacing the logic of exclusion and labour-value extraction with the architecture of autogestion (worker self-management), communities can transform the city from a site of enclosure into a collective oeuvre of autonomy, mutual aid, and joy.