The City as a Commons - A Policy Reader (original) (raw)
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The City as Commons: a Policy Reader
Teppo Eskelinen, Anthony Paul, jose ramos, Monica Bernardi, Timothy E Dolan, Christine McDougall, Arlene Goldbard, Julian Waters-Lynch, Dr.Marta Botta, Michael Linton, Neal Gorenflo, Nathan Schneider, Scott Boylston
Brings together 34 contributions which explore policy options and strategies for creating cities as commons - common pool resources - for urban development and transformation. Each contribution explores a different aspect of commoning a city and proposes strategies and provides policy recommendations based on existing projects around the world. Topics include: Design and the City Commons Active Transit & City Commons: Putting People Back into the City & the City Back into Place Repurposing Public Spaces in a City as a Commons: the Library . Heritage and City Commons Sharing Cities: An Asset-based Approach to the Urban Commons Community Currencies and City Commons Time Banks and City Commoning Construction Waste Transformation and City Commons Platform Cooperatives for Democratic Cities Coworking: Challenges and Opportunities for a Prosperous and Fair New Economy Orchards and the City as a Commons Cosmo-localism and Urban Commoning City Commons and Energy Demand It’s Time to Create Chambers of Commons Sharing Cities: Governing the City as Commons Devolved Commons Governance for Cities Anticipatory Governance and the City as a Commons A Civic Union Tax Reform for a Commons-based City Tax Delinquent Private Property and City Commons Community Land Trusts The City as a Regional Commons Open Data and City Commons Human Service Directory Data as a Commons The Unseen City: Commons Oriented Cities and the Commons Beyond Culture as Commons Ubuntu as a Primer for City Commons Cultural Intelligence (CQ) and the City as Commons Bologna Celebrates One Year of a Bold Experiment in Urban Commoning Milano, New Practices to Booster Social Innovation The Emergence of Assemblies of the Commons History and Evolution of the Chamber of Commons Idea Big Blue Sky: Re-igniting the Art of Citizenship Zaragoza Activa, an Ecosystem of Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation and Creativity, in an Old Sugar Factory
As rapid urbanization intensifies around the world, so do contestations over how city space is utilized and for whose benefit urban revitalization is undertaken. The most prominent sites of this contestation are efforts by city residents to claim important urban goods—open squares, parks, abandoned or underutilized buildings, vacant lots, cultural institutions, streets and other urban infrastructure—as collective, or shared, resources of urban communities. The assertion of a common stake or interest in resources shared with others is a way of resisting the privatization and/or commodification of these resources. We situate these claims within an emerging “urban commons” framework embraced by progressive reformers and scholars across multiple disciplines. The urban commons framework has the potential to provide a discourse, and set of tools, for the development of revitalized and inclusive cities. Yet, scholars have failed to fully develop the concept of the “urban commons,” limiting its utility to policymakers. In this article, we offer a pluralistic account of the urban commons, including the idea of the city itself as a commons. We find that, as a descriptive matter, the characteristics of some shared urban resources mimic open-access, depletable resources that require a governance or management regime to protect them in a congested and rivalrous urban environment. For other kinds of resources in dispute, the language and framework of the commons operates as a normative claim to open up access of an otherwise closed or limited access good. This latter claim resonates with the social obligation norm in property law identified by progressive property scholars and reflected in some doctrines which recognize that private ownership rights must sometimes yield to the common good or community interest. Ultimately, however, the urban commons framework is more than a legal tool to make proprietary claims on particular urban goods and resources. Rather, we argue that the utility of the commons framework is to raise the question of how best to manage, or govern, shared or common resources. The literature on the commons suggests alternatives beyond privatization of common resources or monopolistic public regulatory control over them. We propose that the collaborative and polycentric governance strategies already being employed to manage some natural and urban common resources can be scaled up to the city level to guide decisions about how city space and common goods are used, who has access to them, and how they are shared among a diverse population. We explore what it might look like to manage the city as a commons by describing two evolving models of what we call “urban collaborative governance”: the sharing city and the collaborative city.
Contents: 1. Preface. 2. The goods shared care and urban common services. 3. The urban welfare. 4. The principle of " horizontal subsidiarity " as the cornerstone of a new urban welfare. 5. The civic care of urban spaces. 6. The services of common interest. 7. Conclusions: need for direction for the social innovation and the urban regeneration.
From Urban Commons to commoning as Social Practice
Cultural Commons and Urban Dynamics A Multidisciplinary Perspective, 2020
Today, cities are being intensively reshaped by unexpected dynamics. The rise and growth of the digital economy have fundamentally changed the relationship between the urban fabric and its resident community, overcoming the conventional hierarchy based on production priorities. Moreover, contemporary society discovers new labour conditions and ways of satisfying needs and desires by developing new synergies and links. This book examines cultural and urban commons from a multidisciplinary perspective. Economists, architects, urban planners, sociologists, designers, political scientists, and artists explore the impact and implications of cultural commons on urban change. The contributions discuss both cases of successful urban participation and cases of strong social conflict, while also addressing a host of institutional contradictions and dilemmas. The first part of the book examines urban commons in response to institutional constraints from a theoretical point of view. The second and third parts apply the theories to case studies and discuss various practices of sustainable planning and re-appropriation in the urban context. In closing, the fourth part develops a new urban agenda as artists imagine it. This book will appeal to scholars interested in the social, economic and institutional implications of cultural and urban commons, and provide useful insights and tools to help local governments and policymakers manage social, cultural and economic change.
Urban Commons in the Neoliberal Global Order: Commoning as Counteraction
2016
The proposition of this paper presents Urban Commoning as a counteraction to the current global trend of capitalism and its neo-liberal urbanism. In the face of radical dispossession and marginalisation that is accompanying global urbanisation, we are experiencing the negative logic of 'privatisation' with its public appropriations of exclusionary and dispossessive 'fencing off' of 'new urban enclosures'. The resultant calls to replace the extractive and exclusionary logic of the city with a generative and inclusive ordering has been responded to in the notion of the commons and complementary practices of commoning as counter to this conflict. The urban commons is posited as a means of transforming the urban. By expanding the notion of the commons a new inclusiveness and normative approach can be established. However, in order to understand the commons as a possible just and inclusive urban order, we view it as inhabiting the intermediate space between imposed and popular change. We attempt to excavate from real life urban commons valuable lessons from their emergence, maintenance and transference; contributing toward a new urban episteme. These explorations are grounded in the case of Cape Town, South Africa and the experience of capitalism's different phases-early colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid-demonstrating consistently reproduced patterns of spatial segregation for the vast majority of its 'non-white' population. Urban commoning has historically existed in different forms but recently found renewed emergence in response to urban enclosuring. Located within this context and re-conceptualised through a more inclusive notion of the commons, this essay identifies background details of the empirical case by describing the legacy of capitalist exclusion and enclosures in Cape Town, followed by an account of historical commoning practices in the city. The essay concludes by locating some main findings from the real life cases of emergent communing, reflecting on the transformative potential of urban commons.
Urban Commons: Building a 'Communal System' of the Future
Problemy Polityki Społecznej. Social Policy Issues, 55(4): 48–74, 2021
An increasing number of communities successfully governing urban commons could be seen as a strong move towards ‘delinking’ from homo economicus myth that still remains at the centre of the capitalist economic assumptions. This paper, theoretical in nature, presents an alternative, a preferred scenario of a future ‘communal system’ as a vision of society built on different values than homo economicus conduct, values that are distinctive for urban commons today, especially in peripheral countries. These are: responsibility, networking, cooperation, caring for others, reciprocity, self-help, continuous learning and sharing. The given three examples of urban commons: Torre David, SE VIOME and Bangkok Noi urban gardens — that illustrate such system in the present — share these values and therefore contribute to social change. Although commons are still at the margins of economic considerations, while corporations through the processes of neo-colonisation dominate the centre, a future ransformation into a ‘communal system’ is possible, as posited by the postcolonial theory and the actor-network-theory (ANT) discussed in this article. Vision of an economic system, based on the new communal myth contributes to the emerging field of postcapitalist, post-growth theories arising in the shadow of a climate catastrophe and other upcoming crises.
CoDesign, 2017
Enabling urban commons An increasing interest in commons has generated a rich literature related to co-and participatory design (PD). Besides providing examples, cases and methods, this literature often displays interpretations that are recognisably engaged and political in which commons have acquired an additional symbolic value. In some cases this symbolic value propels more ambitious narratives in which other, post-industrial/postcollapse futures or utopian societal forms are prototyped or infrastructured. Although this literature highlights an important connection between collaborative design and collaborative governance, we hold that the conception of commons underpinning some of these efforts is not fully relevant in contemporary urban contexts. In the following article we describe the practical and normative issues raised by transferring the concept of commons to a contemporary urban setting. We critique aspects of how the concept has been invoked in co-design and participatory design but also seek to demonstrate how it may be applied constructively, paying due attention to both network and subtractive effects of shared resources and acknowledging interrelations with the public sector.
International Conference of Urban Commons
Global Jurist, 2021
The report seeks to outline the issues the lecturers of the International Conference Held at the University of Turin on the 21st and 22nd June 2021 touched upon. The backbone of the Conference was the rise of Urban Commons describing all the different aspects it involves: the urban voids suitable to host urban commons, the participatory models shaping the governance of commoning, the consequences such phenomenon may imply, and the technological and legal infrastructure may flank and support the development of urban commoning. All this explored by referring to concrete case studies and day-to-day experiences.