Introduction

E.F. Schumacher’s seminal work Small Is Beautiful (1973) champions the idea of smallness and localism as the way for meaningful interactions amongst humans and the technology they use. Technology is very important after all. As Ursula Le Guin (2004) puts it, “[t]echnology is the active human interface with the material world”. With this essay we wish to briefly tell a story, inspired by this creed, of an emerging phenomenon that goes beyond the limitations of time and space and may produce a more socially viable and radically democratic life.

We want to cast a radical geographer’s eye over “cosmolocalism”. Antipode has previously published an article by Hannes Gerhardt (2019) and an interview with Michel Bauwens (Gerhardt 2020) that have touched upon “cosmolocalism”. Cosmolocalism emerges from technology initiatives that are small-scale and oriented towards addressing local problems, but simultaneously engage with globally asynchronous collaborative production through digital commoning. We thus connect such a discussion with two ongoing grassroots developments: first, a cosmolocal response to the coronavirus pandemic; and, second, an ongoing effort of French and Greek communities of small-scale farmers, activists and researchers to address their local needs.

Cosmolocalism in a Nutshell

Τhe most important means of information production – i.e. computation, communications, electronic storage and sensors – have been distributed in the population of most advanced economies as well as in parts of the emerging ones (Benkler 2006). People with access to networked computers self-organise, collaborate, and produce digital commons of knowledge, software, and design. Initiatives such as the free encyclopedia Wikipedia and myriad free and open-source software projects have exemplified digital commoning (Benkler 2006; Gerhardt 2019, 2020; Kostakis 2018).

While the first wave of digital commoning included open knowledge projects, the second wave has been moving towards open design and manufacturing (Kostakis et al. 2018). Contrary to the conventional industrial paradigm and its economies of scale, the convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing machinery (from 3D printing and CNC milling machines to low-tech tools and crafts) has been developing commons-based economies of scope (Kostakis et al. 2018). Cosmolocalism describes the processes where the design is developed and improved as a global digital commons, while the manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in check (Bauwens et al. 2019). The physical manufacturing arrangement for cosmolocalism includes makerspaces, which are small-scale community manufacturing facilities providing access to local manufacturing technologies.

Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, cosmolocalism emphasizes applications that are small-scale, decentralised, resilient and locally controlled. Cosmolocal production cases such as L’Atelier Paysan (agricultural tools), Open Bionics (robotic and bionic hands), WikiHouse (buildings) or RepRap (3D printers) demonstrate how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development.

Two Cases of Cosmolocalism

While this essay was being written in March 2020, a multitude of small distributed initiatives were being mobilised to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Individuals across the globe are coming together digitally to pool resources, design open source technological solutions for health problems, and fabricate them in local makerspaces and workshops. For example, people are experimenting with new ventilator designs and hacking existing ones, creating valves for ventilators which are out of stock, and designing and making face shields and respirators.

There are so many initiatives, in fact, that there are now attempts to aggregate and systematise the knowledge produced to avoid wasting resources on problems that have already been tackled and brainstorm new solutions collectively.[1] This unobstructed access to collaboration and co-creation allows thousands of engineers, makers, scientists and medical experts to offer their diverse insights and deliver a heretofore unseen volume of creative output. The necessary information and communication technologies were already available, but capitalism as a system did not facilitate the organisational structure required for such mass mobilisation. In response to the current crisis, an increasing number of people are working against and beyond the system.

Such initiatives can be considered as grassroots cosmolocal attempts to tackle the inability of the globalised capitalist arrangements for production and logistics to address any glitch in the system. We have been researching similar activity in various productive fields for a decade, from other medical applications, like 3D-printed prosthetic hands, to wind turbines and agricultural machines and tools (Giotitsas 2019; Kostakis et al. 2018).

The technology produced is unlike the equivalent market options or is entirely non-existent in the market. It is typically modular in design, versatile in materials, and as low-cost as possible to make reproduction easier (Kostakis 2019). Through our work we have identified a set of values present in the “technical codes” of such technology which can be distilled into the following themes: openness, sustainability and autonomy (Giotitsas 2019). It is these values that we believe lead to an alternative trajectory of technological development that assists the rise of a commons-based mode of production opposite the capitalist one. This “antipode” is made possible through the great capacity for collaboration and networking that its configuration offers.

Allow us to elaborate via an example. In the context of our research we have helped mobilise a pilot initiative in Greece that has been creating a community of farmers, designers and fabricators that helps address issues faced by the local farmers. This pilot, named Tzoumakers, has been greatly inspired by similar initiatives elsewhere, primarily by L’Atelier Paysan in France. The local community benefits from the technological prowess that the French community has achieved, which offers not only certain technological tools but also through them the commitment for regenerative agricultural practices, the communal utilisation of the tools, and an enhanced capacity to maintain and repair. At the same time, these tools are adapted to local needs and potential modifications along with local insights may be sent back to those that initially conceived them. This creates flows of knowledge and know-how but also ideas and values, whilst cultivating a sense of solidarity and conviviality.

Instead of Conclusions, a Call to Arms

We are not geographers. However, the implications of cosmolocalism for geography studies are evident. The spatial and cultural specificities of cosmolocalism need to be studied in depth. This type of study would go beyond critique and suggest a potentially unifying element for the various kindred visions that lack a structural element. The contributors (and readership) are ideally suited to the task of critically examining the cosmolocalism phenomenon and contributing to the idea of scaling-wide, in the context of an open and diverse network, instead of scaling-up.

Cosmolocal initiatives may form a global counter-power through commoning. Considering the current situation we find ourselves in as a species, where we have to haphazardly re-organise entire social structures to accommodate the appearance of a “mere” virus, not to mention climate change, it is blatantly obvious that radical change is required to tackle the massive hurdles to come. Cosmolocalism may point a way forward towards that change.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant no. 802512). The photos were captured by Nicolas Garnier in the Tzoumakers makerspace.

Endnote

[1] Volunteers created the following editable webpage where, at the time of writing, more than 1,500 commons-based initiatives against the ongoing pandemic have been documented: https://airtable.com/shrPm5L5I76Djdu9B/tbl6pY6HtSZvSE6rJ/viwbIjyehBIoKYYt1?blocks=bipjdZOhKwkQnH1tV (last accessed 27 March 2020)

References

Bauwens M, Kostakis V and Pazaitis A (2019) Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto. London: University of Westminster Press

Benkler Y (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press

Gerhardt H (2019) Engaging the non-flat world: Anarchism and the promise of a post-capitalist collaborative commons. Antipode DOI:10.1111/anti.12554

Gerhardt H (2020) A commons-based peer to peer path to post-capitalism: An interview with Michel Bauwens. AntipodeOnline.org 19 February https://antipodeonline.org/2020/02/19/interview-with-michel-bauwens/ (last accessed 27 March 2020)

Giotitsas C (2019) Open Source Agriculture: Grassroots Technology in the Digital Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Kostakis V (2018) In defense of digital commoning. Organization 25(6):812-818

Kostakis V (2019) How to reap the benefits of the “digital revolution”? Modularity and the commons. Halduskultuur: The Estonian Journal of Administrative Culture and Digital Governance 20(1):4-19

Kostakis V, Latoufis K, Liarokapis M and Bauwens M (2018) The convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing from a degrowth perspective: Two illustrative cases. Journal of Cleaner Production 197(2):1684-1693

Le Guin U K (2004) A rant about “technology”. http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-Technology.html (last accessed 27 March 2020)

Schumacher E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered. New York: Harper & Row

The post Small and local are not only beautiful; they can be powerful appeared first on P2P Foundation.

L’Atelier Paysan is French non profit cooperative. We started in 2009 in South of France as project with a group of organic farmers dealing with a new global appropriation of farm technology.

Based on the principle that farmers are themselves innovators, we have been collaboratively developing methods and practices to reclaim farming skills, achieve self-sufficiency and a technical sovereignty in relation to the tools and machinery used in organic farming.

Technical Sovereignty

Our goal is to make farmers imagine, and collectively create, adequate equipment and the means of production on the farm. This is in contrast to a trajectory of over-investment, over-indebtedness and over-sizing.

We believe we can make technical choices and invent sophisticated low tech solutions. We don’t want to be overwhelmed by trendy, plug-and-play and miraculous high-tech tools that will only make us more dependent, will be more intrusive and less controllable.

In 2011, we set ourselves up as a staffed organisation working to promote farm-based inventions. Our aim was to collectively develop new technological solutions adapted to small-scale farming, and to make these skills and ideas widely available through courses and educational materials.

We have also been offering resources and guidance to farmer-driven projects involving the building or renovation of agricultural buildings.

We have five trucks equipped with the machinery and materials we need to run about 80 practical training courses on farms and workshops across France per year.

More than 2.000 farmers have participated in our workshops in six years. We provide advice and guidance for small-scale farmers on agricultural tools tailored to their needs, and accompany them through the trials and tribulations of their farming journey, individually or collectively, whatever their area of production – be it no till, direct seeding, processing tools, tractor, horse or hand power.

The development of tools and self-built machinery adapted to small-scale farming is a technological, economic and cultural instrument which has been little explored within agricultural development in France, although it can provide a significant impact on the growth of organic farming and contribute to improving organic farming practices.

The P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens interviews Julien Reynier and Fabrice Clerc from L’Atelier Paysan

L’Atelier Paysan is a French cooperative that works with farmers to design machines and buildings adapted to the specific practices of small farm agroecology. In addition to distributing free plans on its website, L’Atelier Paysan organizes winter self-help training sessions, during which farmers train in metalworking and build tools which they can then use on their own farms. L’Atelier Paysan works to develop the technological sovereignty of farmers by helping them to become more autonomous through learning and regain knowledge and skills.

In market gardening, crops are grown on beds formed from long strips of land. Generally, little or no attention is paid to ground compaction by tractor wheels. In subsequent years, farmers will then try to grow on these tracks. The idea of permanent, “ridged” beds is to form perennial growing beds so the tractor wheels always run in the same place. Tools are needed to form these ridged beds, which allow crops to have superior moisture retention and drainage, and to warm up better in the sun.

Michel Bauwens: What was the origin of L’Atelier Paysan project?

Julien and Fabrice: The project was born in 2009 after a meeting between Joseph Templier, an organic market gardener from GAEC “Les Jardins du Temple” in Isère (south-eastern France, near the Alps), and Fabrice Clerc, then a technician with ADABio, the local organic agriculture development association. ADABio was created in 1984 to help improve practices, find resources, and share knowledge, among other things.

Joseph and his colleagues used tools on the farm that are very relevant to the soil, especially adapted to an innovative cultural technique called “permanent beds”. Many young farmers came to train in the techniques, the system and the organization of the “Jardins du Temple” and then to practice them on their own farms and projects. At the same time, Fabrice went to many farms in the Rhone Alps to collect and disseminate knowledge and agrarian know-how. Fabrice and Joseph’s idea was to widely publicise the innovative tools used on this farm, which were crafted and assembled from recovered materials and refurbished old tools. Some standardization was necessary first, in order to be able to publish plans for building the tools from parts and accessories that can be found at any hardware store.

Your approach seems very pragmatic. Yet when I read through your website, it is also a very thoughtful approach (philosophical and political). How did you move from one approach to another?

We have just put into words what is happening. A number of farmers in the Alps independently designed and built their own machines, adapted to their own needs. We have gathered and compiled all this into a guide. In the process of constructing this guide, it seemed useful to formalise our approach: first, to take an inventory of innovations on the ground, then to answer the question “what is the meaning of all this?” Why all these bottom-up innovations, which were traditionally outsourced to the equipment manufacturing industry. So, why was the farming world excluded from the design process? Whereas the farmer and the artisan of the village once built the machines needed, now farmers have disappeared from the chain of innovation.

It is not only in the agricultural sector that this has happened: it’s possible to build bridges with changes in other areas such as shared self-build community workshops, and to think about Do It Yourself from the viewpoint of human/social (re)construction. For example, in Grenoble, there are about ten woodworking workshops with available machines and tools, and self-renovation housing initiatives. They are important factors for emancipation, inclusion and social reintegration. For the last 6 or 7 years, we have been thinking a lot about these issues. We don’t want to just make machines. It is a total experience that consists of thinking about daily life and of the political approach it requires.

Current political debate reflects a very strong social demand on the ground. The guide to self-construction is the first book we published in 2012. This is the sum of the first field census of sixteen machines adapted to organic market gardening. These machines, which are low tech (in construction and design) call for a lot of craft know-how. They do not suffer in comparison with high-tech machines. Our machines are three to four times cheaper for an efficiency equal or superior to those of the trade. Why is this search for autonomy not more valued? This is a question of the technological sovereignty of farmers. It is something that is coming back into fashion, taken up by a militant farming community.

The word “farmer” was, until the 1980s, a word used to denigrate. Today, on the contrary, it means someone who is not only a cultivator of agricultural produce but part of a terroir, connected to an ecosystem and a social life. The word “farmer” relates to the invention of a specialized, segmented profession. Today they are even called “producer”, “operator”, or “Chief Operating Officer”. The logic of industrialists and economists invades agriculture.

Photos in this article come from another really interesting essay about the event les Rencontres de l’Atelier Paysan. Words (at the link) and photos (here and at the link) by Samuel Oslund of l’Atelier Paysan.

What are the current project developments?

The approach is open to the whole field of small and organic farming on a human scale. It started around organic market gardening, but now it is open to all sectors: arboriculture, breeding, viticulture… For example, we can include the re-design of livestock buildings and storage. For market gardeners who want to add some poultry farming to their production, we are also working on the issue of mobile buildings.

Depending on the demands of the farmers’ groups on the ground, our resource platform will respond to co-design the tools required for the specific practices of small and organic farmers. We want these tools to be used by conventional farmers to help them adopt a more autonomous and economical approach. It is becoming increasingly credible because it is intended to be a resource available to all farmers. Most of our users are already going through this process, but the technical principles developed, aim to ensure that conventional farmers are no longer frightened by the demanding, know-how-based, techniques of small farm agroecology.

The project started in 2009 at ADABio, a local association of organic producers, but very quickly grew to such a large scale that in 2011 a transitional association was created and then converted into a cooperative in 2014: L’Atelier Paysan. In this human adventure, meetings played a very important part. At each meeting, we took sideways steps, then small jumps and then big jumps. Today we are 11 permanent staff, quite a lot of seasonal staff as well as those who volunteer as a civic service. Everyone comes as who they are and our approach is closely linked to what each person brings. We are very attentive to the requests that come to us, and we have more and more!

What is your business model?

We operate 65% through self-financing and 35% from public funding. In our view, these are normal contributions to our effort to produce and disseminate common goods. We believe that we are in the public interest and that communities need to be involved. Unfortunately, with the reactionary right-wing coming to power in many places, this sort of support has been drastically reduced.

However, we are relatively more secure than other structures, sometimes subsidized at 80%. The 65% self-financing comes from our self-build training activity. In France there are joint vocational training funds that can cover the cost of training. We also profit from a margin on group orders for internships.

We will raise funds more and more from the public: if we want to change the agriculture / food model, the whole of society is involved. That’s why we have set up a partnership with a Citoyens Solidaire endowment fund to collect donations and the associated tax*. It is a mechanism that allows people to choose where their taxes are going. We want to make citizens aware of our work so that they can contribute to the economic independence of L’Atelier Paysan.

What is your relationship with other farmer or social movements?

L’Atelier Paysan is positioned as one of the actors in the alternative food project, an additional tool in the social and solidarity-based agricultural economy. As actors of this arena, we naturally wanted to associate ourselves with those that represent the agricultural environment, to connect, so that they might disseminate our information, our technical material and to bring together our different users. Moreover, the question of agricultural machinery was very seldom dealt with by the existing organisations.

Also, we have had an awareness-raising activity for a year now, through the InPACTassociation, which brings together about ten associations at the national level. We have been the standard-bearers for the technological sovereignty of farmers in this context, in particular to document and expose, on the one hand, the over-sizing of farming equipment production tool and, on the other hand, the publicly funded introduction of robotics and digital technology supported by the techno-scientific community.

At the international level, we are in the Via Campesina network. We participated in the 2nd Nyéléni forum on food sovereignty (in October 2016 in Romania) where we talked about agricultural equipment, saying that there can be no food independence without farmers’ technological sovereignty.

At the forum we met with Spaniards, Romanians, Austrians, Czechs and Hungarians, who were very interested in questions around farming equipment. We staged an exhibition of drawings and fact sheets that really appealed to people. It was not especially a field of exploration for these activists, and there, something happened. No one in Europe has yet set up a platform such as L’Atelier Paysan, which provides ways to document and disseminate knowledge (data sheets, self-construction training …).

We went to Quebec in January 2014 to organize the first self-build training in North America, with the CAPÉ (Coopérative d’Agriculteurs de Proximlité Écologique) and l’EPSH (École professionnelle de Saint-Hyacinthe ), around the vibroplanche (for cultivating permanent “ridged” beds). And now, they independently create self-build courses from the shared tools on our website.

In the United States, we are connected with Farm Hack, incubated and launched by Greenhorns, which itself came from a young-farmer’s coalition, the NYFC (National Young Farmers Coalition). They share tips on adapting machinery via hackathons and open-hacking camps. Though they have not yet organized any training.

We also have discussions with the Land Workers Alliance (a member of Via Campesina) in England. Two years ago they organized the first Farmhack event which we attended to present our work.

Here, a farmer can come for training and can build their own tools: it doesn’t cost much thanks to our famous training funds and group-buying of materials and accessories. Working with metal, tool use (a kind of after-sales service), sharing (using the machine and adapting it to their context in the form of versioning); this is the whole methodology that one wants to share. There is a very specific context in France, which means that a structure like ours can still rely on a large amount of public aid and shared professional funds to pay for the internships (this is not the case in the USA, for example, which has to rely on private funds).

In general, our approach is total, that is what is exciting in this adventure. We are giving ourselves the means to advance this process, between ourselves and with other actors. From a practical point of view, to reach one person is good, but to reach many takes us much further. We also consider political and economic issues, and what are the factors for acceleration and efficiency. The question of agricultural machinery is a question of political and scientific thought. On the whole, on a whole bunch of questions, there is no science-based production. On April 5th we are organizing a seminar on technological sovereignty: we have struggled to find people who have admitted incompetence. These are questions they have never faced.

What do you think of the “Commons” as a political concept?

We would like to be further advanced on this issue of the Commons. We assume that the issue of food, like drinking water, the air we breathe and biodiversity, are essential to protect. In turn, the means to achieve it (know-how, agricultural land, communal areas, techniques…) must by definition be common, since this is the survival of our species. All the know-how and the knowledge of farmers did not come ex nihilo [from nothing. Ed]: they come from sharing, putting into a common pot, shared innovation and openness. We see as a scandal any attempt to expropriate technological solutions so that they can be part of another feed-source for personal profit. This is an issue that we are exploring and trying to pay attention to.

We are alert to the legal regimes related to this issue of the Commons, to open licenses and to what could best reflect this willingness to share knowledge through which we enrich our community of users. If we use Creative Commons, we are always looking for the right license that best expresses this willingness to share.

The starting material of our work are the tools developed by Joseph: he participated very much in the emergence of these communities. But he didn’t only tinker with machines, he also thought of them with regard to a working group of farmers who wanted to adopt the innovative cultural techniques of permanent beds. His machines are designed in a collective. It is therefore the result of a whole lot of visits and picking up of knowledge and know-how from his peers. He had the talent and the energy to imagine and manufacture these machines. It is his way of contributing, like other activists.

How do you see social change? The political atmosphere is not very positive for the change we want. Do you imagine that you work in a “hostile environment”? Is there a political side to your work?

There is the question of public education. The first step of the document on the technological sovereignty of farmers will be to amalgamate the ideas of the users, the political partners, etc. Some participants in our training events do not take long to take the ideas and techniques and disseminate them.

We are also starting to have quite a lot of feedback from researchers / thinkers, who congratulate us for imagining this new way of thinking. This is our goal because we are not going to be able to produce everything: scientific studies, political thinking … What partnerships can be set up to make common the commonalities of these subjects? Additional advocates can be found at meetings. We do not have a strategy. There is nothing stronger than a groundswell to spread our way of doing things. The tidal wave will be less important, there will be no media buzz, no pretty teaser with a background of country music, but this is much more powerful. When people have experienced their ability for self-determination, there is a kind of arriving without the possibility of backtracking.

Are there projects similar to yours but which you criticize and if so, why?

We are quite distinct from the sort of ideas promoted by the likes of Open Source Ecology in the US with a beautiful trailer, to us that does not seem grounded in reality. None of the machines actually work. It is a process of innovation that comes from not involving real users. They are engineers who imagine things a bit on their own.

We are also distancing ourselves from Fablabs, which seem to be an incubator for start-ups rather than for public education. For us, a Fablab must be a place of public education and not of low-cost technological experimentation for the industry.

We are in Grenoble, the cradle of nanotechnology. Here, a Fablab is funded by industry and advanced technology. So there is Fablab after Fablab (woodworking, pedal-powered machines…), and they are generally talking about something other than the quality of what is produced. It takes funding to run a Fablab. In 2013, those who won the call for projects from the Ministry of the Digital Economy are not those who provide public education. How do we finance a general interest?

More broadly, if by Fablab we mean laboratories of open innovation and shared human resources, there are tens of thousands in France. There are ecocentres, Third-Places, associations related to self-build, others that repair bicycles, social innovation, human and economic. They are not necessarily in the high-tech field and are less publicized, but they are working on the necessary questions.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years? How do you think the world will be in which you will evolve? Do you project yourself into the “global arena” and if yes / no, why and how?

The observation is that today, in January, we do not know much about where we will be at the end of December. This has been true since the beginning of the adventure. We are in an exploratory phase, and it is very difficult to know where we will be in 3 years. After 5 years we have already exceeded our dreams of 3 or 4 years ago! Our collective dynamics explode, economically we will have to find more avenues because humanly we will not be able to go much further. We refuse work every day! One of the interesting tracks in a time-scale of 3 or 4 years is to set up our own training centre on a farm with a workshop training centre suited to our needs, a logistics platform, a classroom, offices, garages, and accommodation. Why a farm? To have our feet on the ground, a real support for our experimentation and a working tool to match our needs. Today we operate within our means, but we have ways to improve our work.

In the years to come, beyond the concerts at Rock à la Meuleuse (rock on the grinder) which we organized during our Rencontres in June 2016, we have plans to explore an illustration of our work through contemporary art.

Among the perspectives, we imagine a European network centred on technological sovereignty. In the world of development and international cooperation associations, this idea has been around since the 1970s, based on appropriate technologies: reclaiming ourselves, being more sociable, connecting and building links throughout Europe so that there are more exchanges between our different countries.

Our adventure is not without effort. Part of what helps us keep going is that we don’t miss out on poetry, pleasure and being as we are. We thoroughly, and I mean thoroughly, explore the paths and horizons that are available to us.

One of the objectives for which we believe we are on the right track is the following: while in France local development has always been specialized, today things are actually de-compartmentalized. If we think about things more “globally”, we will participate in developing something richer, more powerful and sustainable. What makes us strong is that we control the whole chain: self-building at the political and collective level.

We are full of energy: our desire is to testify that the fields we are exploring with the methodologies we use, can be applied to a whole bunch of other things.

This article was written by Michel Bauwens for the P2P foundation’s blog, where it first appeared under a Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Read the details…

All images by L’Atelier Paysan. Check out the full photo essay here.

Interview translated by William Charlton and edited by Ann Marie Utratel.

*A registered (private) donor can get a tax exemption of 66% on a donation. On a donation of €150, the donor receives a €100 rebate – the recipient gets 80% of the donation i.e. €120 http://www.citoyens-solidaires.fr/don-particulier/ for business donations (60% tax exemption) see http://www.citoyens-solidaires.fr/don-entreprise/

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Watch the video if you haven’t already and check the rest of the info on this site.

Video: We-Guild, YouTube​

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The P2P Lab is happy to announce the launch of “Open source agriculture: Co-create with Tzoumakers” , celebrating the gathering of designers, makers and farmers who are adapting to the digitised world. The workshop will be hosted at the rural makerspace “Tzoumakers”, which is located in NW Greece.

 1. Introduction and background

The P2P Lab is a not-for-profit organisation based in Ioannina, Greece. It is dedicated to research around peer-to-peer dynamics in technology, society and economy. It works for the development and maintenance of a global knowledge commons, encompassing a global community of researchers and activists.

Currently, the P2P Lab aims to create awareness and promote an emerging collaborative productive model of agriculture, based on the conjunction of commons-based peer production with desktop manufacturing. Agriculture is a key activity in the peripheral and less-developed regions of the EU and a crucial productive sector. It is a field in which ready-to-apply open source hardware and software solutions have already been produced and, thus, can be implemented and improved. Considering the fragmentation of the existing abundant ​open source projects in relation to agriculture, the replication, sharing and improvement of solutions is hindered.

To facilitate interaction and create ​feedback loops among makers, designers and farmers, the P2P Lab is organising a 5-day workshop in Ioannina (NW Greece). The workshop will build upon our experience gained from the previous year, when makers around Europe gathered at a local makerspace for asylum seekers in Ioannina and co-created solutions with a local refugee community. The workshop will now take place at Tzoumakers, a rural makerspace situated in a small mountainous village called Kalentzi. The latter is part of the village cluster of Tzoumerka in Ioannina, a place abundant in cultural and natural wealth but scarce in the economic means of welfare.

The main aim of the workshop is to familiarise the local community with open source technologies developed within the EU and, ideally, connect hubs (e.g. Fab Labs) that provide technical infrastructures for development. This may create a network of open source software/hardware communities and local farmers that overcome barriers through knowledge diffusion and collaboration for their mutual benefit.

2. Invitation to apply

The P2P Lab is looking for 4 designers, makers or enthusiasts to join the workshop in Kaletzi (Ioannina). Selected designers will introduce their technological solution related to agriculture to the local community and manufacture it with their help, while keeping local biophysical conditions in mind.

Travel, accommodation and per diems of the grantees will be covered by the P2P Lab.

Ηere are the general requirements for applicants:

• The designers should be based in the EU, while the solution may originate elsewhere.
• The solutions must be available under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0).
• Each solution should be fully developed within 3 days or less.

Please find below the selection criteria and timeline for this call. If you would like to apply, we ask you to fill in the application form and send it to us no later than Friday, 8 March 2019 22:00 CET.

3. Selection criteria and conditions

The submitted applications will be reviewed and selected by the local community in light of the criteria and the conditions described below:

• Does the solution fit with the values and principles of small-scale farming systems?
• Is the solution developed according to expressed user needs?
• Is the solution easily reproduced and adaptable?

4. Procedure and timeline

To apply for this call, please fill in the application form via this link.

The deadline is 8 March 2019 22:00 CET. The decision will be announced at the P2P Foundation blog on Monday, 25 March 2019.

The workshop will take place in June 2019 (exact dates to be confirmed).

For queries, you may contact us at [email protected].

This event is organised in the context of the Distributed Design Market Platform Creative Europe project.

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Aaron Fernando: It is common to see questionable policies enacted by state and local governments under the guise of economic development — policies which appear to serve the interests of private entities rather than the interests of society at large. Yet at the other end of the spectrum, real and sustainable sources of wealth, along with the many non-financial elements crucial to the health of societies, continue to be generated by individuals and small-scale producers, largely without much assistance from local governments.

Recently, the U.K.-based foundation Nesta released an interactive visualization called ShareTown, intended to help people think about what it might look like if local governments used technology and focused on both small-scale local organizations and individuals in creating positive social outcomes within a locality. Described as “an unashamedly positive vision of a preferred future in which interactions between citizens and local government are balanced and collaborative, and data and digital platforms are deployed for public benefit rather than private gain” ShareTown allows visitors to click around and explore an interrelated set of organizations, institutions, and individuals in one vision of a prosperous local economy of the future. These organizations include a makerspace, a community waste and re-use center, a childcare cooperative, a mobile library and resource center, and many others — all in some way utilizing technology and supported (financially or otherwise) by local government.

The ideas in ShareTown were derived from a workshop in May 2018 with leaders from local governments and members of the public, and discussed in light of drastic budget cuts faced by local governments around the U.K. Although ShareTown is U.K.-specific and offers links to “Reference Points,” which are existing projects, similar projects have already been sprouting up around the world. For instance, ShareTown contains a platform co-op which links freelancers with resources and protections against certain types of risks. The cooperative SMart is mentioned ShareTown, but others around the world like the Freelancer’s Union in New York City, New York, operate similarly.

However it is noted that “ShareTown is not intended as a prediction, but a source of inspiration — and provocation.” ShareTown was created by Nesta’s ShareLab, which has “a mission to grow evidence and understanding of how collaborative digital platforms can deliver social impact.” Thus, explicit in this approach is the belief that data collection and specific technological tracking and monitoring solutions will lead to positive social outcomes. This includes certain initiatives with potentially uncomfortable data-gathering, such as a mobile library operated with a mix of public and private funding which also tracks user outcomes.

In light of recent, serious data breaches like those of Marriott and Equifax, along with the reality that digital platforms and big data have been utilized by the few to manipulate the many, this technological optimism is indeed a provocation and something to be discussed. ShareTown provides a thought-provoking angle with which to think about the role of government and technology in maintaining a healthy local economy, and can be thought of in tandem with frameworks such as the Cleveland Model and the Preston Model. These two models in particular illustrate flows of money, time, and other resources between institutions and organizations without focusing on the usage of technology. Taken together, these frameworks can help both local residents and public officials think about and reframe how a locality achieves economic resilience even with limited resources.

Header image is a screenshot of Nesta’s ShareTown interactive

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This publication is an output of the Interactive Cities URBACT network that explored how digital, social media and user generated content can improve today´s urban management in European cities, whatever size. This challenge has been tackled in two ways.

This challenge has been tackled in two ways. Firstly, as an opportunity to redefine and deepen the concept of citizenship and civic engagement today, providing a path to spark cohesion, commonalities and shared value as well as increasing sense of place. In other words, making the most of the new channels to revisit the relationship between the individual and the local community in the digital era. Secondly, as a way to improve the quality of public services, in terms of efficiency and transparency, and even widen the current service chart provided by local authorities.

Download ebook from Cooperative City site

How the city of Ghent uses open data to increase the economic development and how the Interactive Cities network foster the participation and improve the exchange of ideas and best practices among partners – an interview with Thomas Lecompte. Interactive Cities’ final Conference in Genoa 11-13 April. 2018 Interactive Cities is an URBACT Action and Planning Network on the use of social media to foster interaction between cities and citizens categories. The network operated during 2015 and 2018 thanks to the support of the URBACT program with ERDF funding and was composed by the cities of Genoa (Lead Partner), Alba Iulia, CLLD Lisbon, EDC Debrecen, Ghent, Murcia, Palermo, Semaest Paris, Tartu and Varna. Find more information at: Interactive Cities

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Announcing Popping Bubbles workshop series and our first online Open Space event, part 2 (part 1, part 3)

REconomy practitioners is virtual community of practice (CoP) of and for regenerative entrepreneurs and community organisers. We care about planetary health and regeneration.

We are all over the world.

We do stuff where we live, and we connect translocally, transnationally and globally to benefit from peer-to-peer support, social learning and coordinated action. We do that primarily virtually, travelling to meet only when really necessary or when possible (most of the time we don’t have budgets to travel anyway, and if we would have that we would prefer to spend the money for something more useful). That’s also one more way to reduce our personal carbon footprint — we like to make that point to ourselves and others.

After emerging as transnationally distributed project team within Transition movement (in 2013, our timeline is shared here) we recently kicked off our own transition towards self-organised community of practice. To keep being useful for our members and the Earth we NOW need to do two things: we need to move on with the process of commoning and we need to do some good ol’ bootstrapping to finance our 2019 activities.

What do I mean by commoning?

Some of us understand commoning as something obvious and natural, and some of us are still rather confused about how this is done in business, or in our virtual community of practice. Recent TEDxTalk by Samantha Slade, co-founder of Percolab, might clarify some practicalities.

In our context commoning is this: whatever is done in our virtual community of practice belongs to humanity and life on Earth as a whole. It does not belong to any of us individually or to any of legal entities we are associated with. We are evolving our virtual community of practice as digital commons, in a way — because online platforms and tools we use are not commons, our network is —but that is so only if we keep having conversations that build our relationships of learning and action.

Now… whatever we do is created by somebody’s individual or by team contributions, and facilitating virtual community of practice requires quite a lot of skills and time, both with backend and frontend tasks (above the line, below the line — use whatever jargon works for you). The simple truth is: to achieve anything meaningful in the context of our work (planet Earth ecosystem regeneration during times of climate tragedy, remember?) a coordinated, sustained, daily team effort is needed. To move forward we need to create and fund this team (myself included). Monthly budget of €1,250 seems to be good starting point and we don’t want chicken or egg situation: once funds are in place, we move on. Some grants or awards for what we do might manifest eventually, but we are not in a position to rely on that. As self-organised and high-trust network for systemic change we better rely on ourselves.

And we are quite good at bootstrapping 

Bootstrapping is native to REconomy approach — as it really is for every true entrepreneur. Different languages have different words for that (anybody knows what stands for bootsrapping in French or Swedish?).

REconomy enterprises are normally community-led and often started with community-only support (which is not exactly the same as crowdsourcing, because community is not a crowd, and not exactly the same as tripple F financing because no fools are involved and everything is very deliberate). There is evolving practice among REconomy practitioners of convening Local Entrepreneur Forums where Community of Dragons is looking into ways to support new regenerative enterprises locally. We now need to replicate that for our virtual community of practice, using a medium that enables transnational collaboration — fiat currency (Euro in our case), here:

If what I wrote above makes sense, here is my invitation to you:

• visit our Open Collective page and set up your recurring monthly donation: to reach our bootstrapping budget of €15,000 per year we need 250 monthly donations of €5 or more; you can start supporting REconomy commons personally or as an organisation (there are other ways to contribute, of course, but what we need now is regular monthly income)
• if you have not done that already, join REconomy practitioners on online platform of your choice and meet with us on video soon, see here. Our video calls are meant to be shared experience that we don’t record (we don’t want to make a “content” to be “consumed” later… normally never). Next three REconomy online events are scheduled: for 25 October with Beatrice Ungard, for 15 November with Alanna Irving and for 6 December 2018 with Daniel Christian Wahl. I hope to meet you there.
• Join us on Thursday, 15 November 2018 at 9am GMT / 10:00 CET / 5pm SGT / 10pm NZDT for 2-hour online workshop on Full Circle Leadership with Alanna Irving. Attending our video conferences is the best way to connect and meet with REconomistas and Transitioners worldwide.

Photo by N1NJ4

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Welcome to Refugee Phrasebook. Together we are building an open collection of useful words and phrases for refugees who just arrived. The Refugee Phrasebook is a multilingual tool that provides basic useful vocabulary related to the most common immediate needs. The phrasebook is created in a set of google doc sheets, with the help of volunteers from Berlin and all over the world. Everyone is free to adapt, print and distribute the phrases to support refugees.

Following up on our December update, we prepared a 2 minute video to highlight current challenges and plans for the project. Thank you all for your support!

Refugee Phrasebook is an open collaborative project to provide important vocabulary to refugees. It assembles important phrases from various fields and encourages designers and experts in the field to improve on the material.

While the first collection of phrases was still limited to a closed document with a narrow use case, volunteers quickly migrated the data to an open table in Google Sheets and significantly increased the number of participants with their network. This step also emphasized a commitment to transparency and openness by publishing the data with a Creative Commons license (CC0), reuseable for refugee aid projects everywhere. Due to translation requests from helpers, the length of the tables has more than tripled since August.

The phrases now include a broad range of topics, from a simple “Hello” to “ I need to see a doctor”, covering a general set of phrases as well as sentences for juridical and medical needs.

Local initiatives are welcome to adapt, print and distribute all contents of this page(→FAQ) to support refugees in all regions. It currently contains vocabulary in 28 languages:

• Refugee Phrasebook (orientation / multipurpose)
  currently >561 items in >44 languages
• Medical Phrasebook
  currently 150 items in 28 languages, ca. 80% translated
• Juridical Phrasebook
  currently looking for lawyers to contribute

Do you want to support the project and distribute copies to refugees? The current printable versions (wiki + pdf) can be found here. You can also create a custom version.

We currently prepare the following datasets:

• Short version
  including phrases for general orientation (>180 items)
• Phrasebook for Orientation
  including phrases for general orientation (>600 items), phrases for helpers (>150 items), short version (>180 items)
• Medical Phrasebook
  including medical terms (>150 items)
• Juridical Phrasebook
  including juridical terms (>150 items, experts needed for translation

To display a different language set, select “Languages” and confirm with “Apply”. To print a custom version of Refugee Phrasebook : How to create a printable version (step by step guide for LibreOffice)

The project is noncommercial, the books will be available for free and provided without further political or personal branding. The content is freely available under a Creative Commons License (CC0) and can be reused by anyone everywhere. (→FAQ)

For questions and feedback, contact us at [email protected]

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The idea of a rising ‘sharing economy’ is currently a hot topic in an international debate that builds on the emergence of peer-to-peer network exchanges that rely more on access than on property, on relations more than an appropriation,to call into question the sociological understanding of the relationship between the society and the market that goes back to authors such as Polanyi, Marx and Sombart.

The aim of this monograph is therefore to bring together a selection of contributions that will help identify the analytical categories and indicators needed to interpret this phenomenon from a sociological perspective on a global scale. Through a collection of original empirical research on this topic, from Western and non-Western contexts, by both established and junior scholars and experts, this monograph will make a pivotal contribution to the study of what themes, methods and issues characterise the rise of ‘sharing’ as a socio-economic model and a new frontier of sociological research. In particular, this monograph aims to answer the following questions: what do we mean with ‘sharing economy’? What kind of positive innovations or possible criticalities might this socio-economic model bring? Does ‘sharing’ really represent an alternative to capitalism, or an example of its transformation? In which areas, and how, is the way of doing business in society changing as a result of the diffusion of ‘sharing economies’?

Photo by Burns Library, Boston College

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By Anke Schwarz

PART I: Interview with members of the Tapullo collective, Genoa

29 May, 2017 — Building something together is in itself a good way to create a community

Wireless community networks have been around for a while, but are regaining some attention these days as means of strengthening local interaction and community organizing. The Tapullo project in Genoa was established in 2016 by a group of people, some of them members of the FabLab at the Laboratorio Sociale Occupato Autogestito Buridda squat, with the aim of setting up a DIY wireless community network. The name is reflective of their approach: in Genoese dialect, tapullo roughly refers to a quick and simple improvision (such as repairing a broken frame with Gaffa tape). What is interesting about Tapullo is that rather than providing internet access, it was designed as a purely local mesh network from the very beginning, hosting a local service in the form of a publicly accessible community forum. In technical terms, the network’s nodes consist of ordinary Wi-Fi routers (either the TP-Link TL-WDR3500 or the much cheaper TP-Link Archer C50 model), and a LattePanda single board computer which acts as a web server for the Tapullo forum. Tapullo’s routers run a combination of OpenWRT software, a specific Linux distribution for embedded services including wireless routers, with LibreMesh installed in top. A first access point was installed at the home of a Tapullo host in a building at Piazza dell’Erbe in downtown Genoa in January 2017, with additional nodes to follow in late 2017.

The interview with members of the Tapullo collective was conducted in written form between March and May 2017, and has been edited for clarity.

Tapulli at Piazza dell’Erbe, Genoa 2017

Let us begin with the most obvious question: Why did you opt for a purely local mesh network, as opposed to one (also) offering internet access?

We decided to avoid providing internet access because we recognize that it is already available almost everywhere in an affordable (or even free) and easily accessible manner. Our idea is to re-connect people on a local and physical level. We wanted to create a network allowing for communication on a level that is disconnected and not mediated by the infrastructures of large corporations. We also wanted to build a network that is not interested in collecting and profiling your data. By making our network from scratch, we intent to take a step back to look at what really constitutes a network and to show digital communication at its core, without 20 years of infrastructure built on top of it. Basically, it is a local, organic, additives-free network.

With respect to your programmatic name, which are the cracks in the urban fabric that you hope to ‘fix’ by implementing a local community network in Genoa’s city center?

We hope to ‘fix’ sociality at a local level, by extracting a tool (in this case, a Wi-Fi network and an internet forum) from the ecosystem of the internet, cleaning it and bringing it closer to the physical space, thus making it available just to those people who are present in a specific place in a specific moment in time. In our case, that is Piazza dell’Erbe in downtown Genoa (for now). The internet is a global discussion forum, whereas we as Tapullo hope to be a new, local forum. We believe in communication and sociality at a local level. Another issue important to explore is the medium itself, in this case the network.

How does it work? How can it be used properly? And how can we learn new tricks, to be employed elsewhere afterwards?

We take so many things for granted, but relatively few people really know and understand how our hyper-connected reality works. We want to change that by bringing infrastructure closer to the people who are using it.

Please go a bit into detail here: What exactly needs such ‘fixing’ in Genovese society? I understand that the stereotype is one of a rather introvert community – but what are the main local issues and struggles as you see it?

What we believe needs fixing is, firstly, what is already happening in every city: The isolation occurring between people even when they are physically socializing together. Tapullo allows you to de-isolate yourself using the same medium that is currently generating the isolation in the first place. It generates the possibility to interact on ludic-practical matters with the same people that you’re physically sharing a space with at that very same moment. Secondly, it tries to ‘fix’ the typical introvert/antisocial attitude of the Genoese, which is sometimes visible in the way they deal with ‘the other’, represented by people from other regions, international tourists or migrants. By making a platform that it is local yet accessible to all, we hope to bring down the barriers in our own mentality.

How far does the actual ‘power’ of a communication infrastructure go? To what extend could an instrument like Tapullo actually play a role in processes of (local) social transformation?

We don’t know yet, but we believe in the idea that building something together is in itself a good way to create a community, and by building a communication instrument like a Wi-Fi network, we want to push for something that is close to the community itself. Moreover, it can generate new interactions between different sectors or parts of society that normally do not communicate often (or at all).

Tapullo’s first node was installed at Piazza dell’Erbe in February 2017. What are you first experiences? How do you get people to use your network? Who uses Tapullo so far, and for which purposes?

At the moment, we don’t have enough data to answer this question. The project launched recently and for now, there are only a few active users. We launched Tapullo with a small campaign (stickers, postcards, word of mouth) but apparently, that was not enough to generate a critical mass. We plan to organize more events in the near future to increase the number of users and generate interest in the platform. A few of the proposals being currently discussed are an alleycat race, a treasure hunt, a photography contest, and audio/video/book sharing.

Have you thought of ‘hybrid’ strategies in which access to the internet is available, but is used in a different way (e.g. a website that can be ‘written’ by only those having access to the local network but read online by everyone)?

We are working on something similar: A public internet blog (http://tapullo.net/) where we will discuss the activities happening in the local network. This should make it easier for new people to discover Tapullo and also to keep users informed about what is going on without having to be at Piazza dell’Erbe all the time.

Will you organize any ‘physical’ events to discuss about the network with outsiders?

Yes, we are currently planning one or two theoretical and practical workshops on mesh networks. We want to discuss what these networks are and show how to build antennas and reflash Wi-Fi routers. Hopefully, that should bring more people in and also help us share the technical knowledge amongst ourselves.

As yet another social network, a critic could assume that Tapullo leads to ever more people glued to their screens, rather oblivious of their surroundings. What are your observations so far: Does communication via Tapullo and face-to-face interaction indeed blend over?

Tapullo has only a few active users for now. Yet we believe that users will not be overwhelmed by too much content, as the network is localized and only people physically present at Piazza dell’Erbe can add content. Practically, you can’t lose yourself scrolling down the page as you might in big social networks, at least for now. However, the amount of content is of course linked to the number of users and to the ease of adding new content. The fact that Tapullo is localized restricts these two factors and limits the abuse. If we consider the Internet a window open to the world, our network wants to be like a stroll: you leave the house to change your perspective. That includes an active practice (going out, walking) instead of a more passive one (looking out of a window, browsing the Internet).

How could an alternative communication infrastructure such as Tapullo support ongoing local struggles over the right to the city, for instance with respect to squats and affordable housing in Genoa?

On a philosophical level, we build a virtual space in the same way that you would occupy an abandoned building to repurpose it as a social center for the greater good of the community. In that sense, by re-appropriating them, we want to state the idea that spaces, whether physical or virtual, belong to the communities that inhabit them. Moreover, the virtual space of Tapullo itself may serve as a virtual board or display, increasing the visibility of local struggles.

Are you in contact with local ‘right to the city’ (or other) urban activists, and if yes, has it been easy to communicate Tapullo’s vision to these people engaged in similar struggles in a different context?

Over the past months, we have been talking about the project with many activists, some of them involved in urban struggles, but we haven’t yet built anything together. We do believe that it is fundamental to have a broad, diverse group of activists collaborating on the project, and that this is going to happen organically, over time, as soon as the network builds enough momentum.

You are based in Genoa’s FabLab, but how strongly is Tapullo actually about making or peer production? Aren’t you acting more like a service provider, at least in the beginning?

As we said above, we want to return to the basics of the tool itself. Obviously, our platform is open and accessible to everyone, but the main idea is to bring attention to the method and potential of the tool itself by sharing knowledge on how it works, how to expand it, how to offer more services. Offering services by making them, step by step.

The Tapullo collective is from a leftist/autonomous context, yet you deliberately adopted a neutral stance when launching the community network – rather than explicitly linking it to the FabLab, for instance. Why did you opt for this position?

We decided not to put it under the Buridda or FabLab name because that was never discussed on a general assembly in these two groups. You might say the collective doesn’t represent the whole but only a subset of it. Plus, the idea of installing the network in the city center (instead of in the squat, which is in a different neighborhood) made us think that it doesn’t make sense to directly link it to Buridda or FabLab if we wanted to give it a broader audience in the city.

In technical terms, which are the lessons learned from other wireless community networks? Why did you develop your own hardware/software set-up instead of simply implementing one of the existing concepts such as Ninux (Rome) or AWMN (Athens)?

Our setup is quite simple actually. The Wi-Fi part is handled by the LibreMesh firmware running on a TP-Link router. That same firmware is developed and used by Ninux. For the forum we are using a LattePanda board, which is slightly more powerful than a Raspberry Pi. Why that specific board? Because that’s what we had at hand without having to buy new hardware.

Please explain how you deal with the challenges of operating a wireless community network. What are your thoughts about governance issues related to data storage and private information once the Tapullo network grows? For instance, do you keep any records or user data that might be accessed by friendly or hostile third parties?

We have no plans to collect traffic data, that much is clear. All data ending up on the forum is by definition considered public and thus available to everyone to read. Also, there is no ‘real name policy’, so everyone is free to register an anonymous/pseudonymous nickname. We don’t have any privacy-sensitive service running at the moment, though we might have some in the future. We haven’t really planned much beyond this point (yet) – beside the fact that we do not want your data, now or in the future.

What next for Tapullo? What are your thoughts about the network’s future ownership in terms of its operation, maintenance, and expansion?

We would like to have more users and share the knowledge required to maintain and expand the network with them. Our dream is that Tapullo grows up over time, like a child, so that at some point in the future it becomes autonomous and independent, self-organizing – until the very moment when we can finally shut down the first Wi-Fi router without affecting the network’s functionality because the network itself will have made this first node redundant.

PART II: Remaking Genoa? Urban DIY Mesh Networks and the Right to the City

31 October, 2017

To the visitor, Genoa’s historical center sometimes resembles a confusing set of narrow, cobbled alleyways, with sky-high medieval palaces and densely arranged buildings often creating a canyon-like impression. On the ground, orientation can be difficult, with hardly any clear sky or celestial bodies in sight. Depending on the location (and perhaps more important these days), GPS and mobile internet access are also limited, disrupting digital navigation attempts. An urban environment apparently so hostile to mobile communication and digital services might somehow help keep the destructive effects of mass tourism at bay. However, it also harbors the wireless community network Tapullo. As the walls bespeak the rich social activity and urban movements the area is traditionally teeming with, this seems only logical. Until recently, street corners and sign posts in the Centro storico were covered with posters and stickers for a variety of leftist and autonomous events and causes, from punk concerts, collective dinners and workshops at one of the squatted social centers to the Movimento di lotta per la casa’s marvelous crowbar logo.

Piazza dell’Erbe

I first interviewed members of the Tapullo collective in May 2017. A first node of the prospective mesh network had just been installed in Piazza dell’Erbe, a relatively large public square in downtown Genoa, packed with bars and brimming with mostly younger people in the evenings. This seemed to be the perfect crowd to engage in a local mesh network based on both virtual and face-to-face interaction: Social-media-affine youngsters at their favorite watering hole. There was a palpable enthusiasm in the collective. Yet when I returned in October 2017, the mood had somewhat changed. In a curious turn of events, Tapullo’s one and only node had been damaged: The transformers of both the Wi-Fi router and the LattePanda single board computer had completely burned out, along with laptops, fridges, and a bunch of other electrical devices in the building where the Tapullo host lives. The damage was caused by a flawed power line installation by a technician from ENEL, Italy’s leading energy provider. Consequently, the equipment had to be removed for repairs, and the Tapullo forum was down for several weeks. This episode serves as a reminder to the multiple manners in which other urban infrastructures and social networks underpin a seemingly independent DIY mesh network. Moreover, it draws attention to the effort and time required to install and maintain such a wireless network as Tapullo moved away from its reliance on a single access point. A second phase, where the signals from individual nodes are woven into a mesh, was imminent – just as a notable shift in urban governance in downtown Genoa highlighted the need for collective social (inter)action. Ever since a change in city government in June 2017 brought an entrepreneur running as an independent candidate for the populist right-wing alliance between Forza Italia and Lega Nord into the position of mayor, a 1990s-style law-and-order approach to public space seemed to be gaining pace. After decades of social democratic rule by the Partito Democratico and its predecessors, this represented a rupture for the city home to one of the major seaports in the Mediterranean and once known as a leftist bastion. Some of Genoa’s seven occupied centri sociali may soon face the threat of eviction – and this development comes at a time when neofascists are seeking to establish two new premises in the city. Given the present political situation, it is not hard to predict an increase in urban struggles in the near future. This applies in particular (but not only) to the historical center, where a new regulation prohibiting the consumption of alcohol in public is being discussed. On a more symbolical level, the removal of political posters and graffiti is combined with a widening of an existing city marketing campaign, launched in 2014 under the somewhat comical slogan ‘Genova – more than this’. As the scraped-off posters illustrate, such attempts to sanitize public spaces and render leftist and progressive autonomous voices invisible form part of the new city government’s strategy. Meanwhile, parts of the new administration are pushing an anti-migrant and zero tolerance discourse.

Contested wall

Parts of downtown Genoa are traditionally home to poorer inhabitants and migrant communities, and apart from the centri sociali (which are typically located in derelict industrial or private buildings outside the city center) there are several ‘silent’ occupations of flats exclusively for housing purposes. The existing struggles against marginalization and displacement are captured nicely in the spirit of a graffito that reads “44.000 vacant homes, let’s occupy!”. For Tapullo, the present situation raises interesting questions over the platform’s future audience and usership in its second, increasingly more networked phase. Will it merely evolve into some kind of small, independent service provider, feeding a pattern of individual consumption – or accomplish a more collective approach?

44.000 vacant homes, let’s occupy!

If we wish to read the right to the city, at its core, as a collective rather than individual “right to change ourselves by changing the city” (Harvey 2008: 23), this is precisely where DIY mesh networks like Tapullo come into play. In the present historical situation, defending our ‘digital rights to the city’ (as a recent collection of essays edited by Shaw and Graham 2017 has it) against big tech companies and governmental intrusion alike is certainly paramount. Yet instead of evoking notions of data mining, privacy breaches, surveillance and control typically related to the most widespread information and communication technologies (ICT), such collectively owned digital platforms may well support and further different urban futures (for details, see Antoniadis and Apostol 2014; De Filippi and Tréguer 2015). As Paolo Cardullo observes in his recent study of London’s wireless community network OWN, these networks “operate by strengthening social interactions and relations on the ground, rather than in an imaginary cloud-space. The cultural disposition of people directly involved in using the wireless network is (…) the crucial element that sustained the mesh” (Cardullo 2017: 7). An insurgent peer production of the urban is nourished by social interactions in a material and virtual sense, based on common interests and/or a shared cause. Given both the existing social movements and the looming wave of contestation over public space and centri sociali in Genoa, a host of potential alliances could be activated and deepened by weaving this network tighter, and thus assembling a city for all. Not only in name, the “patchwork improvisation” (Cardullo 2017) of the Tapullo mesh network is thus both dependent on and productive of an urban commons. In October 2017, four fresh routers lay in wait to be installed as new Tapullo nodes in the city center. As members of the collective were in the process of recruiting future hosts amongst local organizations and pubs, probably one of the most pertinent questions for the near future is: Who is remaking Genoa, and in which image?

References

Antoniadis, P. and Apostol, I. (2014): The Right(s) to the Hybrid City and the Role of DIY Networking. In: Journal of Community Informatics 10 (3), http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1092/1113

Cardullo, P. (2017): Gentrification in the mesh? An ethnography of Open Wireless Network (OWN) in Deptford. In: City. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1325236

De Filippi, P. and Tréguer, F. (2015): Expanding the Internet Commons: The Subversive Potential of Wireless Community Networks. In: Journal of Peer Production #6 http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-6-disruption-and-the-law/peer-reviewed-articles/expanding-the-internet-commons-the-subversive-potential-of-wireless-community-networks/

Harvey, D. (2008): The Right to the City. In: New Left Review 53, 23-40. https://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city

Shaw, J. and Graham, M. (eds.) (2017): Our Digital Rights to the City. Meatspace Press. https://meatspacepress.org/our-digital-rights-to-the-city/

PART III: The future of Tapullo

31 January, 2018

The members of the Tapullo collective wish to continue their effort to build a local mesh network and if they succeed to keep their project running you will be hearing about their progress at:

http://tapullo.net (in Italian)

About the author

Anke Schwarz is an urban geographer and postdoctoral researcher at Technical University of Berlin. She is mainly interested in processes of urban transformation, urban infrastructures and everyday life. Her book ‘Demanding Water. A Sociospatial Approach to Domestic Water Use in Mexico City’ was published in 2017. https://ankeschwarz.net/

* All pictures by Anke Schwarz

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