596 Acres: Here’s the problem: Located primarily in areas of the city where low-income communities of color live today, more than a thousand vacant public lots languish behind fences, collecting garbage. One such lot was in Paula Segal’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. In 2010, she began talking to her neighbors about this lot. She gathered as much information as she could find about it and called a community meeting. That meeting led to more meetings, which led to Myrtle Village Green: an active, nearly 2-acre community space with garden beds, an outdoor movie screening area, a pumpkin patch, and an educational production and research farm. From then on, she thought, “How many more such lots are there in New York City?” She got access to city data and learned that, in 2001, 596 acres of public land were waiting for communities to transform them, and soon after, 596 Acres was born.

Here’s how one organization is working on the problem: The 596 Acres team starts by translating the data available about vacant municipal land into information that can be useful in context, using customized mapping tools. With that knowledge in hand, they put signs on the fences of vacant city-owned lots that say, “This land is your land,” in English and Spanish, and explain which agency has control over the property. The signs also say that neighbors, together, may be able to get permission to transform the lot into a garden, park, or farm. They list the city’s parcel identifier, and information about the individual property manager handling the parcel for the agency, including a phone number.

The signs also connect neighbors to an online map and organizing web-tool called LivingLotsNYC.org and to 596 Acres’ staff, who steer and support residents through a bureaucratic maze in order to gain access to the space.

596 Acres takes on a supportive and advocacy role during each campaign — but residents remain the leaders. Each space, ultimately, is managed autonomously, transformed and maintained by volunteers and local community partners to gather, grow food, and play.

Results:

• Since 2011, neighbors have begun campaigns to transform over 200 sites.
• 596 Acres has steered groups through the process of creating new community organizations and helped these organizations get formal access to vacant lots to create 39 new community-managed spaces.
• Nearly all of them have become so valuable to their local and citywide communities that they have been permanently preserved as community spaces by the New York City municipal government. This strategy for activating the potential of vacant public land has been emulated in over a dozen cities around the globe, including Philadelphia and Melbourne.

Learn more from:

• 596 Acres
• Open-source version of the digital tool used by 596 Acres

This case study is adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Get a copy today.

Photo by dreamexplorer

The post ‘This land is your land’: Reclaiming public land for communities in Brooklyn appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Adrien Labaeye: You may have heard of smart cities that use data to improve urban networks like public transportation systems. In the shadow of this well-marketed story is another narrative around data in the city; a story where the right to the city extends to the digital realm. Here are two initiatives where reclaiming citizens’ control over data has enabled practices that run counter to mainstream narratives of market-driven urban development — practices of commoning data and urban spaces, together.

Usually, talking about the role of digital technology in cities brings about the concept of “smart cities.” With billions of corporate and public money invested into the concept, the narrative of tech and efficiency is quickly eluding other notions such as equity, participation, diversity, and nature. With its focus on all-efficiency, the smart city narrative is pushing a vision of the city where urban development is decided by planners and algorithms bound by financial capital that are gradually, as Richard Sennett put it, taking away from citizens the possibility to shape the space where they live.

Case study #1: Urban Foraging in Germany

In 2009, Kai Gidhorn was regularly picking apples while cruising on his bike through the backcountry of Berlin, Germany. Because he wanted to remember the good spots, he plotted them on a map. And because he also wanted to share that with friends, he made it a collaborative map online. Slowly, the map grew as people added more fruit trees in public spaces to it. One thing lead to another, and Mundraub (“theft of food”) was born. Now the Berlin-based initiative has more than 40,000 registered users in Germany and Austria.

The practice in itself — foraging and gleaning — is not new. Still, it was forgotten, particularly in cities. Thanks to Mundraub’s collaborative mapping (or so it seems), the practice is now re-emerging in Germany. People have become used to maps to relate to their environment and find their way. This is not limited to the German-speaking world. Falling Fruit, a similar platform in the U.S. has a global reach and has collected probably the largest data repository of fruit trees globally, tapping on the crowd as well as open data. To sum it up, the idea of urban foraging is to crowdsource a map of growing edibles, reconnect ourselves to our edible urban landscape, and, if possible, get free food. But this isn’t just about taking.

Mundraub staff work with children and adults to share literacy about edibles and plant growth. They also offer tours to uncover new edibles, organize collective harvests, and make apple juice and cider, giving people a taste of DIY projects. In December of 2016, in Pankow, a borough of Berlin, urban foragers struck a deal with the local government to plant and take care of fruit trees in a public park.

Fruit trees are usually not favored by municipalities because they require intensive care. While the number is humble — twelve trees — this is quite a ground-breaking achievement when one considers the tradition of top-down management of German city administrations. Consider that in most German cities, in order to pick up fruits from public trees you are supposed to ask permission to the municipality. In Berlin-Pankow, not only have urban foragers received a bulk authorization to pick fruits from any public tree, but also the right to take care of the planted trees, which includes pruning.

“We are currently in an experimentation phase: If it’s successful, if citizens take good care of the trees, then we are ready to open more land for such direct involvement of citizens,” says Andreas Johnke, director of the municipal service in charge of streets and green spaces of the Berlin-Pankow borough. This is just a start, one borough, twelve trees planted, but Mundraub plans to do the same everywhere in Germany, and many cities already have shown interest. The goal is to get 200 cities by the end of 2017 to open up their tree cadasters and grant bulk authorization to citizens to pick up edibles without needing to ask. And in March, Mundraub also collaborated with a supermarket to let citizens plant five fruit trees in the parking lot, blurring the line between private and public space.

Families planting edible trees for future generations on the private land of a supermarket in Berlin. Photo: CC-BY-SA-NC Adrien Labaeye

Case study #2: Reclaiming Vacant Land in New York City

In 2010, in Brooklyn, New York, Paula Segal started to gather information about a vacant space in her neighborhood. It was empty for years, collecting garbage. After some research, it appeared the vacant, fenced lot was public, and had been planned as a public park — which was never built. After several community meetings and exchanges with the municipality, Myrtle Village Green was born as a community space. It includes a research and production farm, meeting space, and an open-air cinema.

Based on this first experience, Segal and other activists wanted to find out how many such vacant public lots existed. It turned out to be 596 acres, which became the name of Segal’s initiative. Over the past six years, the grassroots organization reclaimed, remixed, and opened to the crowd public data about vacant lots through its Living Lots map. The map offers information about each lot and gives an avenue to chat with neighbors interested in doing something with it. “New community gardeners are contacting us because they are using the Living Lots map to explore what city-owned land is potentially available for community gardening,” says Carlos Martinez, deputy director of Green Thumb, New York’s program for community gardening that emerged to support civic use of land left vacant by the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s.

However, the true strength of 596 Acres lies not only online: The organization also puts up signs calling neighbors to seize the land for their community. And it works. It has spurred the creation of 32 community gardens on previously vacant public land mostly in underprivileged neighborhoods that lack parks and community facilities. Another reason for the success of the organization lies in the productive relationship it has with local agencies for urban gardening: “With 596 Acres, we work closely with each other, they help us to find key people who have interest to be the steward or the leader of a community garden,” says Martinez. As of January, more than 848 acres of vacant public land have been plotted on the map.

Map and Data: Strategic Resources to Inspire Citizen-Led Change

These two examples show that creating a data commons about a shared physical resource may be a critical step in enabling communities to reclaim that resource. In one case, the data is crowdsourced from scratch, and in the other, open municipal data is compiled and given a new life.

As our cases show, data needs to be broken down into digestible bits of information, and the map is a crucial tool in doing that. The mapping interface allows people to make sense of complex information, to visualize vacant lots and fruit trees in the city. It creates a new reality in our minds. Open data alone is not enough to start a social process of slowly and iteratively re-appropriating public space. Data itself needs to be re-appropriated, remodeled, refined into digestible information and collaborative mapping is a powerful tool to do so.

But as Paula Segal found out in Brooklyn, real change happens when people start working together. The point on the map, the sign on the vacant lot is the starting point to collaboration, but it is really on land (i.e. in the physical space but not necessarily offline) co-production, the joy of doing things together that really brings lasting change in communities. It is about pressing apples into juice, planting trees, and so on. Only the sustained and lasting collective action has a chance of reshaping the status quo of local governance towards more collaborative governance of urban resources.

For city administrators, in our two cases, active participation of citizens was viewed favorably: “We find it a good thing that citizens start taking care of a piece of land,” says Johnke of Berlin-Pankow. “They switch from being  like passive customers expecting something in return for the taxes they pay to a more active and civic attitude where they feel and act responsibly.” This, he continues, has a wider impact: “With increasing participation of the public, the role of city administrators in charge of public land is changing from being simple managers of streets and park to becoming more facilitators, coordinators.” But at the same time, administrations are careful about delegating their work to groups of citizens who may fail to sustain action over time. For this, community building and some clear structures and clear rules are essential, says Carlos Martinez, from Green Thumb in New York City.

This image is a screenshot of Mundraub’s map in Berlin: Each icon shows different fruits or herbs

From Public Management to Commoning Cities

This evolution of the role municipal administrations can play, from being top-down managers to becoming facilitators of citizens’ re-appropriation strongly echoes the philosophy followed by the City of New York. “We don’t intervene in any decision-making, [community gardeners] decides their own rules,” Martinez says. “What we ask them is to have by-laws or some guidelines — regulations on how they manage the garden to reduce the risk of conflicts. In that case we may facilitate the conflict resolution, but, generally, we try to stay away, giving them the tools to resolve the conflict themselves.”

Leaving citizens to design the rules to manage shared spaces supports a process of commoning public spaces. This is less about arguing whether green spaces or trees are public goods or commons. It is about municipalities acknowledging and actively enabling the self-organization of public space by citizens. This is what cities like Bologna in Italy are doing at scale to manage the city as a commons. In this process and as we have shown, digital networks offer new opportunities. “With a new generation of gardeners — millennials — there is more room for digital technology to be part of this [community gardening] movement,” Martinez says. The coming of age of the digital natives will transform these traditional grassroots practices. Commoning will have to be increasingly understood as a process that manifests across the digital and physical spaces.

In this story of the digital transformation of cities data in the form of maps, is just a powerful tool among many others that communities may use in a wider commoning process to co-produce shared spaces — a sharing city. This (messy) reality on the ground contrasts starkly with the narrative of a smart city smoothly planned and managed from the top by the technocratic alliance of the bureaucracy and market that would  thanks to big data — calculate the most efficient solutions, and shape optimal, but stupefying spaces. At odds and in the shadow of the mainstream, initiatives like Mundraub and 596 Acres show us that commoning urban data, making it actionable and accessible for normal citizens may trigger a creative practice of commoning public spaces and make cities more livable. Commoning the city in an age of digital transformation may provide people with opportunities for a convivial use of technology. Commoning, with the use of tools like collaborative mapping, enables urban dwellers to actually own and shape the places where they live. Thus, Sharing Cities could be a powerful antidote at a time when so many feel powerless and overwhelmed by a world that appears to be getting more complex and threatening every day.

These two small stories sound marginal? How can we uncover many more?

Photo by Daniel Wehner

The post Sharing Cities: Using Urban Data to Reclaim Public Space as a Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A pioneer in this style of high-tech activism is the Brooklyn-based group 596 Acres, whose name comes from apparent number of acres of vacant public land in Brooklyn in 2011 as determined by the NYC Department of City Planning.  Since its founding that year, 596 Acres has ingeniously used various databases to identify vacant lots throughout the City that could be re-purposed into public gardens, farms parks, and community meeting spaces.

Paula Z. Segal, an attorney who works with the Urban Justice Center in New York City, explained in a blog post that shortly after its founding in 2011, “the 596 Acres team started hunting down all available data about city-owned land. Once we got the data, we worked to translate it into usable information. For each publicly owned ‘vacant’ lot we found, we asked two questions: 1) ‘Is this lot in use already?’ and 2) ‘Can you reach this lot from the street?’”

The group used a combination of automated script, Google Maps, the interactive community maps at OASISNYC.net, and gardener surveys done by a NYC nonprofit, to identify the unused lots accessible from the street.  It discovered that there were approximately 660 acres of vacant public land in New York City, distributed across 1,800 sites.  But putting this land to better, public uses required commoners to organize and pressure elected officials and city bureaucrats to transfer ownership and allow the creation of new green spaces.

There is a backstory to 596 Acres’ activism: In the 1990s, many New Yorkers converged on trashed-out parcels of city land, converting them into hundreds of community gardens. This amazing surge of commoning helped to humanize the cityscape while, as a byproduct, raising property values for adjacent buildings in the neighborhood. People could undertake this work only because the vacant lots were open and accessible. (In the era of Mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg, by contrast, any vacant lots are fenced, effectively thwarting the reclaiming of vacant lots and abandoned buildings for commoners.) Guiliani sought to sell off the land that commoners had reclaimed, provoking a fierce backlash that resulted in the creation of scores of community land trusts to manage the gardens.

Now that vacant lots are fenced, 596 Acres post signs on the fences informing neighbors that the land is actually publicly owned (i.e., government, not commoners, has title to the land). The signs invite people to organize to try to convert the unused lots into gardens or parks. To help move this process along, 596 Acres has created online maps giving detailed information about each vacant lot – who is the registered owner, the land’s legal status, city departments and politicians who should be contacted, etc.

Living Lots NYC now serves as “a clearinghouse of information that New Yorkers can use to find, unlock and protect our shared resources.”  The site features a searchable database and map of 899 “acres of opportunity” on 1,337 sites, and 1,186 acres of community projects on 584 sites.  The map also includes colored dots showing where people have access and where people are organizing to liberate land.  A primary goal of the site is to “broadcast what is know-able [about vacant city land parcels] and to help people find one another on a property-by-property basis.”

Paula Segal explains that:

Wherever possible, the goal is a permanent transfer of public land to the NYC Parks Department, or private land to a community land trust. But sometimes creating a temporary space for a few years until other planned development moves forward—arranged via an interim use agreement—is the only achievable outcome.

In each instance, residents must navigate a unique bureaucratic maze: applying for approval from their Community Board, winning endorsement from local elected officials, and negotiating with whichever agency holds title to the land. Along the way, 596 Acres provides legal advice, technical assistance, and a network for sharing best practices from successful campaigns.

Some of the benefits of building power this way have been unexpected.  In January 2015, when NYC’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) published a list of 181 “hard to develop” properties that they would sell for $1 to developers willing to build affordable housing, we were able to quickly analyze the list and find out that it included 20 community garden lots. Six of those were gardens that had been formed with our support.

Within three weeks of the list’s publication, over 150 New Yorkers, including four City Council members, were rallying on the steps of City Hall. By the end of that year, the administration had transformed 36 formerly “interim use” spaces to permanently preserved NYC Parks Department gardens, including fifteen of the gardens on the January list. Using our network, community gardeners had preempted a major threat, ensuring that the largest wave of garden preservation in NYC history would happen without a legal battle.

596 Acres has now moved beyond vacant lots, focusing on how inaccessible and neglected NYC parks, buildings and post offices could be put to better use.

In collaboration with the Urban Justice Center and Common Cause/NY, 596 Acres also operates a website called NYCommons that helps people learn more about New York City’s public spaces.  Some 3,243 properties are listed, with colored dots indicating whether the property is a library, post office, waterfront facility, public housing, garden, vacant lot, whether “development is pending” and if organizing [against “development”] is underway.

“Some are opportunities to organize new spaces for integrated community services,” writes Segal. “Others we hope to preserve in the face of a real estate market hungry for places it can transform into luxury development.”  Many of of the neglected land parcels, parks, community centers, public baths, rest rooms and buildings are in low-income communities of color — victims of the city’s fiscal crisis and class-driven policy choices in the 1970s.

I’m impressed with how database-driven maps can be used to galvanize and assist citizen campaigns to reclaim the city.  It suggests that commoners should convene more “inter-mapping” confabs to trade insights and develop database activism.

Photo by kika13

The post Using Data Mapping to Help Reclaim Urban Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I returned to Phoenix inspired.

But how was I going to find a place for a community garden?  Even when I found it, how would I go about getting the space zoned and approved? Unlike the City of Portland, Phoenix does not have a website encouraging community gardens.

In New York, 596 Acres has plenty of experience in working with municipalities to convert vacant lots into community gardens. Even more helpful, 596 Acres has produced an open source tool to map any city’s potential community garden spaces. Other cities have already customized the 596 Acres tool to reclaim vacant land for public use.

extracted from http://596acres.org/en/about/about-596-acres/

Hundreds of acres of vacant public land are hidden in plain sight behind chain-link fences in New York City, concentrated in neighborhoods disproportionately deprived of beneficial land uses. We are building the tools for communities to open all these rusty fences and the opportunities within them to improve the areas they live in. In response to a steady stream of inquiries, in 2013 we expanded our work to support communities organizing for control of warehoused private land.

596 Acres creates tools to help neighbors find the lot in their lives by:

(1) making municipal information available online and on the ground (e.g. by placing signs on vacant public land that explain a lot’s status and steps that the community can take to be able to use this land);

(2) providing education about city government and ways to participate in decisions that shape neighborhoods;

(3) assisting communities with legal support and campaign-development on land use issues;

(4) maintaining networks that allow communities to share knowledge and relationships with decision-makers;

(5) working with groups after they get access to land to build sustainable community governance as they become stewards of a public and inclusive resource; and

(6) advocating for municipal agencies to increase participatory decision-making surrounding public resources.

extracted from http://596acres.org/en/about/other-cities-copy/

Maps For Other Cities!

What if I’m in another city? Where do I start looking for land that my neighbors and I can use? 

The place to start is the City or County Property Register, which will tell you definitively who owns what.  Usually, the register is set up for use by those who have a particular property in mind. You’ll want to find out how to contact the office that maintains the Register in your city or county and call them: ask how to get a list or map of public land. Your City Planning Department might also be a help. We started our project with data, but if you have a particular property in mind, you’ll be able to follow the steps we outline on the advacacy resources page.

What if I want to see all the opportunities in my city? 

We’re creating a practice of building online tools neighbors can use to clear hurdles to community land access and of connecting land access advocates in ciites around the world with a set of tools and best practices, and one another. The tools turn city data into information about particular pieces of land and connect people to one another through simple social networking functions. The 596 Acres Team is available to consult with you on your project in another city. Contact us to discuss a fee-structure for customizing tools and tactics for your group or organization. We’re really proud of these partnerships:

• Grounded In Philly, with the Garden Justice Legal Initiative at the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, funded by the Merck Family Fund and the Claneil Foundation.
• LA Open Acres with Community Health Councils (Los Angeles, California) and C-Lab (NYC), winner of the Goldhirsh Foundation LA2050 Competition.

• Living Lots, a prototype vacant lot activation tool for any city supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. We put the prototype together to meet the needs of the New Orleans Food and Farm Network‘s FarmCity Toolbox and created Living Lots NOLA.
• In May 2015, Eric Brelsford of 596 Acres served as consultant for the development of Parkdale People’s Map, a mapping tool for the Parkdale Neighborhood Land Trust in Toronto (Canada).
• In August 2015, Paula was a resident at Neighborhood Academy at Prinzesinnengarten (Berlin, Germany); the goal of the residency was to begin the process of making Berlin’s hidden commons visible to residents for potential reclamation. We created an online map and placed signs on Berlin’s potential “commons.”

You can also build your own version of 596 Acres’ tools. Groups around the world are doing just that:

• Heritage Montreal, an organization that works to promote and to protect the architectural, historic, natural and cultural heritage of Greater Montreal, adapted the Living Lots approach to vacant and vulnerable built sites here: the H-MTL Platform. The project allows people who live in Montreal to identify buildings that they believe should be preserved and then work together to preserve them.
• Lande, also built for Montreal, is a tool created based on 596 Acres’ best practices for resident-led transformation of vacant lots.
• GTECH Strategies, a leading land access and activation organization in Pittsburgh, liked our approach so much they captured it in an Request for Proposals with The City of Pittsburgh’s Planning Department to build a customized tool using municipal data calledLots to Love.
• After learning about 596 Acres’ map, Love Old Trafford Lots created a their own using available technology modeled on ours. They started by making their own data through a series of organized walks. The map is helping neighbors see possibilities and sieze them.
• 3000acres in Melbourne Australia borrowed our strategy and created their own tool. Instead of starting with municipal data, they started with a few sites that users submitted and explored the opportunities they presented by researching each one-by-one, then posting and acting on their findings. These opportunities are turning into growing spaces with the support of 3000acres staff.
• 2000acres in Sydney built on our strategies and the success of 3000acres in Melbourne.

Our code base, Living Lots^TM is open source and free to use; just be sure to attribute and make your improvements available for us and others to use. Code and detailed instructions available on GitHub.

Image Credits

File%3AEverett_Community_Garden.jpg By Finetooth (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

Raiz from 596 Acres photo gallery

Photo by rickbradley

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