Social capital is shaped and molded by space. This same social capital is crucial in the successful self-organization of the commons, according to the late political economist Elinor Ostrom. Thus, in places where people can mobilize social capital, decades of urban planning practices are being challenged.

Digitalization is also an opportunity: It allows people to collect and make use of data in creative ways on an unprecedented scale. This has a huge potential for the urban commons. City administrators hold large amounts of land data that is so far hard to access or use, but when it becomes open data, it can unleash bottom-up innovations.

Last but not least, we should not forget that practices that foster Sharing Cities may have actually been there for decades. Some of those practices may be seen as old-fashioned, but might prove useful today. —Adrien Labaeye

1. Bottom Road Sanctuary: A Post-Apartheid Community Managed Nature Sanctuary

The area around Zeekoevlei lake, in South Africa, has had extremely high concentrations of threatened native plant species. This is partly because its northern bank was used as a garbage dump for many years. Then, in 2005, the city of Cape Town rezoned the area into parcels of land to be purchased by people who suffered through the Apartheid. The residents who moved in joined forces with nature conservation officials and local environmental organizations to restore the wetland. In practice, this meant residents largely left the space open and undeveloped. Some residents have actively removed invasive species, allowing a particularly threatened plant species, the fynbos, to thrive again in its natural habitat. The Bottom Road Sanctuary now has over 50,000 native plants, attracting many kinds of wildlife. It also has walkways, benches, and barbecuing spaces for nearby residents to share. —Adrien Labaeye

2. Gängeviertel: Repurposed Historical Building for Public Art and Culture

The city of Hamburg decided to tear down a deteriorating historical building complex in a neighborhood once known as “das Gängeviertel.” In August 2009, artists formed a collective to oppose the destruction of the 12 buildings, and advocated that they instead be repurposed as a public space for creativity. The collective succeeded in saving the Gängeviertel, and held a launch celebration. The event brought 3,000 residents of Hamburg into the space for exhibitions, film screenings, concerts, and other cultural events. The collective then transformed into a co-operative in 2010, and presented a concept plan for the complex to the local urban development authority in Hamburg. The city approved the plan and granted the co-op’s use and management of the buildings. In the six years since, several of the buildings have been renovated by the city and tens of thousands of people have visited the cultural complex. In 2012, the German UNESCO Commission celebrated the Gängeviertel initiative as a successful example of urban development that promotes cultural and social participation through the preservation of public spaces and democratic city policies. —Adrien Labaeye

3. Chisinau Civic Center: Vacant Lot Reclaimed as a Public Park for Community Gatherings

A neglected plot of triangular land once lay in the city of Chisinau in Moldova. Cars regularly drove over it. Some used it to dump their garbage and construction rubble. Now, the site is a lively public space, known as the Chisinau Civic Center. The transformation was initiated by the local nongovernmental organization the Oberliht Association, and was created together with local officials as well as artists, architects, scientists, students, and community members. In the very beginning, they held a public picnic at the park as a way to invite nearby residents to get involved in the park’s restoration. The organizers then built a wooden platform in the center of the park with support of the nearby residents. This eventually led to the Civic Center becoming a play area for children, as well as a place for community gatherings, film screenings, games, exhibits, and performances. —Cat Johnson

These three short case studies are adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

Cross-posted from Shareable

Photo by humblenick

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Adrien Labaeye: Here’s the problem: Internet access has become an essential part of life. However, many still cannot afford it. There are also growing concerns that internet connections could be unilaterally cut by Internet Service Providers at the request of public agencies. How do we ensure everyone has internet access?

Here’s how one organization is working on the problem: As early as 2002, the German activists of Freifunk, a noncommercial grassroots group, decided to self-organize to provide a free and autonomous internet infrastructure for all. In 2014, Münster free-internet activists from the local hacker space Warpzone decided to deploy a mesh network for their building complex. They visited a neighboring Freifunk community in Bielefeld that provided them with a crash course into the technology involved, which was mainly provided by the national Freifunk network.

The idea is that any WiFi router can be turned into an access point that communicates directly with other routers, passing along information between them, and thus forming a “mesh” of router-to-router connections. This way, people can send data from any point in the mesh without even connecting to the internet. The infrastructure is owned and maintained by the activists, who formed an association to handle legal and financial practicalities.

In 2015, Freifunk Münster joined with nearby Freifunk Warendorf to pool resources, including skilled people and IT infrastructure, and then made them available to the whole Münsterland region.

Results:

• In June 2015, the parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia (Landtag NRW) decided to support the local Freifunk initiatives by granting permission to use the roofs of buildings that belong to the state.
• In 2016, the Freifunk initiative was awarded 8,000 Euros to build a wireless backbone over the city, bringing Freifunk to places with no internet connection and connecting the scattered little mesh clouds.
• Thanks to the growth of communities in western Münsterland, the mesh reached 2,000 access points on April 20, 2016, making it the largest mesh network in Germany.

Learn more from:

• Freifunk network
• Freifunk community forum (German)

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

Header image of the Freifunk-Initiative installing WiFi-Antennas in Berlin-Kreuzberg in 2013 provided by Boris Niehaus

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Adrien Labaeye: Here’s the problem: The internet was initially built as a peer-to-peer network, but commercial interests changed it into a highly market-driven system over time. Domains are one reason for this change. Top-level domains such as .com and .net became resources that were used to make a profit. In the past couple of years, this phenomenon has extended to other domains like .nyc and .paris. Are there ways to secure these digital resources so that they serve local communities?

Here’s how one organization is working on the problem: Back in 2000, Thomas Lowenhaupt, founding director of Connecting.nyc, imagined that a “.nyc” domain could be used to support local online communications across New York City’s neighborhoods. The challenge was to ensure the attribution of the .nyc URLs would be done to benefit residents of New York City and not be taken by commercially-driven interests.

On April 19, 2001, Lowenhaupt convinced the Queens Community Board to pass an Internet Empowerment Resolution. The resolution called for the acquisition of the .nyc Top Level Domain, or TLD, and for its development as a public-interest resource to serve the residents and organizations of New York City.

Receiving no further institutional support, Lowenhaupt then started Connecting.nyc Inc. as a not-for-profit to advance the application and acquisition of the .nyc domain. Eventually, in 2008, a resolution was passed by the New York City Council to support the city’s application for the .nyc domain.

In 2014, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (the global institution governing the attribution of TLDs) delegated .nyc to Neustar, which manages the requests for attributions on behalf of the city administration, under a public-private partnership. Following connecting.nyc’s recommendation, only New York City-based individuals and organizations can register a .nyc domain name and many second-level domain names have been set aside —for example, harlem.nyc. In 2016, the city administration initiated a program to license operators of 385 neighborhood domain names.

Results:

• 385 neighborhood names have been set aside to be licensed to public-interest organizations. Four hundred other names (beyond neighborhoods) have been reserved for public use.
• The Queens Community Board’s Internet Empowerment Resolution was the first instance of a local government calling for the development of a TLD as a public-interest resource. Since then, cities have increasingly begun to look upon TLDs as a new urban space that provides opportunities and requires governance.

Learn more from:

• Connecting.nyc

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

Header image provided by ICANN.

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This site is about foraging in the city. It promotes the idea that cities can become edible. That edible cities are a commons that all urban actors should strive to produce together.

Adrien Labaeye is taking the lead on this great new initiative dedicated to foraging and the urban food commons. The following texts are extracted from the Edible Cities website. which, among other things, features best practices, maps and resources.

Edible Cities Manifesto

We citizens of the cities claim the right to feed ourselves and find medicine from the urban landscape;

We call the city our garden;

We are aware that while foraging people reconnect with their food, its origins, its seasonality, and shape in nature;

We dream of growing edibles everywhere in the city;

We plant and disperse seeds without waiting for a public administration to tell us so;

We care for the edibles we feed from;

We pay attention to local regulations that protect sensitive areas and endangered species;

We are generally against commercial urban foraging (picking to sell) unless its for the common good;

We demand cities free of soil and air contamination, and free from any fertilizers and pesticides;

We share the knowledge of plants with everyone who is genuinely interested;

We find peace and comfort among nature, we honour and show gratitude to the plants and trees;

We respect the claims of all living creatures, human and non-human, to feed from plants and trees, but see the claim for life of any plant and tree superior;

We are part of nature, we are nature.

Edible Cities Resources

Resources. It lists various resources that are useful to learn about foraging: links, books, etc.

Maps. It provides an introduction to all the maps that can be used for foraging.

Manifesto. This is a manifesto of a group of committed foragers outlining what urban foraging can do to cities and the people who live there.

Good practice. This is a collection of principles on how to be a conscious forager.

The Edible Cities Indicator. It introduces the concept that the edibility of a city can be a good indicator of how sustainable a city is. Contact us to know more.

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The oceans were the original global commons, fished and navigated for ages. But new technologies have added numerous challenges to sustaining our oceans: offshore oil drilling, deep-sea mining, and overfishing. However, it’s crucial that water, both freshwater and saltwater, remains a commons and held in the public trust, because access to clean water is a basic human right.

Unfortunately, people directly affected by governing decisions about their environment, resources, and quality of life are systematically prevented from being the ones who make those decisions. Under our current systems of law and governance, those decisions are made by a central government (state or federal), and local people and their municipal governments are “preempted” (forbidden) from deciding what would best serve the creation of sustainable communities and the protection of the environment and the rights of community members.

But cities — and local communities — are at the front lines, protecting access to clean water as emerging water wars unfold. In a recent report entitled “The Role of Urban Agriculture in Building Resilient Cities,” authors H. DE Zeeuw et al. stated, “Rapid urbanisation generally puts high pressures on limited urban resources, like fresh water, while at the same time producing large amounts of wastewater and wastes.” Cities are working to reduce risk, quantify uncertainty about having a sustainable water supply, and make communities more responsive and resilient to a changing planet. — Emily Skeehan and Nikolas Kichler 

These three short case studies, adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons,” show that there are viable alternatives to the management and conservation of water.

1. Resident Development Committees: Community-led Management Over Local Water Supplies 

Among the African nations, Zambia is one of the most rapidly urbanizing countries in the continent. In its capital, Lusaka, 60 percent of the population live in unplanned settlements that are an urban and rural hybrid. This has led to extensive administrative challenges over clean water and public sanitation. In response, the Lusaka Water and Sewage Company, the Lusaka City Council, and various nongovernmental organizations worked together to develop Resident Development Committees (RDCs). The RDCs provide legal entities for local residents to foster cooperation with unplanned neighborhoods, thereby allowing planning, construction, and maintenance of water utilities to become self-organized and co-managed through them. Financial responsibilities, such as fee collection, are also under their jurisdiction. Over time, the RDCs have become the primary managing units for local collective decision-making over water issues, and have sustained a regular flow of information, transparency, and accountability to the communities they represent. Many neighborhoods now have access to a reliable and largely self-sustaining source of clean water. The benefits of RDCs for unplanned communities have been so convincing that formally planned areas are also advocating for the same model. — Nikolas Kichler 

2. depave: Communities Turning Pavement Into Green Public Space 

Paved surfaces contribute to stormwater pollution, by directing rainwater with toxic urban pollutants to local streams and rivers. This, in turn, degrades water quality and natural habitats. Since Portland, Oregon, receives a lot of rain, impervious pavements are especially problematic for the city’s stormwater management. Two friends from Portland thought of a straightforward solution to this problem: remove as much impervious pavement as possible. They organized their first official depaving event in 2008. Since then, they formed depave, a nonprofit organization that promotes the removal of pavement from urban areas to address the harmful effects of stormwater runoff, as well as to create green public spaces. depave seeks out groups that are already community-oriented, such as schools and faith-based groups, and encourages them to work together on the same project. depave has coordinated over 50 depaving projects in Portland. Eric Rosewall, depave’s co-founder, reports the organization has depaved more than 12,500 square meters of asphalt since 2008, diverting an estimated 12,000 cubic meters of stormwater from storm drains. Over the years, depave has grown to support depaving across the Portland metro region and beyond, through their depave network training services. — Eric Rosewall (depave) and Adrien Labaeye 

3. Tarun Bharat Sangh: Fostering Community-driven Solutions to Secure Water Access and Rejuvenate Rivers 

India makes up around 18 percent of the global population, and yet only has access to 4 percent of the world’s drinkable-water resources, according to CNN. Since the 1980s, both rural and urban areas in the country have faced drinking-water shortages and crop failures. This scarcity is exacerbated by river pollution associated with sewage disposal and industrial waste. To address this crisis, in 1985, Rajendra Singh and others formed the local nongovernmental organization Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS, or Young India Organization) in Alvar, a rural district in Rajasthan.

TBS has worked with rural villagers to revive the use of traditional water-harvesting solutions. In particular, they used “johads” (small earthen reservoirs) to harvest rainwater in a way that reduced evaporation losses to substantially replenish local aquifers. People also shifted to organic farming techniques to make more efficient use of water. TBS advocated for these and other methods of water management as a way to bring about a culture of self-sufficiency to local farming communities. The River Arvari Parliament expanded on this objective. Following the revival of the Arvari River in 1990, representatives from the area’s 72 villages formed the transparent, community-driven “river parliament” to maintain the health of the river. To date, Rajasthan communities have created and man- aged more than 11,000 johads, replenishing more than 250,000 wells. Within 28 years, seven river systems that had been dried up for 80 years have been revived. — Nikolas Kichler 

Longer versions of the above case studies can be found in our book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” 

Header image by Leo Rivas-Micoud via Unsplash

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Platforms enabled by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), like Uber and Airbnb, are increasingly being seen as looters by cities. They are like Death Stars, extracting great swaths of value from local communities only to transfer that wealth elsewhere. Indeed, it would seem that the original ideas of sharing and peer-to-peer collaboration have been co-opted through an almost feudal structure of wealth extraction. Technology as such is not the culprit here. But it certainly enables the creation of new products and markets that, in practice, can perpetuate or even deepen existing socio-economic inequities.

In contrast to the usual examples of on-demand “sharing” platforms, the initiatives below demonstrate technology’s capacity to enable real sharing within cities. These examples offer crucial alternatives to extractive platforms that are currently dominant. They are also solutions that are intentionally designed to address urban challenges, instead of exacerbating them. There are solutions based on an understanding of digital technology as what philosopher Ivan Illich defined as tools for conviviality: tools that empower people to realize their freedom through interpersonal dependence and reciprocity. — Adrien Labaeye and Ryan Conway 

These three short case studies are adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

1. Human Ecosystem Project: Social Media Data Used to Analyze City Infrastructure and Citizen Well-being 

Social media networks and state intelligence agencies harvest massive amounts of data on their users. Private services primarily use the data to show targeted advertisements to their users, while government surveillance programs allegedly use the information for national security purposes. In both cases, the use of the data is neither transparent nor is it used to directly help the people whose information is being collected.

Human Ecosystem Relazioni is a project funded by the city of Bologna to harness public information available from social media to understand what their citizens care about and how they are feeling at a given time and place in the city. The Human Ecosystems platform, on which this project relies, turns data from privately-owned social media platforms into open data that can be used by city officials, researchers, and the community at large. It is a way to identify trends and patterns that can lead to observations about the functioning of city infrastructure, and which can in turn lead to possible paths toward their improvement. The data can also be analyzed to produce interactive exhibits featuring a series of visualizations that demonstrate certain types of behavior and opinions among the citizens of Bologna. The Human Ecosystems platform has also been adopted in São Paulo, Brazil, and New Haven, U.S. — Adrien Labaeye 

2. Smart Citizen Toolkit: Monitoring City Air Quality with Crowdsourced Data 

Air pollution is a critical public health issue that many cities are struggling to address. Aside from political disputes that can hinder regulatory solutions, there is also a broader obstacle to solving this challenge: the lack of accurate, publicly-accessible data that reflects the extent of the pollution on a real-time basis. This is why FabLab Barcelona, through a collaboration between technologists and citizen scientists, created the Smart Citizen Toolkit. It is a compact device that contains a data processor and a series of sensors that people use to monitor environmental conditions where they live.

Using the kit and the accompanying online platform, users can monitor such things as temperature, humidity, and carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide levels. The information is automatically uploaded to an independent platform that gathers the data from hundreds of distributed sensors. Since the published data can easily be made publicly accessible, universities, city governments, and anyone with the know-how can use the data for research on the local environment. The software and hardware for the toolkit is also all open-source. In addition to Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Manchester have used it to measure air quality in their region. — Adrien Labaeye 

3. PetaJakarta: Disaster Response Management Through Crowdsourced Civic Data

Jakarta has long faced a host of challenges. It is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and every year the area is battered by a monsoon. Since 40 percent of the city is at or below sea level, it regularly floods — a problem that will be exacerbated by the global sea-level rise induced by climate change. Jakarta also has one of the highest concentrations of active Twitter users in the world and a high proportion of cellphone use overall. That’s why a public-private partnership between Twitter, Jakarta Emergency Management Agency, the University of Wollongong in Australia, and others developed CogniCity, an open-source intelligence framework that manages spatial data received from mobile messaging apps.

The first platform built on CogniCity was PetaJakarta, a Twitter-based crowdsourcing map for flood data. It relies on Twitter to organize and display real-time information about flooding to Jakarta residents. PetaJakarta allows users to geotag Tweets to indicate flooded areas, which are verified and added to a map of government ood alerts that anyone can use to navigate hazardous, urban terrain. The platform has been so successful that it has received international praise from organizations such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. — Ryan Conway 

Longer versions of the above case studies can be found in our book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” 

Header image by Zach Meaney via Unsplash

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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

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