From March to June 2017 peer-to-peer expert Michel Bauwens conducted a three-month research and participation project in Ghent on the ‘commons city of the future’. The result of that research is this Commons Transition Plan, describing the possibilities and role of the City of Ghent (as a local authority) in reinforcing citizen initiatives. With this, the City wishes to give further shape to a sustainable and ethical economy in Ghent.

Michel Bauwens (58) has already been working for over ten years on the theme of the commons-based economy and society. He is solicited all over the world as a speaker or to give workshops, and is the author of the bestseller ‘Saving the world: With P2P towards a postcapitalist society’. Bauwens led a similar research and transition project in Ecuador. The major French newspaper, Libération, referred to him as the leading theorist on the theme of the economy of cooperation, following the French edition of the book.

The commons is a way to describe shared, material or immaterial property that is stewarded, protected or produced by a community – in an urban context often by citizens’ collectives – and managed according to the rules and standards of that community. It is fundamentally distinct from state bodies – government, city, state – but also from market actors. The commons is independent of, but of course still holds relationships to, the government and the market. Commons as a new form of organisation is exemplified by a variety of initiatives based around production and consumption with the idea of achieving a more sustainable society. This can for example be the set-up of energy cooperatives or shared work spaces for co-working. Examples in Ghent are EnerGent, LikeBirds, Voedselteams, Wijdelen, etc.

All of these initiatives show that ‘urban commons’ is alive and kicking today in the city.

Aim of the research

For the City of Ghent, the central question of this research and participation project was: how can a city respond to this and what are the implications of this for city policy? The goal was to come up with a synthesised Commons Transition Plan that describes the possibilities for optimal public interventions while also offering answers to the question of what Ghent’s many commoners and commons projects expect from the city.

The intention of this assignment is therefore to investigate the possibility of a potentially new political, facilitative and regulatory relationship between the local government of Ghent and its citizens so as to facilitate the further development of the commons.

With this work the researchers have tried to find out what kinds of institutionalisation is fitting to handle the commons well. This means essentially a shift from a top-down approach and old organisational principles such as ‘command and control’, towards a new way of thinking and an approach as a ‘partner city’, in which the city facilitates and supports projects. Of course, sometimes the city must also regulate projects, in the role of a more facilitative government.

Structure of the Commons Transition Plan

In the first part, the report gives a general introduction to the commons which serves to explain why the commons are important in the context of urban development.

In a second part, the researchers look at the global context in which the revival of the commons is taking place, but most of all at the reality of the urban commons in a number of other European cities, which may possibly serve as a benchmark for the city of Ghent.

Part 3 presents the findings in Ghent itself.

Finally, in Part 4, the researchers give their recommendations to the city council.

At the end of this study there are a series of appendices, including an English-language overview of the commons in European cities, written by the Greek urbanist Vasilis Niaros, who was a Timelab resident during the period of our research. The authors of the report, Michel Bauwens and Yurek Onzia, are responsible for parts 1 and 4. Vasilis Niaros wrote the comparative study.

• Read the executive summaryWritten by Executive Michel Bauwens and Yurek Onzia
• Read the complete Commons Transition Plan(under revision) (2.62 MB)

Originally published in Stad.gent.

Photo by Dimitris Graffin

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The Assembly of the Commons of Marseille: a prefiguration full of promise

This new postcard will be sunny! If there is one characteristic peculiar to Marseille, it is its light. This is what I discovered by spending a few days there on the invitation of Pierre-Alain, a commoner with whom I had already communicated on the theme of the assemblies of the commons. That’s how I had the chance to participate in the very first commoner meeting of that region.

To get off to a good start, we began with a nice little restaurant on the Vieux Port, of course

It was an opportunity to get acquainted with about ten participants, and discover the diversity of their profiles and respective projects, from the association leader to the lawyer, through the researcher, the doctoral student and the company managers – the table looked like my idea of an assembly of the commons: a joyful mix of heterogeneous careers.

We then joined the MarsMedialab, a magnificent third space of 350m² in the heart of the city, to start the work session proper. The objective was very simple: to bring together the good will of the regions around the question of the commons. The problem was clear: what do we do with this goodwill? What kind of actions can this group implement? What structure should it have?

In addition to the people, the roundtable allowed us to (re)discover a number of emblematic national and local commons and initiatives such as:

• SavoirsCom1, a collective committed to the development of policies and initiatives related to knowledge commons;
• Ars Industrialis, a cultural association created by Bernard Stiegler, whose only regional branch is located in Marseille;
• L’Office, a structure that accompanies the cultural, social, educational and economic transitions from a “digital society” to a “communal society”;
• H2H, a software platform that supports the projects of the Hôtel du Nord residents’ cooperative;
• 1DLab, start-up of the ESS (Social and Solidarity Economy);
• Mnemotix, a cooperative smart-up working on data semantization;
• ManuFabrik, a cooperative which is part of the field of popular education;
• Pas Sans Nous (Not Without Us), an association that has given itself the role of being a union of working class neighbourhoods.

The exchanges were rich and very engaging. Those present were committed to making concrete progress in the local commons. But for a first meeting it was important, before discussing specific projects, to share a common vision of the group’s organization and the methodologies to be adopted to work together.

With this in mind, I shared the practices of the Assembly of the Commons of Lille, in particular the governance model that we have adopted in our collective which has been working very well for the past two years, stigmergy. With the support of Pierre-Alain, who is already convinced, I was careful to stress the importance of documenting practices to facilitate the inclusion of newcomers and promote transparency in processes.

During the afternoon, the specificity of Marseille’s dynamic appeared to me in two ways:

• First, it seemed quite clear that there were two fairly distinct movements. On the one hand, the needs related to what could resemble an Assembly of the Commons: mapping the commons, creating a network, and on the other hand, very pressing and concrete questions concerning the establishment of an economy of the commons, which would be more like a Chamber of Commons structure.
• Second, since the region is vast, it seemed obvious that at least two major geographical poles were emerging: a group centred on Marseille and its surroundings, and another anchored on the side of Sophia Antipolis.

What also emerged from these exchanges was that each of them was already well engaged in their own projects, so time was inevitably limited to invest in a new collective, which would make the assembly a form of “hub”, a chamber echoing each other’s initiatives. But the willingness to get to know each other and to create a true community by working together on concrete initiatives was palpable.

To sum up, after the meeting with the Grenoble commoners, this Marseilles exchange convinced me that the assemblies of the commons are very unique places of co-creation, in which we must not try to apply a centralized theoretical model, but welcome the contributory impulses in a dynamic anchored locally and respectful of the geographical and historical specificities of each location.

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The Assembly of the Commons of Grenoble: building the city together

It was with great pleasure that I met Anne-Sophie and Antoine during my journey, while taking a break in the beautiful city of Grenoble. We happily shared the practices of the Lille and Grenoble assemblies of the commons over a coffee at a sidewalk cafe.

Anne-Sophie and Antoine were both elected to positions in city hall. They shared stories with me of citizens engaged in a dynamic of counterpower and, after being elected in 2014, of their difficulty in taking on an institutional posture. Changing culture is not always easy! But this is what also makes the Grenoble Assembly of the Commons so special, born of the meeting of two dynamics.

The first of these two comes from Nuit Debout, within which a “Commission of the Commons” was created in 2016. The idea was to discuss the management of commons as a common responsibility: not only the responsibility of public authorities, but also of the area’s inhabitants.

The second dynamic, on the part of city hall, was the philosophically interesting idea of investing in a space between the private and the public, to make room for citizens in the public debate. The key here is that this idea has not been abandoned at all, in fact it unites activists and elected representatives in the same assembly today.

Last March, during the Biennale of Cities in Transition, partners and associations were invited to the assembly. About fifty people from various backgrounds participated in this first assembly, including Sylvia Fredricksson and Michel Briand, both well-known French commoners who came to share their experiences.

What the elected representatives underline is that even if they have the will to make a difference in the direction of greater citizen involvement in public life, it is not so simple. Legislation is not adapted at all, particularly with regard to risk management (the insurance framework does not exist). On top of that, officials are not so aware, and not trained to work directly with citizens. Faced with this, the elected representatives asked the services to work on these points and advance the texts and practices.

Nevertheless, among the completed projects at the town hall level, there have been agreements created for occupying public spaces such as shared gardens, for example. The assembly also discussed the idea of writing a charter on housing, a bit like in Bologna (Italy), where a charter of urban commons was drafted and signed by some forty Italian cities.

The city also participates in a “migrants’ platform” to accompany reception initiatives.There are also participatory budgets: every year, 800K€ in investment is opened to citizens’ projects. 106 projects proposed by the Grenoble region were selected in 2017. On the cultural side, we can cite the desire to take art out of museums with the Street Art Festival, whose traces can be found all over the city walls.

To date, the Assembly of the Commons has set up four separate working groups which meet asynchronously at regular intervals:

• Natural Commons
• Knowledge Commons
• Urban Commons
• Commons of Health and Well-being

The spirit of commons in Grenoble has a long history. After the Second World War, unlike many other places, the city had, for quite a while, retained its own operators to manage electricity and water, which made it a very special case.

After being privatized in the 1980s, water came back into the public domain after a citizens’ lengthy legal battle with certain elected environmental officials and some employees of the water authority. This was the first battle won in France for water municipalization, along with the first French users’ committee to make the citizens’ involvement in water management last. The whole world visits Grenoble for its water management model. And on the electricity and gas side, the operator is a mixed-economy company but the public (the city of Grenoble) is still the majority shareholder.

This civic expertise and spirit of solidarity continue today, and are embodied in the city’s desire to be part of a concrete, lasting relationship between two communities that “do with others”, all the others…

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Dirk Holemans: When Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, started his research for the development of a “Commons Transition Plan” for the Flemish city of Ghent, he was overwhelmed by the sheer number of commons-oriented programs. In three months time, he discovered 500 initiatives. A remarkable figure, related to recent research indicating a tenfold increase in commons.

So what is happening? Is it a coincidence that Ghent is one of the frontrunner Sharing Cities? Fortunately, historical evidence gives us a clue. We are witnessing the third big “wave” of what scholars like Tine De Moor call “institutionalised forms of collective action.” The first wave developed in the late Middle Ages in a period of rapid urbanization with commons being established in great numbers. As there was no real state, people had to organize themselves to respond to the new market developments. And what about Ghent? Well, it was at that time the second biggest city north of the Alps, with more than 50 different guilds.

The second wave came during the industrial revolution, with workers and their families living in miserable conditions. People, in the midst of a market and state failure, built their own institutions like cooperatives and unions. Again, Ghent was the leading city in the region. It was the center of the textile industry and the breeding ground for a wide array of citizen associations. This leads us to the current period: Given the city’s tradition of progressive politics, present-day Ghent has a distinct political and administrative culture that is really supportive of citizens’ initiatives.

So, is Ghent really heaven on earth from a commons’ perspective? Not yet, according to Bauwens’s report. There are very promising developments, but the efforts of the city and the commons initiatives are highly fragmented. Though commons initiatives are present in every sector few activities are is aimed at real production. Also despite its historical legacy, the current cooperative sector is quite weak. To put it frankly, there is no existent support infrastructure for start-ups of the generative and cooperative economy that could work with commons infrastructures.

This is the reality: If Ghent doesn’t give the same level of institutional support to the commons as it does to the mainstream start-ups, the commons could remain marginal as an economic player. This brings us to the crucial part of the Bauwens’s report — coherent proposals for new institutions that allow the consolidation of the third wave. I see three clusters of proposals:

• The first is a clear structure that installs a supportive relationship between the city government and people running and participating in commons initiatives. Bauwens proposes the creation of a City Lab that helps people develop their proposals and prepares Commons Agreements between the city and the new initiatives, modeled after the existing Bologna Regulation on Commons.
• Second, commons should play a key role in the transition towards a resilient city. Fortunately, Ghent already has a transition food strategy — Gent en Garde — which embodies the core institutional logic needed. Central here is the Food Council, which meets regularly and brings together relevant experts. It includes representatives of the current forces at play and has the strengths and weaknesses of representative organizations. The latter have power and influence but will probably defend the existing food system. The Food Working Group is one of the members. It mobilizes those active in commons’ initiatives and works along a contributive logic. This means people are not looking to extract value (make private profit) but want to generate social value in the first place. For Bauwens, the combination of a representative and contributive logic can create a more performant Democracy. This, however, requires people participatings in the commons to have a greater voice in the city. Bauwens proposes the establishment of two new institutions: the Assembly of the Commons, for all citizens active in commons’ initiatives, and the Chamber of the Commons, for all social entrepreneurs creating livelihoods around these commons.
• Last not but least, why don’t we provide people who want to engage in the commons with the same support a mainstream profit-driven start-up gets? In Ghent (and in other cities, too), this entails at least three things: The creation of an incubator for a commons-based economy, the establishment of a public city bank, and the development of mutualized commons infrastructures through inter-city cooperation.

The task in Ghent and beyond now is to shape the institutions of the 21st century.

Here’s the executive summary of Ghent commons transition plan.

Header image of De Site, an urban agriculture commons project in the neighborhood of Rabot in Ghent, courtesy of Dirk Holemans

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Our call

Civic and community initiatives are working to vitalize our urban, rural, scientific and digital commons, and promoting a future guided by democratic participation, social equity and environmental sustainability. At the heart of these acts of “commoning” are satisfying, joyful social relationships that regenerate our interpersonal and physical surroundings. We reject the idea that we are merely self-interested individual consumers or competitors in a fierce market jungle. Instead, we also consider ourselves active and cooperative citizen caretakers working for healthy and fair neighbourhoods, cities and societies.

In times when European institutions are losing support and in deep crisis, we as European citizens are reclaiming Europe. We are concerned that many of our governments tend to favour the narrow interests of dominant market forces instead of catering to the common good of people and the planet.

We are alarmed that growing global social inequality and exclusion, along with climate change, are threatening our very future. We regret that massive privatization and commodification have already deprived us of much of our shared commons that is essential for our physical, social and cultural well-being, and our dignity.

Our experiences of commoning

Commoning relates to the network-based cooperation and localized bottom-up initiatives already sustained by millions of people around Europe and the world. These initiatives create self-managed systems that satisfy important needs, and often work outside of dominant markets and traditional state programmes while pioneering new hybrid structures.

As commoners:

• We build and strengthen communities by using and sharing knowledge, arts, culture, agriculture and technology.
• We build co-housing projects, support local agriculture, live in eco-villages, and have community-based and community-owned infrastructures (e.g. for energy, water, wifi, culture and funding).
• We take care of and collectively manage natural resources (including water, forests, seeds and animals).
• We make and freely share music, images, software, educational materials, scientific knowledge and the like.
• We have already succeeded in making some public-sector information accessible to all, including publicly-funded research, health knowledge and technology.
• We try to open up existing democratic institutions, through new tools of participatory democracy and transparency.

We call for

We call for the provision of resources and the necessary freedom to create, manage and sustain our commons. We call upon governments, local and national, as well as European Union institutions to facilitate the defence and growth of the commons, to eliminate barriers and enclosures, to open up doors for citizen participation and to prioritize the common good in all policies.

This requires a shift from traditional structures of top-down governance towards a horizontal participatory process for community decision-making in the design and monitoring of all forms of commons. We call on commoners to support a European movement that will promote solidarity, collaboration, open knowledge and experience sharing as the forces to defend and strengthen the commons.

Therefore, we call for and open the invitation to join an ongoing participatory, inclusive process across Europe for the building and maintenance of a Commons Assembly. Together we can continue to build a vibrant web of caring, regenerative collective projects that reclaim the European Commons for people and our natural environment.

Omnia sunt communia!

Sign the call here

Lead image extracted from the European Commons Assembly Video Intro

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