Brussels is a city that’s intimate with inertia. In its center stands the Palais de Justice, a grand 19th-century courthouse that was once described as the eighth wonder of the world. Scaffolding was erected in 1982 as part of a bold plan to renovate the building for the first time since the Second World War, but 37 years later it remains untouched. Political point-scoring and division over budgetary allocations have stalled the project for nearly four decades. Today, the monument serves as an icon for the dysfunction at the heart of Europe’s capital.

For locals, the Palais de Justice is a lesson that it’s often easier to start something from scratch than repurpose an old idea. The city is a hotbed for radical social enterprises, citizens’ initiatives and grassroots activism, each seeking to build alternative business models for a more sustainable and participatory future. Now, a new movement has been born to make them more effective.

Citizen Spring is a network based in Brussels that aims to connect local projects so that groups can identify ways to support each other, coordinate their activities, and promote sustainable and future-facing ideas. It was launched by Xavier Damman, co-founder of Open Collective — a transparent funding platform for open source projects that has attracted donations from big Silicon Valley players like Airbnb and Facebook. During a climate march in the Belgian capital last year, Damman began talking to activists about the support they needed to create a more sustainable Brussels.

“Demonstrating on the streets is the easy thing to do, but it’s also boring. It can be useful, but we should all be asking what else we can do,” he says. “If we want system change, not climate change, we need to recognize the future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed. We need to bring to the surface the things that people are already doing to initiate change.”

Damman reached out to the city’s community initiatives and invited them to join the first ever Citizen Spring event. He took inspiration from industry open days, where businesses are encouraged to throw their doors open to the public, and decided to recreate the idea for citizen-led efforts.

From March 21st to 24th, the city’s social enterprises and grassroots projects took time out of their hectic schedules to showcase their work. Members of the public were offered tours and presentations of 45 different initiatives where they learned why the projects were founded and how they hoped to improve the city. Workshops were also facilitated to find new ways for social enterprises to work together and pool resources.

“It used to be that big institutions, governments, NGOs and private companies had the monopoly on creating an impact. But citizens are becoming more and more empowered to participate,” Damman said. “We want to accelerate that transition from citizens being passive consumers towards being actors, creators, and contributors. Not just by promoting what they do, but by encouraging people to join them. Opening the doors is just the first step, but it’s an important one.”

The concept is already spreading to other cities in Belgium. Antwerp established its own Citizen Spring network earlier this year, and Damman expects more cities in Europe and elsewhere to join the movement in time for next spring. “There are citizen initiatives in every city in the world, but too often they work in isolation. It’s in everybody’s interest that we connect them so they can find ways to increase the reach and impact of everybody’s work,” he adds.

The municipal authorities in Brussels hope the renovations to the Palais de Justice will be finished sometime in 2028. Political deadlock has prevented the Belgian government from both preserving its history and preparing for the future. Fortunately, the citizens of Brussels aren’t asking for permission to take matters into their own hands.

If you’d like to launch a Citizen Spring network where you are, email info@citizenspring.be for more information.

Cross-posted from Shareable

Header image: Communa invites members of the public to learn how they’re transforming disused spaces across Brussels | Image provided by Xavier Damman (CC BY 4.0)

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By Dirk Holemans et a. Oikos, 2018: In order to find responses to current societal challenges, citizens increasingly take control, including in the form of citizen collectives that produce goods or services themselves, usually as a quest towards a more sustainable alternative. With the support of the King Baudouin Foundation and in the context of its Observatory of Associations and Foundations (Observatorium van Verenigingen en Stichtingen), Oikos think tank carried out the first research on these collectives throughout the country: who facilitates them, how important are they and how do they position themselves among other actors in society such as the classic civil society, governments and companies? With a desk study, a survey and in-depth interviews, Oikos mapped citizens’ collectives established in 2015 and 2016.

Increasing number of establishments

In 2015 and 2016, 249 citizen collectives in Belgium were launched spread over the entire country (map available). 127 among them answered the survey and 106 (48 from Flanders, 36 from Wallonia and 22 from Brussels) completed questionnaires were included in the analysis (21 respondents were found not to comply with the definition or were not established during the study period). Of those 106, most are active in areas such as food, agriculture, energy, social inclusion and the sharing economy; more than half classifies their activity under the label ‘environment and sustainability’ (graph available).

This is the first comprehensive investigation for the French-speaking citizen collectives. On the Dutch-speaking side, Oikos, on the other hand, has historical figures from 2004 onwards (graph available), indicating that 2009 was a turning point : the number of establishments has grown strongly ever since and nothing points to a stagnation of this growth.

What is a citizen collective?

Not all activities that citizens organize together are citizen collectives. A neighborhood barbecue or a temporary action group against logging is not. Then what is? Some elements are necessary to be able to speak of a citizen collective:

• to meet local needs, with the aim of long-term structural results;
• the members take control of the production / execution of the goods or services themselves (although sometimes it is possible to call on paid (service) suppliers);
• citizens are the promoters and determine who belongs to the group, and who can use or manage the resources, goods or services;
  the members have a say in the form, the organization and the action lines for the future;

A few examples: with a social grocery, cooperative library of things, or community supported agriculture where consumers are closely connected to a farmer and are committed to reducing production, or even participating in the harvest.

Pioneers: highly educated working M/F/X in their thirties and forties

Citizen collectives are largely the work of 25- to 45-year-olds, and the real pioneers are usually 36 to 45 years (graph available). Young people and seniors are hardly represented. There is a balance in the participation of women and men, and single people, cohabitants and married couples are fairly equal (graph available).

Among the pioneers in citizen collectives, highly educated people are strongly overrepresented: 86.3% have at least a Bachelor’s degree (graph available– compared to 45.6% of the population aged between 30 and 34 years according to Statbel’s figures). Most pioneers (84.8%) combine their engagement with a job (of whom four out of ten half-time).

53.7% of the respondents are politically engaged. Half of the respondents (48.6%) estimate that the political preference of the pioneers of their citizens’ collective is left on the political spectrum (graph available).

Relationship with government and industry: a healthy distance

Most citizen collectives (58%) are self-sufficient. 78% came about without public participation. But they think a good relationship with the government is important (80%). Approximately 1 in 3 consults with the municipal authorities about the activities and services they offer. The relationship with the (local) government does not always go smoothly: some are satisfied (“the city made our operations possible”), others less (“we mainly got headwinds”).

According to a minority (16.8%) of the citizen collectives, companies see them as competitors. They themselves see their own role in relation to the business sector as additional (in Wallonia), cooperative (in Brussels), or innovative (in the three regions). (graph available).

Little inclusive

The sectors in which they operate show that citizen collectives often strive for a more sustainable society. They inspire other actors from industry, government and civil society. Partly because of their urge for proximity and small scale in their approach, they still play a modest role as an alternative to production and / or consumption,  alongside those (more) dominant actors.

If citizen collectives really strive for a sustainable and inclusive society, then consideration must be given to ways of involving disadvantaged citizens in this citizens’ movement.

Photo by European Parliament

Photo by European Parliament

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Ryan Conway:  The city of Ghent has a fairly long and developed tradition of citizen engagement. Advisory councils and public hearings, which were first introduced in the 1970s, evolved into more comprehensive approaches to community-based planning and led to the creation of a new city department, according to the city of Ghent. By 2003, that department began an “Area Operation” that proactively interacts with neighborhoods in the 25 districts of the city.

This increased focus also produced a new name, the Policy Participation Unit, and includes 20 “neighborhood managers” who engage one or two of the districts and act as brokers between the city and residents to ensure consistent interaction, according to a report titled “Good Practices” published by the European Cultural Foundation in 2016.

The Policy Participation Unit also facilitates a Resident’s Academy, grants for temporary-use projects in underutilized public spaces, neighborhood “Debatcafés” and focus groups, as well as a Neighborhood of the Month program that brings the mayor to each neighborhood for an entire month of interactive discussions.

View full policy here (in Dutch).

Learn more from:

• European Cultural Foundation’s publication on commons and culture

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Rob Hopkins: Something really amazing is happening in Liége in Belgium.  I was last there 4 years ago, where I gave talks and did meetings in support of Liege en Transition, and to attend a meeting to promote a project they had just launched called ‘Ceinture Aliment-Terre Liégeoise’ (‘The Liége Food Belt’).  When I was there, their event brought together academics, politicians, farmers, and many other people with an interest in food, to explore the practicalities of a co-ordinated relocalisation of the food system.  That was four years ago.  Now I’ve been back after four years and, as I said, something really amazing is happening in Liége…

I had been invited by Ceinture Aliment-Terre Liégeoise (CATL) to be the Patron of their ‘Nourrir Liége’ festival, a 10 day event designed to raise the profile of their work.  When I last visited, a cooperative vineyard, Vin de Liége (of which more later), had just raised €2 million in shares, much to everyone’s surprise and delight.  That was the first one, which gave CATL the confidence that this was possible.

Now, in 2018, 14 cooperatives exist under the CATL banner, 10 of which have been created after the official launch of the CATL in Nov. 2013. These include Les Petits Producteurs (two shops), Fungi up, a co-op growing mushrooms on coffee waste, Rayon 9, another using bicycles to distribute goods around the city, Cycle en Terre, a seed saving coop, Les Compagnons de la Terre, a farm growing a wide diversity of produce, La Brasserie Coopérative Liègeoise, a co-operative brewery, Vin du Pays de Herve, a second vineyard in the same model as Vin de Liège, ADM Bio, tranforming the vegetables of seven local farmer to reach collectivities kitchens, HesbiCooop, a food cooperative, Marguerite Happy Cow, a local fair trade milk transformation project, plus three distribution coops, Point Ferme, La Coopérative Ardente et Le Temps des Cerises, which are forming, together with Les Petits producteurs, a network of local food distribution. And running like a thread through all of these is Le Val’Heureux, the region’s local currency.

So what I want to explore in this post is what this ecosystem of co-operatives looks like, to introduce you to some of the key players, to how the imagination runs through this and to how this looks to be scaling up.

To kick us off, I sat down one evening with Christian Jonet, one of the people who has been constant in CATL since the beginning, and who now co-ordinates this network of coops, producers, researchers, institutions and associations (my full conversation with him is below).  He told me that when Liege en Transition started there were lots of working groups, but the ones that lasted were the money and the food groups.

With Christian Jonet of CATL (left) and Pascal Hennen, manager of Les Petits Producteurs, and the €5 Les Val’Hereux note which features CATL.

It became clear that they were not going to Transition the city just with volunteers, and that what they needed was to change the scale and, as he put it, “professionalise the movement”. Belgium has lost 100,000 agricultural jobs since 1990, and some new thinking was clearly needed.

They started with an event in November 2013 where they hired a big venue, invited everyone in the city with an interest in food, and asked them the question “what if within one generation the majority of food consumed in Liège was grown locally in the best ecological and social conditions?” Good question. One after another people took the mike and identified elements of what needed to happen access to land, finance, seeds, know-how, etc. The first co-op to get running was Compagnons de la Terre, and then the brewery and the others started to follow.

The event that launched CATL

“What was most important”, Christian told me, “was that we created a narrative”:

It was about mobilising citizens for the transition of the food system (fixing the environment with agroecology, empowering the community for the good of future generations, creating local jobs, etc), in three complementary ways. First evidently, it was about voting with your consumption, being a virtuous consumer. But it was also about saying if you can, invest in local economy. And if you invest, then also get involved in running things, volunteer, get your hands dirty. And it was a message that really resonated with people”.

And it worked. Together with Vin de Liège (which raised €3 million on its own), the 14 co-ops have nearly raised €5 million in investment from local people so far.

I was curious as to what, for Christian, were the elements behind the project moving from the ‘What If?’ stage into action. “Firstly, we had a good narrative. CATL is based on the narrative of projecting the future and how it could be, and also the fact that Vin de Liège had been a success gave the whole initiative a foundation of confidence. Each new project inspires more confidence in the next one“. Now, the good narrative was only just a start:

Many people had to step up to imagine, create and run collectively all of these cooperatives, and each time it meant had work. Some projects have been lots of fun, but some others have really been about blood, sweat and tears, and holding on strong until the boat was afloat”. The fact that a local endogenous dynamic can be created must also not be taken for granted. “People in other localities have tried to launch projects similar to Ceinture Aliment-Terre, mimicking the methodology used in Liège, gathering the local food chain actors in an open space to draw a collective strategy for local food system transition, but if in the immediate continuation you don’t create projects in which people can put their enthusiasm, energy and money; nothing just happens.”

Les Petits Producteurs

The first of the co-ops that we visited was Les Petits Producteurs, a shop in the centre of the city that has been open for just over a year.  I asked the shop’s manager, Pascal Hennen, to tell me what it is (you can hear our full conversation below).  He told me, “Les Petits Producteurs’ is a co-operative of 200 co-operators (members of the co-op), around 15 local farmers plus a few further afield (they source their oranges from a farm in Sicily for example), 2 shops, 7 workers and lots of energy”.

When they found the shop unit, they had just 5 weeks to transform it into a shop, something they achieved by mobilising their friends, wielding sledgehammers and paintbrushes. It’s a very simple concept. A big space, painted white, with pallets on the ceiling, pallets on the floor, food displayed on pallets, in boxes, with a note about the farmer and their story.

They did a financial forecast with a worse case, middle and best case scenario. The shop has been such a runaway success that they are exceeding the best case scenario, and it is already a challenge managing storing stock and the queues that form in the shop. “All positive problems to have…”, Pascal told me.

They raised €100,000 in shares from local people, although the shop took off so fast that they didn’t end up using much of it. So, I asked, what’s the money for? “For us, this is an agriculture project, not just a shop. The goal is to reinvest profits and exceeding capital for the farmers. Will we use it to buy land? To invest in helping new farmers? In buying buildings to help farmers?” It has been such a success that a second shop is already open elsewhere in the city, and Pascal dreams of opening “15 shops, perhaps 10? We never expected to be so successful, never”, he told me.

Les Petits Producteurs tell their story in their window

hey have a principle of not negotiating the farmer on price, and of keeping costs low. So they spent the minimum on fitting the shop out, and have a policy “one need,one product”. So they stock one kind of jam, one kind of beer and so on, the whole shop containing less than 200 products. Les Petits Producteurs is mostly organic, and their prices for organic produce are, on average, 15% lower than in Carrefour. Part of their staff’s job is to tell the stories of where the food comes from.

Being part of CATL really helps. It provides the links between the different co-ops, and they trade with each other, and share resources. Where might it all go, I wondered? “If we have 20 stores, we will reach the point where the supermarkets will start to say “oh shit”. We would love to fragilise (great word) them locally”.

I asked Christian about what a difference community investment makes for a business like Les Petits Producteurs. “As I said, in CATL we have created beautiful stories, we must now create beautiful stories of success, and Les Petits Producteurs is one of them. It is not easy to have a profitable business in food. This is about inventing new economic models and testing them until they work”.

The second CATL coop we visited, on an organic farm on the edge of Liège, was Brasserie Cooperative Liégeoise, a small brewery brewing 2 different types of organic beers using barley grown in the region, wheat grown on the organic farm where they’re based, and Belgian hops.  They are planning to grow all their hops on the farm and are expecting their first harvest this year.

Raphaël Lambois, the brewer at Brasserie Coopérative Liégeoise

They are currently brewing on a scale at which it is difficult to be profitable, so they are looking to double capacity soon, although within the same space.  Raphaël Lamblois, who showed us round, told me that it was very useful to be part of CATL, as the other members are some of their best customers, and it really helps the business to have good connections with the town.

We also paid a visit to Vin de Liege, in many ways the co-op which gave confidence to what followed that this kind of citizen investor-led approach is possible.  Vin de Liege is amazing.  We were taken on a tour around the production facilities and also the cellar.  It’s impressive to walk around and think that 3 years ago none of it existed.  Now it is a state-of-the-art facility, producing 12 wines, with about 30 acres of vines already planted, and plans to at least double that.  They are already winning awards.

Their cellar was fascinating, hearing how they commission each barrel so it is a particular mix of different woods, so that the woods are able to impart certain flavours and tannins to the wine. Creating a vineyard is a long term investment, they take many years to be profitable. As a testament to having a dream, telling a powerful story and creating something amazing, Vin de Liege is a remarkable thing.

Where it is all starting to get very interesting is in the impact that CATL is having on the city’s local government. While in Liege, I met with the city’s Mayor and councillor responsible for agriculture, and is it clear that something is really shifting. As Christian told me:

Now the local authorities are stepping up and saying wow, this is really interesting. They can see that what we are doing is good for society, that it can create jobs, build social links between people, that it is good for health and for the environment. I think that in the future, new projects will be a combination of the forces of the public and citizen-led initiatives. This week the City of Liège launched a new project called CreaFarm. We had many discussions with them about what was blocking agricultural Transition, and one of the key themes was the price of land.

They were convinced they could help because they own a lot of land in and around the city which is not really used properly. So they have identified all the sites, characterised the kinds of uses they’d be best for, and tested them for contamination (as a former industrial city, land contamination is not uncommon). They have then invited suggestions from people who would like to use the land, and created a panel to decide applications, which we are part of, and once they’ve decided, the land will be made available at low rents”.

Talking to the Mayor it is clear that for him, CATL is what the city sees as being its future story. Ten years ago, the city was set to move towards being a “smart city”. “Now we want to be a Transition City” he told me.

Members of Nourrir Liege, CATL and the Liege municipality sharing breakfast

I was fascinated to get a sense from Christian of how the projects underway and their success had impacted his, and others’, sense of the future, how imaginative and positive they felt about it.  “A lot of people were very pessimistic”, he told me:

Someone who’s been changed by this? Me! I had been very worried and concerned about the possibility of an imminent social collapse. It was very hard. My therapy has been doing these positive projects. I still believe the future might not be very bright. But being active means I feel much better. For me, it’s the connection with other people that changed everything for me, and for many others too!! The antidote was to do something. My sense is that when you read about collapse, you collapse yourself. Doing this work sets you into movement”.

Sitting in the back office at Les Petits Producteurs, Pascal is quietly excited about the increasing involvement of the municipality. “At the beginning, the municipality laughed, but now they think we are quite interesting. We are doing so well, that the municipality will have to follow – I don’t think they have a choice actually! I think it’s going to work. I’m positive because I am a pragmatic guy. I manage a shop. They can’t say no, because we exist and we are making things…”

Pascal Hennen

The following day, in Louvain-le-Neuve, Olivier de Schutter gave a presentation in which he used the term ‘Partner State’, his vision of the state getting alongside bottom-up community action, allowing the ideas and inspiration to rise up from below, and seeing their role as being to remove obstacles and to help things to flourish. My strong sense from everyone I spoke to in Liege was that that looks like the very model that is unfolding in Liege.

About the author: Rob Hopkins, co-founder of both Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network.  I am a serial blogger, author of The Power of Just Doing Stuff and 21 Stories of Transition, and I tweet as @robintransition.  I previously wrote The Transition Handbook and The Transition Companion, and was awarded a PhD by the University of Plymouth and more recently Honorary Doctorates by the University of the West of England and the University of Namur. In 2012 I was voted one of the Independent’s top 100 environmentalists and one of ‘Britain’s 50 New Radicals’.

I have appeared on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Four Thought’ and on ‘A Good Read’, appear in the French film phenomenon ‘Demain’ (‘Tomorrow’), have spoken at TED Global once, and at 3 TEDx events. I am an Ashoka Fellow, a keen gardener and one of the founders of New Lion Brewery in Totnes and a Director of Totnes Community Development Society, the group behind Atmos Totnes, a very ambitious community-led development project.  If you’re wondering why I’m writing a book about imagination, you can find out here.

Republished from the author’s blog, Rob Hopkins, Imagination Taking Power

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Before we start talking about your book, can you tell us a bit about the context that prompted you to write it, and how it fits in your personal quest for understanding social change? I mean, can you say a few words about yourself, your engagement in green politics, and your work with OIKOS?

Twenty-five years ago, I started working as an academic researcher in the field of environmental philosophy and bioethics. With degrees in engineering and philosophy, I tried to understand the role of technology in how people shape their world and dominate nature, to analyse what the importance is of the dominant value system in a society. So, I learned how Modernity radically changed our relation with nature, which from then is an object we as subjects can dominate and manipulate. While this was a rewarding time, it was maybe my engineering background that made me feel that only writing articles and lecturing is not enough to stop the destruction of our living planet. So I joined the Green party and within a few years I first was elected as local councilor of the City of Ghent and subsequently as member of the Flemish Parliament. I learned that politics really matters, being in government we were able to introduce innovative changes in e.g. the care system and energy policy (a law as voted to close the nuclear plants the coming decades). At the same time I experienced that our representative democratic system, established in the 19th century, needs a thorough update. So the first book I wrote was about the need for Deliberative Democracy, acknowledging the value and importance of citizens engaging in an active dialogue.

After being a member of parliament, I founded the green foundation OIKOS, because I believe innovative ideas are the core fuel of societal change. You cannot develop new sustainable systems – think of mobility, energy or food- with old concepts. At the same I noticed how citizens are taking their future back in their hands, becoming from consumer producer again. These citizens’ collectives, commons, are the basis for what I see as the most promising actor of change in our current times.

Your book centers around the tension between freedom, which I read as individual freedom, and security, which I read as more of a collective reality. Can you describe how you see that tension and how you see it as resolvable or not.

In the dominant narrative of our society, we see freedom as an individual quality. But this creates the illusion that we are independent actors that can create our own future and lifeworld on our one. While freedom is maybe the most collective concept we now. How free is someone who is born in a poor country, without a decent educational system? What kind of choices (s)he can make? If freedom is the ability to influence the future development of our world, we can only do it if we work together. That was what the green thinker Ivan Illich meant with autonomy: ‘the joyful capacity to shape the world together’. Anyway, how free are we if the corporations and multinationals determine what we (can) buy. Everyday, we see thousands of advertisements and marketings signals (like logos). Do you really think they don’t influence us in a profound way? So the paradox is that enhancing you personal freedom is working together to change the environment you live. Like the Green mayor of Grenoble did, but getting rid of advertisements boards in public spaces and streets.

Does our welfare system have to change, and if so, how so.

Our current welfare system was built on the assumption of full employment with man working 40 hours a week, staying 40 years with the same employer, in the framework of a decent fiscal system with rich people and big companies paying the fair share of taxes. No need to say that our society has changed in many fundamental ways.

We need what I call a new ‘security package’ for the 21th century, empowering people and allowing them to enrich their community and society. This package is based on the fact that there are three different kinds of work: next to our job, the paid work, there is the care work we do while raising kids, cooking at home etc. and also autonomous work, things we find important, like establishing with people in your town a commons, think about an energy co-op or growing vegetables together. If our goal is a good life for all, we have to make sure people can combine these types of work in a relaxed way. Hence, I suggest the combination of a shorter working week of 30 hours with a universal basic income of 500 euros that for low and middle incomes compensates for the lower salary, in combination with an affordable education and health system.

The number of hours, 30 a week, is not randomly chosen. It is the weekly number most women work who have to combine their job with their family work and personal development. I see the ‘security package’ as a transition model, in the evolution towards a social-ecological society. The more things we do in our autonomous work, products and services who are cheaper and last longer than produced by corporations – think about Wikipedia or platform co-ops for car sharing – will enable to live better with less buying power, allowing to maybe lower the normal working week to 21 hours, as the New Economics Foundation proposes.

What I found very useful in your book is the historical context you are offering about how current social movements, and the surge for the commons in particular, are related to the earlier struggles post-1968. Can you elaborate a bit?

Big corporations – think about Apple – want to make us believe that they invented all the new stuff in our society. Mariana Mazzucato has in a convincing way shown that corporations only can make these products and profits because governments invested loads of money in research and development. On top of this, I want to add that quite a lot of crucial innovations where introduced not by companies or public authorities, but by citizens’ initiatives. Who build for instance the first wind mill to start the transition towards a renewable energy system? It where villagers in the north of Denmark in the 1970’s. Who invented the recycle or thrift shop, the starting point for the circular economy: wise citizens in the Netherlands. The same goes for sharing, with people in Amsterdam experimenting with a bike sharing system, already in the mid 1960’s? These initiatives are part of a broader emancipatory movement with a lot new social movements..

Overall, the emancipatory movement wanted to create more space for citizens by reducing the reach of the state, other traditional structures and multinationals. Looking back, we can say that this movement has been successful, but did not achieve its goal. This is connected with the greater success of the neoliberal freedom concept. This concept of freedom succeeded in reducing the build-up of identity into an individualistic project, where consumption plays a crucial role.

How did it happen? The 1980s and 1990s are the battleground of these two freedom-based concepts. A crucial difference lies in scale: while businesses are organised worldwide, this is less evident for new civil movements and unions. Only the anti-globalisation movement would later bundle forces across borders. Meanwhile, large corporations have taken up the free space for the most part.

A second explanation concerns the evolution of most of the new social movements. Starting mostly from a position of a radical critique, professionalisation and building a relationship with mainstream politicians leads to a pragmatic attitude. Proposals must now be feasible within the framework of the current policy. The increasing dependency on subsidies of many non-governmental organisations has sometimes led to uncritical inscription into government policy options. As said, at the same time, more and more citizens were seduced by the neoliberal narrative that a good life means work hard, earn money and spent it all to be happy. If you don’t feel well, just buy a ticket for a wellness club.

The biggest financial crisis since the 1930’s, which started ten years ago, changed everything again. The crisis is a real wake-up call for a lot of citizens, they realize that if they want a sustainable future for their children, they have to build it themselves. So, we see all over the world a new wave of citizens’ initiatives, rediscovering the emancipatory concept of freedom and autonomy. A crucial difference is that we know live in the age of internet, lowering the transaction costs of cooperation dramatically. What was very hard to realize in the post-68 period, e.g. sharing cars in a neighborhood, is now a piece of cake with digital platforms.

What can we learn from this history? That if social movements want to be successful in a globalized world, they also have to build translocal and transnational networks. It for instance makes no sense that in ten cities in the world, people are trying to build their own digital platform as an alternative for companies like Airbnb or Uber. Transnational networks of commons cities can be the fundament of a new governance model in the future.

Do you have a prescription for our future, and a way to get there? Also to which degree does your book also apply to non-European or non-Western countries?

I don’t have of course the prescription for our future, what I did in preparing my book was observing society carefully, looking for the places and processes of hope. I found two very relevant developments: citizens starting new collective initiatives, commons, for the production of sustainable products and services, and local governments implementing very ambitious policy plans in fields like climate, energy, food and mobility policy.

Slowly but surely, there is a new range of autonomous activities that together form a transformational movement towards a socio-ecological society. It is important to note that we are not only talking about small or isolated projects. Take, for instance, the 20 majestic wind turbines at the coastline of Copenhagen. This project was started by a group of habitants of the city who developed the idea and went with it to their Minister of Energy. Instead of refusing or taking it over, the government decided to start a co-creation process. Civil servants give technical and judicial advice. Half of the shares were owned by a citizens’ co-op, after completion, thousands of families every year receive a financial dividend. Similarly, following the Energiewende in Germany, half of the renewable energy installations are owned by citizens and their co-ops. Even in smaller towns, governments support the local population in setting up renewable energy projects. This adds up to really big business. So, citizens and local governments really can make a difference, and build together the counter current.

My book starts from the history and developments in Europe, so I am really modest on what it has to say to other continents. At the same time, I see the same developments in cities all over the world. There I think the crucial concept of action developed in my book based on the work of André Gorz, revolutionary reformism, really can be very useful. It answers the question how to move a step further, beyond all the individual great citizens’ initiatives and local policy proposals.

The two concepts are each in themselves insufficient. A political revolution that will change everything for good at once – we should not hope for that. And a few reforms of the existing system will not lead to a real structural change. For example, while it’s good that people share cars, this alone will not lead us to sustainable accessibility and mobility. This needs strategic cooperation and planning.

Revolutionary reformism can be defined as a chain of far-reaching reforms that complement and strengthen each other and, at the same time, raise political awareness. In system terms, it is a matter of implementing reforms that are complementary and reinforce each other. This will generate synergy and even positive feedback: virtuous circles. For example, in progressive cities like Ghent you see the establishment of commons if the field of renewable energy, mobility, food, etc. But for most of them they don’t cooperate beyond the borders of their domain. Imagine a food coop distributing their food boxes by another commons specialized in delivery by electric bikes, that in turn only uses green energy produced by the urban energy coop. When they then, supported by the local government, introduce and use the same local currency for connecting their economic transactions, you put in motion a chain in action that will reinforce itself. It is this kind of thinking and action that is crucial for the future, and can be useful all over the world.

The post Freedom, Equality and Commoning in the Age of the Precariat: an interview with Dirk Holemans appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Starting last November, I have accepted a consulting association with SMart and the press announcement below explains the strategic priorities of this engagement:

SMart welcomes Michel Bauwens, joining us for a research and development residency for the next 3 years.

Collaborative economy theorist, co-author of Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy and founder of the P2P Foundation, Michel Bauwens works in collaboration with an international group of researchers on the application of peer-to-peer in governance, production and ownership.

Peer-to-peer (P2P)

This concept stems from the tech world and describes peer-to-peer relationships in networks, where all those with access to computers are equal. Michel Bauwens was one of the first to apply this principle to other aspects of society, considering it as a social structure. For him, P2P is principally concerned with the capacity of people to create common value as equals, and without authorization (permissionless).
For Michel Bauwens, the society of the commons, emerging from P2P dynamics, can offer a response to the ecological and social crises we are faced with today.

Objectives of the residence

Over these three years, Michel Bauwens will work alongside SMart on various projects:

• SMart is based on a digital platform that makes the right to economic initiative accessible to as many people as possible through a large-scale open cooperative. A new narrative is being created that should be better known at the international level.
• SMart aims to reorganize and accelerate its international development. Michel Bauwens will guide this process.
• Another of his missions will be assisting SMart in strengthening its connections with the world of platform cooperatives.
• Most of SMart’s community services were constructed in a centralized, top down way. We aim to promote grassroots development in a participative and contributory manner (peer-to-peer). Some of our new computer applications could benefit from development using peer-to-peer logic. With this in mind, Michel Bauwens will lead a change in our teams and help create conditions for contributors to participate;
• Finally, Michel Bauwens will stimulate the implementation of the ideas of the Commons in our cooperative.

Photo by Filmatu

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Kevin Stark: SMart is a social enterprise founded in 1998 in Belgium. The project’s aim is to simplify the careers of freelancers in cities across Europe where SMart operates. These days, there are many freelancer services — cooperatives, coworking spaces, unions — but at the time of its inception, SMart officials were focused on one subsection of this workforce: artists. “That’s how we started,” says Lieza Dessein, a project and community manager for SMart. “What we realize is that a lot of artists have the same kind of issues when they are working. For example, a band would make up a contract. The band would actually pay the musicians with that single contract. And they had very irregular revenues.”

Dessein said the original idea was to take all the bookkeeping and other administrative tasks off of the artist. “The solution that they came up with was, OK we will just make up a company,” she said. “So instead of every artist needing to develop its own legal entity to be able to work, we will just share a company with the artists.”

Today, setting-up a coworking platform is not uncommon, but at the time it was a bold idea. Over the years, SMart expanded to provide services for many other types of freelancers, and changed with the evolving nature of work. Dessein spoke with us about the evolution of the project.

Kevin Stark, Shareable: I’m a freelancer in Chicago, and to my knowledge, we don’t have an organization that is as comprehensive as SMart. If I were moving to Brussels, how would you pitch me on the program? 

Lieza Dessein, SMart EU: We are a shared company. It’s quite important for us. We have over 90,000 members here in Belgium alone. And active members on a yearly basis, we are around 20,000. Active members are members who log in between one and three times a year. All of that together in 2016, they billed to our company in Belgium 136 million euros. We’re operating in nine European countries.

The development of the project in European countries is quite different from country to country. They’re not all that far developed as Belgium. Belgium is the mother house. For 20 years, we’ve had a full range of services. Our business model is a patient one. We grow steadily and smoothly and build up the community inside each country. We make sure that everything we are doing is under a legal frame that exists in that country, and we need also to adapt it to the culture in each country and in the communities. I would say, we haven’t changed all that much but we have shifted with the realization that the work environment has changed.

I love the lifestyle associated with freelancing and the freedom to work on a wide range of projects. The only rub for me is the stability and the lack of community. What’s different about SMart?  

We have a whole range of services, and the most important one is that people who work with us to guarantee that they will be paid in seven days after the end of a contract — even if the client hasn’t paid yet. We have a mutualized salary guarantee fund, and we take care of the debt collection for the freelancers as well. We share the company with our freelancers. We become the employer of all our freelancers and take on the responsibility linked to the employer status. The reason why we decided to become the employer of the freelancers is that for the moment it’s very difficult for freelancers to access social protection and the best social protection you can get is linked to the employment contract. And, if we manage to put everybody on the employment contract they have easier access to social protection as well.

How has the project evolved over time?

Smart means Societe Mutuelle pour ARTistes (mutualized company for artists). It was a company that aimed to take over the administrative burden linked to artistic entrepreneurship. Little by little we developed a tool that could cover a wider range of professions and we opened up to all freelancers. It’s an evolution that little by little you realize that you have a tool that can serve a whole new community that you weren’t planning to serve. There was this shift to make in the mind. We were saying, “Is it actually possible?” Because it’s a little bit frightening to say. I’m focused on musician, artist people in the theater. And it’s like you can have a grasp of that reality, and suddenly you get people working in the care service — everything that’s related to massage, yoga. We have I.T. consultants, and you get all those different professions. For the advisors, it could be overwhelming. We really rationalized: What are the needs of that community as a whole? What are the needs? They are the same as the freelancers. Along with shifting our mindset, we also strengthened our team with advisors coming from a wide range of different professions to make sure we have people who have a good grasp on particular professions.

What were some of those needs?

Our members have an irregular income, multiple clients, being an employee and then becoming an employer, develop different skills and jobs. We have a very fractured job environment where they will work a lot during the year and then not always in the summer. If you really take the whole community and say what are the needs? Instead of focusing on the differences — they need this, and they need that. At one point to say, where are the similarities? If you look at not from the perspective of differences but on a perspective of similarities. We needed to open up our services. Because freelancers — and artists — are evolving in complex legal issues, are confronted to a lot of administration and the risks involved in individual entrepreneurship are high.

SMart was evolving with the changing nature of work?

The workforce is more and more scattered and individualized. And you have all those individual entrepreneurs and the old school way of doing things is to say: I’m an individual entrepreneur,so I will set up my own legal entity. I will go for my own little office somewhere lost in city.

If you scale that model you can see that you are facing very isolated society where every individual is on their own and facing the same kind of difficulties. How do I set-up a company? How do I make myself known? How do I meet fellow people that are working in the same field? How do I find clients? Suddenly if we say, let us take over the administration, and then if you need training we have training sessions. And for the moment we are also investing in work spaces. We are really looking into different ways of bringing back [collectivism] among that scattered workforce. How do you reinvent solidarity amongst individual entrepreneurs? How do you make people create a community that eases their entrepreneurship? How do we reinvent the social protection for all workers?

Images: SMart’s website

The post How the European Social Enterprise SMart is Creating a Safety Net for Freelancers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

With Michel Bauwens working on the commons transition plan in Ghent and multiple initiatives in the Netherlands we will have a lot to discuss this coming year.  Our network it steadily growing and I am very happy to be part of it. I am Walter Dresscher and will be the coördinator of the Dutch language blog. I work on the relation between peer to peer practices and the potential improvement of city life and public space that is enabled by P2P practices. I will initiate multiple projects this year that I will be sharing on the blog.

So next to our already very successful Greek an French blog we re-add the native tongue of the two main figures of our community: Jean and Michel.

I hope to find all Dutch speaking commoners on our blog to discuss how we can help orchestrate the transition to a post-capitalist society.

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