The international debate on the commons has a long history but only in recent years has it started gearing towards the definition of Urban Commons and what their role is in shaping our society, especially at the wake of the economic crisis. This debate developed strongly in Italy as a result of a referendum refusing the privatisation of water infrastructures. Following this, many city administrations have brought forward this debate at local level. The concept of commons has extended from water to many other resources, both physical and immaterial, inspiring regulations of the commons in several Italian cities. Experiences from Italy, in turn, have inspired the discussion about the commons in other parts of Europe.

By Daniela Patti:  “Commons are those resources that apart from the property that is mainly public, pursue a natural and economic vocation that is of social interest, immediately serving not the administration but the collectivity and the people composing it. They are resources that belong to all the associates and that law must protect and safeguard also in virtue of future generations.” (Lucarelli 2011) According to Alberto Lucarelli, a professor in constitutional law in Naples, commons are defined by rights and by the management models rather than simply the property model. Urban Commons provide a complex scenario in which both property and management of these collectives resources require new legal framework, increasingly provided by legal experts, municipalities and activists in various parts of Europe. As Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione, scholars of the commons point out, “[…] the urban commons framework is more than a legal tool to make proprietary claims on particular urban goods and resources. Rather, we argue that the utility of the commons framework is to raise the question of how best to manage, or govern, shared or common resources”. (Foster, at al., 2015).

This debate developed strongly in Italy as a result of the Referendum on the Privatisation of Water, which saw a victory with 95% from the position supporting water as a commons to be protected in public interest and not to be privatised. Following this episode, which has not yet seen a clear policy developed at national level, many city administrations have brought forward this debate at local level. The concept of commons has extended from water to many other resources, both physical and immaterial. In terms of physical spaces, open public spaces are rather unanimously recognised as urban commons and regulations in many cities have been developed to legislate the community use of urban gardens, as an example. Such spaces do not prove to be unproblematic as even through the property remains public, the collective access and the management costs are interpreted differently across the country. In Rome, the Regulation of Green Spaces adopted by the City Council in 2014 foresaw that all running costs, such as water, and ordinary maintenance, such cutting the grass, should be responsibility of the communities adopting the green space, where open public access must be nevertheless be guaranteed. Given the poor condition of maintenance of public green spaces in Rome, many people accepted these conditions to improve their living standards. Within this context, the regulation of buildings appears to be far more complex, given the higher number of variables in which the civic and the Public should find terms of agreement. To respond to these challenges, some cities developed a Regulation of the Commons, that would provide a framework for civic organisations and the public administration to find agreements on the shared management and use of urban commons.

The City of Bologna has had a long tradition in terms of citizens’ participation in decision making over the city’s development, but especially as a result of the economic crisis and the subsequent reduction on welfare expenditure, citizens have become increasingly active in the city. Responding to such inputs, the City Council has over recent years developed a series of relevant participation processes, Open Data initiatives, a participatory budgeting platform and the Regulations of the Commons, this last having gained much visibility both at national level and abroad. The reason for the Regulation of the Commons having gained so much attention was because this was the first of its kind ever being developed and was then adopted, with small variations, by a large number of cities across the peninsula.
The Regulation of the Commons is an application of the Principle of Subsidiarity foreseen by the art.118 of the Italian Constitution, that foresees that public administrations should support citizens in the development of autonomous initiatives aiming towards the collective interest. Therefore in 2014, Bologna’s City Council officially adopted the Regulation on the collaboration between citizens and the public administration on activities aiming at the care and regeneration of urban commons. The Regulation acts as a general framework within which citizens, both individuals or groups, can submit proposals for projects to be developed on a spontaneous basis with voluntary effort for the involved parties, putting competences, resources and energy available to the collective good. Such projects are disciplined by the Regulation through a series of specific agreements, called Collaborations Pacts, in which both the citizens and the Public Administration agree to the terms of their cooperation for the safeguarding of the commons. The commons targeted by this Regulation are material spaces as public squares, green areas or schools, immaterial commons, such as education and social inclusion, and digital commons, such as applications and digital alphabetisation.

The value of this pioneering Regulation has been to attempt to provide a legal framework to the activities and projects promoting the commons that were taking place spontaneously in the city, often outside if not even in contrast to the existing regulations. At the same time, this Regulation has the limitation of addressing only the less problematic situations of collaboration between civic and public stakeholders when promoting the urban commons. In fact, collective cleaning of public spaces, paintings of murals or creation of street furniture have been valuable initiatives taking place even more frequently thanks to the legal clarity in which they can take place, but are rather unproblematic in social and political terms. Urban Commons involving higher stakes in terms of ownership, management and economic conditions, as in the case of public buildings or even private ones, are not part of the scope of the Bologna Regulation of the Commons.

Theatre rehearsal at the Cascina Roccafranca. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Such a challenge was instead recently taken on by the City of Turin, which as many other Italian cities adopted the Bologna’ Regulation of the Commons with very small adjustments in January 2016. Within the framework of the Co-City project supported by the Urban Innovative Actions program, Turin aims at developing the experience of the commons towards the creation of an innovative social welfare that will foster the co-production of services with community enterprises. Low cost urban regeneration activities in open spaces as well as buildings will take place and will be financially supported through the European-funded project. Having the project officially started only at the beginning of 2017, it is still early to appreciate any results but it is nevertheless worthy to say that its ambition is strongly embedded within a longer experience in terms of civic-public collaboration, as testified by the experience of the Network of the Neighbourhood Houses, which are also a key partner in the Co-City project. This network of community spaces, started in 2007, gathers eight spaces across the city with different functions and management models, some being public and others privately-run. For example, Cascina Roccafranca is a multi-functional community centre operating in a building owned by the City of Turin. Partly financed by the municipal budget, the centre is managed through cooperation between public and civic actors: a scheme that offers a valuable governance model while providing a wide range of social and cultural activities. As the staff member Stefania De Masi stated: “Our status as a public-private foundation is an experiment, an attempt of close collaboration with the municipality.”

The network of Neighbourhood Houses in Turin. Image (c) Case del Quartiere

An experience stemming from a different background to the one of Bologna is the Regulation of the Commons in Naples. It was in this city that for the first time in 2011, the juridical definition of Commons was introduced in the City Council’s Statute, referring especially to the case of water, which had been object of the national Referendum that same year. The following years, the “Regulation for the Discipline of the Commons” and the “Principles for the government and management of the Commons” were established. According to these, “each citizens should concur to the natural and spiritual progress of the city”. The focus towards the urban commons was explicit in 2013, when the City Council adopted the Public Space Charter, elaborated by the Biennial of Public Space held that same year in Rome, which aims at the creation of concrete processes towards the promotion of the urban public spaces.

It is in 2014 that the current regulation deliberating on the urban commons in Naples was approved by the City Council. This regulation outlines the identification of the commons and the process of collective management for their civic use and collective benefit are outlined. This regulation has foreseen the recognition of ongoing civic initiatives pursuing projects in spaces identified as urban commons. This approach therefore attempts to foster a logic of self-governance and experimental management of public spaces, aiming at recognising these spaces as commons of collective interest and fruition. In 2016 seven locations in Naples were identified as commons because of the collective commitment of citizens in their regeneration after a long period of abandonment. Before such recognition these spaces were officially identified as illegal occupation of public properties, for which all people involved were subjected to legal persecution. The innovation of what is happening in Naples stands basically in the fact that the ancient tradition of the Usi Civici (Civic Uses) applied since medieval times to the forests for people to access and harvest wood or collect food, is now applied to urban spaces. This is the case of the Je So’ Pazzo initiative taking place in the old mental asylum in the city centre of Naples, where a group of inhabitants, many of whom youngsters, have taken over the space to provide a series of local services, such as music classes, sports facilities and many other community-run activities. Currently the agreement with the Municipalities implies that utility costs of the space are paid by the City Council but all activities related expenses are responsibility of the users. In terms of property rights, the space remains in public ownership and users are granted freely access as long as the activities remain of public interest and open to all citizens.

At first sight the Regulations of the Commons of Bologna and Turin and the one of Naples could appear to be rather similar, having been developed at the same with an overall same objectives, yet they greatly differ in terms of concepts of property and usage of the commons. Bologna and the blueprint in Turin, do not effectively intervene on the property model of the public estates, that remain an asset exclusively managed by the Authority, albeit in the public interest. Even in terms of what is the usage model of these properties, this remains unaltered as the Authority is ultimately responsible for the refurbishment of the estates or for the development of social and economic functions. For this reason, it can be said that the civic-public collaborations to be activated tend to take place in open public spaces with a low conflict threshold. Instead, Naples has attempted to pursue a different model of property and management of the commons. in fact, to be identified as a commons are the buildings themselves, based on a series of social and cultural elements, and not the communities operating in them, therefore avoiding conflicts in terms of public procurement in assigning tenants to a public property. The activities currently taking place within these identified Urban Commons are accepted by the Administration as long as they respect the Commons ethics and guarantee access to citizens.

These experiences from Italy are also inspiring other parts of Europe, allowing for an increasing international exchange to take place. From a more institutional perspective at European level, not only has the recently started Urban Innovative Actions European program have financially supported the Co-City project in Turin, but also other European programs are recognising the relevance of such experiences for a European audience. This is the case of the URBACT capacity building program for cities that recently awarded the Good Practice title to the Commons initiative in Naples, based on which knowledge transfer networks of cities could be financially supported throughout Europe starting from 2018. Civic initiatives were also inspired by the work in Italy, as the model of LabGov, the Laboratory on the Governance of the Commons that supported the elaboration of the Bologna Regulation, is collaborating with the Pakhuis de Zwijger to develop an Amsterdam-based branch. The European Alternatives network has initiated a research mapping local governments that are promoting participatory governance in their institutions, in which Naples is thoroughly covered. These Italian applications of regulating the Urban Commons well depict the political positions and the solutions that may be adopted to regulate a form of property that is neither public nor private, but collective.

References
Foster, Sheila and Iaione, Christian, The City as a Commons (August 29, 2015). 34 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 281 (2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2653084 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2653084

Lucarelli, A.,2011, Beni Comuni, Dalla Teoria All’Azione Politica, Dissenzi – own translation

Header image: Urban Center, Bologna. Photo (cc) Eutropian

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• June 8th 2018 19:30 – 21:30
• Location: IHECS Brussels School for Journalism and Communication, Stoofstraat 58, Brussel, Brussel, België
• Category: Evenementen denktank

Will cities change the world? At least, cities are becoming a new and hopeful transnational governance level. They are organizing themselves in a whole tissue of networks (Fearless Cities, Fabcities, …), working together in domains like climate policy, renewable energy and urban economy.

At the same time, citizens are developing a whole range of urban commons, based on co-operation and an ethics of care. Tired of only being a powerless consumer or a passive citizen, we get active as maker, urban farmer, solidarity volunteer, user of shared resources, civic or social entrepreneur, etc. This goes along with the establishment of new organisations and infrastructures like fablabs, energy co-ops, co-working spaces, urban food production plots, etc.

Recent years, we have seen cities like Ghent and Bologna moving a step further, establishing structures and processes that aim at building synergies between the public and the commons domain. This is part of a new political vision, the Partner State. So, a partner city sustains and gives incentives to alternative civil and economic institutions, like the commons and cooperatives. Taking these developments of collaborative city-making together, we see the emergence of a prototype of transformative cities, that could be the driving force towards socio-ecological societies.

Thanks to these transitions institutions, research groups and organizations where created to investigate how commons could be sustainable integrated in the vivid networks of cities.

How can a commons transition in cities be realized to create sustainable Eco-Cities? Experts from different projects and institutions will inspire you with their knowledge and findings about sustainable commons in cities. At this conference you can get inspired and motivated to start, or strengthen, your own project, common initiative or cooperation.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Michel Bauwens

Founder and director of the P2P Foundation and expert in peer production, governance and property. Bauwens is a well-known public speaker and thought leader. In 2017 he wrote the Commons Transition Plan for Ghent, after a similar project for Ecuador.

Elena De Nictolis

Research associate at LabGov, the LABoratory for the GOVernance of the City as a Commons. She prepares a Phd thesis on public policies for urban co-governance and the relation with the quality of city democracy at LUISS University of Rome.

Photo by Dominic’s pics

The post Creating Eco-Societies through Urban Commons Transitions, with Michel Bauwens and Elena De Nictolis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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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From 9 – 11 of June, mayors, local councillors and activists from over 40 countries will meet in Barcelona for the international municipalist summit ‘Fearless Cities’. The event will bring together, for the first time, a network of municipalist platforms that has been expanding around the world, to relatively little fanfare, over recent years.

Nathan Law Kwung Chun of Demosisto during Hong Kong legislative election, 2016. Wikicommons/Iris Tong. Some rights reserved.

The municipalist movement is made up of an ecosystem of organizations working within and beyond electoral politics at local level. It’s a movement defined as much by how it does politics as by its goals, and it is this insistence on the need to do things differently that gives municipalism its unique strength in the current context.

Municipalism works at the local scale. In an age of xenophobic discourses that exclude people based on national or ethnic criteria, municipalism constructs alternative forms of collective identity and citizenship based on residence and participation. Municipalism is pragmatic and goal-based: in a neoliberal system that tells us ‘there is no alternative’, municipalism proves that things can be done differently through small, but concrete, victories, like remuncipalizing basic services or providing local ID schemes for undocumented immigrants. Municipalism allows us to reclaim individual and collective autonomy; in response to citizen demands for real democracy, municipalism opens up forms of participation that go beyond voting once every few years.

The global municipalist map today

The municipalist movement has already made significant inroads in some areas of the world. Perhaps the most profound contemporary expressions of municipalism are found in the Kurdish movements in the Middle East. Against the most inhospitable background of conflict and repression, the Kurds are building feminist, assembly-based models of stateless democracy, most notably in the self-governing region of Rojava in Northern Syria.

Municipalism is also flourishing in Southern Europe. In Spain, citizen platforms govern most major cities, including Barcelona and Madrid. These platforms followed in the footsteps of the municipalist Popular Unity Candidacies (CUP), which gained significant representation in the 2007 and 2011 local elections in Catalonia.

Spain’s ‘cities of change’ are reversing austerity measures, remunicipalizing basic services and integrating an explicitly feminist perspective into public policy. As a network, these city halls are also playing a significant role in challenging central government policy on issues like migration and housing. In Italy, Cambiamo Messina dal Basso was an early example of what is known as “neo-municipalismo”, taking office in the Sicilian city in 2013. In Naples, a municipalist coalition has developed innovative ways of democratizing the urban commons and stood up to the central government over urban development plans under the leadership of Mayor Luigi Demagistris. Citizen platforms have seats on city councils in Bologna and Pisa, while in other cities, like Padova or Verona, platforms are running for office in the local elections on June 11.

Elsewhere, municipalism is being explored as a strategy for the future in response to the failures and limits of national politics. In France, for example, activists from the Nuit Debout movement that occupied city squares in 2016 are considering replicating the municipalist path taken by some of their indignados counterparts in Spain at the 2020 local elections. The citizen-left-green alliance, RCGE that governs in Grenoble with mayor Eric Piolle, and Autrement pour Saillans in the small town of Saillans could serve as potential sources of inspiration closer to home. In the wake of a presidential election that presented a choice between a neoliberal and a far-right candidate, the time is ripe in France to prove that there are alternatives at local level.

In the wake of a presidential election that presented a choice between a neoliberal and a far-right candidate, the time is ripe in France to prove that there are alternatives at local level. 

Similarly, in the USA, the victory of Trump has provoked reflection among supporters of Bernie Sanders about the potential of towns and cities as sites of resistance and transformation. Sanders himself has said that the next step for his movement is to organize locally and stand candidates for local office. The Working Families Party, which endorsed Sanders in 2016, is actively working to harness the energy of his movement in local and state primary races. In the US, as in France, there are isolated cases of municipalist platforms – Richmond for All in California, and the People’s Assembly in Jackson, Mississippi – that could serve as models for a broader movement.

In Hong Kong, the city council has become a key site of conflict between the pro-democracy movement and the Chinese government: elected councillors from the Demosisto and Youngspiration parties face repression and state prosecution for their role in pro-democracy protests inside and outside the council chamber.

In Poland, another country governed by the authoritarian right, a municipalist movement has been brewing for a number of years. 2011 saw the founding of the Congress of Urban Movements, bringing together diverse organizations working at local level. A number of citizen platforms from the congress stood in the local elections in 2014, picking up seats in six city councils and on district councils in Warsaw, and winning the mayoralty in Gorzow Wielkopolski. Municipal elections in 2018 should see this movement make further advances, in alliance with local branches of the national party, Razem.

Municipal elections in 2018 should see this movement make further advances, in alliance with local branches of the national party, Razem.

In Latin America, too, municipal movements are providing glimmers of hope against a backdrop of national stagnation or crisis. In 2016, Áurea Carolina de Freitas of citizen platform Cidade que Queremos won more votes than any other candidate for city council in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, while Jorge Sharpe, a former student activist supported by a citizen platform, won the mayoralty of Chile’s second city, Valparaíso. In Rosario, Argentina, Ciudad Futura has spent over ten years creating non-state institutions outside city hall and just over two using its three councilors to push for change from within it.

A new political space?

Up until now, international connections between these movements have been mostly limited to bilateral exchanges on organizing tactics or policy debates. But the possibility of articulating a new political space among these diverse experiences is tantalising. The response to the invitation from Barcelona en Comú to Fearless Cities – to which over 600 participants from more than 180 towns and cities have registered – suggests that there is already the latent awareness of a common municipalist identity, and appetite to deepen global collaboration.

This matters, because the consolidation and expansion of municipalism globally could determine the ability of any individual platform to meet its goals over the long-term. After all, one of the greatest limits of municipalism is the difficulty it faces in responding to forces and interests that cross borders: transnational speculation in urban land and housing markets, the threat posed by multinationals to local economic and environmental sustainability, displacement and forced migration. Only a strong, networked response will be capable of providing a counterweight to central government and corporate power in these areas.

It will be up to municipalist movements themselves to define a blueprint for an internationalism for the twenty-first century. An internationalism that moves beyond formal bureaucratic structures and harnesses the ways of working that define municipalism itself: concrete and goal-based, feminist and collaborative, radical yet pragmatic. Only in this way, through infinite acts of bravery, through faith in the cumulative effects of a thousand small victories, can we build a global alternative to a world in crisis.

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Bologna, Italy – City of the Commons

What would it be like if city governments, instead of relying chiefly on bureaucratic rules and programs, actually invited citizens to take their own initiatives to improve city life? That’s what the city of Bologna, Italy, is doing, and it amounts to a landmark reconceptualization of how government might work in cooperation with citizens. Ordinary people acting as commoners are invited to enter into a “co-design process” with the city to manage public spaces, urban green zones, abandoned buildings and other urban issues.

The Bologna project is the brainchild of Professor Christian Iaione of LUISS, university in Rome, in cooperation with student and faculty collaborators at LabGov, the Laboratory for the Governance of Commons. LabGov is an “inhouse clinic” and think tank that is concerned with collaborative governance, public collaborations for the commons, subsidiarity (governance at the lowest appropriate level), the sharing economy and collaborative consumption. The tagline for LabGov says it all: “Society runs, economy follows. Let’s (re)design institutions and law together.”

For years Iaione has been contemplating the idea of the “city as commons” in a number of law review articles and other essays. In 2014, the City of Bologna formally adopted legislation drafted by LabGov interns. The thirty-page Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons outlines a legal framework by which the city can enter into partnerships with citizens for a variety of purposes, including social services, digital innovation, urban creativity and collaborative services.¹ Taken together, these collaborations comprise a new vision of the “sharing city” or commons-oriented city. To date, some ninety projects have been approved under the Bologna Regulation. Dozens of other Italian cities are emulating the Bologna initiative. The Bologna Regulation takes seriously the idea that citizens have energy, imagination and responsibility that they can apply to all sorts of municipal challenges. So why not empower such citizen action rather than stifling it under a morass of bureaucratic edicts and political battles? The conceptualization of “city as commons” represents a serious shift in thinking. Law and bureaucratic programs are not seen as the ultimate or only solution, and certainly not as solutions that are independent of the urban culture. Thinking about the city as commons requires a deeper sense of mutual engagement and obligation than “service delivery,” outsourcing and other market paradigms allow.

Instead of relying on the familiar public/private partnerships that often siphon public resources into private pockets, a city can instead pursue “public/commons partnerships” that bring people together into close, convivial and flexible collaborations. The working default is “finding a solution” rather than beggar-thy-neighbor adversarialism or fierce political warfare.

To Iaione, the Bologna Regulation offers a structure for “local authorities, citizens and the community at large to manage public and private spaces and assets together. As such, it’s a sort of handbook for civic and public collaboration, and also a new vision for government.” He believes that “we need a cultural shift in terms of how we think about government, moving away from the Leviathan State or Welfare State toward collaborative or polycentric governance.”

SSM Sozialistische Selbsthilfe Mühlheim (Socialist Self-Help Mühlheim), Germany

Sozialistische Selbsthilfe Mühlheim (SSM) is a self-organized residential and work project with a tradition and a vision. SSM evolved in the wake of a squat in an old Schnapps distillery in the Mühlheim district of Cologne. After negotiating with the city of Cologne for four years, SSM signed a rental contract for the distillery buildings. It took the legal form of a Verein, an association controlled by its members.

This arrangement has given SSM some assets that it can use to generate revenues to sustain itself as a nonprofit. It rents out one part of its hall for events, for example. And since one of SSM’s activities is liquidating households, another part of the building is used for furniture storage. The project also runs a secondhand store. The group has always taken pride in not becoming politically or financially dependent; it began without any supporting funding and is financially self-sufficient today.

Since its founding in 1979 about twenty people have been living on the SSM site. Their common space enables them to live independent lives without social isolation, and their community ethic is prized by members as a way to counter the capitalist, consumerist sensibilities of the surrounding city. SSM members seek not only to take control of their own lives, but to advance more humane, ecologically responsible urban policies. For example, SSM took a strong activist role in opposing the demolition of the Barmer Viertel neighborhood of Cologne – one of SSM’s many public-spirited initiatives that have earned it respect and admiration among city officials as well as the general population.

In light of such activism, the abbreviation SSM could reasonably stand for “self-help and solidarity come to life in Mühlheim.” The community has been providing communal housing since 1979 and creating jobs that conventional markets do not find lucrative enough to create. SSM members confidently use the term “socialist self-help” to describe their projects. SSM is a commons because it relies on self-organized governance and public-spirited action, combined with the self-reliance, sense of responsibility and ecological commitments of its members. It is a living social system that is independent and durable, and therefore able to enter into constructive engagements with both the market and state. Confirming its wide respect, SSM won the “Soziale Stadt 2012” prize (“Social City 2012”) from a business organization, the Association of German Housing and Real Estate Companies.

, Great Britain

For most city-dwellers, one of the great challenges they face is the high cost of living and housing expenses due to investor speculation. In the early twentieth century, Ebenezer Howard tackled this problem by proposing the idea of a “garden city” that would blend the benefits of both country and city living and be financed through collective ownership of land. The central idea of Letchworth is to keep land ownership in the hands of the community while allowing housing and other buildings to be sold or leased to individuals.

Garden City Letchworth² was started more than a century ago by ethical investors, Quakers and philanthropists and other socially concerned individuals. In 1903, founders Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker purchased 2,057 hectares of land near London at a reasonable price and then made it available to the members of the community for building. In this way, people came to own the roofs over their heads but co-owned the land on which their houses had been built. Despite low wages for many people, the community-oriented form of ownership made it possible to avoid high rents.

The collective ownership of the land also generated revenues through housing rentals and business leases. This in turn made it possible for the community to finance schools and hospitals. Everyone, not just investors, could benefit. Howard described his ideas in detail in his 1898 book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. For decades the economic value generated by Letchworth’s infrastructures – water, sewerage, gas, electricity, roads, schools, hospitals – were mutualized to benefit all of its inhabitants. This helped the city to become relatively self-sufficient. Inspired by the Letchworth example, other garden cities followed, such as the Welwyn Garden City in the 1920s.

Following World War II, the appeal of the garden city model declined. People still enjoyed living in leafy surroundings, but a more individualistic ethic replaced the idea of community in general and community ownership of land in particular. In 1995, the Garden City Corporation in Letchworth became the Garden City Letchworth Heritage Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that finances itself. The plots of the residences created in the beginning are still in the hands of the Community Land Trust (CLT). Today more than 33,000 people live in Letchworth, on land that belongs to the CLT.

In Europe and the US, there is a renewed interest in the idea of community land trusts as a way to decommodify land and mutualize the benefits of land ownership. In such discussions, Garden City Letchworth remains an inspiration and archetype. “There is indeed a wind of change now building for rethinking and updating the garden city model,” says British land trust expert and community researcher Pat Conaty.

In 1996, the people who lived in Sellwood neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, decided to reclaim a street intersection, Ninth Avenue and Sherrett Street, to create “Share-It Square.” They filled it with a tea stand, a children’s playhouse and a community library. This was the beginning of an ongoing volunteer project, the City Repair Project, a self-organized urban commons designed to foster a sense of community participation and make the urbanscape more inviting and sociable.

Every May, the City Repair Project hosts a ten-day series of workshops called “Village Building Convergence” in places around Portland. The events have created dozens of projects that enliven the city through “natural buildings” and permaculture designs. Thousands of volunteers have built benches and information kiosks using “natural materials” such as sand, straw and “cob” (unburned clay masonry). The kiosks are a place for sharing neighborhood information, such as requests or offers of services (babysitting, housecleaning, massage, gardening). They are also places where people can share their homegrown vegetables.

At first, city officials resisted the idea of a neighborhood claiming a public space for itself by painting the pavement and creating small structures. But then they realized that the convivial neighborhood life at at Share-It Square was a great way for people to become more involved with city life. In 2000, the City of Portland passed an ordinance authorizing “intersection repair” throughout the city. With the help of City Repair volunteers, a neighborhood that obtains the consent of 80 percent of its residents within two blocks of an intersection, can design paintings and creative public spaces for the centers of the intersection.

Much of the inspiration for the City Repair Project has come from Mark Lakeman, the self-styled “placemaking coordinator” of the initiative. The group’s stated mission is to facilitate “artistic and ecologically oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world. We are an organized group action that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live.”

In practice, this means everything from “intersection repairs” to public installations, block parties and conferences, and educational events and festivals. The commoning catalyzed by City Repair allows people to make decisions about their own immediate neighborhoods and to actively shape the future of the community. Sometimes that amounts to finding out the name of the neighbor who’s been living across the street for the past twenty years.

Vila Autódromo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

For more than thirty years, the Vila Autódromo favela community in Rio de Janeiro has been fighting the city government’s plans to evict everyone and build a new upper-middle class neighborhood. At first, the resistance came from fishers and other people with low incomes who had built their huts on the banks of Jacarepaguá Lagoon. Then, as real estate values rose in this area adjacent to the upscale neighborhood of Barra da Tijuca, developers wanted to build luxury apartments, highways or sports facilities in the Vila Autódromo.

The city government has offered a shifting set of reasons for eliminating the neighborhood – the needs of the Olympic Games in 2016, growing traffic, the environment. But the real reasons seem to be about money. As one commentator put it, “The general assumption is that skyrocketing land values have put pressure on city officials to make the space available to developers, the same interests that fund local politicians and newspapers. Yet the Brazilian constitution stipulates that those who occupy unused urban land for more than five years without contestation by land owners should be granted legal claim. And Vila Autódromo has been there since 1967.”³

Residents in Vila Autódromo are accustomed to doing things for themselves. Decades ago, they built their own houses, installing all of the electrical connections, water pipes, septic systems and telephone lines, with no government assistance. So it was not so difficult for them to form their own residential association. Their resistance helped them win formal land use rights from the government in 1994. But residents could never be sure that the government would not forcibly remove them. Many have already succumbed to the government’s strategy of paying residents large sums of money to move, leaving many parts of the neighborhood in a state of abandoned disrepair.

To propose a different vision for their neighborhood, the residents’ association came up with its own local development plan, a Plano Popular, in 2012, with the support of students and professors at state universities and the Rio de Janeiro university ETTERN.⁴ The grassroots proposal called for better infrastructure, restoration measures for the banks of the lagoon, and better-quality urban design for the community. In December 2013, the plan beat out 170 other applicants and received the Urban Age Award, presented annually by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank to creative urban initiatives.

Yet still the Vila remains under threat by a hostile city government and developers. In early 2014, construction of new housing, where the government plans to resettle the Autódromo residents, began just a kilometer away. Some residents accepted attractive cash compensation offers from the city officials, which had the effect of dividing residents and sapping energy from the protest. By January 2015, construction had begun for new buildings adjacent to the houses of residents still fighting the projects. Whether the residents will prevail in their resistance is uncertain, but they have already made one thing clear: it is best to pursue urban design with the active, collective participation of a neighborhood’s residents, in ways that meet their real interests and needs, than to sell off such “development” rights to the highest bidder.

Resident-Managed Housing, Astrachan, Russia

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, practically all of the state-owned housing stock in Russia was privatized in the early 1990s. While roughly 80 percent of the apartments are privately owned, managing the jointly owned stock – from the roof to the outdoor facilities – has generally remained either a responsibility of the state or has been handed over to private real estate companies. Maintenance and upkeep declined so greatly that approximately 40 percent of the apartments in Russia must now be completely refurbished. In some places the answer to the problem is being solved through self-governance by residents. This possibility arose in 2005 when the government passed a law enabling the residents to manage apartment buildings themselves or through housing cooperatives.

One early set of cooperators were residents of apartments in Astrachan, a city of 500,000 people in southern Russia. Residents of Eleventh Red Army Street in Astrachan decided to manage their apartments themselves through a council of residents known as Soyuz Zhiteley.⁵ The residents’ council levies a monthly charge of 8.7 rubles (roughly 17 euro cents) for every square meter of an apartment, which is then earmarked for repairs and maintenance.

Roughly one-fifth of Astrachan’s apartments, a total of 1,900 apartment buildings, are now managed by their residents. Similar initiatives exist in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi and many smaller provincial cities. Management by the residents is a good alternative to the often corrupt private real estate management companies. It also helps to counter the expropriation of adjacent green spaces between the prefab apartment buildings, which developers consider suitable land for high-priced high-rises.

Not surprisingly, President Vladimir Putin’s government is opposed to resident-managed repairs and maintenance in apartment buildings. He would like to overturn the 2005 law that authorized the arrangements and housing cooperatives. If successful, residents would become individually liable for repairs and maintenance again, leading to a decline in building upkeep. The residents’ associations would also be more vulnerable to fraud and embezzlement of their contributions for repair and maintenance.

The figures show what this kind of discrimination against residents’ management means in concrete terms: in 2007, the government promised 380 billion rubles to refurbish apartment buildings. However, these monies have been granted only to buildings managed by private real estate companies or cooperatives, and not a single ruble to housing managed by the residents.

Jannis Kühne (Germany) studies urbanism at Bauhaus University in Weimar where he does research on urban commons. He has done internships in Bamako, Mali (DRCTU) and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (NAPP) as well as a semester of study at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where he worked on the issue of favela upgrading andremoção branca (the displacement of residents in pacified favela).

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo of Vila Autódromo by CatComm | ComCat | RioOnWatch

The post Patterns of Commoning: Notable Urban Commons Around the World appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series of articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

KVV: We probably all know of some commons initiative in our neighbourhood but the commons as a concept is less well known – how would you sum it up?

CI: How do you explain the commons to people who lead a “regular life”, which is basically getting to work, earning money, and then using this money to live and work within the framework of our current society? Well, this life is simple because it is based on two pillars: first, you produce something to take care of your private needs, your subsistence, and maybe more because if you’re able to do well in life, then you accumulate resources and in return you get more influence and social status in life, or wealth. Then as a second pillar, the state takes care of all your individual needs: transportation, infrastructure – how water and light are brought to your house. If you want to make your life more complex you then add a third pillar which is all about volunteering, reciprocating, giving back, etc.

It’s between these lines that the commons work, in a very complex way. And their real nature is underinvestigated. For instance, instead of going to the supermarket to get groceries, one could farm and produce food using a community garden or by placing an urban farm on the rooftop of one’s building. Or one could manage a piece of the city or produce goods and services together with one’s peers, instead of relying on an entity in which an owner or shareholder owns the means of production. These activities are not public nor private, nor even social. So they form a new pillar: the commons. This pillar should be seen both as complementary to, and as a way to rethink, the previous pillars.

For quite a while the commons were perceived as something small, in the sense that some small communities managed themselves without the state or market. They were long seen as something that substitutes the public or the private and this is relatively true in very remote communities, like rural communities in Africa which actually evade the state and the market. But more and more we see the commons spreading in urban areas, complementing the state and the market rather than rejecting them. Think for example about community gardening or cultural spaces.

I am currently working on defining how, in the future, such initiatives can offer a way to update, improve, and change the state and the market. The commons can be an infrastructure for experimentation, a space where new institutions and new economic ventures are born that rely on this idea of cooperation, sharing, self-empowerment, collaboration, and coordination among peers.

How did you get involved in the commons? 

Ten years ago I studied the subject of climate change regulation in the context of urban law and policy, to find out whether it was possible to address climate change issues through action at the grassroots and city level. So I started with a specific case study rooted in urban mobility, public transportation means and systems. And I ended up talking about what has nowadays basically been labelled as both the sharing economy and the urban commons.

My conclusion in this study, ‘The Tragedy of Urban Roads’, was twofold: in the future, on one hand, more cities should invest in forms of sharing means of transportation. On the other hand regulation could enable behavioural shifts of individuals that are willing to embrace more economically and environmentally sustainable behaviours, because I discovered at the time, more than 10 years ago, that two thirds of the emissions come from households and individual consumption. So I thought we need to look at what political economist and Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom labelled in 1990 as the ‘governance of the commons’: everyone should be part of a locally rooted but worldwide regulatory scheme in which everyone is a ‘commoner’, and is part of the solution – not part of the problem – by changing their behaviour, shifting from car ownership to car sharing, trying to save water and energy because this creates less emissions and so on and so forth. We need an individualised citizen-centred approach and a regulatory scheme that is based on sharing and collaboration. That’s where I started to study the commons and how governments were designed, especially governments’ mechanisms connected to the commons.

You co-designed the ‘Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Commons’¹ . Two years after its implementation, can you give an assessment of the present state of affairs?

Today in Bologna there are more than 200 projects or pacts of collaboration that were approved according to the regulation. People see it as a way to take action as individuals and as groups, formal or informal. The Regulation is also about trying to involve civil society organisations as much as possible, which mistakenly perceived it as a way to bypass them. Bologna is now aiming at an implementation that goes from just sharing to collaboration, from small everyday economically unsustainable practices towards forms of economically viable ventures that are self-sustaining and also more independent.

We’ve learnt that it is important to underpin the ecosystemic nature of the commons in governing them, which could also be a way to design other public policies. There is another public policy called ‘Incredibol’: creative innovation in Bologna – it’s all about creative spaces, more rooted in the idea of start-ups than the Bologna Regulation. We are now trying to merge these two public policies. Through Incredibol for instance, you have a space in one of the main parks, Le Serre dei Giardini Margherita, that was regenerated and turned into a co-working space, with also a kindergarten, and a restaurant.

Another space I always mention is ‘Dynamo’. It’s a former bus depot that has been transformed into a repair shop and a hub for sustainable mobility and bicycle sharing. Some people are working on the re-use of clothing, or creating a library of objects, while others help with the upkeep of local parks. Others still are working on integration of migrants and low-income people, involving them not only in the care or maintenance of the city but also in the creation of social innovation and collaborative economy processes. You have FabLab spaces like ‘Make in BO’ in Piazza dei Colori, community gardening, real urban farming in Pilastro… A lot has been done on the civic restoration of historic buildings in the city centre and on the regeneration of vacant buildings or public spaces. We see groups of “city makers” that take care of the city and have the right to do so – an important measure that fosters social control and which, in this case, is more effective than policing, command, and control and public provisioning strategies. These examples could light the spark for a Europe-wide movement because similar processes are happening in many cities around Europe, as shown by the Cities in Transition project. For me, the most important way to foster social, economic, and institutional transition in cities is through the urban commons.

You mentioned a commons project on the integration of migrants. Nowadays we witness many problems of social exclusion. How do you see this aspect of integration within the commons?

This is a big issue. We need to demonstrate that the commons can be a means of achieving urban justice because there is currently still a lack of diversity among the people who are ‘commoning’. So we need to find ways of including other people, migrants, refugees, etc. in the commons and in commons-based governance schemes. In fact this is important for the work that one could do on the outskirts of cities where there are clusters of people (especially in public housing), immigrants (people that are now living in the city in a stable way), and migrants (people who just landed or are even maybe just in transit to another city because of the current refugee crisis). We need to understand if and how the commons could be an answer.

I am running an experiment in Piazza dei Colori (in English “Square of Colours”) in Bologna. It’s a public housing cluster where 60 percent of the inhabitants are foreigners: people that are now based in Bologna legally. But in close proximity we also have the so-called migrants’ hub, a place where refugees from Africa or the Middle East are now arriving. They are hosted for up to three months before they are dispatched to other areas of the city or to other cities in the region. So, there is a FabLab and a network of cultural and creative spaces in Piazza dei Colori, as well as a pact of collaboration in a nearby area. The CO-Bologna project is now leveraging both the Incredibol policy and the Bologna Regulation to involve the migrants and other people from the public housing compound and the Hub of the migrants in creating a collaborative economy district in which they can all manage the public space through the pact of collaboration and at the same time produce, manage, and manufacture by working in the FabLab or in those spaces.

So the commons, which is about social value, and the kind of connections you build around the commons, could be a way to create a shared set of values in a society that is becoming, or already is, more diverse, especially in European urban areas. In fact, the commons are more about the social process than the results. It doesn’t work like the state and the market where you have only formal rules, only organised structures. Most of the time, the commons are also about social norms in an informal organisation, which is adaptive, intuitive. It is very organic and changes over time. What might be suited to one context is not suited to another. It is very important to have this focus on diversity.

You are coordinator at the Laboratory for the Governance of Commons (LabGov)². As an expert, what advice can you give other cities with regards to governing the commons?

LabGov is the first step of this Co-City process, which should be established by local knowledge institutions, together with city officials and commons practitioners in the city. It should be creative in a way that it is designed to start debates and discussions on what the commons are in that specific city, what is the entry point to start from, what is the real commons. What is a commons in Gent might not be a commons in Bologna. After all, the community, the ‘commoners’ decide what the commons are, so they should be able to define by themselves what square, what park, what street, what abandoned building needs to be reframed as a commons. Once you worked this out, you have to start mapping the commons institutions in the city because there might already be examples, as well as the ‘commoning’ communities that might not know of each other.

For instance, you decide that food is a commons for Gent. There might be projects, people, associations that are not speaking ‘the language of the commons’ but are already doing precisely that: a commons-based project, in the sense that you have a community that is cooperating and producing in an open way, collaborating with other urban actors, to produce some form of positive spillovers for the city in an open, non-hierarchical way. So you need to go out there, talk to them and invite them to be part of an experimentation process to practice the creation of commons governance tools together. Then you prototype a governance scheme. It could be a public policy regulation, a governance device, an institution, an economic venture, etc. It doesn’t need to be laws or regulations, it could also be social norms like civic uses. But it is vital that you first practice together. Then you prototype, you evaluate, you test the effects of this prototype, and lastly, you might model it into some form of governance. At the end you always need to evaluate and measure the impacts. That is what the co-city protocol is about.

Notes

[1] A pioneering policy that regards the city as a collaborative social ecosystem where citizens’ initiatives and collaboration are legally recognised, valued, and actively supported by thegovernment.

[2] A place of experimentation where students, scholars, experts, and activists discuss the future shapes that social, economic, and legal institutions may take. LabGov  has been developing the international research and experimentation protocol ‘Co-Cities’ to design the city of the future based on the governance of urban commons, collaborative land use, social innovation, sharing economy, collaborative economy. LabGov adopts a learning-by-doing approach.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 4th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by Dimitris Graffin

The post Finding Common Ground 4: The City as a Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post, written by Dirk Holemans, is part of our series on articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

Two real-world stories

One: a medieval city called Ghent. The remnants of the age-old St-Baafs abbey are a public museum. Sounds logical; it is where the history of the city started. But the municipal government had to cut its budget and, as there are not many visitors, the site is closed. For a few years, nothing happens. Who cares? Then the people of the neighbourhood decide it is a great shame, a beautiful medieval refectory and garden hidden from public life. They take action because such a thing of beauty should be shared by everyone. They start a citizens’ initiative and organise lectures and concerts in the abbey. It evolves into a very successful organisation. Twenty years later, around 150 volunteers organise more than 200 public events, reaching out to thousands of people. A vibrant new urban common is created.

Two: a big country called Germany. In the 1990s, the state produces electricity mostly from nuclear energy and fossil fuels. Even in light of climate change, the four big German electricity companies think that business as usual is the only way forward. Investing in renewables is laughed at. So citizens come together and start their own energy initiatives, mostly renewable energy cooperatives (REScoops). In cities and villages, the idea turns out to be contagious, and together they start to change the energy system. Nowadays, half of the new renewable energy systems in Germany are owned by citizens and their organisations. Call it a state-wide network of local commons.

You’ll never walk alone

These examples are true, but they only tell half the story.

In Ghent, the neighbours had to ask for the key to the abbey. The civil servant responsible, probably a visionary, not only gave it to them but added: “Nobody can inspire such an abbey as a neighbourhood”. Several departments of the municipal government actively supported the citizens’ initiative by, for example, announcing the activities in the newsletter of the official neighbourhood centre. The responsible alderman had to back their civil servants who, in a gesture of trust, just handed over the keys; after a while, on a permanent basis.

In Germany, the REScoops could only establish themselves in such numbers because of a stimulating legal framework, with stable feed-in tariffs for the renewable energy delivered to the energy network. First introduced in 1990, this law was consolidated with the ambitious Law on Renewable Energy, (and other far-reaching government policies), ten years later. When the financial crisis arrived later, putting your money in renewable energy systems was not only a civil gesture, but also a financially smart move.

These two examples are in line with research done in the Netherlands on citizens’ initiatives. In one way or another, they all have to rely on support from the government, be it for a space they need for their activities, a piece of land for urban agriculture, or some money. As we will argue, this support is not a problem, but rather a vital part of democracy.

There is still a dimension missing in these stories: the economic one. People in Germany who produce their own renewable electricity still sell it on a market, albeit a highly regulated one. And, luckily, when there is no wind or sun they can buy energy that comes from other sources or other countries. Even if the ‘Neighbours of the Abbey’ is run by volunteers, they also have to pay their bills. So they run a café during their activities, which, from a Belgian perspective, is the most obvious thing to do financially.

Together with the Liberals and the Socialists, ecologists acknowledge that a combination of market, state and autonomy components is optimal.

Complex thinking

Let’s move from the examples to the general societal debate. If, for instance, we look at opinions about how we should organise housing, they tend to lie on a spectrum between two opposing views. On the Left, there is the view that the government is the best option to organise it in a fair way. On the other side, the Right argues that only the market can allocate houses in an optimal manner. On a higher level, a lot of commentators interpreted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as the victory of the Right side of the spectrum. Concretely, in countries such as the UK, this led to the dismantling of public social housing, and the transferral of care homes from the public to the private sector.

What matters is that discussions on this, as well as other areas of society, are trapped in a Left-Right framework, within which the radical Left, without any critical analysis, invariably pushes the government forward as a solution and the Right, equally unquestioningly, only sees merit in the market approach by private companies. It is as if the citizen – the bearer of democracy – may only watch from the side-lines and is unable to propose solutions to societal needs. Remaining on the question of housing for elderly people, arguments for citizens’ initiatives, the Abbeyfield Houses for example, are rarely heard in the mainstream debate. This initiative was born in 1956 in Britain in response to a growing social problem: an increasing number of elderly people in the poor neighbourhoods of London were no longer able to live independently in a dignified manner. Today, the British Abbeyfield Society manages 700 homes with 7,000 seniors, aided by 10,000 volunteers1. Abbeyfield is a concept of collective living and a volunteer movement which has already taken root in many countries.

This is not to imply that citizens’ initiatives are the panacea for all challenges; but they can be an important part of the future if we are willing to widen our gaze. These examples clearly demonstrate that we have three basic options to address these challenges and to organise society. This broadened view of society can be visualised in the following triangle. The spectrum discussed above is actually only the line at the base of the triangle.

Each corner indicates an extreme society: a fully market-oriented society; a 100 per cent state-run society; or one exclusively managed by autonomous citizens. How a given society formulates a response to a social need – such as the nursing homes – can be situated within this triangle.

With this broadened view we come to the core of political ecology, as has been pointed out by the philosopher Philippe Van Parijs. For this presentation shows the narrowness of the dominant discourse in our society (oscillating between more state or more market), as it only takes place on the horizontal side of the triangle. Once one conceptualises the three corner points, with autonomy above as the vertical dimension, it becomes immediately clear that when the liberal and socialist logics praise the importance of the market or of the state, they not only advocate less state or less market, respectively, but plead also for a smaller autonomous sphere. But there exists a third perspective that emphasises autonomous activities and, thus, less of both state and market involvement. The horizontal ‘Left-Right’ axis is typical of modern industrial society; transitioning from this line up to the top of the triangle is a feature of the current post-industrial society that promotes other forms of participation in social life from the perspective of autonomy, rather than that of money and work. This is exactly the field of the commons.

The strength of social innovation

The autonomy perspective is a key element of political ecology (ecologism). As for the other two ways of thinking, it is not desirable, from a Green perspective, to drive society into any single corner of the triangle. Together with the Liberals and the Socialists, ecologists acknowledge that a combination of market, state and autonomy components is optimal. At the same time, their point of view distinguishes itself clearly from the liberal and socialist approach. For ecologists, autonomy represents the joyful potential to shape the world together. Autonomy is at odds with a unilateral individualisation: the joyful shaping is always done in cooperation with others. Therefore, ecologists speak about connected autonomy: I can only find fulfilment and build a world to live in through a fruitful connection with others, which also entails the dimension of care, for each other, for the world we live in, and for our living planet. This perspective is related to the notion of stewardship: our freedom to act and change the world implies, at the same time, feeling responsible for it.

With more and more citizens taking initiatives of their own, the challenge for governments is to turn themselves into a partner state, as is already happening in Bologna and Ghent.

As a source of social innovation, the importance of the autonomous sphere cannot be underestimated; a lot of solutions to societal challenges did not come from the government or from business, but from creative citizens. The aforementioned Abbeyfield Housing is a good example, as are social innovations such as car sharing, organic farming initiatives, and food teams2. And who built the first windmills to produce electricity? It was citizens developing a positive alternative to nuclear plants in countries like Denmark and Ireland.

The triangle shows that political ecology cannot be reduced to environmental protection. Ecologists want not only to respect the boundaries of the earth’s ecosystem; they strive at the same time for a larger independent social sphere where people can deploy their capabilities without the interference of market or state. The final goal is a good life for all.

From public-private to public-civil partnerships

As these examples show, most citizens’ initiatives rely in one way or another on cooperation with the state. This is not a problem: it is the future. The neoliberal regime of the last thirty years dictated that the best approach to organising anything in society was one based on markets and competition. This has led to a wide array of public-private partnerships, which, most of the time, leads to a government losing its grip on policy areas and citizens paying too much tax for the services delivered. Again, the triangle clearly shows the alternative, future way to develop: public-civil partnership. With more and more citizens taking initiatives of their own, the challenge for governments is to turn themselves into a partner state, as is already happening in Bologna and Ghent. Here, politicians don’t see their political constituency as a region to manage from above, but as a community of citizens with a lot of experience and creativity. Leaving top-down politics behind, they develop forms of co-creation and co-production. In Ghent, citizens developed, within the frame of a participatory climate policy, the concept of ‘living streets’: they decided by themselves to reclaim their streets, getting rid of all cars for one or two months. And the municipal government took care of all the necessary measures to make it happen in a legal and safe way. With public-civil partnerships, an underestimated area of the triangle of societal possibilities is explored in a positive way.

Stimulating and sustaining the commons requires an active state which develops new institutions that allows citizens to engage in transition projects.

Institutional diversity for resilient societies

With the revival of the commons, it has become clear that there exists a third fundamental way to develop and organise society. Centred on the basic principle of autonomy, it has its own logic, consisting of specific forms of social relations based on reciprocity and cooperation. It is more than probable that new commons initiatives will form a crucial part of the transformation towards a social-ecological society. At the same time, it would be very unwise to strive for a pure ‘commonism’. Just as with communism or neoliberalism, a society based on only one of the three approaches to organisation is unable to cope with the broad array of severe challenges we face nowadays. Having said that, stimulating and sustaining the commons requires an active state which develops new institutions that allows citizens to engage in transition projects in a secure way, so their autonomy and creativity can flourish. In combination with other innovations, a universal basic income could be part of this new socio-ecological security framework for the 21th century.

This is probably the most important argument at the political level in favour of the commons. At the level of who we are and how we relate, it stimulates the basic human ability to cooperate and take care of ourselves and each other. What more can we dream of, than citizens using their freedom to take their future in their own hands?

Their passion is unbeatable.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 2nd article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by pni

The post Finding Common Ground 2: Institutional Diversity for Resilient Societies appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this talk, John focuses on the concept of the partner state and what can be learned from previous experiences, such as those in Italy.

Very clear sound, and worth listening to.

Watch the video here:

Photo by micurs

The post John Restakis on the Cooperative Experience in Emilia-Romagna and What It Means Today for Transformational Change appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The disaster with Flint, Michigan’s drinking water, created by political leaders more devoted to fiscal austerity than the common good, illuminates why it’s important to think of our cities as commons–human creations that belong to all residents, not just the wealthy and politically well-connected.

The commons itself means all the many things we share together rather than own privately–a list that starts with air, water, parks and streets and expands to include more complex entities such as the Internet, civic organizations and entire communities.

Typically the commons evokes images of the countryside: sheep grazing on communally-tended pastures, people frolicking on a town green, untrammeled wilderness open to all. Even in the modern context, commons champion (and Nobel Prize winner) Elinor Ostrom is best known for research on the management of forests, fisheries and agricultural irrigation systems even though one of her important studies focused on police departments in metropolitan St. Louis.

Yet the recent resurgence of commons projects is happening in urban as well as rural areas, witnessed by the City as a Commons: Reconceiving Urban Space, Common Good and City Governance conference held last November in Bologna, Italy–a city taking big steps to integrate commons-based collaboration into its own policies and operations (more on this below).

The strong pastoral association with the commons makes sense from an historical perspective. Individualism and market economics were embraced first in urban areas as enlightenment philosophies and industrialization spread throughout Europe and eventually the whole planet. It was in rural communities where cooperative traditions endured and in some cases expanded, said Dutch historian Tine De Moor, president of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, one of the conference sponsors. Cooperatives, for instance, grew up the countryside of many nations during the 19^th and 20^th centuries because many rural communities’ needs could not be profitably met by private businesses.

In England, many villages once held Beating the Bounds parties in which folks hiked the boundaries of their local commons together, ripping out private encroachments on their collective land. US commons scholar David Bollier suggested urban and digital activists might update this custom to preserve commons of our own time.

The social alienation and crushing poverty associated with early industrial cities can be explained by the sudden loss of commons connections and resources by rural refugees forced off the land into factories, said Michel Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, based in Thailand. Cities lacked the free common spaces where people could raise food, gather firewood or gather outside with their neighbors. These human necessities must all be purchased.

The Rise of Urban Commons

Urban commons like parks, sanitation systems, public schools, public transit, libraries, hospitals, labor unions, private and public social welfare agencies emerged throughout the 19^th century in response to squalid urban conditions. And the commons movement today stands on the shoulders of people’s continuing efforts to improve urban life by addressing issues like racial and economic inequality, environmental problems, neighborhood vitality, community organizing, walkability and biking.

“The city as a commons is designed to be disruptive–to question who owns and controls the city,” explained Sheila Foster, Fordham University Law Professor at a post-conference conversation convened in a bustling Bologna park by Shareable.net magazine. “It’s a claim that the city is open to how we exchange goods and services. It’s not just elites who should have power.”

“The idea of the urban commons is still very much in development,” said Foster, who wrote a groundbreaking paper on the city as commons with her conference co-chair Christian Iaione.

Foster outlined four major tenets of the city as commons in conference’s closing session:

1. The city is an open resource where all people can share public space and interact.

2. The city exists for widespread collaboration and cooperation.

3. The city is generative, producing for human nourishment and human need.

4. The city is a partner in creating conditions where commons can flourish.

What Does the Future Look Like?

The form urban commons might take over the next 25 years was vividly sketched by Berlin activist Silke Helfrich. She described a convivial community living according to the African philosophy of ubuntu (“I am because you are”). Many people live in cooperative co-housing communities, and work at home or co-working spaces. The streets are alive with people on foot, bike, transit and in shared cars. Every neighborhood proudly sports community vegetable gardens, fruit orchards, flower patches, herb commons, sanctuaries for birds and bees, greenspaces, cafés, a cultural center, library, ballroom and open source hub.

“The space of the commons will expand, and the space of the market will shrink,” Helfrich envisions, because systems are designed to allow commons to happen. Commoning will be as easy to do then as shopping is today.

The conference’s workshops zeroed in lessons learned from local urban commons projects around the world, including US inner cities.

A struggling neighborhood on the west side of Buffalo, New York became a laboratory for applying Elinor Ostrom’s eight commons principles to community revitalization efforts. Ronald Oakerson, a political scientist at nearby Houghton College, and Jeremy Clifton, an AmeriCorps organizer, experimented with how to activate low-income renters in tackling crime and disinvestment problems on their blocks.

“What doesn’t work is flyers and knocking on doors,” says Clifton, who is now studying psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. What worked is identifying the community’s natural leaders and helping them create block clubs. “People take action when they feel ownership, but not necessarily home ownership but ownership of the street where they live.”

In Brooklyn, local activist Paula Siegel discovered the borough harbored 596 acres of vacant land (more space than Brooklyn’s beloved Prospect Park). Under the banner of “this land is your land,” she launched 596 acres to explore how residents can claim it for public use as gardens, playgrounds and learning centers.

Barcelona is moving toward participatory democracy with new commons policies tapping citizen’s ideas “to create the conditions for social initiatives to flourish”, according to Miquel Ortega, the city’s Commissioner for Commerce, Consumer Affairs and Markets. Airbnb was recently banned in the city because it was jacking up rents in many residential neighborhoods and forcing families out in favor of tourists.

Hitting the Ground in Bologna

The City as Commons event, which attracted more than 200 commoners from around the world to a refurbished factory, closed with a panel featuring Bologna’s Deputy Mayor Matteo Lepore who outlined some of the more than 100 collaborative projects with citizen groups the city has undertaken in its pioneering plans to incorporate commons thinking and practice into municipal governance:

• Neighborhood regeneration projects, which he emphasized, are “not on behalf of citizens but with citizens, who are a great source of energy, talent, resources, capabilities and ideas.”
• An experiment where restaurants and bars work directly with neighbors to set rules for their businesses and cooperate on regenerating the community.
• A program to draw upon parents’ ideas and skills in improving kindergartens.
• A civic crowdfunding prototype to support projects that the city cannot wholly fund, such as restoration of Bologna’s 24 miles of arched porticoes over sidewalks.
• An ambitious program of urban gardens.
• Creation of digital platforms to support commons projects of all varieties.
• A citywide conversation “about what is collaboration, and how the city government can work in new ways.

“Commons aren’t just something we protect, but also what we invent,” declared Lepore.

Bologna’s urban commons initiative began in May 2014, when the city council passed landmark legislation, Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons. “A new era was dawning where citizens are active co-managers of the resources they use in cities instead of passive recipients of services,” wrote Neal Gorenflo in Shareable after visiting Bologna at the first anniversary of the project.

The origins of the idea date back to 2011 when a group of local women contacted the city about donating benches to their neighborhood park, which lacked any place to sit. The women grew frustrated as their generous offer was bounced from one municipal department to another until finally they were told it was impossible. In fact, it was illegal for citizens to contribute improvements to their hometown.

As one of Italy’s most progressive cities, home to Europe’s oldest university and with a regional economy based on cooperative enterprises, this incident caused a stir around Bologna and spurred city officials to partner with the Rome-based organization LabGov (Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons) which applies the work of Elinor Ostrom to city life. Conference co-chair Christian Iaione, a legal scholar, was instrumental in bringing the project to life. Similar projects sprouted in the Italian cities of Palermo, Montova, Battipaglia and Rome. In North America, Toronto is looking at implementing Urban Commons policies and LabGov is partnering Fordham Urban Law Center to launch a project in New York City.

Lead image by Tyler Durdan.

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Neal Gorenflo shares his report on the recent The City as a Commons conference, held in Bologna, Italy. For more coverage on the conference, check out David Bollier’s take on the event.

The City as a Commons conference broke new ground earlier this month. As the first International Association of the Study of the Commons (IASC) conference on the urban commons, it urged that the historical focus of study and action on rural natural resource commons should shift, at least somewhat, to material and immaterial commons in cities. This is appropriate now that humans have become an urban species for the first time within the last decade.

However, the conference organizers, legal scholars Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione, took things even further. This was not just a call to shift the focus, but a call to recast the city in the image of the commons. The wording of the conference title was carefully considered. As co-organizer Sheila Foster has made clear, the city as a commons is a claim on the city by the people that calls for us to rethink how cities are governed and resources allocated and by whom. The city imagined as commons is a starting point that can lead to more fair, convivial and sustainable cities.

While a radical proposal for cities, one well aligned to Shareable’s vision, it was well grounded in theory and practice by scholars and commons practitioners alike in the conference’s dizzying number of panels (related papers available here until December 1, 2015). Moreover, one of the goals laid out by Foster in her welcome message — to create community around the urban commons — seemed work out too.  After two days of sessions and delicious Italian meals together, this diverse group seemed to jell.

The conference was hosted by LabGov, the International Association for the Study of the Commons, the Fordham Law School’s Urban Law Center and LUISS University in Rome. It was appropriately held in Bologna, Italy, a historical center of urban innovation which more recently celebrated the one year anniversary of its Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons, a groundbreaking new law and process empowering citizens to be hands-on city makers.

The conference was bookended by two powerful keynotes, one about the past and one about the future. The opening keynote by Tine De Moor, President of the organization (IASC) Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom co-founded 1989, gave a short, insightful, and sobering history of the commons. Silke Helfrich, one of the world’s most astute commons activists, closed with a keynote imagining the urban commons in 2040.

De Moor’s speech outlined the long history of European commons, with a heyday starting in the 11th century and ending in the 19th when the commons were literally legislated out of existence. She warned that we should not place too high an expectation of the commons as they are revived or we risk repeating the mistake of the private property story as a one fits all solution. She urged attendees to be realistic about what can and can’t be governed by the commons.

She also highlighted the revolutionary nature of the commons. She reminded us that people lost their sense of collectivity with the rise of the individual and market paradigm, and that the commons re-introduces this sensibility and way of being. She put the urban commons in historical context noting that commons rise during economic crises. Urban commons like cooperatives, associations, and credit unions are all a product of such crises. She noted a similar dynamic at work today in the Netherlands, her home. There’s been a dramatic spike in the formation of cooperatives in the last decade.

Helfrich speech was the perfect closing to the conference. She prefaced her exploration of a future urban commons with this philosophical bottom line about the commons:

Human beings are free in relatedness but never free from relationships. That’s the ontological bottom line. Relation precedes the things being related to, i.e. the actual facts, objects, situations and circumstances. Just as physics and biology are coming to see that the critical factors in their fields are relationships, not things, so it is with commons.

Then took us on a walk of the 2040 version of the city as a commons exploring commons-based housing, food, workspaces, services, and more. She brought to life a total vision of the city as commons in 2040. She called this a “concrete utopia” because all the pieces of it already exist but have not been assembled yet. Then she told us how it came to be, or rather how we can get there. The key is to, “connect commons, confederate the hot spots of commoning, create commons-neighbourhoods, commonify the city.”

The conference was just such an effort. I agree with commons expert David Bollier that we’ll see increasing activity in this space. People may look back at this conference as the catalyst for a powerful movement.

Vision of a city as a commons from Helfrich’s presentation, created by N. Kichler und D. Steinwender. City of Workshops – green, Lizenz: CC BY SA

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