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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-posted from Shareable

Photo by humblenick

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Cat Johnson: Group decision making has long been one of the big challenges of cooperative organizations. Groups may be able to reach a decision quickly, or, they may spend six hours debating whether to serve beer or kombucha at the next event.

A growing collection of digital tools, however, can help groups make collaborative decision more quickly and efficiently. One of the standouts is Loomio, an online tool designed to “increase transparency and inclusion, decrease meetings and emails, and make better decisions together.” The open source Loomio Co-op Handbook documents how Loomio Cooperative runs as a non-hierarchical organization and serves as a model for other collaborative organizations.

Loomio recently released Loomio School, a collection of case studies and resources about online facilitation, building a collaborative culture, team training, and more. It also provides instruction on using Loomio in your own group. While resources are focused on groups using Loomio, many of them can be used or adapted to any group decision making process. Here are five standout resources from Loomio School:

1. How to Supercharge Your Meeting: Five easy steps to help your team have more productive meetings.

2. Resolving Conflict on Loomio: a collection of informal practices for dealing with conflict on Loomio, written by Enspiral co-founder Joshua Vial.

3. Holding More Efficient In-person Meetings with Loomio: Online collaboration allows everyone to contribute to the decision making process in their own time. But in-person meetings can be a valuable way to share information.

4. Facilitation Guide: This in-depth guide covers numerous concepts and tips for facilitating meetings including preparation, commencing, underway, concluding, and ongoing practice

5. Case Studies: These case studies cover group decision making in the business and cooperative sphere, government, community, collectives and political organizations.

For more resources and inspiration, visit Loomio School

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Illustration: Loomio. Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter

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Cat Johnson: The commons are generally thought of as shared resources — these include everything from the public spaces we share to the air we breathe. A new movement hopes to redefine food as a commons.

As agricultural engineer Jose Luis Vivero-Pol explains in a new proposal to create a food commons in Europe, food should be considered a commons based on its “essentialness for human survival and the commoning practices that different peoples maintain to produce food for all.” He points out that the ethos surrounding the commons is different from those surrounding for-profit capitalistic ventures, and that food should not be treated as the latter.

The proposal notes that “the theory of the commons has barely touched upon food.” Vivero-Pol recommends a number of policy options for food to be valued and governed as a commons in Europe — here are 10 from a list of 15 ideas published by the P2P Foundation:

1. Declare food as a commons
A Declaration of the European Parliament to consider food no longer as a commodity but a commons, public good and human right to be included in national legal frames and public policies.

2. Create food commons initiatives
European Citizen Initiative to consider food as a human right, a public good and a commons in European policy and legal frameworks. Policy priorities should be geared towards safeguarding farmer’s livelihood and eater’s rights to adequate and healthy food.

3. Get healthy food into schools
Local, organic, freshly-made school meals as universal entitlements, governed by parents and school staff.

4. Support food councils 
Promote Food Policy Councils at all levels through participatory democracies, financial seed capital and enabling laws. Once enough numbers are achieved, an EU Food Policy Council could be established to monitor the reform yet-to-be Commons Food Policy.

5. Reframe the role of food producers 
Food producers to be employed by the state to provide food regularly to satisfy the state’s needs (i.e. for hospitals, schools, army, ministries, etc).

6. Ensure that everyone is fed 
Guaranteed daily bread for all. Establishing public bakeries where every citizen can get access to a bread loaf every day (if needed or willing to).

7. Reduce food waste 
Stricter and innovative rules to avoid food waste (binding regulations).

8. Keep public research in the commons All agricultural research funded with public funds to be in the public domain.

9. Support civic actions 
Food-related subsidies to support innovative civic actions for food such as Territories of Commons, community-supported agriculture, food buying groups, open agricultural knowledge, etc.

10. Food banks as a right 
European Parliament to elaborate a communication to call for an E.U. food bank network that is universal, accountable, compulsory and not voluntary, random and targeted, shifting from charitable food to food as a right.

The post 10 Policy Ideas to Make Food a Shared Resource in Europe appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Cat Johnson: We recently came across an inspiring video report by Agence France-Presse about a honey cooperative run by women in Afghanistan. It offers a glimpse into the life of an Afghan mother of seven who runs a beekeeping enterprise. She is just one of an estimated 200 women in the Bamiyan province working in honey production jobs.

Cooperatives in Afghanistan were banned for a number of years and were allowed again only 15 years ago, according to the International Co-operative Alliance based in Brussels, Belgium.

“Since then more than 3,000 co-operatives were re-registered,” the ICA noted. “However, many one these are not familiar with co-operative values and principles and also need support for capacity building.”

The cooperative beekeeping industry is an example of how co-ops can transform the lives of people with limited access to resources — those who have historically been unable to create entrepreneurial ventures. As new worker co-ops continue to redefine the cooperative movement, through platform co-ops, cabby-owned taxi cooperatives, artist co-ops, freelancer collectives and more, co-ops are increasingly being used as a tool to empower underserved communities and create an equitable and sustainable economy that works for all.

Header image is a screenshot from the Agence France-Presse video. Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter

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Cat Johnson: For seniors who want to age in a supportive community environment, cohousing is an exciting alternative to traditional options such as retirement homes and assisted living centers. In senior cohousing spaces, rather than relying on administrators, people rely on each other to lend a hand when needed and provide much-needed social engagement.

We recently connected with Anne P. Glass, professor and gerontology program coordinator at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, about the current state of senior cohousing. Glass, who has researched the topic of senior cohousing for the past decade, shared her thoughts about why the senior cohousing model is so appealing, what senior social networks look like in practice, and why we need to get rid of ageist stereotypes.

Cat Johnson: When I wrote about senior cohousing for Shareable in 2011, there were around 120 cohousing communities total in the U.S. What has happened since then, especially in regards to senior cohousing?

Anne P. Glass: One of the first senior, or elder cohousing, was in the late part of 2005. In 2006, the elder cohousing movement officially began. There are still only a dozen or so in the U.S., but there are at least a dozen more in the planning or development stages.

It was already much further developed in countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, although they might call it different things — like in Sweden they call it collaborative housing, and it might be an apartment building, for example. It looks a little bit different, but it’s still the same idea. It’s still the idea of older people developing a sense of community, running the place themselves, and having the interest in connecting with each other.

In addition to providing a social network, cohousing is a way for seniors to take care of each other, which is an area of particular interest to you. How do you see this working out in cohousing communities?

There are some big differences if you move into an elder cohousing community, for example, versus living in the suburbs or living in an apartment by yourself. Even in the suburbs, oftentimes people drive into the garage, shut the door, and they don’t even know their next door neighbors — they don’t even know their names.

If you move into a cohousing community, you would know all your neighbors — an average of 25-30 people — you would pretty much know everybody within 24-48 hours, so that’s already a big difference.

There’s a lot of security in being part of a community like that because you know people are looking out for you. People are not all going to love each other equally, but there is something going on where people are looking out for each other. That’s wonderful because more people are living alone and the term “elder orphan” is being used more and more. This kind of housing situation could work really well for people who are lonely and isolated, as well as for couples and friends.

Traditional cohousing generally has individual units surrounding common areas such as gardens and gathering areas. Pictured: Silver Sage in Boulder, Colorado. Photo: Anne P. Glass.

You mentioned that, unlike ageist societal stereotypes of older adults as dependent and needy, many older people are quite capable and willing to help each other. What does this look like on a day-to-day basis?

It turns out that a lot of help that older people really need is neighborly help rather than skilled care, per se. Some communities have assigned one or two coordinators, one of the other neighbors, for each person. So, if I go into the hospital, my coordinator would work with the other folks in the community to help me meet whatever needs I have. That may be that I want people to visit at hospital, or visit me at home when I come home, or I’d like to have a meal brought over, or I need someone to walk my dog. Things like that can go on for a few weeks afterwards.

I like it because it means that if you’re the person that has fallen or ended up in the hospital or has some other illness, it doesn’t fall on you to have to beg your neighbors to help you out, you can have your coordinator coordinate it for you.

I think the beauty and strength of collaborative communities like this is that people can build them and create them as they see fit.

It’s very clear from the interviews I’ve done with people who have organized these communities is that it’s an exciting thing to be part of the creation. I see these people as pioneers because this is a new thing in our country, and it’s different from other senior living arrangements because the people who live there run it themselves — they don’t have an administrator, [and] they don’t have a service staff. They really do rely on each other.

It seems that a lot of cohousing communities here are cost-prohibitive. Do you think we’ll start to see more affordable cohousing solutions?

There is one elder cohousing community that, from the beginning, they wanted to make it affordable and target it for low-and-moderate-income folks. It’s a unique model because it has both rental and owner units in the same community. The rental units have an income subsidy connected with them. The good side of that is that it does make it affordable, but the complicated side is that, because of fair housing and such, people can move in if they meet the criteria without really buying into the community and taking a role in that. If you have too many people who aren’t buying into being part of the community, that kind of defeats the purpose.

I’ve seen cohousing communities that people have moved out of because there wasn’t that strong community angle that they were looking for.

I think that is definitely a challenge, to keep that going. Another interesting thing is that the neighborhood or community is always changing. I think of it like an organism because, as some people move in and some people move out, it changes the whole atmosphere and personality of the community and some people are more engaged than others.

Of the communities I’ve visited, some are in the stage of having to figure out how to integrate newcomers. The founders all came in together and got everything going and decided everything, then when new people come in, they want to also have their say, so that’s a challenge that they’re still grappling with.

That is not unique to cohousing communities, I’ve heard people in retirement communities as well talking about the how the older generations and younger generations want to do things differently, so there’s a little bit of tension around that. It’s also the case with cohousing that, if you are going to be fully engaged, you do have to put the time and effort and work in, so it’s not going to be for everybody.

Senior cohousing enables residents to live in community while still maintaining a sense of independence. Pictured: Sand River Cohousing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Photo: Anne P. Glass

What are some of the differences you see in senior cohousing communities in Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands, and what can we learn?

There are a lot more communities, like in the hundreds, of elder collaborative housing. In Sweden and the Netherlands, some of the ones I visited were apartment-type living, but in Denmark, the community I visited was more like what we’ve come to think of cohousing here, with the units around the common space. There’s definitely interest in cohousing and it’s growing around the world. There’s interest in Spain and in Asia, and the U.K.

One woman I interviewed said she moved in because she said she didn’t want to die in her apartment and be found a few days later. So it’s being part of a community, and having people looking out for you. Not only would they notice if you didn’t come out of your house all day, but more subtle things of just looking out for each other.

My article “Aging Better Together” explains my thinking on that and some of the outcomes of it. It has to do with the idea that we’re aging together, in solidarity, and we’re willing to talk about it and we can have a better experience by doing it together. To promote social contact is the whole idea of it.

The idea of giving people a space to talk about aging is interesting. What more can you tell me about that?

One of the things that came out of the research is what I talk about as aging literacy. We don’t give people an opportunity to talk about what it’s like to be aging. If we have an event for older people, it’s usually a healthcare expo where we’re selling services, not the kind of opportunity or forum for people to come together.

One woman I interviewed said she felt differently when she got into her eighties, and she wanted to get a group together to discuss if they felt differently about life when they got into their eighties. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about — much deeper and richer conversations. We don’t have that. Even in retirement communities where you have a lot of older people living together, they have activities, but I don’t think they have many opportunities to have those deep discussions.

What do these cohousing communities have in common? How do they differ?

For the most part, the founders of these communities really are looking to create something new — a new alternative. They want the sense of community. It turns out that even people who are introverted are choosing cohousing. They realize that their tendency would be to become a hermit. They realize it’s important to have connections and that it was easier to do it this way and have people right outside your door that you could go to the movies with. They saw that there were advantages to it.

There’s more and more evidence that shows that social isolation can be as bad for elders as smoking and lack of exercise. It’s becoming realized as a public health issue. Having those connections is vitally important.

I’ve read that elders in urban centers tend to live longer than elders in suburbs because they can get out and go to the bodega or walk to the park and be among people.

That’s absolutely been recognized as an issue. When the Baby Boomers, of which I am one, when we were children, everybody wanted to live in the suburbs because it was supposed to be good for your children to have a yard and a place for them to play, so everybody moved to the suburbs. Now that everybody is aging in the suburbs, it’s not a great location to be, especially when you get to where you can’t drive anymore. The people who live in more urban settings, where there’s a lot within walking distance, can be at a much better advantage.

Anything you’d like to add?

In our society, we value independence so much, that people have to do everything for themselves, but I would argue that, as we get older, being interdependent is what we should strive for.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Top photo: Oakcreek Community in Stillwater, Oklahoma. 

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While the amount allotted for the project is relatively small in its first year — €3 million, as opposed to the €100 million spent in 2016 in Paris, the world’s largest PB project—it’s a step toward engaging people both in cities and in rural areas. It also gives government officials a better idea of what people want and need in their lives and communities.

To better reach those in outlying areas, organizers of the Portugal PB project, led by Graça Fonseca, the minister responsible for it, hope to enable people to vote via ATM machines. This is to boost turnout and ensure that more voices are heard in the democratic process. As Fonseca wrote in Apolitical:

“It’s about quality of life, it’s about the quality of public space, it’s about the quality of life for your children, it’s about your life, OK? And you have a huge deficit of trust between people and the institutions of democracy. That’s the point we’re starting from and, if you look around, Portugal is not an exception in that among Western societies. We need to build that trust and, in my opinion, it’s urgent. If you don’t do anything, in ten, twenty years you’ll have serious problems.”

Photo: Grace Fonseca with the Orçamento Participativo Portugal bus. Photo Orçamento Participativo Portugal

The official window for proposals begins in January, though some ideas, including one to equip kindergartens with open-source technology to teach them about robotics, have already been submitted. Proposals can be made in the areas of science, culture, agriculture, and lifelong learning. Organizers will host more than forty events next year for people to present and discuss their ideas.

“The organisers hope that it will go some way to restoring closer contact between government and its citizens,” writes Fonseca. “Previous projects have shown that people who don’t vote in general elections often do cast their ballot on the specific proposals that participatory budgeting entails.”

Cross-posted from Shareable. Top photo: Jason Briscoe (CC-0)

The post Portugal Announces World’s First Nationwide Participatory Budgeting Project appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Cat Johnson: Loomio is a worker-owned cooperative building open-source software to help organizations and communitieswith collaborative decision making. Based in New Zealand, the co-op is part of Enspiral, a collaborative network of social enterprises. Loomio’s vision is to create a world where it’s easy for anyone to participate in decisions that affect them.

The Loomio Co-op Handbook provides a behind-the-scenes look at the co-op: what inspired it, how the organization plans and implements its work, how it is organized, and its values as a co-operative social enterprise.

The handbook serves as an overview of a pioneering digital cooperative and a roadmap for other worker-owned cooperatives. It details how the organization strategizes and plans, how it uses work sprints to “maintain agility, clarity and accountability,” how it self organizes into working groups and how it uses a collaborative process to prioritize product development.

In addition to the practicalities of running a worker-owned cooperative, the Co-op Handbook also offers insights into how Loomio looks after its people, from prioritizing well-being and conflict resolution to professional development, and more.

If you’re creating a worker-owned co-op, or platform co-op, this will be a good resource to have in your toolbox. In the following video, Loomio’s co-founder Ben Knight shares his story and some insights into self-organizing communities.

The post The Loomio Handbook: A Roadmap for Worker-Owned Cooperatives appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This was the question posed recently by David Bollier, a policy strategist, activist, and a leading voice in the commons movement.

In an effort to find the answer, Bollier and his colleague Anna Grear, a law professor at Cardiff University, connected with a number of people about the “positive, practical steps that anyone can take in dealing with the terrible challenges of our time.”

One result of their efforts is the short film, Re-imagine the Future (below), which features conversations with international law professors, human rights advocates and activists who participated in the Operationalising Green Governance workshop outside of Paris earlier this year.

The film serves to inspire, inform and remind us that “new ways of thinking, acting and being are urgently needed.” It points to commoning, and the need to involve the planet in all of our decisions, as a central piece of the solution.

As Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University says in Re-imagine the Future, “[T]he unregulated way the world economy has been operating has contributed to global inequality of a dangerous sort…creating a lack of confidence in the fairness of the way in which politics are organized.”

Falk adds that people need new ways of interacting with governments and institutions if we’re to “evolve the new kind of planetary politics that are needed to meet the challenges of our age.”

Cross-posted from Shareable.

Photo: Joey Kyber (CC-0). Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter

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At its essence, PB is a democratic process that gives people direct control over a portion of a budget, whether in government, an organization or a school. It enables people to play an active role in shaping their communities and helps leaders better serve their stakeholders.

A new white paper, Participatory Budgeting: Next Generation Democracy, from the Participatory Budgeting Project provides an overview of PB and spotlights some of the benefits of using it, including:

• It’s effective leadership. The process motivates broad participation and engages communities in finding solutions that respond to community needs.
• It’s fair leadership. PB engages a true cross-section of the community. More people get inspired and active, including those who often can’t or don’t participate, like youth.
• It’s visionary leadership. By supporting their communities to become more resilient and connected, officials who do PB build a legacy as bold and innovative leaders.

Participatory Budgeting enables everyday people to directly support community projects. Image: Participatory Budgeting Project

The report is a guide for leaders to give them a deeper understanding of PB, to answer questions they may have, and to provide support materials for them in convincing city officials of the importance of PB.

People of all ages can participate in participatory budgeting. Photo: Participatory Budgeting Project

The paper looks at how leaders implement PB to reach more people, bridge community divides, and make government more effective by developing solutions with citizens. Included are case studies, tips on implementing PB, a timeline of the growth of the PB movement, testimonials from city officials, infographics and more—all pointing to the power and effectiveness of PB. As the report states:

People are disconnected from the tough choices of public service…Most city leaders are facing slashed budgets, shrinking revenue, and widespread mistrust of their work. Elected office is an overtime job (and often on a part-time salary). People rarely understand the nuanced compromises that leaders have to make. Many believe our democracy is no longer fair. In this climate, participatory budgeting offers a way to re-engage.

Want to start PB in your town or city? Start with our guide, “How to Start Participatory Budgeting in Your City.”

Cross-posted from Shareable.net. Lead photo credit: Participatory Budgeting Project.

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The argument that publicly-funded research should be made available to the public recently received a shot on the arm when the Competitiveness Council of the European Union reinforced its commitment to making all scientific articles and data openly accessible and reusable by 2020. As Creative Commons reports, the Council offered the following conclusions about the transition towards an open science system, stating that it:

• Acknowledges that open science has the potential to increase the quality, impact and benefits of science and to accelerate advancement of knowledge by making it more reliable, more efficient and accurate, better understandable by society and responsive to societal challenges, and has the potential to enable growth and innovation through reuse of scientific results by all stakeholders at all levels of society, and ultimately contribute to growth and competitiveness of Europe;
• Invites the Commission and the Member States to explore legal possibilities for measures in this respect and promote the use of licensing models, such as Creative Commons, for scientific publications and research data sets;
• Welcomes open access to scientific publications as the option by default for publishing the results of publicly funded research;
• Agrees to further promote the mainstreaming of open access to scientific publications by continuing to support a transition to immediate open access as the default by 2020;
• Encourages the Member States, the Commission and stakeholders to set optimal reuse of research data as the point of departure, whilst recognising the needs for different access regimes because of Intellectual Property Rights, personal data protection and confidentiality, security concerns, as well as global economic competitiveness and other legitimate interests.

In a recent interview with Shareable, Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley stressed that opening research leads to faster innovation and solutions to pressing issues around climate, public health and more.

“What if we were to say, ‘Let’s open cancer,’” he says. “What if we opened up all the research that relates to this work? Let’s shine a bright light on this disease that we’ve allowed to hide in the shadows and behind paywalls, and crush it with innovation. What would that look like?”

As the open movement continues to grow, with an increasing number of artists, scholars, researchers, scientists and ordinary citizens contributing to the commons, the Competitiveness Council of the European Union’s commitment to open data and articles marks a positive step toward a more open global culture.

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Photo: re:publica (CC-BY). Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter

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