‘Shared Spaces’ features many concrete policy ideas for municipal leaders and lawmakers, as well as strategies and tips for urban commons pioneers. It was written by Jens Kimmel, Sophie Bloemen and Till Gentsch and designed by raumlaborberlin. The authors state:

We believe we need to actively protect and strengthen commons initiatives in European cities and build and promote a commons sector by transforming cities’ institutional and policy frameworks. Commons in the city involve people managing urban resources – such as space – together through which economic and, more importantly, social value is created. It is crucial to protect that value as it sustains the very social fabric of our cities. Urban commons strengthen existing communities and bring people together into new ones, they herald the era of pro-active citizenship and encourage participatory and democratic governance.

This paper is meant as an inspiration and tool for those involved or interested in the commons movement, as an urgent reminder for policymakers, as an invitation for politicians to think more concretely about the commons sector in their cities, and as the starting point for a constructive discussion about improving our cities by protecting and strengthening the commons in the urban environment.

You can read it in full, embedded below, or download the pdf here.

The post Shared Spaces: New Paper on Urban Commons (by Commons Network) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series of articles on the Urban Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 16 “Talk of the Town: Exploring the City in Europe”. In this instalment, Jorge Pinto, research associate at the Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society (University of Minho, Portugal) and co-founder of the Portuguese party LIVRE, writes about the ‘Order of Barcelona’, and global municipalism.

Jorge Pinto: Confronted with the lack of action and proposals by their countries, many cities have been trying to assume a leadership role regarding some of the most pressing issues of our times, from the reduction of inequality to the struggle against climate change. They do so thanks to their capacity to involve civil society – and all its diversity of views and ideas – to an extent which is difficult to achieve at the national level. This has allowed municipalist movements to assume power in various large cities, grounding their actions in democratic and participatory values, reinforcing the historic role of cities as progressive and cosmopolitan places, places of tolerance and of intercultural meeting.

A key characteristic of the current municipalist vision is the fact that, besides the attention given to the city itself, there is a clear global vision: a cosmopolitan sense, in which all citizens feel part of the city but also part of the global community. It was precisely under the banner of municipalism and a vision of a global polis that more than 700 mayors and activists from 180 countries came together in Barcelona, in June 2017, to discuss what ‘fearless cities’ can do. It might not be too optimistic to argue that this has planted the seeds of a new global and municipalist order – the ‘Order of Barcelona’ – that could potentially supplant the previous Westphalian order. This new order is one where fearless cities and regions have a more preponderant role in the definition of global politics, bringing decision-making processes closer to the people. This municipalist vision can support the development of republicanism, a political theory that has been kept in the shadows for too long and is increasingly worth exploring.

Rethinking republicanism

Republicanism as a political theory has its roots in Ancient Greece and Rome, with figures such as Aristotle or Cicero among its main thinkers. Central to the definition of republicanism are the notions of freedom as non-domination, civic virtues (Cicero talked of four: justice, prudence, courage, and temperance), participation in the political life of the community and the debating of ideas, public over private interest, combatting all forms of corruption, and also the defence of a state based on strong laws – the “empire of laws and not of men”, to use the words of the 17th century political theorist James Harrington.

Within republicanism, there are two different lines of thought: on the one hand, civic humanism (or the neo-Aristotelian line) and, on the other, civic republicanism (the neo-Roman line). The first, similar to communitarianism in its defence of a single vision of the common good, defends the positive concept of freedom, in which the individual is free through active participation in the political life of the community. The second, clearly the most popular amongst current defenders of republicanism, argues for a vision of liberty in which individuals are free as long as they are not dominated – either by the state (imperium) or by other individuals (dominium) – and are protected from arbitrary forms of power.

Non-arbitrary interference that serves to reduce domination over individuals – i.e. actions taken (by the state or the city, for example) in order to increase one’s liberty – is not only accepted but defended. To give an example, when we think of the fight against economic inequality and climate change, it is difficult to make much progress without any kind of interference from public powers, such as a stronger taxing system or better economic (re)distribution. And this interference is politically more difficult to justify through a liberal vision of freedom based on non-interference, than through the republican approach of non-domination.

A classic example used to distinguish between non-interference and non-domination is the case of the slave and the master. If the slave has a good relationship with the master and doesn’t suffer any punishment throughout their life, the vision of liberty as non-interference would consider such a slave to have more liberty than another one who is regularly punished. On the other hand, the republican notion of liberty as non-domination would say that although this slave has slightly better life conditions, they are not free, because all the actors – slave and master – are aware of the difference in terms of power and know that, whenever the master decides – an arbitrary form of power – the slave can be punished. Thus, in this view, the bigger the difference in power, the bigger the risk of domination. This offers the political justification to avoid the (increasing) inequality between states, cities, and individuals.

The political participation defended by republicanism implies the existence of a political community, which is, in theory, more easily promoted at the municipal level. At this level, it is easier to give a voice to citizens, and for them to be able to disagree openly, debating and deliberating the matters that interest them. Complementarily, municipalism contends that the local is extremely important and that it is at this level that citizens have a greater capacity to actively participate and to know the problems that affect them, and are being better prepared to resolve them. Obviously, in an interconnected world, there are a number of problems that cross borders, with inequality and climate change being at the forefront of this.

Republicanism needs therefore to be conceptualised in such a way that it can be applied globally, but the answer is unlikely to lie in a hypothetical global government. Rather than concentrating power in one entity, it would be better to distribute it among cities, states, and regions linked in a network. International institutions could, nevertheless, ensure that basic liberties are respected, guaranteeing a common minimum of republican freedom to every individual around the globe. The exact shape of a global republican approach is subject to big discussions between those who defend a statist view (where people are represented by their states) and those defending the civil society view (representation via non-state actors such as NGOs). Municipalism provides strong arguments in favour of a third view, a more expansive one that keeps the best of both other approaches, by facilitating the multi-layered representation of citizens at the international, national, and city level. With greater opportunities to participate politically in their own republics, citizens’ voices would carry more weight, both locally and globally, proving the advantage of this local/global republicanism when compared to the nation-state and the intergovernmental approach. And, after all, who better than the citizens themselves to put forward solutions to the problems directly affecting them?

The sun is setting on Westphalia

For the first time in human history, the number of inhabitants in cities has overtaken that of inhabitants in rural areas. This is a fundamental change in the way that societies organise themselves, and everything indicates that this trend of migration from the country to the city will continue. Although this reality must not mean a lack of investment at the level of territorial cohesion policies, or the abandonment of the rural world, it is also clear that cities will assume an increasingly important role in the definition of public policy. This is a moment in which states are increasingly losing control and sovereignty, to use Saskia Sassen’s words.

A world governed by sovereign, independent nation-states, coming out of the Peace of Westphalia, has been questioned by the advancement of globalisation. While it is true that states remain an essential element in governance and can be expected to stay this way in the near future, the progressivists who aim to achieve a more just and sustainable world should start to think about how a new model of global organisation could be designed. We do not want a retreat to a world of siloes that do not communicate, therefore it is of primary importance to think of alternative globalisation models. This is where municipalist cities come in.

There are a number of cities and their respective metropolitan areas which today represent what in the past was considered a state, in terms of their size, population, and income. However, the autonomy of cities in various domains is still very limited by the definition of national laws, which creates conflict at the level of sovereignty between state and city. This conflict is seen most clearly in the notion of citizenship rights. The European Union provides a case in point and can define the role of cities in the future. Currently, access to European citizenship is granted solely through the intermediary of national citizenship – people can enjoy European rights only when they enjoy the citizenship rights of one of the Member States. Now, the discussions surrounding the acceptance of refugees have started to expose some of the problems of this model. While the number of refugees that each state should receive has been decided at the European level, a number of states have postponed this intake.1 In contrast, some of their cities have not only shown themselves willing to take refugees in, but have also held demonstrations to demand this. This is a clear example of conflict between the three levels of sovereignty. It can be expected that such conflicts will increase as cities continue to grow in importance and states continue down the opposite path.

A small number of progressive cities, challenging the established order in radical ways but acting more or less separately, will find it difficult to achieve great things. However, a global network of rebel cities2 acting in a coordinated way, sharing their experience and knowledge, errors and lessons, will be able to completely reformulate the way in which globalisation takes place. A republican globalism based on cities organised in a network can therefore be our next step. And there are various examples of attempts to form these networks, with varying levels of success, such as: ‘Solidarity cities’, ‘Eurocities’, the ‘Global Parliament of Mayors’, or the ‘Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy’.

But specifically, what can be done to promote municipalism and to strengthen republican freedom within cities? A first step is to look at what has been done already, namely regarding remunicipalisation initiatives. Secondly, one can look at city governments such as the ones in Paris and Stockholm which have assumed a leadership role in pressing issues such as climate change. It has to be noted that the construction of a republic of cities will not only include larger cities, as proven by the municipalist examples of A Coruña and Bristol with their complementary currency system. These latter cities exemplify the republican motivation of the citizens and the civic virtues that animate them: the search for more justice, participation in the life of the community, and a strong sense of perseverance. These practical examples are truly inspirational and serve as baseline for other municipalist movements and for the definition of a 21st century brand of municipalism.

Barcelona: The Dawn of a New Order

The definition of a new global order should not happen through the creation of a hypothetical global government but through greater shared sovereignty. States should share their sovereignty with supra-national institutions (such as the European Union), but also with sub-national institutions, namely cities. The European Union can, as a matter of fact, be a good environment in which to experiment with municipalist republicanism in the 21st century, by supporting existing projects in various countries and promoting a true Europe of the regions and cities, in which subsidiarity does not boil down to intergovernmentalism, but to the sharing of skills, responsibilities, and funds with cities and regions. Direct contact between European institutions and cities must therefore be increased and improved, not making it dependent on the states in which these cities are located. Republican cities would therefore have various platforms on which to make themselves heard, and be able to have a more influential role in public policy and in shaping alternative development models. This true subsidiarity – clearly distinct from the current model – would help to promote the republican notion of non-domination at the European level.

Global municipalism has therefore a fundamental role to play in the critical moment we are living in, through the promotion and support of governance for the common good. Responsibility to the entire human community, based on the criterion of global justice, is a necessity for those municipalist movements which, having emerged initially as opposition forces, now have to start implementing their proposals.

Today a European republic, tomorrow a global republic

Throughout history, the constitution of citizenship has been defined as top-down. That is, the definition of a specific political area was followed by the attribution of a series of rights and responsibilities associated with belonging to that area. But the European Union can radically challenge this model, going to the heart of belonging to a nation state: citizenship. Allowing access to the privileges of European citizenship for those who are not citizens of any of the EU countries but reside in their cities, would represent a true change of paradigm.

We can imagine a European Republic3 formed by various republics at the municipal or regional level. Small, medium, and large republics agreeing on deliberation as a way of doing politics and creating the necessary platforms for citizen representation. Places with alternative currencies at the regional level, as exists in Bristol now, that promote sharing and the decommodification of goods. Republics that follow the example of Barcelona and where the citizens, also through their representatives, are members of energy production and distribution cooperatives, living in cities designed for this end: living. Cities and regions where everyone has the right to not be dominated, giving everyone a set of minimum conditions (e.g. access to shelter, to education, to health, to transport, and a basic income) that allow them to freely exercise their activities as citizens. Republics that look inwards, concerned about the quality of life for those living there, but also look outwards, cosmopolitan and open to those who arrive, conscious that there exist multiple visions of the common good.

The message from the main municipalist projects is opposed to a dark and defeatist vision based on fear. With a message of hope, justice, perseverance, and courage – essential republican civic virtues – these movements have managed to awaken in citizens a sense of urgency to act and to grasp their future with their own hands. Not by chance, the first municipalist meeting in Barcelona was called ‘Fearless Cities’. But fear of what, exactly? Of course, to no longer fear being open to all those who seek shelter there, be they residents or refugees. To be courageous in confronting states when they fail in the definition of progressive policies, in fighting inequality, in investing in education, and in promoting a sustainable development model. To not fear involving citizens in their civic virtues, giving them the platform necessary to make themselves heard. To not fear being ambitious in envisaging the future. And what objective could be more ambitious than the definition of a new global order?

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 3rd article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

1 In September 2015, in one of the peaks of the refugee crisis and faced with lack of governance and reluctance by Member States to open their borders to refugees, the European Commission adopted a refugees’ relocation policy, intended to relocate 120,000 refugees among the Member States.

2 Using David Harvey’s expression, who in his 2013 book lays out the potential role of cites as places of social justice and ecological resistance.

3 To use Ulrike Guérot’s expression, although not directly referring to it.

Photo by ifolha

The post The Order of Barcelona: Cities Without Fear appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Originally published on Medium.com

A recent article about the BlockChain appeared on the Italian version of Vice’s Motherboard and raised a series of interesting conversations, and was soon followed up by another one.

In that article I was called to express a series of opinions about what was happening with BlockChains and cryptocurrencies, from the point of view of an organization such as the one I lead (HER, Human Ecosystems Relazioni), which deals with data, complex connections between sciences, technology, society, design and art, and the social, political, cultural and psychological implications of these connections and interactions.

In my job, everyday, I deal with multiple points of view which confront with these impacts brought on by data, blockchains and cryptocurrencies, with a wide variety of subjects from hyper-technical ones, to entrepreneurs and investors, to policymakers, up to the ones beyond suspicion, “ordinary” people who have to understand what an artwork which uses the blockchain does, or who deals with culture, museums, the city’s neighborhoods. People who — whether they like it or not — have to do with these technologies and practices. A large variety.
I have the maximum respect for the blockchain. It possibly is the technology which bears the highest potential for radical innovation and transformation today. With all its limits and problems.

My critique is not technical, but psychological.

It moves across the domain of perception and of comprehension of reality.

In this domain — the one of the psychic processes which are engaged and shared by people and their relations as they interpret the world to understand how to orient themselves and how to act in it — technologies like the Blockchain are a disaster.

Why?

On the one hand, they are a very powerful agent towards the “transactionalization of life”, that is of the fact that all the elements of our lives are progressively turning into transactions.

Which overlaps with the fact that they become “financialized”. Everything, including our relations and emotions, progressively becomes transactionalized/financialized, and the Blockchain represent an apex of this tendency. This is already becoming a problem for informality, for the possibility of transgression, for the normation and normalization of conflicts and, thus, in prospect, for our liberties and fundamental rights, and for our possibility to perceive them (because we are talking about psychological effects).

On the other hand, they move attention onto the algorithm, on the system, on the framework. Instead of supporting and maintaining the necessity and culture of establishing co-responsibility between human beings, these systems include “trust” in procedural ways. In ways which are technical. Thus, the necessity for trust (and, thus, on the responsibility to attribute trust, based on human relations) progressively disappears.

Therefore, together with it, society disappears. Society as actively and consciously built by people who freely decide if and when to trust each other, and who collectively agree to the modalities of this attribution.

What remains is only consumption of services and products. Safe, transparent and all. But mere transactionalized consumption. Society ends, and so does citizenship: we become citizen of nothing, of the network, of the algorithm.

These are not technical issues, but psychological ones, perceptive ones. And, thus, even more serious.

Technology is not neutral.

I can use a hammer to plant a nail or to smash it on your head, that’s true. But what is also true is that as soon as I have a hammer in my hand, everything starts looking like a nail.

This is the same for Blockchains. As soon as I start using them, as soon as I start imagining the world through them, everything starts looking as a transaction, as something which is “tokenizable”. And this is a disaster, in the ancient sense of the word (dis-aster, without stars for orientation).

Technology creates us just as much as we create technology.

We are starting to design systems which are, on the one hand, completely open and transparent. Which is a good thing from one point of view, and a problematic thing to do on the other. (unless the complete transparency of “The Circle” scenarios is something we feel comfortable with).

From another point of view, these systems are progressively being associated to identity systems, meaning that all the advantages and freedoms deriving from the fact that digital identity is anything but univocal and fixed are progressively being lost. Byebye anonymous, temporary, shared, multiple, plural, identities. Goodbye all the freedoms that come with them.

What derives are “citizenship” sytems (not “existence”, not “inhabitantship”) which are literally trustless, “without the need for trust”, in which trust is in the peer-to-peer network, in the automation, in the algorithm.

Institutions and other people disappear, replaced by an algorithm. Who knows where trust is at/in! It is everywhere, diffused, in the peer-to-peer network. Which means that it’s nowhere, and in nobody.

In a weird way it is like in call centers: they are not really useful for the client, and they completely serve the purpose minimizing bother for the companies, letting clients slipping into the “procedure” (which is synonym with algorithm), and avoiding them from obtaining real answers and effects, in their own terms outside of procedures.

These are all processes which separate people from each other, from institutions, organizations, companies, through the Procedure.

Citizens of everywhere. Citizens of nowhere and nothing.

From a philosophical and psychological point of view it corresponds to a powerful addition to a process which is already taking place on a large scale: the transactionalisation of life.

Everything is turning into a transaction: our relationships, emotions and expressions; our ways of producing, acquiring and transferring knowledge; communication; everything.

As soon as each of these things become the subject of a service, they become transactions: they become an atomic part of a procedure.

Because this is what a transaction is: an atom in a procedure, in an algorithm. This includes the fact that transactions are designed, according to a certain business, operational, strategic, marketing model.

This means that when our relationships, emotions, expressions, knowledge, communication and everything become transactions, they also become atoms of those business models whose forms, allowances, degrees of freedoms and liberty are established by those models.

With the Internet of Things these processes also arrive to the objects which fill our daily lives, to the elements of the environment and to the environment itself.

This means that we will be surrounded by transactions, within ourselves and in everything around us. It will become truly difficult to think of something that does not correspond to a transaction.

As said above: this will bring on issues for informality, the possibility for transgression and for our freedoms and rights.

Many of these these will simply disappear, as we lose capacity to conceive them outside of the “procedure”, of the transaction that embodies them. Whether it is purchase or an emotional expression, it will not make any difference.

Furthermore, speaking of transactionalization and its equivalent, financialization, the issue of access will also arise from the fact that there will be a limited amount of subjects who will have the resources to sustain the cost of the transactions which are needed to have rights and freedoms, or to pull themselves out of the procedures themselves. And of course there will be people who don’t have these resources.

These reflections have long been outside of the discussions which are going on about these new technologies. Hackers, activists, researchers, philosophers, antropologists are talking about the blockchain, as well as governments, organizations, companies and banks themselves. Yet none of these doubts are yet on agendas. There is a mono, singular narrative, which is interpreted for activism, business, governance, exploitation.

Investments, from above (with governments, financial institutions, investors) and below (with crowd based operations, evangelism, activism and also with the desire to exploit and to access funds and resources, to abandon the state of crisis) are happening.

And yet we must consider.

The Blockchain is the first tentative answer in years to the extremely centralized models which are de facto ruling us today, whether we talk about energy, environment, finance, welfare, governance.

The Blockchain is all about distribution of power.

And yet, this same distribution is its weak spot, if our objective is to collectively create a society with more freedoms, solidarity and opportunities for relation, emotion, communication and knowledge.

Because this distribution of power does not require conscience and desire, and the responsibility of these conscience and desire. Because these are in the algorithm, not in ourselves and in our relations.

It is not the algorithm serving us, and what we want. It is the algorithm turing us into itself, making us become like it.

What can we do?

The most important thing we can do is, probably, that we need to realize that these are not technological or technical issues.

Design only arrives up to a certain point. The design and production of services, products and instruments does not address a class of issues which are aesthetic, psychological and which deal with sensibility and imagination.

For example, in our practice we often talk about the Third Infoscape, which is originated from the concept of the Third Landscape.

As in the Third Landscape: where “technicians” see “weeds”, the Third Landscape sees opportunity, biodiversity, an open source media which is a reservoir for the future of the planet, which does not require energy to maintain, but produces energy, food, knowledge, relations.

As Marco Casagrande describes, the entire territory becomes a form of knowledge, with all its conflicts, dissonances and polyphonies. This is not a transactional (or transactionalizing) vision. It is a thing in which data and information are not laid out geometrically, formally, as in gardens, but more like the woods and wild nature, in which multiple forms of dimensions, boundaries, layers and interpretations co-exist by complex desire, relation and interaction, not by design.

It is a different kind of technology, a different kind of science, with a different imagination to support it.

The Third Infoscape, just as the Third Landscape, is not a matter of technology or technique. It is a question of sensibility, of imagination and of aesthetics.

The problem? It is current science and data. Which we are now using as something absolute and immutable. As a society, we are now using Science and Data like once we used Religion and Magic.

The Blockchain is one direct effect of this.

It is the procedure that “liberates” us from trust, from having to trust, from having to trust others. It compels you to trust, because it is the algorithm itself which embodies trust. And, by doing that, by forcing you to become like it, transforms all into a transaction.

To make trust exist, it transforms all into itself.

We need a change in sensibility and imagination, not disruptive services.

The post The Financialization of Life appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The City as Commons: a Policy Reader, brings together 34 contributions and 31 authors which explore policy options and strategies for creating cities as commons for urban development and transformation. Each contribution explores a different aspect of city commoning and proposes strategies and policy recommendations based on existing projects from around the world. Contributions include:

1. Design and the City Commons, Marco Bevolo
2. Active Transit & City Commons: Putting People Back into the City & the City Back into Place, Anthony James
3. Repurposing Public Spaces in a City as a Commons: the Library, Sandrina Burkhardt
4. Heritage and City Commons, Marta Botta
5. Sharing Cities: An Asset-based Approach to the Urban Commons, Darren Sharp
6. Community Currencies and City Commons, Michael Linton
7. Time Banks and City Commoning, Teppo Eskelinen
8. Construction Waste Transformation and City Commons, Scott Boylston
9. Platform Cooperatives for Democratic Cities, Nathan Schneider
10. Coworking: Challenges and Opportunities for a Prosperous and Fair New Economy, Julian Waters-Lynch
11. Orchards and the City as a Commons, Timothy Dolan
12. Cosmo-localism and Urban Commoning, José Ramos
13. City Commons and Energy Demand, Josh Floyd
14. It’s Time to Create Chambers of Commons, David Ronfeldt
15. Sharing Cities: Governing the City as Commons, Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman
16. Devolved Commons Governance for Cities, David Week
17. Anticipatory Governance and the City as a Commons, José Ramos
18. A Civic Union, David Week
19. Tax Reform for a Commons-based City, Karl Fitzgerald
20. Tax Delinquent Private Property and City Commons, Paula Z. Segal
21. Community Land Trusts, Karl Fitzgerald
22. The City as a Regional Commons, Colin Russo
23. Open Data and City Commons, Paula Z. Segal
24. Human Service Directory Data as a Commons, Greg Bloom
25. The Unseen City: Commons Oriented Cities and the Commons Beyond, Sharon Ede
26. Culture as Commons, Arlene Goldbard
27. Ubuntu as a Primer for City Commons, Charles Ikem
28. Cultural Intelligence (CQ) and the City as Commons, Cherie Minniecon
29. Bologna Celebrates One Year of a Bold Experiment in Urban Commoning, Neal Gorenflo
30. Milano, New Practices to Booster Social Innovation, Monica Bernardi
31. The Emergence of Assemblies of the Commons, Maïa Dereva
32. History and Evolution of the Chamber of Commons Idea, David Ronfeldt with Michel Bauwens
33. Big Blue Sky: Re-igniting the Art of Citizenship, Christine McDougall
34. Zaragoza Activa, an Ecosystem of Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation and Creativity, in an Old Sugar Factory, Raúl Oliván

Overview

The ‘City as a Commons’—the idea of urban commoning—is an emerging body of ideas and practices, that have the potential to transform the ways in which we experience and shape our urban environments, and indeed world.

This reader attempts to bring various dimensions of urban commoning into one place, in a format that is easy to digest, communicate and advocate for. The intent of the project is to provide a resource for urban commons advocates, which helps them (you) to articulate and strategize urban commons transformation projects in a variety of areas. It is by no means complete, as the urban commoning movement has only just begun, and the scope of this ‘reader’ is limited to who has contributed. It is merely a step on the journey toward our cities as commons.

It is also part of a process of experimentation. Many of the ideas are new: urban collaborative governance, sharing cities, platform cooperativism, open money, the new political contract between citizens and the state, and so on. Therefore, you the reader are in a special position. Urban commoning is not a finished book, completed and to be followed like a recipe. It is a book with only the first chapter half written. You and urban commons advocates are in a place to propose new innovations and formulations. You the readers should go through each of the proposals with scrutiny and discernment. You may agree with some proposals and disagree with others. If you have suggestions for improvements for any work, let the author(s) know, or write and develop your own versions. (All the authors emails and contact information is in the biography section at the very end of this reader.)

Therefore, in this experiment in pathmaking, you the reader, as advocate, policy maker, social innovator, social entrepreneur, community development worker, writer/scholar, and citizen, play a fundamental role in this journey. It is through you that an urban commons will be created in different cities around the world. It is through you that many of these ideas and proposals will be tested, adopted, discarded or refined. It is through you that urban commoning will transition from embryonic social practices into mature and powerful approaches that can reshape our cities.

What Is A Commons?

A simple definition of the commons is: “that which we mutually depend on for our survival and well-being”. When we consider this, there is much that is the commons. Our atmosphere, access to educational opportunities, public safety, social cohesion, the knowledge resources we need for our survival, the list is endless. But there is more to it than this.

The idea of the commons has experienced a special and profound resurgence over the past few decades. Elinor Ostrom’s work, for which she won a Nobel Prize, was seminal in breaking the mental stranglehold of the dualism that characterized discussions on our commons. This dualism assumed that a shared resource must be managed by the state, or managed by private enterprise, or it was unmanageable. She showed otherwise, how people effectively manage their common resources as communities, outside of the state-market dualism.

Scholar and advocate of the commons, David Bollier, provided this succinct definition for what a commons is:

• A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and community identity.

• A self-organized system by which communities manage resources (both depletable and replenishable) with minimal or no reliance on the Market or State.

• The wealth that we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished or enhanced, to our children.  Our collective wealth includes the gifts of nature, civic infrastructure, cultural works and traditions, and knowledge.

• A sector of the economy (and life!) that generates value in ways that are often taken for granted – and often jeopardized by the Market-State.^[1]

Peer to Peer (P2P) theorist Michel Bauwens has offered these four categories to explain some of the dimensions of the commons:

There are, I believe, four types of commons to distinguish … The first type is the immaterial commons we inherit, such as language and culture. The second type is the immaterial commons we create. This is where the hugely important knowledge and digital commons come in (since it this digital commons that is currently exploding). The third type is the material commons we inherit, the oceans, the atmosphere, the forests, etc.; and the fourth type is the as yet underappreciated potential for the created material commons, i.e. productively manufactured resources.[2]

Thus, from a commons perspective, we are the oxygen generated by Amazonian rainforests, water that melted from the glaciers of the Himalaya, the ideas produced by thinkers of antiquity, the DNA code passed down to us through thousands of millions of years of evolution, and the open source design revolution reshaping our lives today. Our knowledge of our cosmic self defies the small logic of our individuality. Our individuality is our vehicle for experience and becoming, but it is of the commons.

What binds these all as commons is their characteristic of being critical to our mutual wellbeing and survival, such that they require a collective effort and ethos to protect and extend them. They must, therefore, be collectively governed by the members of society that depend on them for their wellbeing and survival. As we have witnessed, however, through the 20^th century and through previous historical periods, the state does not always have the wellbeing of the community in mind. A state may be co-opted by moneyed interests as oligarchy, or it may become despotic. And we have also seen that private interests via processes of capitalism are also not equipped to protect the commons – capitalism, almost by definition, produces vast social and ecological externalities (problems) as a by-product of the concern with immediate profit. Protecting and extending our commons is synonymous with active, shared and inclusive governance that does not (just) rely on market and state, but which is based on the governance rights and practice of those that depend on such commons.

This activity and practice is what Bollier and Silke Helfrich point to as the deeper dimension of the commons. Commons are not things, they argue, they are “an organic fabric of social structures and processes”. Thus the commons are not an object we can just point to, and say “there it is”, but rather becomes so through enacting it with others and that “thing”. Urban co-governance ideas in this reader can thus be considered potential practices of enacting commons between commoners and the urban environments they seek to transform as such. As much as a recognition of common needs and mutual inter-dependence on some thing (water, safety, participation), it is also the creative enactment of bringing what is a “common good” into being through “the consciousness of thinking, learning and acting as a commoner.”[3]

Commons are thematically diverse, but they also transgress simple categories as the language and worldview from which the commons as an idea arises sees the world systemically, interconnected and interdependent. Commons are relationally active – they are embodied through the social practices of people interwoven into culture and geography. A safe atmosphere as a commons arises only through its recognition as something we mutually depend on for our survival and well-being, and which we enact as such through our practices of collective governance and maintenance. Arturo Escobar talks about this relational dynamic as a “pluriverse… made up of a multiplicity of mutually entangled and co-constituting but distinct worlds.”[4]

Thus from the point of view of the urban commons, we can think of our whole city as relational processes of commoning, where citizens recognize and enact commons through consciousness and action. For each of us who lives in a city, we may see the health of the city as our own health, a city’s resilience as our resilience, the empowerment of its citizens as our empowerment, its social relations as our relations – and bring forth new social practices that care for and nurture these aspects of our relational urban worlds.

The Urban Commons

This reader does not engage extensively with theory, however any engagement with policy does have to grapple with theory at some level. The reason for this is that policy-making sits at the intersection between two crucial elements. On the one hand, the legal (and epistemological) perspectives that frame what is deemed possible or impossible in respect to questions of governance; and on the other hand, the particular practices and strategies that are enacted to ‘make things happen’. Because of this, proposals for urban commoning policies need to be seen as embodying new legal and social perspectives that legitimate them. The current context for policy, in particular in the West, is based on positivist law, a very narrow and technical application of contractual property relations. Based on this, over the past 35 years or so cities around the world have been overwhelmed by neo-liberal and “third way” policy that provides little conceptual space for an urban commons perspective, and hence the policies and the practices that flow from them. Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione provide us with some of the theoretical starting points that begin to build an urban commons framework, writing:

As an initial matter, we contend that any articulation of the urban commons needs to be grounded in a theory of property, or at least a theory about the character of particular urban resources in relationship to other social goods, to other urban inhabitants, and to the state. This is especially necessary given the centrality of property law in resource allocation decisions that affect owners, non-owners and the community as a whole. As David Super has poignantly written, property law has an important role in addressing widespread economic inequality by protecting those goods most essential to the well-being of a broad swath of society, rather than just protecting the goods that are disproportionately held by the wealthy. As long as large segments of the population lack the security that property rights provide, he argues, many social problems will remain quite intractable.[5]

As Foster and Iaione argue, conventional legal theory has not had the conceptual resources needed to understand the dynamics and potentials of enacted commons and commoning, and has assumed that commons are “unregulated open access resource[s]” which people will over-consume and overexploit. By contrast, they argue, a normative (ethics based) understanding of the commons asserts a community’s right to use a city’s resources, because of the value that this produces for the whole community. In their view then, “the city is a commons in the sense that it is a shared resource that belongs to all of its inhabitants.”[6] They write:

… the commons claim is importantly aligned with the idea behind the “right to the city”—the right to be part of the creation of the city, the right to be part of the decision-making processes shaping the lives of city inhabitants, and the power of inhabitants to shape decisions about the collective resource in which we all have a stake.

It is the very relational heart of the commons equation that transforms our understanding of governance and property rights. It is that the quality of public spaces is synonymous with our living quality; or how public safety equates to our safety; or when the price of housing relates to our livelihoods – that we are interwoven into the health of our cities – which is what must transform our relationship from passive observers of the decaying neo-liberal state to active shapers of a city as a commons. The vision which Foster and Iaione give for this they call “urban collaborative governance”. In this vision:

… all actors who have a stake in the commons are part of an autonomous center of decision making as co-partners, or co- collaborators, coordinated and enabled by the public authority.[7]

The state is then a facilitator or enabler for citizen led commoning, synonymous with proposals made by Michel Bauwen and others regarding a “partner state”, in which the state’s central role is to empower its citizens AS A WHOLE. Not empower its property developers to the exclusion of legacy residents. Nor its industry to the exclusion of the air quality of residents. But for the whole. Policy-making for the urban commons, even as it emerges, sits between such theoretical vision and the practices and strategies enacted on the ground.

A leader in the development of urban commons theory and practice is GovLab: an independently run laboratory for the governance of the commons. GovLab was developed to “train a new breed of professionals… experts in the governance of urban commons.”^[8] On 6 & 7 November, 2015 they held a landmark conference called the “City as a Commons: Reconceiving Urban Space, Common Good, and City Governance.”^[9] From the conference, GovLab distilled these learnings on the urban commons:^[10]

1. There are many kinds of urban commons, some existing for many decades (e.g. housing cooperatives) and others just emerging. Social innovation is important for designing some types of urban commons and the conditions for commoning;

2. We must embrace the diversity of commons and commoning yet still be careful about what we call the commons; so more work is needed on analyzing what is an urban commons and what is not;

3. In addition to many resources being held or managed in common, in a collaborative fashion, the city itself must be considered a commons–both as an urban space and as a governing entity. The governance of the urban commons can be a framework to update political and bureaucratic decision-making processes at the city level;

4. The commons is an emerging framework for inclusiveness and equity in cities as the world is urbanizing and cities are the place where different cultures, classes and people come to live together, work together and grow together;

5. The role of technology is important for the commons, but technology is a means and not an end. It must enable and support the urban commons, and the ability of people to come together and collaborate in the interest of the community or communities;

6. Collective action for the urban commons should be enabling existing communities, stakeholders, and city inhabitants as much as creating new urban communities, formal and informal groups, movements, traditional stakeholders and social or collective organizations;

7. Urban commons need an “industrial plan” and new economic and/or social institutions to help transition some cities, and some areas within them, away from an old economic model to one that leverages the power of commoning and collaboration to support sustainable, flourishing as well as more inclusive, just and democratic communities;

8. The urban commons governance principle is not self-government, nor decentralization. It is rather distribution of powers among public, social, economic, knowledge and civic actors and therefore it implies a significant investment in the design of new forms of collaboration and partnerships among these actors;

9. Design principles for the urban commons should be written to reflect the design principles created by Elinor Ostrom, but adapting them to the challenges and characteristics of the more political, confrontational, and overregulated space which cities represent. The study of the commons in the city should be the focus of future research beyond the study of the urban commons. More attention should be put on experimentation, institutional diversity, spreading of social norms within urban contexts;

10. There should be safeguards against opportunistic, exploitative, and short-sighted behaviors, as well as escapist flights and utopian or ideological visions, in developing and sustaining the urban commons. A bottom-up, as well as a circular, approach is crucial for the urban commons and confirms Focault’s argument that power is “not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non egalitarian and mobile relations”.

Along side this profound convergence are singular breakthroughs in urban commoning that are our leading lights. For example, the urban commoning experiment in Bologna involves a reconceptualization of the relationship between citizen and state, and the role of citizen as social innovator in the re-creation of the city.^[11] Bologna provides an inspiring example of what is possible for our cities.

It is in this context of innovation where this rather humble endeavor sits. While conceived outside of their ambit, this reader was inspired by these examples and hopes to make a contribution to this broader project of change.

Critical Themes In The Reader

When reviewing the thirty-four or more contributions in this reader, some themes clearly emerge.

The urban commons represents a new political contract. As mentioned, this is clearly seen in the development of the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons^[12] as well as Foster and Iaione’s call for “urban collaborative governance”. In a number of examples in this reader, urban commoning strategies require civic-state alliances and coordination, in the vein of Bauwens “partner state” ideas.[13] In particular, new political contracts, such as the one created in Bologna, enfranchise citizens with a right to be social innovators in transforming their cities. Likewise, such political contracts enlist the state as a facilitator charged with empowering citizens in commoning the city. If a city is a commons, then following the wisdom of Elinor Ostrom, it can be governed as one by all the members of a city that depend on its perpetual sustainment. In contrast to the “beyond market and state” notions of the commons, it is clear that for urban commoning, the state’s role cannot be disowned or discarded as a critical factor.

In addition, the urban commons represents a new culture of citizenship. This is a fundamental transformation from citizen as passive beneficiary of technocratic systems, to one who is actively shaping the city around them, taking responsibility for the care and development of their cities. Whereas 20^th century technocracy has infantilized citizenry, expected only to be tax payers, service users and once every 3-4 years voters, the urban commons demands that we step up as active citizens to not only create and shape our cities for the better, but indeed to play a role in actively governing our cities with others.

The urban commons also represents new value exchange systems that sit outside the traditional marketplace and outside municipal service relationships. The sharing economy, local currencies, time-banking, circularization of waste, and other reciprocity based systems are part of a new equation in which value finds new ways of circulating and enriching people’s lives. To be truly commons based, these value exchange systems must circulate the value they create back into the communities that produced them.

It can also be added that the urban commons represents new visibility for what has been invisible in relation to urbanism. From intangibles such as culture and cultural intelligence, to the hidden costs of monopoly rents, to underutilized land, and cities’ use of energy and contributions to our atmospheric commons through carbon emissions. The commons perspective naturally unearths dimensions of city life that are hidden by other perspectives, opening the way for more holistic strategies of responsibility taking and wellbeing making.

Of course, the urban commons represents a new way of seeing the city. It represents an emerging worldview and vision. This will evolve over time and become clearer as we make the path by walking.

Acknowledgements

This reader would not have been created without the friendship and inspiration of Michel Bauwens. While giving talks in Melbourne in late 2015, Michel dropped a match in the dry kindle of my heart, sparking this call for policy briefs that culminated in this reader.

I would also like to acknowledge the Commons Strategy Group, which brought me to Bangkok in 2012 for a commons deep dive and Berlin in 2013 for the Economies of the Commons conference. These experiences helped to seed my thinking and practice and have led to a number of commons projects and directions.

Finally, acknowledgment goes to the authors of the policy briefs that have made this reader such a delight to edit. As an editor, having carefully read through each of your contributions, I have been continually inspired by your ideas, proposals and spirit. I am sure other readers will be just as inspired as I am by your words and visions.

May our urban commons prosper and flourish through our hearts, minds and actions.

José M. Ramos

Melbourne, Australia

11 July 2016

Notes

[1] http://bollier.org/commons-short-and-sweet

[2] http://futurism.com/interview-michel-bauwens-on-peer-to-peer-economics-and-its-role-in-reshaping-our-world/

[3] Bollier, D. and Helfrich, S. (2015) Patterns of Commoning, Mass: The Commons Strategy Group / Off the Commons Books (p2-3)

[4] Escobar, A. Commons in the Pluriverse, in Bollier, D. and Helfrich, S. (2015) Patterns of Commoning, Mass: The Commons Strategy Group / Off the Commons Books, (p355)

[5] Foster, S.R. and Iaione, C. The City as a Commons, Yale Law and Policy Review, V.34, p.286

[6] Foster, S.R. and Iaione, C. The City as a Commons, Yale Law and Policy Review, V.34, p.288

[7] Foster, S.R. and Iaione, C. The City as a Commons, Yale Law and Policy Review, V.34, p.290

[8] http://www.labgov.it/about-labgov/

[9] http://urbancommons.labgov.it

[10] http://www.labgov.it/2015/12/03/ten-points-on-the-city-as-commons/

[11] http://www.shareable.net/blog/bologna-celebrates-one-year-of-a-bold-experiment-in-urban-commoning

[12] http://www.comune.bo.it/media/files/bolognaregulation.pdf

[13] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Partner_State

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