• 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.

While such experiments and proposals may be crucial stepping stones in fostering social salience and political legitimacy around alternatives to dominant welfare and wage labour models, it is important to recognize their limitations, particular application contexts, scales and time-horizons, with reference to wider integrative visions and potential mechanisms of socio-economic and political transformation. However the reality is that at this time such wider and integrative visions are lacking, while radical and systemic alternatives to welfare remain severely undertheorized in crucial areas. In the following I outline three critical areas that in my opinion can further the UBI debate, guided by the overarching question of what might an open ended, ecologically sound and socially just welfare system and pathway towards it look like.

1: Considering UBI as an interim model for citizen empowerment

Imagining potential futures of welfare from a ‘long now’[ii] perspective necessitates the recognition that some solutions should be designed to have intentionally short life-spans while others should be designed to change over long periods of time.[iii] The reality is that the forms of UBI thus far explored are likely not the be-all and end-all of alternatives. It is thus important to consider the view that UBI models based on fiat money pooled and distributed by means of more or less conventional market and state mechanisms (e.g. taxes, redistribution of state funds) may be an an overall important, yet perhaps best seen as consciously interim step in institutional re-design and citizen emancipation and empowerment. It is relevant to note however that UBI models, defined as unconditional payments of certain sums of money to individuals of a society, already today find rivals, for example in the concepts of Universal Basic Assets (UBA)[iv] and Universal Basic Services (UBS)[v], which importantly shift the debate from income to access to and participation in the commons. Using the ‘city as a commons’ framework and the critical concepts of UBA and UBS as starting points, it is possible to conceive of commons-based welfare models that operate on the principles of universal rights and effective access to basic and potentially expanding asset and service options (e.g. housing, food, energy, healthcare, mobility, internet, education, sport, recreation) and the care, co-creation of and democratic deliberation about them using novel collaborative, open-source, circular, sharing and regenerative economy approaches, among others.

2: Anchoring alternative welfare systems in alternative currencies

One issue that is very rarely addressed even within more radical UBI debates is that of the currencies and accounting frameworks on which such systems are (to be) based.[vi] Arguably, pursuing the interrelated goals of ecological sustainability and social justice calls for a reconsideration of ‘money-as-usual’. Many currency systems have been proposed that too range from local, complimentary and other currency types more or less congruent with or supplementary to the economic status quo, to radical alternatives.[vii] The envisioned ‘commonified’ basic assets and services model(s), indeed commons and commoning activity generally, may be anchored in a rich ecosystem of alternative currencies, indices and accounting frameworks operating at different scales and in different socioeconomic and socioecological contexts. Some of the more prominent proposed money anchors specifically include energy, time, CO2 emissions, single resources such as water or grain, or ‘baskets of resources’.[viii] Additional aspects to consider include:

• the ethics, scales and forms of cosmopolitan and translocal solidarity
• gift cultures and economies
• open data
• forms of transaction (e.g. ‘commoner smart cards’ for food, public transportation and skill-sharing)
• the potentials of blockchain technology

3: A deep rethinking of ‘work’

The currently ongoing and planned UBI experiments in the Netherlands, once presented as a beacon of hope in mainstream media, have recently been subject to a number of relevant critiques. It is important to outline that these experiments are not of universal income as they specifically target the unemployed and those already receiving some form of social benefit; nor are they unconditional, but configured with mind to supporting existing ‘labour market integration’ policies and mechanisms. Today, it is crucial to expand our definition of work and to rethink our engagement with it, a discussion that should go well beyond the reductionism of the automation narrative as presented in the mainstream. What is thus needed are systems complimentary to UBI/UBA/UBS that open up and encourage access to skills, (co-production of) knowledge, and discovering and trying oneself out at various (sometimes not so at once apparent) forms of social and ecological service and ‘life callings’ in transitional times; as well as civic media infrastructures that can support proactive public discourse and balance the challenges of sustainability and equitable and resilient welfare provisioning with voluntary contributions to the collective resource and work/service pool, individual capabilities, personal and communal lifestyle preferences, and translocal solidarity agreements. An interesting idea in this regard is the ‘balanced job complex’,[ix] proposed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel in their model for participatory economics; a deliberative democratic model that may be found useful in conceptualizing dynamic ways of societal self-configuration of equitable and contributory work loads depending on needs and challenges.

Conclusion

By imbuing the UBI debate with a more systems-oriented and commons perspective, I have argued that an important shift is made from income and work as such to deeper interrelated questions of 1.) rights, capabilities and effective access; 2.) forms of deliberation, governance, entrepreneurship, collective care and accounting; 3.) forms and scales of pooling resources and work, and; 4.) forms and scales of equitable distribution and sustainable and resilient provisioning of universal basic commons entitlements. The perspective illuminates the contingent relationship between the contextual and subjective ‘political viability‘ of the UBI, and the scopes and salience of articulated (critical, open-source, open-ended) alternative institutional possibilities; and the prospects of a polity that exploits a dialectical relationship between interim or hybrid institutional models on the one hand, and radical experimentation with other socioeconomic configurations, emergent city-making/place-making cultures and political possibilities in the here-and-now on the other.

[i] Schouten, Socrates. 2018. Baby Steps on the Road to Basic Income. Green European Journal. Available at: https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/baby-steps-on-the-road-to-a-basic-income/

[ii] Brand, Stewart. 1999. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. New York: Basic Books.

[iii] Irwin et al. 2016. Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research. Design and Culture, 7(2), 229–246.

[iv] https://medium.com/institute-for-the-future/universal-basic-assets-abb08ca2f0fc.

[v] https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2017/10/universal-basic-services-or-universal-basic-income

[vi] Bauwens, Michel. 2006. Complementary Currencies and the Basic Income. Available at: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/complementary-currencies-and-the-basic-income/2006/02/14; Bauwens, M. & Niaros, V. (2017). Value in the Commons Economy: Developments in Open and Contributory Value Accounting. Chiang Mai: Heinrich Böll Stiftung & P2P Foundation.

[vii] Dittmer, Kristofer. 2011. Local currencies for purposive degrowth? A quality check of some proposals for changing money-as-usual. Available at: http://degrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Dittmer_JCP_pre-pub-manuscript.pdf

[viii] New Economics Foundation. 2013. Energising Money: An introduction to energy currencies and accounting. Available at: http://neweconomics.org/2013/02/energising-money/

[ix] Albert, Michael. 2003. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. London: Verso

Lead image:Graffiti work by Banksy, itself a reworking of the original “Begging for Change” by Australian street artist Meek.
Cross-posted from Labgov.it

The post Basic income in the ‘long now’: three critical considerations for the future(s) of alternative welfare systems appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“With the New Democracy series we investigate democratic change as a transition, looking for socio-economic trends on the one side, and practices of social innovators on the other, that simultaneously puts pressure on the existing system, forcing it into change. Tonight we will continue our research by identifying what resources in the city we can regard as urban commons and looking into the practicalities of governing them in a co-creative manner. Our main guest is David Bollier, internationally one of the leading specialists on the commons. Bollier is an author, activist, blogger and consultant who explores the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture.

Bollier will sketch the potential of a society that embraces the commons as a governance structure. He describes the revolution of pioneering in practical forms of self-governance and production controlled by people themselves. To him, the commons is an exploding field of DIY innovation ranging from Wikipedia and seed-sharing to community forests and collaborative consumption. This development challenges the standard narrative of market economics by showcasing how cooperation generates significant value and human fulfillment. Bollier provides us with a framework of law and social action that can help us to rebuild our society and reclaim our shared inheritance towards a co-governed city.

After Bollier’s story, Christian Iaione, David Hammerstein, Marleen Stikker and Stan Majoor will join us for a dialogue on the city as commons. We encourage you to participate, as this dialogue will be the starting point of building a co-creative model of governance for our city. During the evening we want to learn what it means to live in a culture of the commons. What can we see as commons in culture, in housing, in education, in care, in public space? By explaining the work he has done with the Laboratory for Governance of the Commons, Iaione will help us exploring the possibilities of starting to govern these commons in a co-creative way. Our ambition is to jointly develop a LabGov Amsterdam in the coming months and years.”

The post David Bollier and the City as a Commons 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

The post The City as Commons: a Policy Reader appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Related Links

• Dr Ramos’s callout for papers on the City as a Commons
  Michel Bauwens on the Top Peer-to-Peer trends of 2015
  Janelle Orsi on the Renegade Economists, discussing Platform Cooperatives
  Karl on Collaborative California
  The World Has Discovered a $1 Trillion Ocean

Glossary

Here’s the Twitter and watch #LVT, #commons, #rentier.

Share with your friends, and if you could, provide an itunes review for the show. Thank you!

The post Podcast: Jose Ramos and Karl Fitzgerald on the Culture of the Commons Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The smart city discourse has become a ‘used future’. It is spouted by consultants and tech advocates, but it does not seem to have much humanity, nor does it include a critical understanding of sustainability and civic engagement.

Inspired by Michel Bauwens in his recent trip to Melbourne, I am putting together a policy advocacy paper to explore and promote the vision for a ‘city as commons’.

The paper will bring together specialists and advocates in a range of area, including: tax policy, co-working, co-ops, food production/consumption, peri-urbanism, sharing, political space, place-making, cultural diversity, de-gentrification, anticipatory governance, social enterprise and making / industry (to name a few). Overall about 20 authors can be accepted in this first round.

The intention is to bring together a sample of diverse city commoning visions and practices, that can give policy makers concrete pathways when conceiving of public policy.

This is an ‘idea leadership consortium’ that is intended to bring advocates, specialists and activists together specifically to develop short policy statements that outline ‘city as a commons’ visions, and the policies that support those visions.

The paper will offer a competing and more progressive vision to the ‘smart city’ vision, one that helps legitimate ‘city as commons’ ideas within the domain of civic public policy. The policy think paper can provide clear pathways toward ‘partner state’ ideas promoted by Bauwens and others in the context of civic development, toward public-p2p commons partnerships.

Each contributor will develop a one page overview (only!!) of the area of ‘city as commons’ they want to develop. The reason to limit this to a page is to make it succinct and readable to policy makers.

Policy makers should be able to quickly scan through and find relevant subject areas that can provide them with new ideas. As such it is a plain language publication, it will not be written in an academic style.

The ‘policy think paper’ will be professionally formatted with artwork, in a contemporary and attractive style.

It will be licensed creative commons and allow non-commercial use and circulation.

Expectations for authors

• Each contribution will be one page detailing a specific civic area “x and city commons”.
• Written in plain language, no in text citations, but with use of endnote links.
• Authors can add specialist terms to a glossary section.
• Authors can add exemplar projects from around the world, located in an appendix. This will provide a space where leading examples can be pointed to.
• Timely production of drafts and edits.

The policy paper will be logo-free, meaning that no company logos associated with authors can be included. This is to remove elements of marketing, and for authors to speak personally as advocates and experts promoting the vision for city as commons. This includes the editors. However, there will be an ‘about the authors’ section at the end where authors can name their associations (companies, businesses, social enterprises, etc.).

The timeline for publication

It does not take long to draft a one page document, therefore I want to work on a fast cycle timeline, and would like the one page document from authors by the end of January 2016. From then I will give feedback within the first week of Feb. and will expect final drafts by the end of Feb. 2016. The publication date should be the end of March 2016.

Feedback

As a starting point I am seeking feedback on this proposal. If you have ideas you would like to share, or would like to contribute, please contact me.

The post Proposal for Public Policy Paper: “From Smart Cities to Smart Citizens: City as a Commons” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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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