Let me open by saying this is only a sketch – Michel Bauwens would probably want to elaborate, but I would like to mention only the very barest details here. Back around 2006, Michel started putting his notes about Peer-to-Peer and related ideas on the P2P Foundation wiki, and opened it up to trusted others to contribute as well. Naturally, after more than 12 years of committed input, there are thousands of pages, which have received millions of page views. Like many wikis, this can be seen as an information commons.

Can one person maintain, as well as continue contributing to, such a growing resource? At some point, any such venture can become a full time occupation, and at a later point, simply unfeasible for one person alone. Thus, from time to time, Michel has invited others to help organise and contribute to the pages, and the wiki as a whole. Leaving out personal details, this has not all been sweetness and light. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of wishing to impose one’s own personal structure, one’s own worldview, on any resource of which one shares control.

Beyond the wiki pages themselves, the wiki (running on software similar to Wikipedia) pages can be given categories, and over the years Michel has written guide pages for many of these categories.

A story about community resources

Again, I will sketch out only the barest details, taken directly from life. The houses in the cohousing community that I live in are marvellously well-insulated, but small, and with little storage space: no lofts, garages or garden sheds. Coming from larger homes in an individualistic society, many of us bring literal baggage along with the habit of keeping collections of things that might be useful some time. The community does share guest rooms, a large dining and living space, a garden tool store, etc., so there are several areas where we don’t need to keep our own stuff.

But what about stuff like: books; envelopes; bags; fabrics and materials; glass jars; plastic containers; DIY tools and materials; boxes; camping equipment or any of the many things other people keep in their lofts, garages or garden sheds? We are committed to a low-energy future, where reuse and re-purposing are valued. But there is not enough space for us to keep more than a fraction of what we could potentially reuse. Can we make more of a material commons around these day-to-day resources, even if they look unimportant politically?

How are wikis like stuff we keep? Where are the commons here?

The truth is, in any highly complex system, each of us has at best only a partial and personal understanding of that complexity. We may be experts in our own field (however small) but know little of other people’s fields, and have only a vague overview. Or we may be the people with an overview of everything, but the more we devote ourselves to holding the overview in mind, the less mental space we have for all the details. So, are commons simple or complex? While each part of a commons may be simple enough to grasp, my guess is that, when taken together, the sum total of our potential commons is indeed highly complex, and far beyond the scope of what any one person can fully comprehend.

The lack of space in our homes simply serves to highlight the fact that in any case, most of us don’t have the time or energy to keep a well organised collection of jars, bottles, tools, equipment, and potentially reusable resources of all kinds. When we delve into the richness of a wiki like the P2P Foundation’s, the links in the chain rapidly lead us to areas where we know very little. That’s why it is useful! We gather and store information, as we do physical materials, not knowing when something might be useful. But can we find it (the material resource, the information) when we want to?

My proposition is that, first, we grasp that essential truth that this same pattern is increasingly common in our complex world. And, second, we recognise that we can do something very constructive about it. But it needs coordination, trust, and, maybe, something like a ‘commons’ mindset.

The sad version of the ending

Returning to our stories, what might happen next? It’s easy to imagine awkward, frustrating futures. The information we stored is no longer up to date. The links lead to 404 pages. The summaries, useful in their time, omit last year’s game-changing developments. Visitors don’t find them useful, and so they are not motivated to join in the curation. Our information commons initiative, once so promising and useful, gradually loses its value, and sooner or later it is effectively abandoned. We turn back to the monetised sources of information that are controlled by global capital.

We overfill our small homes with stuff that might come in handy one day. But because we don’t really have the proper space to organise the stuff, when we want something we can’t find it anyway. And we have less room in our heads, as well as our houses, trying to keep track of all the stuff. No one else can help us quickly, because they all suffer from the same difficulties. And no one has thought to keep those rare whatever-they-are-called things.

Alternatively, the space we use collectively to store our stuff gets fuller and fuller, and everything is harder to find. No one knows where everything is. People start moving other people’s stuff just to help them organise some other stuff. Either way, we don’t find what we’re looking for. So we go and order a new one. More consumption of energy, more resource depletion, worse environment, more climate change …

Articulating the commons of information and physical materials

So, let’s try for more positive narratives.

Anyone who turns up to use our information commons resource is invited to get to know someone here already. Soon we have an idea of what particular knowledge our newcomer has, in which areas. Through personal contact and discussion, and seeing some reliable behaviour, trust develops. We give them the task of revising the most out-of-date resource that is within their area of competence, interest, energy or enthusiasm. They make a good job of it. They get appreciative feedback, which motivates them to take on more, looking after a whole category. The resource, the commons, grows in real value, and more people come. ‘They’ become one of us. Repeat.

My neighbours and I get together to talk over our resources, and soon every kind of stuff has one or two people who volunteer to look after that kind of stuff. Now that I can trustingly pass on my unused books, my DIY materials, my plastic bottles and containers, and all the other ‘junk’ I have accumulated, I have enough space for a really well-organised collection of glass jars. Anyone with spare glass jars gives them to me. I know which ones there is demand for, and I pass the others on for recycling. When anyone has a sudden urge to make jam, I have plenty of jars ready for the occasion. I even keep a few unusual ones just in case, because I have the space. Every now and then, someone is really astonished that just what they need is there!

Let me, finally, try to describe the common pattern here, and contrast it with other possible patterns.

It’s different from having one big heap of resources which is everyone’s responsibility equally. No one knows which resources or areas they should take responsibility for, and there is anxiety about entrusting other people to look after other areas, because no one is clear how much attention is being given to what, and how much energy is being wasted looking over other people’s shoulders.

It’s different from a hierarchical control structure, because the people at the ‘top’ are less likely to have the on-the-ground feedback to know what a manageable, coherent collection is. Yes, perhaps it is possible to emulate a good commons with an enlightened hierarchical structure, but how do you know that some agent of global capital isn’t going to come right in and completely change the way things are done, imposing a confusing, alien world view, and promptly syphoning off the surplus value?

The common pattern – the pattern I am suggesting for complex commons – could be called “distributed curation”, and the vision is of a commons governed by consensus, and maintained through a culture that promotes the development of trust, along with the development of people to be worthy of that trust. It relies on personal knowledge and trust between people curating neighbouring areas, so that they can gracefully shift their mutual boundaries when times change, or allow a new area to grow between them. It relies on the natural, spontaneous differences in people’s interests, as well as the motivation for people to take on responsibility for deepening their own areas of knowledge within a community context, when trusted, encouraged, and given positive feedback and support by the community; and when they see the natural feedback of their actions benefiting other people.

I’m left with the question, how do we get there? My answers are few, and need much elaboration. Yes, we need to get to know each other, but how can we arrange to introduce people who will enjoy getting to know each other? Yes, we need to build up trust, but what kinds of activities can we do so that trust is built most reliably? Yes, we need to identify and negotiate people’s different patches of service and responsibility, but just how can we do that? Yes, we need to inspire people with a vision of distributed curation, but what language, and which media, are going to communicate that vision effectively?

Some discussion of this post is taking place on the Commons Transition Loomio Group

Photo by Simón73 melancólico

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Mainstenant and the pirate island

The extraordinary thing about nomadism is that it lets me discover people and places whose existence I could never have suspected! On the recommendation of a commoner friend, I found myself one day with my little suitcase-on-wheels at the Paris Saint Lazare station; I took a suburban train and 25 minutes later disembarked in another dimension…

After a good fifteen minutes of walking, I reached a barely noticed dock and before long, a small boat approached and I boarded for a trip to the opposite side of the river. I had arrived on the island of Platais! Here, Laurence came to greet me, and guided me through a maze of small green pathways.

Laurence, a researcher at the university, is part of Mainstenant, a group of about fifty people who set out to revive abandoned places, villages and buildings – not only for leisure or work, but also to settle permanently and live with their families. And among the places they discovered, there is this extraordinary island.

It is, in large part, inhabited, sometimes year-round but most often in the summer. There are lots of cottages, large and small, made of fibre cement or wood. This place looks like a giant campsite whose tents and caravans would fall down eventually. As you stroll along the narrow roads, it’s almost like “The Village” in the Prisoner series.

But the most surprising thing was yet to come. A whole part of the island is indeed uninhabited, abandoned after a period of glory now past. Accompanied by Adrien, Nicolas, and a whole bunch of explorers of all ages, I crouched in the grass beside an old disused swimming pool worthy of a cinema set.

My hosts were obviously at home in this ruin! They brought me around the property with a big smile, happy to show me the empty cabins, the old piano, the graffiti (more creative than many others), the tiled terrace giving onto a splendid panorama, the vestiges of an unlikely miniature golf re-colonized by nature…

Then we pushed a little further on, between the trees and the nettles, and settled down on a hidden beach. While the children laughed at each other in the muddy waters of the Seine, the adults took care to calmly pick up potentially harmful objects: rusty rims, pieces of glass, plastic and scrap metal…all the rubbish from civilization landed on the shores of this magical island.

When the sun set, we went to the association’s chalet to prepare the evening meal together around the wood fire. And while the humidity was already starting to invade the lawn, we happily settled around a large tablecloth, just below the pirate flag that proudly floats on the garden fence.

For a city girl like me, this getaway was a real life lesson. It reassures me that people can explore and invest in abandoned places in order to open up spaces of possibilities. I really felt that what they do, they do for us as human beings who are completely disconnected from their needs and from nature, left so vulnerable to the challenges that lie ahead.

Photoa : © 2017 Mainstenant | all rights reserved.

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Mai Sutton: Urban commons initiatives are booming in the Belgian city of Ghent, according to a new report. One of the researchers behind the study, Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation, says that “the ecosystem of commons-based initiatives in Ghent is quite exemplary precisely because it covers an ecosystem in an area that requires a lot of capital and has to overcome a lot of commons-antagonistic regulation.” So against the odds, approximately 500 urban commons projects have sprung up in the last decade.

>A canal in Ghent. Photo: Dimitris Kamaras (CC-BY 2.0)

Last week, we wrote about the overall findings about the report. Below, we highlight a few standout examples of urban commons projects that are thriving in Ghent:

1. Wooncoop is a housing cooperative that gives home renters the same housing security as home owners. The cooperative buys, refurbishes, and mutualizes buildings — not the land on which they stand like a Community Land Trust. Once someone buys a share of Wooncoop, they can rent a house or apartment in one of their properties owned by the co-op. They are guaranteed housing there for a lifetime while paying reasonable rent for a well-maintained residence.
2. There is a multitude of innovative co-housing initiatives that have emerged in Ghent. But what is interesting is that people are not simply living together in a shared space, but rather, sharing various amenities. This includes sharing kitchens, guestrooms, and laundry rooms. This model works when a group of houses are designed collectively to share their facilities. However, local regulations have hindered the growth of this kind of co-housing development. Labland is a workshop and think-and-do-tank that is working to change policies on behalf of these experimental initiatives.

A park in Ghent. Photo: Dimitris Kamaras (CC-BY 2.0)

3. The City of Ghent facilitates the temporary use of local land and buildings. The most notable one is the Driemasterpark, a park that sits on a former industrial site in a poor neighborhood that is entirely managed by nearby residents. It was opened in late 2016, and in addition to having a playground, the park has spaces for chickens and dogs, and a vegetable garden.
4. Ghent has a thriving Community Land Trust(CLT). When public land becomes available, the city occasionally sets aside a percentage of land to the CLT so that it bypasses land speculation by real estate developers. The CLT keeps properties affordable and accessible to low-income residents.

View of Ghent from above. Photo: Gunvor Røkke (CC-BY 2.0)

5. Ghent’s food sector is where the commons is most developed. This is partly due to the public organizations in the city that are building political support for this work. Gent en Garde is a transition platform that endorses the demands of civil society for fair, organic, and local food. It created, among other things, the Urban Agriculture workshop, which is a working group of individuals and organizations whose mission is to create a more sustainable and healthy food ecosystem in Ghent.
6. Ghent’s public schools collectively provide about five million meals a year to their students. However, much of it tends to be the cheapest food they can order from remote multinational food producers.L unch met LEF is an initiative that aims to counteract this by bringing local, organic food to public schools. The group plans to transport the ingredients using cargo bike sharing, a zero-carbon transportation system.
7. A brainstorming session between a few Ghent urban commons leaders led to the idea of introducing pigs to vacant land, as an experiment in maximizing the use of unused public property in Ghent. Spilvarken started as a pilot project in 2014. A few weeks after three pigs were brought to the neighborhood, nearby residents voluntarily began taking care of them. Soon thereafter, the pigs because a center of community socializing, and a way for nearby residents to dispose of food waste as feed to the animals.

Solar panel installation in Ghent. Photo courtesy of Johan Eyckens

8. As a city that was inthe first cohort to sign the EU Covenant of Mayors in 2009, Ghent has created an ambitious plan to reduce its carbon emissions by the year 2030. One critical part of its strategy is the creation of a central governmental body called Energiecentrale. The agency serves as a contact point for locals to get support for anything related to making energy efficient renovations to their homes, businesses, and facilities. The agency provides free energy audits of homes and facilitates a “sustainable neighborhoods” program, by providing advice and financial support to get community-led energy efficiency initiatives, such as energy co-ops, off the ground.
9. The crown jewel of the city’s energy program is the community-owned Energent — a renewable energy cooperative with cheap shares that make membership accessible to most Ghent residents. The co-op started as an ambitious project, in coordination with the city, to furnish the majority of houses in the neighborhood of St. Amandsberg with solar panels. Individual solar power — in which people only get the power harnessed from their own panels — are expensive. Under a system like Energent, more people can afford to install solar panels. The problem of less productive, east-west roofs — called the intermittency problem or the unequal provision of energy due to weather — gets solved. This shows the the advantage of having a collective approach to energy provisioning.

Header image courtesy of Nathalie Snauwaert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anything you’d like to add?

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

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

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Archaeologists use the term “material culture” for all objects that express a way of life and bring the relationship that a society has with Nature into everyday life. It is curious how unconscious we are of it, but from the house with a hearth to one with an “economical kitchen” with the arrival of the industrial era, and again from there to a house with electric freezer and stove, there’s a major leap in the development of science and technology. Material culture is the way the capacity for transformation and knowledge reaches our daily life.

In 1879, August Bebel, one of the last German guild artisans and father and theoretician of German pre-war social democracy, dedicated his major work to presenting a history of the place occupied by the women in the evolution of economic systems, showing how it wasn’t intellectual differences between the sexes or moral ideologies that had put women in a role of true domestic slavery, but the needs of the different historical systems of organization of production. It was the first work that embraced this kind of focus. It’s hard to imagine today how groundbreaking it was, and the impact it had across Europe. In Russia, it was spread tirelessly by Alexandra Kolontai, and in Spain, Emilia Pardo Bazán published it with her own funds.

The most interesting thing today about The Woman in the Past, in the Present and in the Future—re-published today as Woman and Socialism—is surely the final chapters. In them, Bebel tries to imagine a society in which domestic work disappears as a result of the application of science and technology to everyday labors. For the first time, he builds a vision for future socialism based on what are, at the time, advanced technologies that are very expensive and practically inaccessible.

The kitchen equipped with electricity for lighting and heating is the ideal one. No more smoke, heat, or disagreeable odors! The kitchen resembles a workshop furnished with all kinds of technical and mechanical appliances that quickly perform the hardest and most disagreeable tasks. Here we see potato and fruit-paring machines, apparatus for removing kernels, meat-choppers, mills for grinding coffee and spice, ice-choppers, corkscrews, bread-cutters, and a hundred other machines and appliances, all run by electricity, that enable a comparatively small number of persons, without excessive labor, to prepare a meal for hundreds of guests. The same is true of the equipments for house-cleaning and for washing the dishes.

It continues to be striking that, faced with the chronic malnutrition of the European workers and peasants of his time, Bebel’s view of the future has lost the hedonistic spirit of his friend Lafargue. But what he doesn’t forget is that domestic work is productive activity, that the social form of organizing this productive activity is what is cloistering the women of his time in a subordinate place, and that the key for their emancipation, like that of all of society, is to enact alternatives, which means creating and applying knowledge.

The preparation of food should be conducted as scientifically as any other human activity, in order to be as advantageous as possible. This requires knowledge and proper equipment.

Bebel is projecting the technological development of his time on to material culture. But he can’t imagine those technologies on a scale other than what is viable then. An electric kitchen… for hundreds of people. Dishwashers for large communal dining rooms. This limitation of scale, which is perfectly consistent with someone who imagined socialism like “the mail system,” leads him to propose “the abolition of the private kitchen” as a logical corollary to that of private property.

To millions of women, the private kitchen is an institution that is extravagant in its methods, entailing endless drudgery and waste of time, robbing them of their health and good spirits, and an object of daily worry, especially when means are scant, as is the case with most families. The abolition of the private kitchen will come as a liberation to countless women. The private kitchen is as antiquated an institution as the workshop of the small mechanic. Both represent a useless and needless waste of time, labor and material.

The birth of “cohousing”

Bebel understands that the home and production are linked by the degree of technological development, and therefore share the same logic of scale, scale that makes an efficient use of resources. In 1879, when the book was published, this scale was much greater than today, which is why the debate that began soon merged with the movements of “hygienist” urbanism—which, like Bebel himself, were influenced by the Fourierist experience of Guise–and ended up resulting in what is known today as “cohousing.”

And Bebel had many followers. In 1901, Lily Braun published Frauenarbeit und Hauswirtschaft, where she proposed the “Einküchenhaus,” a building with just one kitchen, as a way of liberating working-class women from the domestic work. Braun organized a donation campaign in the social-democratic press—a very typical form of “crowdfunding” at the time—that allowed her to commission blueprints from a team of architects and found a society to fund its construction, the “Haushaltsgenossenschaft.” But she never got the capital for the following phase: building a block of sixty houses with a common dining room, day-care and cooperativized kitchen that, looking back on it today, is the first documented “cohousing” project in history.

The reduction of scales and diversity

The reduction of scale in domestic technology would still take a while to arrive. The first prototypes of electric kitchens for the home came about in the ’20s. Then it wasn’t until after WWII that the first models of electric ovens and stoves, and later a swarm of new appliances like those Bebel imagined, reached working-class homes. There was no need for a social revolution for this, only technological development that allowed a general reduction of scale.

Because where Bebel was right was in seeing that the organization of leisure and the “reproductive” time of a society oriented towards abundance was going to reflect the logic and technology of productive organization. But time and scientific-technical development would lead the promise of abundance to a place very far from those big factories and post offices that he imagined. With the direct economy and P2P production, high productivity returns to the workshop, and in parallel, we can once again imagine domestic abundance on a small scale, far beyond cohousing and even today’s communitarian glimpses.

In fact, when there is talk about P2P production of cultural content in distributed networks—a world where abundance already walks on terra firma—it means that diversity is multiplied in abundance. It’s not that everything is “long tail,” it’s that the tail of the distribution of preferences tends to be greater than the surface around the average. The average tends to become little more than a reference.

Abundant minimalism

The world of abundance, the distributed and diverse world, can be imagined as the opposite of the world of recentralization. We can intuit a transnational, multilingual, and communal world where the search for a significant way of creating for everyone saturates the design of things, and rather than try to substitute and compensate for the deficiencies and frustrations of an unsatisfying way of working, things try to serve the way that each person wants build his/her life.

So, while it’s certainly too soon to define the styles in the first products of direct economy and the first P2P industrial production, a certain pattern does already seem to be emerging. An underlying trend in which the idea of “no logo” and the search for a generic aesthetic in the ’90s has been transformed into minimalism and the vindication of “honest design.” So it seems that, in the abundant world, we would have “honestly” functional objects and a very long and powerful tail of community customizations and aesthetics.

What doubtlessly provides us with the experience of the new forms of production is that, the closer we get closer to abundance, the closer production and consumption are to each other. Let’s say I want a shaving machine. I produce it myself… or I participate in financing one I like, or if I don’t like any of them, I design it and I propose it for financing by others. When you take part in the production of something you want to consume, your relationship with objects changes radically: they become full of meaning, and are now “de-alienating.”

And abundance in material culture means the possibility of rediscovering ourselves in the things that we use, as well as finding ourselves and others in their production.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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