To read the full Vision and Pathways report (bringing together four years of research and engagement on how to rapidly cut southern Australian cities’ greenhouse gas emissions), click on the image below.

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Australian cities need to reduce their emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change, potentially profoundly impacting our future lifestyles.

A fantastic new report by Dr Seona Candy, Kirsten Larsen and Jennifer Sheridan, University of Melbourne, following our own Commons Transition templates. They were assisted by our colleagues in the Commons Transiton Coalition (Australia) Jose Ramos and Darren Sharp. The following was originally published in the University of Melbourne’s Pursuit publication.

It’s 2040.

As you wake and look outside, things might not look hugely different to 2017 – there aren’t any hoverboards or sky highways – but Australian cities have managed to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent.

And how your day unfolds will look very different depending on how we reached this point.

As you step outside some changes are obvious. Renewable energy is now everywhere. You pass bladeless wind turbines, and solar farms on city skyscapers. On your way, you walk through an urban farm and the concrete jungle is greener with roof and vertical gardens throughout the city. But you’ve had to make some concessions in terms of privacy and lifestyle.

So what’s changed? And how did we get here?

These are just some of the questions explored in the final report from the Visions and Pathways 2040 research project which looks at how we can rapidly reduce Australian cities’ emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change as we approach the end of what’s being called the ‘critical decade’.

WE’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY

The report finds that exactly how we achieve emissions reductions will have a profound impact on what life in Australia is like in the future. Many of the technologies required to get us to a greener future already exist – but what’s important is how we apply them and who drives the change.

Over the last four years, through research, workshops and engagement activities, the project has drawn on input from over 250 experts across industry, government, academia and civil society to determine how Australian cities could reach this goal. But also to design what these future cities might look like.

This group of experts came together because they can see Australia is not on track to achieve even its stated emissions reductions targets. These targets have been put in place by successive governments who have repeatedly weakened the numbers and the criteria – and still we cannot meet them.

Since the removal of the carbon price, Australia’s emissions have started to increase again. We are going the wrong way.

The Australian political context means the multitude of technical pathways are clear, but the cultural, political and economic pathways are not. The Action Pathways in our report consider the forces of change that might be required to achieve the drastic greenhouse gas emissions reductions we seek.

Many of the technologies required to get us to a greener future already exists. Picture: Amy Bracks/VEIL 2015

But how do we trigger political changes of this magnitude, and what is our own potential power in progressing these?

TWO PATHWAYS

The team designed two scenarios to demonstrate these positive outcomes – ‘Green Growth’ and a ‘Commons Transition’.

The first Green Growth scenario points to the role city governments, driven by community and stakeholder action, can play in discouraging organisations and businesses that are not explicitly and proactively decarbonising. This social and political mobilisation could help drive out the complicit acceptance and corruption preventing rapid reduction in fossil fuel use and development.

The Commons Transition scenario paints a new picture that re-empowers the citizen movement already evident in sweeping social changes in cities around the world. It draws on leading innovations in sharing and shareable cities; peer-to-peer, Open Design Distributed Manufacturing, cooperatives and platform cooperative movements, as well as some new, more radical cultural, political and economic initiatives.

These new movements are already gaining momentum. Citizen groups in countries like Spain, Iceland, Taiwan, Korea and Italy have not just challenged power, but also forged new political contracts that place citizens at the centre of city decision-making.

To ensure future cities achieve the necessary emissions reductions, we modelled them using the CSIRO-developed Australian Stocks and Flows Framework, which factors in not just for cities as they stand in 2040, but also the pathway that might get us there.

CONSUMING AND EMITTING

We took a consumption-based approach including both direct and indirect emissions. Direct emissions, like your car’s exhaust or burning gas to heat your house, occur within city boundaries. Indirect or embodied emissions are associated with the production of goods and services that support our urban lifestyles but are usually generated outside the city, like food, household appliances and electricity.

According to our research, direct emissions make up around 16 per cent of overall city emissions, equivalent to 52 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2013.

Changes to urban lifestyles like more active transport, reducing landfill waste, switching to electric transport coupled with clean electricity generation, as well as improving the design of our buildings, results in a reduction of these direct emissions of around 60 per cent by 2040 for both pathways.

The results indicate, though, that the majority of emissions related to a city lifestyle are produced outside city boundaries. Electricity generation contributes almost 50 per cent of the carbon footprint of southern Australian cities, with heavy industry and agriculture contributing around 12 per cent and 9 per cent respectively.

To significantly reduce city emissions, our report shows the accelerated replacement of fossil fuel power stations with 100 per cent clean generation technologies must be a priority. There’s also an urgent need to reduce heavy industry and agricultural production through recycling, lowering consumption of red meat and reducing exports, which account for the majority of indirect emissions in these sectors.

Changes to urban lifestyles like more active transport and switching to electric cars will have an impact. Picture: Amy Bracks/VEIL 2015

To achieve overall emissions reductions of 80 per cent by 2040 and in the critical short term, we also need to switch from forest clearing to forest preservation and regeneration, and rapidly increase other land uses that can sequester carbon (capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide) like agricultural production systems and urban forestry.

IMAGINING A GREENER FUTURE

Emissions reductions of this scale can be achieved, but will require – and drive – massive transformation of our cities and even our societies, economies and politics.

Importantly, the report emphasises the important role of cities as cultural and political leaders – understanding, supporting and demanding change in production sectors and land-use outside the cities – as well as making the changes needed themselves.

The need for early and radical changes to land-use and management for carbon sequestration to ‘buy time’ for structural change, points to a critical role city dwellers can play as consumers of forestry, agricultural and food products, as well as directly in urban forestry.

To believe that these scenarios and action pathways are possible, any of them – let alone the ones we actually want – requires a leap of imagination. To make them possible requires a corresponding leap of determination.

The Visions and Pathways 2040 project challenges all of us – leaders and citizens alike – to be determined and prioritise reducing emissions before it’s too late, and points to the pathways that might just be able to get us there.

The project was led by the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab at the University of Melbourne, and included researchers from Swinburne University and University of New South Wales. It was funded by the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living. Download the report from the Visions and Pathways 2040 website.

Photo by RW Sinclair

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(19 mins) Kristy Milland, TurkerNation — If Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) were a boss, one would guess that it hated its employees. This has driven mTurk workers (Turkers) to fight back in a variety of ways, some of which may be useful to those fighting their own battles in other sectors. From rating customers to writing letters to awakening class consciousness to writing rules about what is ethical customer and platform behaviour, a variety of techniques are being tried in the attempt to make online work more bearable. A good work environment does not have to remain a dream, it can be something we realize together. I will take you from today’s mTurk to what online crowd platforms could be, so we can work together to fix the future of work.

Photo by geralt (Pixabay)

The post Kristy Milland: From Digital Worker Subsistence to Organized Resistance appeared first on P2P Foundation.

(14 mins) Darren Sharp – Australia is in the midst of a transition from an extractive economy led by the mining and agricultural sectors, towards a knowledge-based service economy. While digital innovation and startups are lauded for their ability to create jobs and stimulate the new economy, an extractive logic which privileges individual reward over mutual benefit remains dominant. Platform co-operatives provide an ethical bridge to the new economy through collective ownership and democratic governance of digital platforms to keep wealth and decision-making in the hands of value creators. Australia is home to a nascent cooperative platform ecosystem comprised of networks like the Commons Transition Coalition and enterprises including AbilityMate, AnyShare, bHive Bendigo, Geddup, Open Food Network and YLab. These system entrepreneurs and organizations are working in partnership with the communities they serve to bring an equitable and inclusive new economy to life.

Photo by Marko Mikkonen

The post Darren Sharp on the Emerging Ecosystem of Platform Cooperativism in Australia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

These questions framed the opening of an event with Nathan Schneider, journalist, author, co-convenor of the first platform cooperativism conference (NYC) and professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Nathan’s visit to Australia was capped off by a workshop in Melbourne Australia on 10th June 2016 called ‘Sharing Value and Ownership for the Common Good: Building the Commons Economy’.

Nathan Schneider began with his keynote on the transformative power of an Internet that we can co-own and co-govern together. From Nathan’s introduction: “we are in a period of transition to a platform society one in which we carry out the economy less from fixed workplaces and more through tools of connection – an infrastructure of online tools that enable us to connect with each other and create value together. We are moving from an economy which has this cool toy called the Internet to the Internet orchestrating this cool toy called the economy. One of the features of it, is continuing a pattern the offline industrial economy has been following in recent years. We’re seeing this continued process in this online platform economy, in which we are increasingly disconnected from the benefits of the very economy we’re creating.”

Sharing Value and Ownership for the Common Good, Church of All Nations, Melbourne Australia.

Nathan continues: “In the wake of the economic crisis there’s been this urge to share, the sharing economy. Wouldn’t we all love to share the stuff that we all have too much of, like cars and housing and all this stuff. This energised a lot of young people to take part in a positive new economy. But then, there started to be some cracks. We start to see workers with very little security in the context of what’s called a ‘sharing economy’. We start to realize that what we’re doing is not so much sharing as micro-rental all the time and that nothing is being shared in this process. Instead the profits are being directed to a very centralized organization. And these companies in the so-called sharing economy have a shocking disregard for the public good. We have a choice between this really positive vision of the liberated freelancer, people who control their working hours and don’t have to have the same job to control their security for the rest of their life. But then there’s also this vision of the precariat, who loses control over work and has to deal with a completely unaccountable global corporation that has no interest in their interest.”

Nathan Schneider asks: “what can we say yes to?”

Nathan on the cooperative platform economy: “This leaves us with a question. There’s lots of good stuff and there’s lots of bad stuff. So what can we say yes to? In a lot of cities around the world it often feels like those in government have to say no to this emerging platform economy and they don’t seem to have a lot of choices about what they can say yes to, what they can encourage. One of the ways to think about what we’re doing when we talk about a cooperative online economy is creating a choice, a choice that’s actually worth having. What if there were a real sharing economy? Fortunately there are some pretty good precedents to draw on. Alongside the development of industrial capitalism has been this vision of a cooperative economy, and practice of a cooperative economy, that has thrived around the world in many industries through open membership, democratic control and ownership, shared profits, autonomy, and a deep concern for community. This is a tradition that has spread and I think more than many of us even recognize because it’s not something that we learn about in school very often, or that’s talked about in public debate, but this is a very powerful and widespread sector of the global economy, and it’s a source that we can draw upon. If we’re talking about a sharing economy, this is the gold standard, the co-operative economy. Meanwhile we can also draw on practices that have developed from tech culture that contribute to and develop the tradition of co-operative enterprize.”

Nathan’s keynote presentation can be heard in full here.

A great overview of ‘Building the Commons Economy’ by @PaulaSgherza

A panel of local innovators including Serenity Hill (Open Food Network), Eric Doriean (AnyShare) and Antony McMullen (Employee Ownership Australia and New Zealand) came together with Nathan to discuss how the Commons Economy is taking shape in Australia. The panel discussion can be heard here.

Panel featuring Nathan Schneider, Serenity Hill, Eric Doriean, Antony McMullen and Darren Sharp.

The second half of the event was a Design Lab facilitated by co-convener Jose Ramos for AbilityMate, a Sydney-based social enterprise creating affordable assistive devices for people with a disablity using open design and 3D printing. The Design Lab was run to help co-founders Mel Fuller and Johan du Plessis and designer Kin Ly collaboratively workshop ideas in development and seek fedback from fellow practitioners related to funding and scaling their social enterprise.

Jose Ramos introducing Kin, Johan and Mel from AbilityMate.

Human-centred design was used to understand the key design challenges (pain points) faced by AbilityMate, identify opportunity areas and create a series of how might we questions used for brainstorming and ideation.

Seminar participants were given three How Might We Questions to brainstorm together in small groups:

1. How might we attract and scale investment from $500,000 in 2 years to $30 million in 4 years, while maintaining co-op principles of equal voting power and fair return on investment? (There are constraints around equity crowd funding in Australia. If an entity has more than 50 shareholders that aren’t employees it has to be publicly listed, which has very onerous protocols and tax implications).
2. How might we use the cooperative model to both support AbilityMate’s social impact mission and remain globally competitive (access to capital, markets, customers and speed)?
3. How might we run and find funding to test an AbilityMate platform co-op trial which includes investors, employees, customers and founders in order to validate/prove the benefits of platform co-ops?

The Design Lab group presentations can be heard in full here.

Design Lab with AbilityMate on converting to a platform co-operative.

This event was part of a global conversation about the future of value, ownership and governance in the emerging platform economy. The Melbourne workshop explored how social enterprizes like AbilityMate can become platform co-ops and developed practical ideas for how ventures can attract investment and support while maintaining their social mission. These discussions are relevant to any organization developing commons-based solutions to ensure that prosperity and decision-making can be shared between value creators working together for mutual benefit and the transition to a more equitable platform economy.

Nathan’s Australian visit also included a public seminar on platform cooperativism at ACMI in Melbourne with Janelle Orsi on 7th June.

I look forward to sharing details of Australia’s evolving cooperative platform ecosystem at the second platform cooperativism conference being held in New York 11-13 November.

Photo by aKs_phOtOs (Pixabay)

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Anna Bergren Miller: The City as Commons is an important new resource for urban commons activists. (Graphic by Scott Boylston)

The cover of The City as Commons: A Policy Reader, published recently by Melbourne, Australia’s Commons Transition Coalition, features a repeated pattern of overlapping spirals and circular clusters of node-and-line shapes. The graphic, explains designer Scott Boylston (SCAD professor and president of Emergent Structures), was inspired by biophysicist Harold Morowitz‘s proposal of the how the preconditions for life on Earth may have been created. “The human city reminds me of Morowitz’s description of an open and vital membrane that creates conditions for the emergence of new ideas,” writes Boylston, who contributed a chapter on the re-use of construction waste to the book. “I see urban commoning as a ‘new’ metabolism that has the potential for generating new forms of life/living/being.”

Edited by José Maria Ramos, The City as Commons is a reference for individuals and groups who, like Boylston, believe that a re-imagining of shared resources (from intellectual property to real property) through a lens that prioritizes social and environmental sustainability over financial profits can transform the lives of humans for the better. It is also an important record of some of the commons-centric projects and policies already underway or in development around the world. The “urban” emphasis of “urban commoning” refers to the central role played by cities in the commoning process, both as the collectors of the most urgent physical, social, and environmental needs, and as the geographical and governmental entities arguably best equipped to drive change.

The 34 contributions to The City as Commons are divided into sections including Space, Value Exchange, Production, Governance, Land, Knowledge, Culture, and Accounts. The categories necessarily overlap, and the content itself is somewhat rough around the edges, with variations in voice, format, and point of origin (some are repurposed blog posts or other publications; at least one summarizes a conference). Rather than weakening the total product, these irregularities affirm the book’s identity as a conversation starter, a work-in-progress designed to encourage experimentation and revision even as it seeks to pin down some of the recent theoretical and practical developments in urban commoning.

Though the “Accounts” section, to which Shareable’s co-founder Neal Gorenflo contributed, is most explicitly framed around real-world examples, all of the authors include strategy and/or policy recommendations in their chapters. The geographical and topical scope of The City as Commons is impressive, as is the list of commentators and practitioners who have contributed to the collection. These include P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens, Prosper Australia project director Karl Fitzgerald, 596 Acres founding director Paula Z. Segal, and Julian Agyeman and Duncan McLaren, authors of Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities. The City as Commons deserves a place on the bookshelf (or hard drive) of activists already involved in contemporary commoning, as well as of citizens more generally interested in promoting the physical, social, and environmental wellbeing of their communities.

Glenwood Green Acres is a community garden built on formerly vacant land in North Central Philadelphia. (Tony Fischer / Flickr)

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