An open and self-organized gathering, this event is structured into 3 modules:

COMMONS, MUNICIPALISM and RIGHTS TO THE CITY and MAPS and SYNERGY meetings, both dedicated to making digital tools for the commoners. The CommonsCamp will end with a workshop dedicated to identify possible follow-ups or next steps. Two exhibitions will be held during the event : “Les communs” (Commons) and “Les voies de la démocratie” (Ways of democracy).

This CommonsCamp will be focussing on actionable knowledge and skills in the field of urban commons. It intends to stimulate the emergence and the realisation of concrete projects and collaboration between the commoners.

For more information, have a look at the program:

Program in FRENCH
Program in ENGLISH

And to the list of contributors/participants

All the information (program, preparation, contributors, actions, budget already online) is accessible here.

There will be interpreting in FR and EN during the plenary meetings. For the other activities, the organisers and facilitator will make sure that everybody will be able to participate (ex.: through whispering interpreting).

Documentation (note taking, photos, audio/video) will be a collective endeavour, everybody being invited to contribute to our collective pool of knowledge. A group of volunteers will assist the harvest and publishing of the content on the web, on a daily basis.

You can already start to contribute by sending messages by editing a pad or by sending requests or materials to:
Mélanie Pinet:  pinet.melanie75 (at) gmail (dot) com   or

FrédéricSultan: fredericsultan (at) gmail (dot) com

Flyer CommonsCamp VF.1-1 shared by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Photo by THEfunkyman

The post CommonsCamp: Grenoble, France August 22 – 26 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Assembly of the Commons of Grenoble: building the city together

It was with great pleasure that I met Anne-Sophie and Antoine during my journey, while taking a break in the beautiful city of Grenoble. We happily shared the practices of the Lille and Grenoble assemblies of the commons over a coffee at a sidewalk cafe.

Anne-Sophie and Antoine were both elected to positions in city hall. They shared stories with me of citizens engaged in a dynamic of counterpower and, after being elected in 2014, of their difficulty in taking on an institutional posture. Changing culture is not always easy! But this is what also makes the Grenoble Assembly of the Commons so special, born of the meeting of two dynamics.

The first of these two comes from Nuit Debout, within which a “Commission of the Commons” was created in 2016. The idea was to discuss the management of commons as a common responsibility: not only the responsibility of public authorities, but also of the area’s inhabitants.

The second dynamic, on the part of city hall, was the philosophically interesting idea of investing in a space between the private and the public, to make room for citizens in the public debate. The key here is that this idea has not been abandoned at all, in fact it unites activists and elected representatives in the same assembly today.

Last March, during the Biennale of Cities in Transition, partners and associations were invited to the assembly. About fifty people from various backgrounds participated in this first assembly, including Sylvia Fredricksson and Michel Briand, both well-known French commoners who came to share their experiences.

What the elected representatives underline is that even if they have the will to make a difference in the direction of greater citizen involvement in public life, it is not so simple. Legislation is not adapted at all, particularly with regard to risk management (the insurance framework does not exist). On top of that, officials are not so aware, and not trained to work directly with citizens. Faced with this, the elected representatives asked the services to work on these points and advance the texts and practices.

Nevertheless, among the completed projects at the town hall level, there have been agreements created for occupying public spaces such as shared gardens, for example. The assembly also discussed the idea of writing a charter on housing, a bit like in Bologna (Italy), where a charter of urban commons was drafted and signed by some forty Italian cities.

The city also participates in a “migrants’ platform” to accompany reception initiatives.There are also participatory budgets: every year, 800K€ in investment is opened to citizens’ projects. 106 projects proposed by the Grenoble region were selected in 2017. On the cultural side, we can cite the desire to take art out of museums with the Street Art Festival, whose traces can be found all over the city walls.

To date, the Assembly of the Commons has set up four separate working groups which meet asynchronously at regular intervals:

• Natural Commons
• Knowledge Commons
• Urban Commons
• Commons of Health and Well-being

The spirit of commons in Grenoble has a long history. After the Second World War, unlike many other places, the city had, for quite a while, retained its own operators to manage electricity and water, which made it a very special case.

After being privatized in the 1980s, water came back into the public domain after a citizens’ lengthy legal battle with certain elected environmental officials and some employees of the water authority. This was the first battle won in France for water municipalization, along with the first French users’ committee to make the citizens’ involvement in water management last. The whole world visits Grenoble for its water management model. And on the electricity and gas side, the operator is a mixed-economy company but the public (the city of Grenoble) is still the majority shareholder.

This civic expertise and spirit of solidarity continue today, and are embodied in the city’s desire to be part of a concrete, lasting relationship between two communities that “do with others”, all the others…

The post Summer of Commoning 3: The Assembly of the Commons of Grenoble appeared first on P2P Foundation.

L’Atelier Paysan is a French cooperative that works with farmers to design machines and buildings adapted to the specific practices of small farm agroecology. In addition to distributing free plans on its website, L’Atelier Paysan organizes winter self-help training sessions, during which farmers train in metalworking and build tools which they can then use on their own farms. L’Atelier Paysan works to develop the technological sovereignty of farmers by helping them to become more autonomous through learning and regain knowledge and skills.

In market gardening, crops are grown on beds formed from long strips of land. Generally, little or no attention is paid to ground compaction by tractor wheels. In subsequent years, farmers will then try to grow on these tracks. The idea of permanent, “ridged” beds is to form perennial growing beds so the tractor wheels always run in the same place. Tools are needed to form these ridged beds, which allow crops to have superior moisture retention and drainage, and to warm up better in the sun. 

Michel Bauwens: What was the origin of L’Atelier Paysan project?

Julien and Fabrice: The project was born in 2009 after a meeting between Joseph Templier, an organic market gardener from GAEC “Les Jardins du Temple” in Isère (south-eastern France, near the Alps), and Fabrice Clerc, then a technician with ADABio, the local organic agriculture development association. ADABio was created in 1984 to help improve practices, find resources, and share knowledge, among other things.

Joseph and his colleagues used tools on the farm that are very relevant to the soil, especially adapted to an innovative cultural technique called “permanent beds”. Many young farmers came to train in the techniques, the system and the organization of the “Jardins du Temple” and then to practice them on their own farms and projects. At the same time, Fabrice went to many farms in the Rhone Alps to collect and disseminate knowledge and agrarian know-how. Fabrice and Joseph’s idea was to widely publicise the innovative tools used on this farm, which were crafted and assembled from recovered materials and refurbished old tools. Some standardization was necessary first, in order to be able to publish plans for building the tools from parts and accessories that can be found at any hardware store.

Your approach seems very pragmatic. Yet when I read through your website, it is also a very thoughtful approach (philosophical and political). How did you move from one approach to another?

We have just put into words what is happening. A number of farmers in the Alps independently designed and built their own machines, adapted to their own needs. We have gathered and compiled all this into a guide. In the process of constructing this guide, it seemed useful to formalise our approach: first, to take an inventory of innovations on the ground, then to answer the question “what is the meaning of all this?” Why all these bottom-up innovations, which were traditionally outsourced to the equipment manufacturing industry. So, why was the farming world excluded from the design process? Whereas the farmer and the artisan of the village once built the machines needed, now farmers have disappeared from the chain of innovation.

It is not only in the agricultural sector that this has happened: it’s possible to build bridges with changes in other areas such as shared self-build community workshops, and to think about Do It Yourself from the viewpoint of human/social (re)construction. For example, in Grenoble, there are about ten woodworking workshops with available machines and tools, and self-renovation housing initiatives. They are important factors for emancipation, inclusion and social reintegration. For the last 6 or 7 years, we have been thinking a lot about these issues. We don’t want to just make machines. It is a total experience that consists of thinking about daily life and of the political approach it requires.

Current political debate reflects a very strong social demand on the ground. The guide to self-construction is the first book we published in 2012. This is the sum of the first field census of sixteen machines adapted to organic market gardening. These machines, which are low tech (in construction and design) call for a lot of craft know-how. They do not suffer in comparison with high-tech machines. Our machines are three to four times cheaper for an efficiency equal or superior to those of the trade. Why is this search for autonomy not more valued? This is a question of the technological sovereignty of farmers. It is something that is coming back into fashion, taken up by a militant farming community.

The word “farmer” was, until the 1980s, a word used to denigrate. Today, on the contrary, it means someone who is not only a cultivator of agricultural produce but part of a terroir, connected to an ecosystem and a social life. The word “farmer” relates to the invention of a specialized, segmented profession. Today they are even called “producer”, “operator”, or “Chief Operating Officer”. The logic of industrialists and economists invades agriculture.

What are the current project developments?

The approach is open to the whole field of small and organic farming on a human scale. It started around organic market gardening, but now it is open to all sectors: arboriculture, breeding, viticulture… For example, we can include the re-design of livestock buildings and storage. For market gardeners who want to add some poultry farming to their production, we are also working on the issue of mobile buildings.

Depending on the demands of the farmers’ groups on the ground, our resource platform will respond to co-design the tools required for the specific practices of small and organic farmers. We want these tools to be used by conventional farmers to help them adopt a more autonomous and economical approach. It is becoming increasingly credible because it is intended to be a resource available to all farmers. Most of our users are already going through this process, but the technical principles developed, aim to ensure that conventional farmers are no longer frightened by the demanding, know-how-based, techniques of small farm agroecology.

The project started in 2009 at ADABio, a local association of organic producers, but very quickly grew to such a large scale that in 2011 a transitional association was created and then converted into a cooperative in 2014: L’Atelier Paysan. In this human adventure, meetings played a very important part. At each meeting, we took sideways steps, then small jumps and then big jumps. Today we are 11 permanent staff, quite a lot of seasonal staff as well as those who volunteer as a civic service. Everyone comes as who they are and our approach is closely linked to what each person brings. We are very attentive to the requests that come to us, and we have more and more!

What is your business model?

We operate 65% through self-financing and 35% from public funding. In our view, these are normal contributions to our effort to produce and disseminate common goods. We believe that we are in the public interest and that communities need to be involved. Unfortunately, with the reactionary right-wing coming to power in many places, this sort of support has been drastically reduced.

However, we are relatively more secure than other structures, sometimes subsidized at 80%. The 65% self-financing comes from our self-build training activity. In France there are joint vocational training funds that can cover the cost of training. We also profit from a margin on group orders for internships.

We will raise funds more and more from the public: if we want to change the agriculture / food model, the whole of society is involved. That’s why we have set up a partnership with a Citoyens Solidaire endowment fund to collect donations and the associated tax [1]. It is a mechanism that allows people to choose where their taxes are going. We want to make citizens aware of our work so that they can contribute to the economic independence of L’Atelier Paysan.

What is your relationship with other farmer or social movements?

L’Atelier Paysan is positioned as one of the actors in the alternative food project, an additional tool in the social and solidarity-based agricultural economy. As actors of this arena, we naturally wanted to associate ourselves with those that represent the agricultural environment, to connect, so that they might disseminate our information, our technical material and to bring together our different users. Moreover, the question of agricultural machinery was very seldom dealt with by the existing organisations.

Also, we have had an awareness-raising activity for a year now, through the InPACTassociation, which brings together about ten associations at the national level. We have been the standard-bearers for the technological sovereignty of farmers in this context, in particular to document and expose, on the one hand, the over-sizing of farming equipment production tool and, on the other hand, the publicly funded introduction of robotics and digital technology supported by the techno-scientific community.

At the international level, we are in the Via Campesina network. We participated in the 2nd Nyéléni forum on food sovereignty (in October 2016 in Romania) where we talked about agricultural equipment, saying that there can be no food independence without farmers’ technological sovereignty.

At the forum we met with Spaniards, Romanians, Austrians, Czechs and Hungarians, who were very interested in questions around farming equipment. We staged an exhibition of drawings and fact sheets that really appealed to people. It was not especially a field of exploration for these activists, and there, something happened. No one in Europe has yet set up a platform such as L’Atelier Paysan, which provides ways to document and disseminate knowledge (data sheets, self-construction training …).

We went to Quebec in January 2014 to organize the first self-build training in North America, with the CAPÉ (Coopérative d’Agriculteurs de Proximlité Écologique) and l’EPSH (École professionnelle de Saint-Hyacinthe ), around the vibroplanche (for cultivating permanent “ridged” beds). And now, they independently create self-build courses from the shared tools on our website.

In the United States, we are connected with Farm Hack, incubated and launched by Greenhorns, which itself came from a young-farmer’s coalition, the NYFC (National Young Farmers Coalition). They share tips on adapting machinery via hackathons and open-hacking camps. Though they have not yet organized any training.

We also have discussions with the Land Workers Alliance (a member of Via Campesina) in England. Two years ago they organized the first Farmhack event which we attended to present our work.

Here, a farmer can come for training and can build their own tools: it doesn’t cost much thanks to our famous training funds and group-buying of materials and accessories. Working with metal, tool use (a kind of after-sales service), sharing (using the machine and adapting it to their context in the form of versioning); this is the whole methodology that one wants to share. There is a very specific context in France, which means that a structure like ours can still rely on a large amount of public aid and shared professional funds to pay for the internships (this is not the case in the USA, for example, which has to rely on private funds).

In general, our approach is total, that is what is exciting in this adventure. We are giving ourselves the means to advance this process, between ourselves and with other actors. From a practical point of view, to reach one person is good, but to reach many takes us much further. We also consider political and economic issues, and what are the factors for acceleration and efficiency. The question of agricultural machinery is a question of political and scientific thought. On the whole, on a whole bunch of questions, there is no science-based production. On April 5th we are organizing a seminar on technological sovereignty: we have struggled to find people who have admitted incompetence. These are questions they have never faced.

What do you think of the “Commons” as a political concept?

We would like to be further advanced on this issue of the Commons. We assume that the issue of food, like drinking water, the air we breathe and biodiversity, are essential to protect. In turn, the means to achieve it (know-how, agricultural land, communal areas, techniques…) must by definition be common, since this is the survival of our species. All the know-how and the knowledge of farmers did not come ex nihilo [from nothing. Ed]: they come from sharing, putting into a common pot, shared innovation and openness. We see as a scandal any attempt to expropriate technological solutions so that they can be part of another feed-source for personal profit. This is an issue that we are exploring and trying to pay attention to.

We are alert to the legal regimes related to this issue of the Commons, to open licenses and to what could best reflect this willingness to share knowledge through which we enrich our community of users. If we use Creative Commons, we are always looking for the right license that best expresses this willingness to share.

The starting material of our work are the tools developed by Joseph: he participated very much in the emergence of these communities. But he didn’t only tinker with machines, he also thought of them with regard to a working group of farmers who wanted to adopt the innovative cultural techniques of permanent beds. His machines are designed in a collective. It is therefore the result of a whole lot of visits and picking up of knowledge and know-how from his peers. He had the talent and the energy to imagine and manufacture these machines. It is his way of contributing, like other activists.

How do you see social change? The political atmosphere is not very positive for the change we want. Do you imagine that you work in a “hostile environment”? Is there a political side to your work?

There is the question of public education. The first step of the document on the technological sovereignty of farmers will be to amalgamate the ideas of the users, the political partners, etc. Some participants in our training events do not take long to take the ideas and techniques and disseminate them.

We are also starting to have quite a lot of feedback from researchers / thinkers, who congratulate us for imagining this new way of thinking. This is our goal because we are not going to be able to produce everything: scientific studies, political thinking … What partnerships can be set up to make common the commonalities of these subjects? Additional advocates can be found at meetings. We do not have a strategy. There is nothing stronger than a groundswell to spread our way of doing things. The tidal wave will be less important, there will be no media buzz, no pretty teaser with a background of country music, but this is much more powerful. When people have experienced their ability for self-determination, there is a kind of arriving without the possibility of backtracking.

Are there projects similar to yours but which you criticize and if so, why?

We are quite distinct from the sort of ideas promoted by the likes of Open Source Ecology in the US with a beautiful trailer, to us that does not seem grounded in reality. None of the machines actually work. It is a process of innovation that comes from not involving real users. They are engineers who imagine things a bit on their own.

We are also distancing ourselves from Fablabs, which seem to be an incubator for start-ups rather than for public education. For us, a Fablab must be a place of public education and not of low-cost technological experimentation for the industry.

We are in Grenoble, the cradle of nanotechnology. Here, a Fablab is funded by industry and advanced technology. So there is Fablab after Fablab (woodworking, pedal-powered machines…), and they are generally talking about something other than the quality of what is produced. It takes funding to run a Fablab. In 2013, those who won the call for projects from the Ministry of the Digital Economy are not those who provide public education. How do we finance a general interest?

More broadly, if by Fablab we mean laboratories of open innovation and shared human resources, there are tens of thousands in France. There are ecocentres, Third-Places, associations related to self-build, others that repair bicycles, social innovation, human and economic. They are not necessarily in the high-tech field and are less publicized, but they are working on the necessary questions.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years? How do you think the world will be in which you will evolve? Do you project yourself into the “global arena” and if yes / no, why and how?

The observation is that today, in January, we do not know much about where we will be at the end of December. This has been true since the beginning of the adventure. We are in an exploratory phase, and it is very difficult to know where we will be in 3 years. After 5 years we have already exceeded our dreams of 3 or 4 years ago! Our collective dynamics explode, economically we will have to find more avenues because humanly we will not be able to go much further. We refuse work every day! One of the interesting tracks in a time-scale of 3 or 4 years is to set up our own training centre on a farm with a workshop training centre suited to our needs, a logistics platform, a classroom, offices, garages, and accommodation. Why a farm? To have our feet on the ground, a real support for our experimentation and a working tool to match our needs. Today we operate within our means, but we have ways to improve our work.

In the years to come, beyond the concerts at Rock à la Meuleuse (rock on the grinder) which we organized during our Rencontres in June 2016, we have plans to explore an illustration of our work through contemporary art.

Among the perspectives, we imagine a European network centred on technological sovereignty. In the world of development and international cooperation associations, this idea has been around since the 1970s, based on appropriate technologies: reclaiming ourselves, being more sociable, connecting and building links throughout Europe so that there are more exchanges between our different countries.

Our adventure is not without effort. Part of what helps us keep going is that we don’t miss out on poetry, pleasure and being as we are. We thoroughly, and I mean thoroughly, explore the paths and horizons that are available to us.

One of the objectives for which we believe we are on the right track is the following: while in France local development has always been specialized, today things are actually de-compartmentalized. If we think about things more “globally”, we will participate in developing something richer, more powerful and sustainable. What makes us strong is that we control the whole chain: self-building at the political and collective level.

We are full of energy: our desire is to testify that the fields we are exploring with the methodologies we use, can be applied to a whole bunch of other things.

All images by L’Atelier Paysan. Check out the full photo essay here.

Interview translated by William Charlton and edited by Ann Marie Utratel

[1] A registered (private) donor can get a tax exemption of 66% on a donation. On a donation of €150, the donor receives a €100 rebate – the recipient gets 80% of the donation i.e. €120 http://www.citoyens-solidaires.fr/don-particulier/ for business donations (60% tax exemption) see http://www.citoyens-solidaires.fr/don-entreprise/

The post Julien Reynier and Fabrice Clerc from L’Atelier Paysan on self-build communities in farming appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series on articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

Rosalie Salaün: What links do you see between the commons and the participative politics that you are conducting in public spaces, which embrace several areas, such as  culture, traffic, and so on?

Eric Piolle: The link is strong: we have removed billboards from public spaces; we are working on street furniture especially designed for children, on the frontiers, both physical and temporal, within the city; on reclaiming public space with, for example, the potential tensions between night-time and day-time use of space.  At each stage we have to explore and preserve what we have in common. Citizens have to rediscover their capacity for action, individual and collective, and what we hold in common must be managed, shared, and supported politically to have any meaning:  we don’t simply ‘consume’ the commons; we find meaning there.

In all public services, users are the ultimate owners of the commons. Rather than reinforcing the logic of a consumer society, we adopt an Aristotelian approach, which is that each citizen must be able to govern and be governed. That is our perspective, on both public spaces and participatory democracy.

This vision of the public space is quite unusual in France…

The ecological vision which flows from this is an actor-network vision (which is doubtless more developed in other European countries). First and foremost, there is a logic of subsidiarity: each level has its relevance and meaning. What we do together, we can do more easily.

Last week I was with the Norwegian ambassador, who was speaking about his experience in France; he mentioned this capacity to think both in terms of history and the long-term, with leaps of progress, and to do things which go in the right direction, without fitting perfectly into an ideology.

Citizens have to rediscover their capacity for action, individual and collective, and what we hold in common must be managed, shared, and supported politically to have any meaning

Our aim in Grenoble is to stay our collective course with this society of actor-networks which find meaning in social and economic exchanges; a society with debate and conflict, but also the ability to get things done. We want to stimulate conflict that is organised and goes beyond intellectual debate to action: ideas must generate action.

Is it not a little risky, for the achievement of some of your ecological policies, for example for billboards or parking, to have this participatory approach?

The real risk is that nothing changes; that we continue as before. Transition is an innovative societal project, for it responds in concrete new ways to the emergencies and extreme constraints that we are dealing with nowadays. Yes, we must change, but we must actively choose, not just passively put up with change. That’s what my engagement in public life is about: clearly recognising constraints, without submitting to them. The urgency of the current situation pushes us to shake off old habits; some say that austerity management is enough. For my part, I maintain that it’s through more democracy that we will succeed.

How are local people reacting to this change in how things are done?

Firstly, people are contacting me a lot. Secondly, residents have a two-fold reaction: satisfaction that there is no more queue-jumping; but also frustration, because you can’t pull strings anymore!

Transition is an innovative societal project, for it responds in concrete new ways to the emergencies and extreme constraints that we are dealing with

The old system was a bit of a lottery: the losers tell themselves they can win next time if they bump into the mayor at a good time – everyone plays the game. This was also true for cultural politics, in Grenoble as elsewhere, where cultural life often revolved around arbitrary decisions from above. Certain stakeholders got used to this. We are staying the course of transparency and the same rules for all; what matters is to respond to the needs of the people of Grenoble.

The approach we have adopted is ambitious, but it also recognises each person’s capacity to take charge of their own lives, both individually and collectively.  I was recently at a citizen’s forum in a disadvantaged part of town. They have worked on defining indicators of well-being (peace and quiet, housing, education, living together, etc.), and on identifying their resources.

For me, managing conflict is eminently democratic – it’s where the visions of all of us meet that the city comes to life.

We are moving on from the old mentality of raising all issues with the mayor’s office, which creates a really interesting dynamic which values the actions of local people. They are organising their own support for school children, initiating campaigns for people to greet each other in the street and get to know their neighbours, working on managing waste, developing mentoring networks for local people, creating activities to build links between parents and young people in a sometimes problematic public square, and even creating ‘true/false’ activities on the allocation of housing. All that, simply on a neighbourhood scale, is support in action in our city.

Does the mayor’s office provide a framework for this?

Yes, for the participatory budgeting, we impose limits. The project that I just mentioned was supported by the public landlord: for example, we wanted to bury the waste disposal points because they were causing problems, so we incorporated that into redesigning the square.  Even such an apparently trivial matter raises fundamental questions. We did the planning with local residents, and there was a debate about a children’s play area in the middle of the square. In the end, it was decided collectively to put it in the middle; the local senior women say that when there is no noise that’s when the dealers appear, and so on.

All this also involved discussions about what public spaces mean to us, our relationships with our neighbourhoods, and the tensions between different uses of space. For me, managing conflict is eminently democratic – it’s where the visions of all of us meet that the city comes to life.

Innovation is generally the fruit of a blend of various inputs, which shift, hybridise, and cross-pollinate.

So you see yourself in a role of mediator, rather than coming down on the side of one plan or another?

Yes; there is even self-regulation of conflict. The work of the city’s stakeholders enables us to reframe the terms of discussions.

With participatory budgeting, the rules were a little stricter. Projects varied in size, and we mustn’t allow operating costs to outstrip start-up costs; we can’t support a project which would entail ever-increasing expenditure. So it is a matter of investment, which, naturally, needs to be maintained.

In the spring, you are welcoming an Assembly of the Commons, as part of the first Transition Towns Biennial gathering.  Is your ambition to be a model, or innovator for this movement?

I don’t know if we are as innovative as all that. It seems to me that innovation is generally the fruit of a blend of various inputs, which shift, hybridise, and cross-pollinate. So many things are springing up all over the place that being a model doesn’t mean very much. Simply to demonstrate consistency, rather than to be a blueprint, would be pretty good.

When considering all areas of our work, we have to think in intersectional terms. For example, measures to combat air pollution are social policies: l’INSERM (the National Institute for Health and Medical Research) has shown that in Grenoble, not only are there two deaths per week from polluted air, but that this mainly affects the poorest people. I like to use the image of sailing with a compass:  I tack into the wind, so that even if things are not exactly how I would like, we are all going in the right direction. The important thing is not to do anything which takes us backwards or in the wrong direction.

For example, the government’s environmental policies are mind-boggling: on the one hand they host COP21 and create a law on energy transition, and on the other, we have plans for more motorways, a new airport at Notre-Dame des Landes, a high-speed railway between Lyon and Turin, a nuclear programme, and so on. They set a course, yet all the while sending out strong signals that are not only out of line with it, but taking us in completely the wrong direction.  Consistency is essential for us to unite the forces which will carry society forward.

Conversely, does giving more power to citizens give local politics more consistency?

Well, it raises the question, anyway. The debate about advertising is interesting. When we decided to ban billboards, the vast majority of people were in favour.  99% of the feedback went from ‘we didn’t even think that was possible’, through to ‘we didn’t think that politicians had the power to make that sort of decision’ (which also gives people more confidence in political decision-making), to ‘that’s great – we are deluged with adverts, and I don’t want to see naked women, cars, and alcohol when I’m taking my children to school’. It was amazing; these reactions came from everyone: young, old, all political persuasions, from here and even around the world.

What appeals to me about the commons approach is that it brings together individual and public interest.  There is a third way.

Over time, with the difficulties of transition, cuts to funding from central government, and Grenoble’s financial situation, we have no choice but to impose pretty savage savings measures.  Several times a month I find myself with key people in culture or education who tell me to put the adverts back so we can have a bit more money for them.  I understand them, but there is a contradiction here: to have more money for education do you want me to stick up a massive billboard for Landrover because they would give us more money for exercise books?

This means local stakeholders have to think in a very broad way…

Beyond their own immediate interest, yes, certainly.

Does this consultative, or co-constructive, approach, in a very complicated budgetary context, also mean the processes are more accessible to people?

What appeals to me about the commons approach is that it brings together individual and public interest.  There is a third way. The general interest can sometimes be paralysing – there is a risk of being unfocused, saying we can’t do anything about anything because there is too much at stake everywhere, so we don’t know what to do about climate change, we become demoralised and end up doing nothing. It’s by working through the commons, this space where we come together in all our differences, that we get a sense of how our personal interests are part of a whole, and are not in opposition to the public interest.

Coming back to the commons, do your traffic policies chime with this thinking?

In the 1950s and 60s, we really designed our towns around cars, and since the 70s we have, little by little, tried to reclaim some of what we handed over to cars during that period, in a similar way to how we have tried to reclaim some of what we handed over to shopping malls in the 80s and 90s.  It’s a matter of seeing the car as a 10m² of private space, ‘squatting’ in public thoroughfares.

In real terms, what sort of feedback have you had for these policies?  Do local citizens understand that it’s best for everyone to travel by bicycle?

Yes and no – there’s a bit of everything!  Some, for example, say that if parking were free,

they would leave their car parked and take public transport. And this is also an opportunity for us all to learn from each other. Here in Grenoble in 2012 there were already 35% of households which didn’t have a car, and it has progressed since then.

As for what we spend on cars in public spaces, we are realising that ultimately the local community is paying for something which only benefits a few people. Is that really what we want? The social pricing which we put in place for parking created howls of rage at the thought of price rises, but the first figures show that in fact, for 40% of people, it’s cheaper. To those for whom the price has gone up, I reply that local taxes are those that are the least linked to income.

We can also combine that with the particular situation in Grenoble, which is that the town spread in the 1950s and 1960s and the tax income from the more disadvantaged parts of town are greater than those of the wealthier areas.

There is also the element of gender, which is extremely interesting. If we are not careful, a town can become a town for men: fit, able-bodied, for whom the system works well. We must also consider the elderly, children, women, and so on.

In relation to the vote on social pricing for parking, how will you react if the majority of voters turns out to be against your proposal?

What interests me is bringing the debate to life.  In theory, that could be difficult; we are raising overall parking costs, so we could expect 90% of people will vote to scrap this consultation. However, we can also have an interesting debate with, for example, people who have private parking for their car and therefore don’t use public space; those whose cars are in public spaces but not in the city centre (where you have to pay), with the 40% who will pay less, and so on.  Will all those people join the debate and vote, or will it only be those who feel hard done by who will be mobilised? The debate continues, and in any case, I will accept the result.

Photo by gauthierchovin

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