Isaiah J. Poole: Communities can do more than just put a Band-Aid on the problem of gentrification and displacement, and a panel of researchers who held a forum at the Democracy Collaborative’s offices in Washington discussed the best thinking and work happening on both sides of the Atlantic to keep housing affordable for everyone.

In a panel entitled “The Politics of Land and Housing,” The Democracy Collaborative’s Jarrid Green and Peter Gowan were joined by Laurie Macfarlane, who is based in Edinburgh, Scotland and is co-author of The Economics of Land and Housing and editor of openDemocracy. (Watch the full panel discussion below.) Together, they discussed the financial-sector-driven processes that keep housing costs spiraling upward and how we can move toward a world in which housing is a social good for all rather than a profit center for a few.

“The place that we’ve landed in is suboptimal for a whole range of reasons, and inequality is growing between those who own property and those who don’t; those who are facing higher rents and higher costs versus those who are riding the wave of increasing asset prices,” Macfarlane said.

Macfarlane stressed that “there is no single-bullet solution to what we do about this,” but the two speakers that followed laid out a set of strategies that are beginning to bear fruit either inside or outside the United States.

Gowan drew a contrast between the housing market in Ireland, which mirrors the United States in that it is driven largely by borrowing and rent-seeking, and Austria, where 40 percent of the residents live in “social housing” that is publicly owned and regulated. While in Ireland housing prices soared in the early 2000s before entering a crash that paralleled the U.S. financial crash in 2008, Austrian housing prices have remained stable throughout the past 20 years. One reason, Gowan said, is the attraction of good-quality affordable social housing to middle-class as well as lower-income households, who therefore don’t feel compelled go to into 15-to-30-year-debt to buy a home.

To Gowan, Austria’s example suggests that the US should overcome the negative stereotype of “public housing.” He concedes “there were legitimate issues” with the low-income housing built in decades past, but “that’s not to say that we can’t do better in the future. It’s not to say we can’t have a democratic community- or publicly controlled housing sector that is racially integrated, socially just and fit for the future.”

Green discussed work he did with the Alliance for Housing Solutions to help community leaders in Alexandria, Va., just outside Washington, to grapple with a market that has become increasingly inhospitable for low-income people.

The set of solutions that are being discussed around community control of land and housing, through such strategies as community land trusts, limited equity co-ops, land banks, resident ownership communities and community benefit agreements – together make up less than one percent of the housing economy in the United States, Green said. “It’s a mix of things that are approved by voters at the ballot box as well as some things that agencies can do on their own” with state or local funding. The challenge is to scale-up these solutions in the midst of what is increasingly acknowledged as an affordable housing crisis.

The strategies to address gentrification and displacement discussed in this panel will be explored more deeply in a report by Green that the Democracy Collaborative plans to release in August.

Originally published on The Next System

Photo by Ted’s photos – For Me & You

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Michel Bauwens: Karl Polanyi, in his landmark book, ‘The Great Transformation’, famously posited the ‘double movement’ of industrial civilisations, characterized by periodic swings between liberal and more labour oriented periods, such as the welfare state model vs the neoliberal period. Yet, though the latter is in deep crisis, it is not very clear that there are workable alternatives at the nation-state level, that won’t be derailed by transnational capital movements and strikes. Perhaps this means that social movements need to radically re-orient themselves to translocal and trans-national solutions and create adequate counter-power at the appropriate level to counter the increasing corporate sovereignty of ‘netarchical capital’? Just as capitalism is moving from the commodity-labor form to commons-extraction, perhaps now is the time for commoners to practice reverse cooptation? As a case study, we will look at the situation of the thousands of cognitive workers living and working in the global capital of digital nomadic workers, Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, but also about the new solidarity mechanisms being developed by a new wave of labour mutuals (such as SMart) in old Europe, who are organizing solidarity mechanisms for autonomous workers. Reviewing the emergence of new trans-local and trans-national organized networks, including how the token economy is used by sectors of cognitive labor to reclaim surplus value from capital investors, we will inquire into potential alternatives at different scales of governance (urban, bio-regional, nation-state, and beyond).

Our review of the emerging answers will lead to the concept of the Partner State, i.e. a community-state form that enables and scales commons-based cooperation at all levels.

The annual conference of the European Artistic Research Network (EARN) will be hosted in 2018 by the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) and Dublin School of Creative Arts & Media (DSCA) at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT).

Key-note speakers include:

Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation); Conflict Kitchen – Dawn Weleski & Jon Rublin (artists); Bernard Stiegler (philosopher)

This two-day conference seeks to address the impact of contributory economies on tradi- tional understandings of the nation and state. Since the 2008 financial crisis, alterna- tive economies have been increasingly explored through digitally networked communities, artistic practice and activist strategies that endeavour to transgress traditional links between nation and economy. Developed at a crucial time on the island of Ireland when Brexit is set to redefine centre/margin relations the conference seeks to engage with a number of themes within this context: nation and inter-nation; the nation and aesthet- ics; art and economy; P2P networks; digital economies; modes of exchange and modes of production; alternative economies; network aesthetics; populism and counter populism; aesthetics and the imagination; activist practices; geo-politics; island, archipelago and continent; centre and margin.

The guiding concept of the conference ‘Inter-Nation’ comes from the work of anthro- pologist Marcel Mauss, who in ‘A Different Approach to Nationhood’ (1920) proposed an original understanding of both concepts that opposes traditional definitions of state and nationalism. More recently, Bernard Stiegler has revisited Mauss’s definition of In- ter-Nation as a broader concept in support of contributory economies emerging in digital culture. Contributory economies are those exchange networks and peer-to-peer communities that seek to challenge the dominant value system inherent to the nation-state. Such dig- ital networks have the potential to challenge traditional concepts of sovereignty and geo-politics through complex technological platforms. Central to these platforms are a broad understanding of technology beyond technical devices to include praxis-oriented processes and applied knowledges inherent to artistic forms of research. Similarly, due to the aesthetic function of the nation, artistic researchers are critically placed to engage with the multiple registers at play within this conference, and to address these issues through multiple forms as they play out live on this island.

Photo by bookgrl

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“I was in the forest today and I came out taller than the trees”

Karin Eyben, writing for Voluntary Art’s series on Cultural Commons, tells the story of Garvagh People’s Forest.

Karin Eyben: Garvagh (from Irish: Garbhach, meaning “rough place” or Garbhachadh meaning “rough field”) is a village in County Londonderry. It was developed in its current lay out by the Canning family in the 17^th Century following the 1640s rebellion with land confiscated by the Crown from the O’Cahans.

Garvagh once lay on the edges of the famous Glenconkeyne Forest which stretched from north-west from Lough Neagh, down the Bann valley, nearly to Coleraine, and across to the Sperrin mountains in the east. In 1607 this area was described by Sir John Davys, the Irish attorney-general, as “well-nigh as large as the New Forest in Hampshire and stored with the best timber in Ireland.” (Irish Woods Since Tudor Times, 1971). It formed in its day one of the biggest, and possibly the densest, oak forest in the country and became notorious for the hide out of the woodkernes; “a race of outlaws driven from their miserable dwellings by the Norman invaders, rarely emerging from their retreats in the impenetrable forests except in pursuit of plunder.”(http://www.clanmcshane.org/TheMacShanes.PDF) They became the most formidable enemies with which the first planters in Ulster had to contend with. By the end of the 17^th century the woods of south Derry had become mostly depleted with the woods exploited by the Crown with the timber used for casks, barrels, buildings and ships.

Garvagh Forest today is 600 acres and is a mix of broad leaf and conifer forest. From its more recent story as land ruled by different chieftains in Gaelic Ireland and managed through the Brehon laws, to private ownership through the Canning family who built the ‘big house’ in the forest to the state managed and owned from the 1950s as a commercial forest this small piece of land has evolved through different forms of ownership and management.

Understanding this history and the complexity of people’s relationship with the land and the forest is a key underpinning of the Garvagh People’s Forest project. The story of this project began with the closure of Garvagh High School (also sitting on the former Canning estate) in August 2013. There was significant level of community grief and anger at the time which was gradually shifted to exploring the potential of a community asset transfer of the land from the Department of Education to community management. The feasibility of this is still being explored. However, during this process, a new conversation began noticing the asset of the neighbouring forest and to what extent understanding the value of the forest could contribute to wider community well-being. A year was spent testing out different possibilities in the forest, led by Garvagh Development Trust (GDT), a local development trust, with the support of Corrymeela, such as creative community events and establishing a collaborative relationship with a number of local primary schools to explore the value of young people learning outside. This year established enough evidence to allow GDT to apply to the Big Lottery for five years funding to grow the project. We were successful in this bid with this new chapter of the story beginning in August 2017.

Garvagh People’s Forest (GPF) has as its mission to grow value in the forest with and for local people with a simple premise: time outside makes us feel better (if warmly dressed lol) and when we feel better we are in a better place to do interesting things for ourselves and with others. We have five strands to the project:

1. Developing a Forest School in collaboration with six local primary schools and three pre-schools with the ambition of increasing the time young people learn and create outside; this includes growing the skills and confidence of local educators in connecting young people to the outdoors;
2. An adult education programme, ‘classes in the forest’, where people with skills give time to share and teach those skills with others. For example, we have just completed a 5 week Unplugged in Garvagh Forest course teaching basic woodworking skills using reclaimed wood and making useful household items; this has led to the opening up of our Library of Tools & Forest Resources;
3. Growing community with imagination – this focuses on using the forest for community events that invite people to look at the world around them differently in the medium of the forest. We are currently planning a Time Travel Festival for the first weekend in August exploring the layered histories of the Garvagh area through an interactive adventure and challenge from Mesolithic Times to the Future through different sites in the forest;
4. Contributing to greater physical and mental well-being framing this work through 5 Indicators of Well Being: Notice; Learn; Give; Move; Connect.
5. Reflection, Learning, Evaluation, Community and Advocacy.

Garvagh Forest is already well loved by individual walkers, mountain bikers and families. Garvagh People’s Forest is building on these relationships with an invitation to shift from individual connections to exploring the potential of collaboration across individuals and local groups potentially sharing if not shifting the sense of ownership and responsibility with the Forest Service, local government and the State. Our dream is that by the end of five years there is a community-led integrated plan for Garvagh Forest informed by understanding of how the forest works, its biodiversity, social and commercial interests and most importantly that the forest is understood, shaped and used by local people through activity contributing to wider common good.

So how does Garvagh People’s Forest fit into the ‘cultural commoning’ movement? The initial decision that began the project was a small act of creative courage as it was driven by intuition as opposed to any evidence. The intuition was that the forest is a key aspect of shared cultural heritage and well-being and that so much more value could grow from people’s relationship with the forest and the local environment if we worked collectively. The forest offers a difference space and tangible focal point for all kinds of commoning work as well as giving value to the work that is happening across Garvagh. We also firmly believe that the sharing of responsibility and ownership of the forest will be better for people, the environment and the place of Garvagh.

We have recently crowd-funded for the purchase of nine Lost Words Books by Robert McFarlane and Jackie Morris for Garvagh Forest schools. All over these islands, there are words disappearing from children’s lives. Words like Otter, Bramble, Acorn, Dandelion, Bluebell are gone from many dictionaries disconnecting young people from the heritage, history and landscape around them. The loss of words is the loss of a relationship and the loss of the art of noticing and learning from our natural world and understanding our place within it.

We hope that the next year we can shape our programme of work and activities in the Forest recovering the words that have been lost to the people around it.

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Photo by stevecadman

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