“I’ve lived in six places in five years,” one mother living in substandard private rented accommodation told me. “I am not happy because I can’t give my daughter the stability she needs while she does her GCSEs.” She showed me a box of anti-depressant pills. “And this is what they give me. I just want a place where I can raise my daughter.”

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a lack of social rented homes and falling home-ownership has forced more low-income families with children into the private rented sector. The proportion of children in the poorest fifth of the population living in the private rented sector has more than doubled to 36%. Many Londoners see no way out of their precarious and poor conditions except by leaving London. Of those who can’t or won’t leave, many shrug in despair and accept the situation. 

A collective response begins

But another pattern is also emerging across the city: someone is in distress with their housing, but rather than suffering alone, suddenly there are others around them, human blockades, collective lobbies working in their favour, campaigns emerging to address the systemic problems. London Renters Union has arrived.

Arthur had been trying to get repairs done on his flat for months when the renters union showed up at his door. “They said, if I have a problem come to a meeting,” he recalls. “That’s when I came to the union. I went to the meeting and told my story.” With the intervention of London Renters Union the necessary work got done within days. “I’d been through hell. I tried to get help from my doctors, councillor and MP – they couldn’t do anything. I didn’t have money for a solicitor,” Arthur says. “You need a union to be successful – they’ll fight for you.”

While the union takes on some individual cases, the point is to bring out the commonalities among renters so they can fight together. Many renters feel too isolated to go up against a landlord who holds all the power. Without support they bear the burden alone of the stress and insecurity that comes from a conflict with a person or agency who can make them homeless. The renters union aims to build support between members in order to create the confidence to take action. As one LRU member put it, “I thought it was just me struggling in this block. Then I got the renters union leaflet through my door and I realised it was everyone.”

London Renters Union’s membership is now over a thousand, and it could be one of the most significant new housing organisations for a generation. Several years in gestation, it is a product of other organisations already involved in housing struggles. “Organising locally as renters had taken us only so far.” says Heather Kennedy, one of those on the initial steering group for the project. “Our members got evicted and priced out to other bits of London all the time, and lots of the problems we face can’t be fixed by the local council. We needed something bigger and stronger, that could bring renters together across london to stand up to the power landlords wield over us.”

A new strategy

London-wide there are many organisations focused on defending social housing from attacks by governments national and local. It is a vital and necessary struggle, and a key front in the battle against housing as a commodity, but all the while the number of private renters has been growing, from the bottom of the market as social housing is lost, and in the middle of the market as buying became more unaffordable. The few organisations addressing private rental issues were struggling to make an impact.

London Renters Union saw the need for a London-wide organisation focused on renters, but don’t claim to solve the problems alone. lRU is part of the movement ecology of housing organisations from which they emerged, and solidarity between organisations as a key part of building a successful movement to confront the housing crisis.

Not only have private renters been growing in number but they have also borne the full brunt of decades of bad housing policy in the UK. When London Renters Union meets new members the same problems appear again and again: poor repair and no way to seek redress, rents too high, bad and even illegal behaviour by landlords, exploitation by letting agents, arbitrary evictions. Sometimes the union might simply help a member with advice, or help write a letter to a landlord. Sometimes members have participated in simple but impactful collective visits to the office of their letting agents: once an agent knows the member has back-up they are usually quick to realise they must do the repairs needed to make a home decent. 

Evictions are particularly difficult to resist in the UK, where, unlike some other countries, bailiffs can return again and again until they succeed. But London Renters Union turned out early one morning when bailiffs were due at a members’ house. Alongside other local people they formed human barricades at the front and rear of the property. When the bailiffs arrived they saw the people and renters union banners, and drove off without even getting out the car. The action bought the member precious time to find another place to live. Other landlords, say union activists, have called off illegal evictions at the mere mention of the union’s name. 

Talking about these victories is important to the union. Meetings aim to be inspiring and participatory, not just about dry administrative tasks or voting on position statements. Celebrating successes creates positive, sociable and accessible spaces in which members support each other. The everyday work of running local branches such as writing meeting agendas still has to be done, but it is shared between members as much as possible, ensuring nobody gets caught up in only doing the admin.

London Renters Union describes itself as a fighting union and a campaigning union. It wants not only to defend individual members, but also to change the landscape of housing. Demands that most housing charities consider radical are just the beginning for the union: rent controls, an end to arbitrary evictions, forcing landlords to take tenants on welfare. “We aim to mobilise our members to transform the housing system in the UK,” said Jacob Wills, a member of the coordinating group. But that doesn’t preclude joining more immediate campaigns, such as the campaign to End Section 21 with their partner organisation Generation Rent. Campaigning pressure from housing organisations recently forced the government to scrap Section 21, which had permitted ‘no fault’ evictions – a sign of the movement’s growing influence.

Long term transformation

The aims of the LRU include organising their membership into a radical fighting body. “Education is a really key idea in the union,” says Heather Kennedy. “We are providing training to all of our members so that we can all learn together how to fight for change.” As the union sees it, skilling up all members – not just a few – to take on leadership roles is key to building a truly mass housing movement in London. Not everyone who joins the union will from the outset sees their housing problems as political, but the union is determined to expose the politics of housing for all to see, and to show that it is possible to fight for change. 

The union is also democratic, and that means training people to be in control. Branches are designed to be largely autonomous, and the coordinating group of the union is elected by members for only six months at a time. Policy and demands can be made by members at democratic general meetings. The union aims not just to build a housing movement but also to create a legacy for London: large numbers of people who know how to act together.

It is still at the beginning of its journey: it has three branches and is focused on building them slowly and surely before creating new ones. “LRU has to reflect the diversity of this city to be successful.” said Jacob Wills. “realistically it’s those most affected by housing injustices who are going to see the changes needed and win them.” This means the union sees recruiting on the street and in existing community organisations as essential to ensure that the organisation doesn’t get stuck at the level of recruiting the usual activists.

While driven mostly by volunteer work, the founders also decided that it would need paid staff to operate at scale. From two staff at present, the union plans to grow its paid staff in 2019. While taking money from funding organisations, it is also asking for membership fees so that it can begin to self-fund its expansion. At the recent Labour Party conference the party pledged  to fund independent renters unions if they get into office.

As the plight of renters becomes more stark, the union are happy to have some policy-makers onside, but they don’t want to be reliant on politicians. “Our union is all about building skills, agency and strong community between renters,” said Heather Kennedy. “Building durable supportive relationships with one another is how we can take on the landlords, developers and politicians we’re up against. We see this as a long term project to build community, as part of building our capacity to fight.”

The ultimate goal of the London Renters Union is to ensure that everyone can have a decent home, to turn anger and frustration at the housing system into systemic change. It is an aim both simple and ambitious, and the members know that to succeed they must help promote the demand that housing should exist to serve people, not be a mere commodity. Just as importantly, they know that for long-term success, the union must continue to build the ability of exploited communities to fight for themselves. 

Republished from Tribune Magazine

The post Organising for the right to housing in London appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Saturday 13 October: 11.00-18.00

Register Here.

What to expect

In his book ‘Tools for Conviviality’ (1973), the late Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich argued that the nature of modern ‘tools’, from machines to schools, had the effect of making people dependent and undermined their own natural abilities. What he called “convivial tools” were those that encouraged people to think for themselves and be more socially engaged.

Convivial Tools is a programme of talks, debates and workshops exploring new strategies for a more cooperative society. Using Ivan Illich’s concept of “conviviality”, it will bring together designers, artists, media theorists, curators, and social thinkers from diverse fields to examine current tools and technologies that encourage alternative modes of production and social relations.

Working together with those in the cooperatives movement – which includes economists, technologists, philosophers, sociologists and proactive citizens – the programme will explore whether they can help to create what Illich would call a convivial society.

Speakers include; John Thackara, Eleanor Saitta, Joseph Rykwert, Ben Vickers, Torange Khonsari, Adam Greenfield, Ben Terrett, Sarah T Gold, Dougald Hine, and many more…

Photo by P. Marioné

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Hosted at London South Bank University (@LSBU), 6th Oct., by Prof. Ros Wade (@RosWade1).

Filmed by Jeremy Williams (@jeremy_willaims) of www.makewealthhistory.org.

Event organised by Gudrun Freese (@doshorts) from www.dosustainability.com.

Visit Postgrowth.org.

Photo by Medieval Karl

The post The Not-for-Profit World Our Hearts Know is Possible appeared first on P2P Foundation.

LAUNCHING FOR ADMISSION SEPTEMBER 2018
MA: Design for Cultural Commons – The Cass (London Metropolitan University)

Although a movement and a model of practice there are few courses dedicated to the Commons and even fewer for Cultural Commons. This course is not only to reward you with a post graduate qualification but also to support the movement of the commons through expanding its practitioners and its network. The course is 1 year full time and 2 years part-time (the part-time route allows you to work to earn money and set up your future organisation)

What are Commons and why relevant today:

The Commons discourse is informed by ideas, which have been around for hundreds of years. In current context of much inequality, the Commons discourse offers alternatives and models of sharing. Commons are about the assets that everyone should have the right to, forming resources that should benefit all, rather than being enclosed to just a few.

What you achieve:

In this course you’ll learn how resources are shared, protected, reclaimed, created, governed, used and distributed without overuse and abuse.You will create and develop a live project (anything from a novel to a supermarket) for your new operating organisation. The organisation will be formed, it’s governance designed, its financial structure set out and all policies written using Commoning as a model.

You will gain expertise in applying creative thinking towards asset sharing, mutual resources, self-governance and peer to peer economic models. Collaborating with cultural institutions and government agencies which we will facilitate, will enable you to develop related policies, projects, collaborations and open up new networks to position your Commons organisation. In the UK, co-production is being referred to in some government policies and tenders and the commons have been discussed in policies in the EU parliament. Beyond teaching you to initiate your commons projects and practice, you’ll learn how to raise funds, and make your common sustainable in the long term. On completion of the course, students will have an operational practice/organisation. There will be an array of optional modules, ranging from comparative public policy to social theories and citizenship, micro-economies and digital media. This is complemented with art and design teaching, visual communication and performance to architecture and photography. There is the opportunity to tailor your learning and construct your own unique curriculum.

If you are interested in the MA or wish to join the mailing list for talks, events on Commons contact tDOTkhonsariATlondonmetDOTacDOTuk

Apply by following the link: http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/design-for-cultural-commons—ma/

The post Last Call: Applications due Sept 18! MA, Design for Cultural Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The idea of a rising ‘sharing economy’ is currently a hot topic in an international debate that builds on the emergence of peer-to-peer network exchanges that rely more on access than on property, on relations more than an appropriation,to call into question the sociological understanding of the relationship between the society and the market that goes back to authors such as Polanyi, Marx and Sombart.

The aim of this monograph is therefore to bring together a selection of contributions that will help identify the analytical categories and indicators needed to interpret this phenomenon from a sociological perspective on a global scale. Through a collection of original empirical research on this topic, from Western and non-Western contexts, by both established and junior scholars and experts, this monograph will make a pivotal contribution to the study of what themes, methods and issues characterise the rise of ‘sharing’ as a socio-economic model and a new frontier of sociological research. In particular, this monograph aims to answer the following questions: what do we mean with ‘sharing economy’? What kind of positive innovations or possible criticalities might this socio-economic model bring? Does ‘sharing’ really represent an alternative to capitalism, or an example of its transformation? In which areas, and how, is the way of doing business in society changing as a result of the diffusion of ‘sharing economies’?

Photo by Burns Library, Boston College

The post Essay of the Day: Unboxing the Sharing Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series of articles on the Urban Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 16 “Talk of the Town: Exploring the City in Europe”. In this instalment, Julia Toynbee Lagoutte and Samir Jeraj discuss housing rights in the UK.

The pitter patter of a keyboard hums in the dust-speckled London space. Two tattered sofas in the corner are dwarfed by 70 square metres of open office space. Matthew, a thirtysomething freelance documentary film-maker, is working from home. One floor down, along from an old reception area, is a makeshift kitchen shared with 12 other people. Matthew is a property guardian, one of many thousands living in European cities such as London. Property guardianship started out in the 1990s in the Netherlands as ‘Anti-Kraak’ (anti-squat), a way to counter squatting. The owner of a building would employ a company to manage the building until it was sold, demolished, or redeveloped. That company would find people – often students and artists who needed cheap living and working space – to live in the building for below market rents and very short-notice agreements. The building would remain occupied, and thus secured against squatting. Some of these companies are set up for the sole purpose of property guardianship while for others property guardianship is one option in their portfolio of security measures. These businesses have since spread from the Netherlands to other parts of Europe; industry pioneer Camelot Europe has offices in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, and France.

Whilst initially seen as a marginal and stopgap solution for students or artists, property guardianship in London and elsewhere has become increasingly normalised, formalised, and expensive. Amidst the largely positive press, criticisms from lawyers and guardians themselves have joined those of squatter and housing organisations, pointing out that the legal grey area guardians occupy – as neither security guards nor tenants – opens the door wide open to exploitation of this new class of ‘sub-tenants’. On top on this, this practice represents a symptom of a problem; a symptom that has managed to market itself as a solution.

Where are my rights?

Property guardians in the UK are legally classed as ‘licensees’, not tenants (they pay a ‘license fee’, rather than rent). They are not protected by tenant rights, such as those regarding privacy and tenure. The average contract between a guardian and the property guardianship company would include: the right for the company to visit all areas of the property at any time without warning; no pets or children (even to stay one night); no guests in the building without the guardian present. Some properties are not subject to HMO (houses of multiple occupancy) laws about about how many toilets and showers are needed for a certain number of people, for example*. In one old doctor’s surgery in South London, nine guardians shared one shower and one kitchen. Many properties don’t have internet or phone lines and often guardians are not allowed to install washing machines or ovens – the short notice period means this is often not worth the cost anyway. The deposit guardians have to give to their property guardianship company (up to 800 pounds) is not legally protected, and companies such as Camelot are notoriously bad at returning them. Initially, guardians were given as little as 24 hours to move out but this has increased to 28 days after lawyers highlighted this was not legal. Many contracts also prevent guardians from speaking to the media about their experience.

In order to legally protect themselves from having to provide tenants’ rights, property guardianship companies ensure guardians cannot claim ‘exclusive access to a space’, one of the key conditions of being a tenant. This they do through unannounced visits to the guardians’ rooms whenever they want, often once or twice a month. Mirela, a mental health nurse from Romania, explained, “I don’t feel comfortable with a stranger coming in my room and finding a note when I come back. Someone has been here. I feel like my space is invaded and also because I’m quite tidy I wouldn’t like people to know if I have clothes around. I’m paying, at least give me my privacy.”

Guardians are not protected from sudden rent hikes: one morning Matthew received an email informing him his monthly ‘fee’ would increase from 350 to 550 pounds the following month. Guardians have no idea whether they will stay 28 days or three years in a place. Alice, an archaeology graduate working in tourism, was given notice to leave within two weeks of moving into a new place, shouldering time and financial burdens that she could ill afford. The lack of security built into being a guardian affects their homemaking; they tend to make less effort or have less furniture and a more makeshift and temporary feeling leads to many never really feeling at home, even after years of inhabiting a place (especially knowing a stranger could enter at any moment). This is particularly visible in larger properties – such as ex-care homes or old office buildings – with locks on cupboards, new guardians coming and going without input from other residents, and the anonymous feel of a hostel.

Many guardians report feeling anxious about the possibility of having to move on and uncomfortable with the lack of privacy and rights. Alice remarked of living in a property guardianship that “I didn’t feel secure, I never felt stable.”

Pop-up people

Looking at the characteristics required of a guardian, we can begin to see how property guardianship represents an extension of deeper contemporary socio-economic trends into the area of housing. For the characteristics required of them – reliable, flexible, disposable – are also those of the growing group of people who make up what economist Guy Standing has dubbed the ‘precariat’. For this ‘class-in-the-making’, work is increasingly precarious, short-term, and flexible. The rise of zero-hour contracts exemplifies this: in the UK today there are 1.7 million zero-hour contracts, making up 6 per cent of all employment contracts. This is four times higher than in 2000.

This shift towards temporary jobs and being ‘independent contractors’ underpins what many have called the ‘sharing economy’ but in reality is better described by the term the ‘access economy’. This includes platforms that enable people to monetise temporary access to their assets – such as their property (Airbnb) or their cars (Uber and Lyft) – and platforms that just connect service users with service providers, such as Deliveroo. Property guardianship as a platform linking service users with service providers to extract money from the use of temporarily empty properties, and the provision of this service by people on insecure and right-less contracts, is the epitome of these processes. It is a new manifestation of these under-the-surface dynamics that foster ever more imaginative efforts to bring new areas into the market and extract profit from them; bringing it to a level at which even the spaces in between the owner’s usage – when assets are apparently unused – can be used to extract money. In a new twist, guardians also pay for the privilege of providing the service of guarding properties.

The rights of the ‘pop-up people’ who maintain these new structures have been watered down if not dissolved. Just as guardians don’t have tenants’ rights, Uber drivers or Deliveroo couriers as independent contractors shoulder the financial investments and risks of their trade and don’t have rights such as sick pay or insurance. Just as Uber doesn’t have the responsibilities towards its drivers that taxi companies do towards theirs, property guardianship companies do not have the same obligations towards their guardians as a landlady towards her tenants.

What this represents in the broader picture is the creation of new structures of work and living which appear the same as before, but lack the same rights and protection and require a huge level of flexibility and insecurity of the person providing the service. Property guardianship represents the creeping of these processes of flexibilisation, precarity, and decreased rights into the new area of housing. In this scheme, which seems more emblematic of neoliberal logics the more one learns about it, housing becomes a by-product of providing a service, not a right. These pop-up people are also commodified as products as well as service users: guardians’ bodies are effectively replacing infrastructure (security companies would previously have boarded up the buildings and installed CCTV). Guardians like Matthew, Alice, and Mirela are also products marketed to property owners; “we provide reliable and trustworthy guardians”, as Ad Hoc Property Guardians company boasts. Guardians often have to provide references and, in some cases, proof of a social conscience and willingness to invest in the local community (such as with Dotdotdot Property Guardians).

Whose city?

More than most cities in Europe, London shows us how extreme the housing crisis can get. Private renters there spend around 70 per cent of their income on rent, sterile luxury developments are being built in areas once known for being affordable and vibrant, and social housing is being demolished and neglected, and replaced with private housing – with young professionals displacing working-class people who are pushed further and further out. Property guardianship plays a role in facilitating this.

Research by Green London Assembly Member Sian Berry found that 24 out of London’s 32 local governments were using property guardians in their empty properties, with over 1,000 people in over 200 publicly-owned buildings in 2016. East London’s iconic social housing building, Balfron Tower, was recently transferred to a housing association. Since its social residents were moved out in 2014 for so-called ‘refurbishments’ guardians have lived there, and the housing association has now announced it will be renovating the flats with a property developer and selling them on the private market. By preventing neglect and squatting for years, property guardians unwittingly – for they are victims of these same processes – played a role in facilitating its passing from public to private hands, easing the process by allowing the housing association to sit on it without doing anything for several years.

This is actively encouraged by the state – through recent legal changes such as criminalising squatting in residential properties and loosening regulations about changing a building’s use from commercial to residential (to let guardians stay there), as well as the deregulation of the housing market that started under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Almost all properties managed by property guardianship company Ad Hoc are in council-owned estates. Property guardianship also obscures and normalises the fact that there are so many empty houses in cities like London, private as well as council-owned, that have been emptied of residents in order to sell to private developers.

The point here is that property guardianship is not a natural and inevitable consequence of market forces in which people who need housing fit neatly into naturally empty spaces, but is part of a wider process where buildings that are in use are emptied of their residents and turned into vehicles for monumental levels of profit. Its increasing profitability is due to state intervention in some areas – in supporting property owners in extracting more rent from their properties – and the withdrawal of state intervention in others, when it comes to ensuring affordability and protection for tenants.

Whilst some guardians liked the idea of living in large and unusual spaces, most we spoke to were motivated by the high cost of renting. In this situation, renters in London are forced to trade in rights and security by becoming guardians for rents they can afford. And whilst the state is the main engineer of this process, the winners are private actors and companies for whom the London housing market is an increasingly lucrative cash cow – whether by buying up London’s public housing stock and turning it into unaffordable private accommodation or now through property guardianship (Camelot Europe having a yearly turnover of five to six million pounds). This slow takeover of publicly-owned properties and assets by private actors, supported by the state, is a classic feature of neoliberalism and bears out Naomi Klein’s argument that neoliberalism, rather than weakening the state, is highly dependent on it.

Confusing symptom with solution

Property guardianship is a symptom of London’s broken housing market – but its appearance as a win-win solution which both solves the blight of empty properties and provides cheap housing means it is confused by many with the solution. It thus obscures the extent of the problem and provides an excuse for politicians not to act. Owning empty property used to incur costs, but now it is increasingly profitable, and this will surely have an effect on property owners, just as research has shown that Airbnb drives up property prices. Whilst reinforcing the narrative that the ‘invisible hand of the market’ will eventually sort out all problems, property guardianship is actually state-led and it is part of the problem, not the solution – not only that, but it contributes to it, by normalising corporate control of housing, lower tenant rights, and insecurity, by easing the process of gentrification, and masking the extent of the problem. It is a new way of extracting rent from properties, exploiting people like Mirela, Alice, and Matthew’s desperate need for housing in London.

When David Harvey, in his seminal book Rebel Cities, wrote about the city as the factory for a new type of class struggle that would birth real revolutionary movements, he argued that it was against new types of urban rent extraction and human desperation such as property guardianship that these movements would arise. This edition explores how cities foster new forms of political and social experiments – yet these cannot be understood without identifying what they are reacting against. And whilst a key characteristic of the ‘precariat’ – and of guardians – is being fragmented, dispersed, and not rooted anywhere, which makes it harder to organise and demand their rights, groups of urban precariat workers, such as Deliveroo couriers and Uber drivers, are starting to stand up for their rights, as are guardians such as Rex Duis who has published a charter for property guardianship companies.

A recent court case in the British city of Bristol has called into question whether property guardianship will continue in the UK. Regardless of the outcome, this practice has exposed certain processes at play within European cities, such as the tendency to put the needs of corporate actors before even something as basic as the right to decent housing. It raises questions about urban space: how are neoliberal economic processes reshaping and curtailing people’s access to urban space, and how can this access be safeguarded? What will happen to the already feeble political will to solve the deep yet politically resolvable housing crisis of London and other European cities if the expansion of property guardianship is seen as a viable alternative? Instead of being a solution, property guardianship must be a catalyst to examine and respond to the worsening crisis it springs from.

*This article was updated on the 31st January 2018 to reflect new information.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 5th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by diamond geezer

The post Guardians of the Property: Pop-up Housing for Pop-up People appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The School for Civic Action in collaboration with Commons Rising are inviting commons initiatives and commoners to come together to initiate a UK wide Commons Assembly. This is an open platform to meet others, exchange knowledge and to see if there is an appetite for an ongoing UK Commons Assembly.

The Commons discourse is informed by an idea, which has been around for hundreds of years. In a contemporary context of much inequality, the Commons discourse introduces models of sharing. The Commons are about the assets that belong to everyone, forming resources that should benefit all, rather than being enclosed to just a few.

The aim of the day is to put on an exhibition showing the wealth of Commons projects happening in the UK. There will be discussions as well as workshops to inform the public about the commons. It is also an opportunity to vision how the commons might work beyond the individual projects and to set up practical outcomes going forwards.

You will see commons initiatives from each of the following areas Health, Food production, Food distribution, Housing, Economy/Money, Energy, Culture, Waste, Commons Law and Charters, Digital Commons, Governance of the Commons, Land use/ownership, Transport and Technology.

The ambition of this event is to continue beyond this event in formats decided by the participants and contributors on the day.

Register through Eventbrite

@publicworksuk Facebook

Programme PDF:

Uk Commons Assembly_tate Exchange Programme by P2P Foundation on Scribd

The post UK Commons Assembly, School for Civic Action, 20th July 2018 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

London Renters Union is starting up with the aim of transforming the housing system in London. In particular it wants to make life less terrible for those who have to rent privately in one of the most absurd and brutal housing markets in the world. The renters union is a way of saying ‘no’ to rents that damage our quality of life, to evictions at the drop of a hat, to abusive landlords, to slum conditions in one of the richest cities in the world. We are stating that people should have more control over their housing than this, and we are willing to fight for it.

The birth of the union

It began with the coming together of organisations. After decades of absurd and damaging economic and housing policies creating a ‘housing crisis’, many organisations had sprang up across London to fight for better housing. Some of the people involved in existing housing struggles began to see a need for a new organisation, one focused on the private rented sector, designed from scratch to be a mass-membership London-wide organisation with a stomach for a fight.

An initial steering group for the project was made up of representatives from existing organisations, all experienced activists. After some initial groundwork the group opened out to other people. It attracted first other experienced activists, then more and more people new to political organising. The need for a renters union in London is so clear that recruitment among the politically aware is almost effortless. But in order to expand, and in order to create a truly broad and diverse membership base, we had to go out and begin talking to those outside of our usual circles.

First though, we had a lot of planning to do. Starting a truly mass-based democratic membership organisation is, it turns out, tricky. One of the difficulties is that not many people in the UK have done such a thing recently. There isn’t a long history or extensive experience to draw upon. Instead we had to refer to, for example, the co-operative sector, in order to come up with a formal constitution. For the organising we wanted to do we had to draw on the few groups in London that have really tried organising from scratch and at scale. As for how to run large membership organisations, we had to learn about organising in other countries, primarily the US and Spain. Such a large project always has ancestry, and London Renters Union has international roots.

Then there were the meetings. You cannot set up a small organisation without meetings. You cannot set up a big organisation without a lot of meetings, or not if you want to be democratic. The way we organised together was important to us: we do not want to organise on behalf of other people, we want to organise together with each other. This requires, besides people’s time, space to meet in a city where nearly every inch is exploited to the max. We have drawn on nearly every radical organising space in London at some point in our formation. Resources put together when the renters union was not yet dreamt of were happy to accommodate us. The level of understanding extended to us by other organisations has been a joy to experience.

A union needs people

Not only space has been made available: advice and expertise has poured in from so many organisations that it would be difficult to list them all. When we have felt stretched to the limit people with experience in other organisations have joined us. We have recruited amazing paid staff with years of experience in other political projects. The impossibility of the London housing market draws people in, and so does the ambition of the renters union. It sometimes feels as though there is a collective wish among organisations and individuals to create a new grassroots force against the London housing market. It needn’t necessarily be a force called the London Renters Union, but many people see in us a chance to create something big and powerful in opposition to the rule of landlords and investors.

Having built the framework of an organisation, we went out and began meeting individuals on the doorstep and on the street, starting in the borough of Newham. We confronted people with a request to join an organisation of mutual aid, different even to the unions they might join at work, more democratic, more led by the members. The novelty of the request often surprises people, but there is also widespread agreement that the situation of private renters in London should be improved.

One of the big factors that determines whether or not people join the union is whether they believe that action they can take is able to improve the situation. Part of the renters union’s task, it turns out, is to create a collective self-belief, to challenge the depression and lassitude into which many people have fallen, beaten down by the market and the authorities. It is heartening to watch people move from conviction that nothing can change to conviction that they can make change. Hope is one of the most beautiful things the union can offer, but it also sets up a strong expectation – as does asking for membership fees. It feels like there is no choice now, having drawn so many people into a commitment and a promise. We have to make it work.

The union is relationships

What does it mean to make the union work? We are just at the beginning and will launch a London-wide membership drive this summer, so this is still an open question. Of course we want to make renting in London less awful, we want to see changes in law, changes in culture, changes in political attitudes, we want to question even the notion of renting. But it has become clear that this starts somewhere more basic: with the way people relate to each other. As the union has grown I have met people I do not normally meet, I have started to develop relationships of solidarity with those beyond my circles of friends. This can be difficult and demanding. Where are the boundaries when a tenant you are organising with calls you up on a holiday to ask you to solve a problem in which you have no expertise? I won’t say I always feel relaxed about these new relationships, but I’m happy to be exploring them; it is part of the work we want to do against the atomising housing market.

To build a union then is to draw on all the resources that other people and organisations offer up, but it is also to build new bonds, to replace relationships of commerce or convention with relationships that bind us together in order to increase our own power. The housing system is the obvious battleground, but the other battle is against alienation and resignation in a city so difficult and lonely for so many. We all live in London; in order to take control of the housing system we are pooling our knowledge and our resources and learning to live in London together.

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LAUNCHING FOR ADMISSION SEPTEMBER 2018
MA: Design for Cultural Commons – The Cass (London Metropolitan University)

Although a movement and a model of practice there are few courses dedicated to the Commons and even fewer for Cultural Commons. This course is not only to reward you with a post graduate qualification but also to support the movement of the commons through expanding its practitioners and its network. The course is 1 year full time and 2 years part-time (the part-time route allows you to work to earn money and set up your future organisation)

What are Commons and why relevant today:

The Commons discourse is informed by ideas, which have been around for hundreds of years. In current context of much inequality, the Commons discourse offers alternatives and models of sharing. Commons are about the assets that everyone should have the right to, forming resources that should benefit all, rather than being enclosed to just a few.

What you achieve:

In this course you’ll learn how resources are shared, protected, reclaimed, created, governed, used and distributed without overuse and abuse.You will create and develop a live project (anything from a novel to a supermarket) for your new operating organisation. The organisation will be formed, it’s governance designed, its financial structure set out and all policies written using Commoning as a model.

You will gain expertise in applying creative thinking towards asset sharing, mutual resources, self-governance and peer to peer economic models. Collaborating with cultural institutions and government agencies which we will facilitate, will enable you to develop related policies, projects, collaborations and open up new networks to position your Commons organisation. In the UK, co-production is being referred to in some government policies and tenders and the commons have been discussed in policies in the EU parliament. Beyond teaching you to initiate your commons projects and practice, you’ll learn how to raise funds, and make your common sustainable in the long term. On completion of the course, students will have an operational practice/organisation. There will be an array of optional modules, ranging from comparative public policy to social theories and citizenship, micro-economies and digital media. This is complemented with art and design teaching, visual communication and performance to architecture and photography. There is the opportunity to tailor your learning and construct your own unique curriculum.

If you are interested in the MA or wish to join the mailing list for talks, events on Commons contact tDOTkhonsariATlondonmetDOTacDOTuk

Apply by following the link: http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/design-for-cultural-commons—ma/

The post Apply Now for Sept 18! MA: Design for Cultural Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It all began when my good friend Roxana Bacian felt stuck in our jobs and started having regular conversations about the kind of learning and development we wanted to participate in – and couldn’t find!

We wanted learning that was first and foremost a social experience. We wanted something that was affordable, flexible and wouldn’t lag behind the workplace. We wanted something that reflected values of cooperation and sharing. And finally, we wanted something with a bit of magic to it.

So we set out to create the thing we couldn’t find, learning as we went about how to make it possible. What we developed was a 6 month learning accelerator called the Learning Marathon which is self-directed and fully peer-to-peer (by which I mean there are no teachers, lecturers or trainers other than the peers themselves). We both participated in our pilot, and now I continue to offer the service. Enrol Yourself  brings groups of 10–12 people together to pool their resources, skills, creativity and enthusiasm, each working toward an outcome they couldn’t achieve alone, guided by their personal Learning Question. By synchronising their learning and development they make it more effective, deeper, and much more fun.

Enrol Yourself is an ongoing enquiry into how groups of people can turn to one other to produce powerful learning experiences outside of institutions and traditional formats. We base our activity on the assumption that there is enough experience, wisdom and creativity within groups of ‘ordinary’ adults to make this possible. We’re exploring how this assumption within adult education might empower people at the individual level, and contribute to a collective consciousness shift at the societal level.

The future of work (not to mention global challenges) seems set to demand more frequent and ongoing learning and development from adults. Our goal is to build a community-led model to make this possible. We’re piloting a distributed approach to growth whereby we ‘train the trainers’, facilitators who initiate peer learning communities where they are. Our facilitators are currently looking for pioneering participants in Glasgow, Birmingham and London.

I’m an avid reader of the P2P Foundation blog and have found the principles really helpful as Enrol Yourself has developed, a checklist for whether we’re embodying the values we intend to. So, how are we applying P2P and commons based approaches? Here are some reflections.

1. Information and other commons

Each peer group we connect creates an information commons, both amongst themselves but also drawing on the ever expanding information commons online. And it’s not just a commons of knowledge but a commons of vulnerability and experience that we aim to facilitate. We do this by encouraging peer groups to expose their thinking, their self-limiting beliefs and their ideas to the group as they go. The value of commoning such things within the group is to create a very safe space in which risks that would usually seem out of the question can be taken. Commoning the process of learning as well as the content also leads to a unique opportunity to develop ‘metacognition’ which means awareness and understanding of the learning process itself. Demand for this ‘skill’ is on the rise in the workplace as employers increasingly prize adaptability over prior experience which can be dated.

Placing support in the commons, rather than awarding it by merit, is another concerted effort that we make. I’ve written previously about the value of unconditional support for adults, and how rare and valuable a commodity it is, not just for learning outcomes but for wellbeing outcomes too. Our next step is to figure out how we can common publicly more of what we common within peer groups. This is a challenge for a small team with limited resources, but a live question for us nonetheless.

Market and state should be servants of civil society, not the other way round

Education has always had a crucial role in strengthening the will of people against (near) unstoppable market forces. Today this is more important than ever. Worryingly, in the UK participation in adult learning is actually declining. We can see in stats that show numbers of mature students have plummeted by more than half since 2011. Workplace training is declining too, and the self-employed population, who have no formal learning and development provision, is on the increase.  It generally follows that he who funds something gets to dictate the agenda. Which can be seen as a strong argument in favour of independent and autonomous learning spaces. Of course it is crucially important that learning connect to the requirements of the world of work: vocational is essential. But so is learning that doesn’t serve commercial, capitalist agendas. For civil society to take more power into its hands, instead of watching as it slips through our metaphorical fingers, we need a multitude of independent spaces within which people and communities can craft their own agendas, gaining purpose and resolve as well as skills.

Preparing for a consciousness shift toward networked participation

Participation is by nature a two-way, or multi-way process. It is not as simple as our governing bodies opening the participatory ‘floodgates’. For participation to be a positive thing, the quality of participation on both sides must be high. If our societal and global challenges necessitate an increasingly participatory and cooperative existence (debate whether this is the case separately!), then it follows that we must learn in this way too. We will need to be adept at accessing the knowledge, resources and support we require through networks, rather than through the one source, one teacher, one voice that we’re used to. What we lose in simplicity and ease of navigation we gain back in cooperative and collaborative skills, collectively setting us up for a brighter future.By nature participation requires compromise. On an individual level this can feel very ugly, damaging our egos who scream that their identities are being compromised by this new way of doing things! But the ugly compromises can give life to a new consciousness, more fit for the reality of the 21st Century. It is the role of educational structures, Enrol Yourself included, to make spaces for and support people to make these transitions which can be painful but ultimately rewarding.

A move toward work as creative expression

Maybe a future where everyone can earn a living doing what they love is now inevitable. Maybe it’s as much a utopian pipe dream as it always has been. Or perhaps the truth is that there is simply a wider divide between those for whom it is an inevitability, and for those for don’t have the option.

Whatever the reality, the process of mainstreaming purpose, creativity and problem solving as the heart of education and learning is very much underway the world over. I see this as a hugely positive thing, an energy that can resist opposing forces that would see all education as vocational. But we do need to be careful about creating a sense of entitlement, an expectation that work is the space in which everyone will continue their creative journey. For the majority this is not the case, but this doesn’t have to mean they must all surrender their dreams and grow no further. Enrol Yourself is designed to integrate alongside working life. We aim to help people to carve space in their lives for personal development and creative expression, regardless of how they make their living.

• Applications are open in London, Birmingham and Glasgow. Find out more and sign up.
• We’re accepting expressions of interest from folk who’d like to participate in an online version of the Learning Marathon.
• We always love to hear from peers and potential collaborators, you can reach us here: [email protected]
• Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Medium and Facebook.

The post Enrol Yourself! An Experiment in Using P2P and Commons-based Approaches to Reimagine Lifelong Learning appeared first on P2P Foundation.