The legal right to ramble stems from the Charter of the Forest, the 1217 social compact grudgingly ratified by King John that formally recognized commoners’ rights of access to the forest. The right was part of a larger constellation of rights won by commoners after their long struggle with the Crown over who shall have access to the forest – only the King and his lords and retainers, or ordinary people, too?

Because of the right to ramble, a sprawling network of paths evolved in Great Britain over the centuries, bringing together villages, roads, farms, and natural landmarks throughout the landscape. The pathways were once regarded as vital infrastructure for commerce, social tradition, and everyday convenience. Now the pathways are mostly seen as a beloved cultural heritage and recreational commons. Millions of people roam the pathways every year. 

Like so many social limitations on private private property, however, people forget about what belongs to them – while property owners are ever-alert to the prospect of expanding their rights. Many modern-day property owners in England and Wales despise the right to ramble because it limits, however marginally, their absolute, exclusive control of the land. 

In 2000, property owners prevailed upon the British Parliament to terminate the ancient right to ramble unless a given pathway has been formally mapped and officially recognized. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act set a deadline for such mapping: January 1, 2026. (Parliament originally set a ten-year deadline.) After 2026, unmapped historic pathways will revert to private property and the public right to ramble on such lands will expire forever.

To counter this threat, the Ramblers – a long-time association of walking enthusiasts dedicated to the sense of freedom and benefits that come from being outdoors on foot” — has organized a campaign, Don’t Lose Your Way, along with a guidebook for ramblers, “Protect Where You Love to Walk.” The goal: to help a small army of volunteers map all of the pathways in England and Wales by 2026, and in so doing, keep them available to commoners.

This task is difficult because some historic pathways may not exist on any contemporary maps. Many pathways are known only through informal, customary use.Their very existence is known because one generation introduces the next generation to the joy of walking them. The official maps made by local authorities may or may not recognize the paths, and newer maps may omit older, less-used paths. Sometimes unscrupulous landowners have actually altered pathways to discourage people from using them, or to eradicate local memory of them.

The Ramblers say that identifying and verifying the existence of many pathways really requires a “systemic trawling through archives.” There is no other way to be definitive. But this task is plainly impractical. Chances are good that some pathways will be overlooked and lost to private enclosure. 

But Brits have a history of standing up for their “right to roam.” In a still-remembered episode in 1932, there was a mass trespass on the mountain area known as Kinder Scout — a deliberate act of civil disobedience by hundreds — to protest the lack of access to open countryside in England and Wales.

The mapping requirement by Parliament reminds me of other enclosures in modern life. Think how Indians (on the subcontinent) have had to document the medicinal value of hundreds of traditional plants and herbal medicines in order to keep them available to all.Without such documentation, transnational pharmaceutical companies could patent traditional medicines that have been freely used for centuries. Without affirmative evidence marshaled by commoners — the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library — Big Pharma could claim private, proprietary control over the biowealth of the commons.

I am also reminded of the way that the music industry used copyright law to privatize the commercial use of the 1858 song “Happy Birthday.” Another example of how the culture of commoning is an irresistible target for private commercialization. (Happily, a US federal court declared the copyright of “Happy Birthday” to be invalid in 2016.)

It is encouraging to know that the Ramblers and their allies are on the case. Their campaign to map English and Welsh walking trails serves as another reminder that the rights of commoners cannot be taken for granted. They must be secured through hard work and struggle.

The post A Looming Deadline for the Right to Ramble appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Dirk Holemans et a. Oikos, 2018: In order to find responses to current societal challenges, citizens increasingly take control, including in the form of citizen collectives that produce goods or services themselves, usually as a quest towards a more sustainable alternative. With the support of the King Baudouin Foundation and in the context of its Observatory of Associations and Foundations (Observatorium van Verenigingen en Stichtingen), Oikos think tank carried out the first research on these collectives throughout the country: who facilitates them, how important are they and how do they position themselves among other actors in society such as the classic civil society, governments and companies? With a desk study, a survey and in-depth interviews, Oikos mapped citizens’ collectives established in 2015 and 2016.

Increasing number of establishments

In 2015 and 2016, 249 citizen collectives in Belgium were launched spread over the entire country (map available). 127 among them answered the survey and 106 (48 from Flanders, 36 from Wallonia and 22 from Brussels) completed questionnaires were included in the analysis (21 respondents were found not to comply with the definition or were not established during the study period). Of those 106, most are active in areas such as food, agriculture, energy, social inclusion and the sharing economy; more than half classifies their activity under the label ‘environment and sustainability’ (graph available).

This is the first comprehensive investigation for the French-speaking citizen collectives. On the Dutch-speaking side, Oikos, on the other hand, has historical figures from 2004 onwards (graph available), indicating that 2009 was a turning point : the number of establishments has grown strongly ever since and nothing points to a stagnation of this growth.

What is a citizen collective?

Not all activities that citizens organize together are citizen collectives. A neighborhood barbecue or a temporary action group against logging is not. Then what is? Some elements are necessary to be able to speak of a citizen collective:

• to meet local needs, with the aim of long-term structural results;
• the members take control of the production / execution of the goods or services themselves (although sometimes it is possible to call on paid (service) suppliers);
• citizens are the promoters and determine who belongs to the group, and who can use or manage the resources, goods or services;
  the members have a say in the form, the organization and the action lines for the future;

A few examples: with a social grocery, cooperative library of things, or community supported agriculture where consumers are closely connected to a farmer and are committed to reducing production, or even participating in the harvest.

Pioneers: highly educated working M/F/X in their thirties and forties

Citizen collectives are largely the work of 25- to 45-year-olds, and the real pioneers are usually 36 to 45 years (graph available). Young people and seniors are hardly represented. There is a balance in the participation of women and men, and single people, cohabitants and married couples are fairly equal (graph available).

Among the pioneers in citizen collectives, highly educated people are strongly overrepresented: 86.3% have at least a Bachelor’s degree (graph available– compared to 45.6% of the population aged between 30 and 34 years according to Statbel’s figures). Most pioneers (84.8%) combine their engagement with a job (of whom four out of ten half-time).

53.7% of the respondents are politically engaged. Half of the respondents (48.6%) estimate that the political preference of the pioneers of their citizens’ collective is left on the political spectrum (graph available).

Relationship with government and industry: a healthy distance

Most citizen collectives (58%) are self-sufficient. 78% came about without public participation. But they think a good relationship with the government is important (80%). Approximately 1 in 3 consults with the municipal authorities about the activities and services they offer. The relationship with the (local) government does not always go smoothly: some are satisfied (“the city made our operations possible”), others less (“we mainly got headwinds”).

According to a minority (16.8%) of the citizen collectives, companies see them as competitors. They themselves see their own role in relation to the business sector as additional (in Wallonia), cooperative (in Brussels), or innovative (in the three regions). (graph available).

Little inclusive

The sectors in which they operate show that citizen collectives often strive for a more sustainable society. They inspire other actors from industry, government and civil society. Partly because of their urge for proximity and small scale in their approach, they still play a modest role as an alternative to production and / or consumption,  alongside those (more) dominant actors.

If citizen collectives really strive for a sustainable and inclusive society, then consideration must be given to ways of involving disadvantaged citizens in this citizens’ movement.

Photo by European Parliament

Photo by European Parliament

The post When citizens take matters into their own hands: a closer look at citizen collectives established in 2015 and 2016 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Photo by LaertesCTB

The post Open 2018 – Mapping the cooperative / solidarity economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There are also some great shared notes which were made during this session. The mapping project is one of our key projects at The Open Co-op so please get in touch if you want more information, or to collaborate.

Photo by glennshootspeople

The post Open 2018: Mapping the Coop Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Giulia Spinaci: Commons have turned to be notorious only in recent times, but since they have timidly appeared, there has been literally an explosion of articles, studies and experiments of governance of the commons on field.

When a new phenomenon is taken into consideration, usually, one of the first things to do is its analysis: of its characteristics, of the possible implications and, obviously, its geographical distribution. Since ancient times, the explanatory power of maps has always been extremely helpful in both academic and professional sectors, because of the immediacy of the images in transmitting a message.
The daily routine does not always allow to be aware of what surrounds us and sometimes, we need active and passionate citizens to remind us of it. This is even truer when it comes to the commons. In this sense, a map might be even more powerful than usual, since it helps displaying the richness of a country in terms of places, monuments, traditions and experiments of governance of the commons.
Across Europe and the world, many countries already assimilated this lesson and a lot of associations and organizations produced wonderful maps, offering a glimpse of their variegated national heritage.

The case of “Mapping the Commons.net” is exemplary, because of the transnational nature of the investigation. Through a series of workshops and after a thorough analysis of the parameters to be considered and of the commons to be included, this project elaborated a total of six maps of the commons in as many cities in the world: Athens, Istanbul, Rio De Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Quito. The philosophical and theoretical work behind these maps is huge. The map represents the ultimate effort of a sequential process that starts from the definition of the word “common” and passes through the study of the cultural and historical background of each city. In the end, “Mapping the Commons.net” won the Elinor Ostrom Award for research and social intervention linked to the Commons, on the category “Conceptual Approaches on the commons”: a formal recognition for this extraordinary work.

When it comes to Italy, it is a different story. A widespread culture on the commons has developed later than the other European countries and generally, than the rest of the world. Consequently, mapping the Italian commons is only a recent achievement. The attempt made by Zappata Romana is noteworthy, but limited in space (it covers only the city of Rome) and only green spaces are taken into consideration. Another map is the one provided by UNESCO, which on the one hand has the virtue of listing intangible benefits (local traditions), while on the other it obviously lacks a comprehensive classification of all the on-field experiments of governance, by marking only the artistic and archeological sites. We might enumerate all the mapping attempts in Italy. Still, there is not an exhaustive map of the commons and maybe there will never be, given the great variety of the commons.

With the willingness of bridging the gap, LabGov’s latest efforts dealt with this: mapping the Italian urban and natural commons, both the material and the intangible ones, also with an insight of the consolidated governance approaches and of the ongoing experiments on field.

Let us start with the definition of the commons: commons are goods, tangible, intangible and digital, that citizens and the Administration, also through participative and deliberative procedures, recognize to be functional to the individual and collective wellbeing, activating themselves towards them pursuant to article 118, par. 4, of the Italian Constitution, to share the responsibility with the Administration to care or regenerate them in order to improve their public use That being stated, it has been quite easy making a list of the numerous (almost infinite) commons in Italy.
The map distinguishes the various categories with different marks and the classification includes the UNESCO material and intangible sites, the cooperative communities, the consumer cooperatives (water and electricity), but it also offers an updated list of the cities that approved the Bologna Regulation and of the ongoing projects of LabGov. The spatial distribution is homogeneous, even if the consumer cooperatives are concentrated in Northern Italy, for obvious physical characteristics, since they deal with water resources.

Being the project ongoing, the map will never be definitive. Still, it preserves the evocative power typical of images, through the transmission of a message of cooperation in the care and regeneration of the commons.

Photo by RikyUnreal

The post Mapping the Italian Urban and Natural Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Shanna Hanbury: In the face of poor public services and high rates of assault and violence, how can women help each other heal and deal with the aftermath of traumatic events? A small team spread out across Rio De Janeiro, Recife, and São Paulo in Brazil, is betting on solidarity and sorority to build a firm nation-wide network of support and care called Mapa do Acolhimento. Roughly translated to the Map of Support and Care, this platform connects survivors of domestic and sexual violence with immediate and free access to mental health and legal services. The project has over 600 volunteer therapists and lawyers and another 2,000 collaborators.

In 2016, the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl shook the country and prompted a small group of women to sit down and talk. Isabel Albuquerque, the coordinator of the map, remembers the feeling at the time: “There was a lot of frustration, a feeling that what we were doing was not enough. We had been involved with gender issues in public policy making — but what is the point if women are still suffering from violence and are still going through the pain?”

The legal and psychological services have proven extremely useful and successful, and the map is working on expanding to all Brazilian states and using their extensive network of volunteers to reach more women. Outreach is one of the bigger challenges. Only a year and a half in, 414 at-risk women have sought help. However, there are more than 600 volunteer therapists and lawyers. “We know that the women that most suffer from violence have a specific demographic profile: peripheral, black and young,” Albuquerque says. “One of our biggest concerns is not managing to reach the people that most need it.”

Brazil has some of the world’s more rigorous laws against domestic violence. The Maria da Penha law, named after a woman who fought a seven-year legal battle to put her abusive husband behind bars after two homicide attempts that left her paraplegic increased the punishment for offenders and created specialized police stations and shelters for survivors.

Despite the progressive measures, the numbers are alarming. A recent study by the Public Security Forum showed that 9 percent of women in Brazil have been physically attacked, and 29 percent have been verbally, sexually or physically assaulted – 35 percent by romantic partners. That adds up to over 10 million women. However, in the same year, only 140,350 cases of violence against women were reported. Two thirds of these cases were committed by men who were husbands, boyfriends, lovers, or ex-partners of the victims, according to Brazilian government figures.

In 2017, the project launched a collective financing campaign in order to hire a team and expand the scope of the Map’s work. The campaign spread like wildfire on social media, shared by several high profile women, including famous actresses. Their first year has been a success, but the issue of keeping the project financially viable is a concern for the long-term. The priority now is to make sure there are people available to support these women in every part of Brazil.

Header photo of the Mapa do Acolhimento team by Shanna Hanbury

The post This collaborative mapping platform in Brazil connects survivors of violence with support services appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Buying food is part of everyday life, and seems a normal way to gain access to food. In contrast, food sharing as a means to secure sustenance is somewhat less common in developed cities, at least beyond our friends and family. However, sharing is a fundamental form of cooperation that existed in human societies long before the supermarket. Over the last few years, with the rise in awareness of food waste and its environmental implications as well as emerging discourses around a “sharing economy”, there has been renewed interest in food sharing practices and particularly the role that information and communication technologies (ICT) can play in extending the spaces and sites in which food sharing can take place.

Such ICT-mediated food sharing initiatives hold many promises, not least reducing food waste, increasing food security and forging new social relationships, but do they deliver on such promises? Up until now there have been no inventories of food sharing activities that could answer this question, but the European Research Council project SHARECITY is seeking to change all this. Examining the practices and potential impacts of initiatives that use ICT to facilitate sharing beyond friends and family networks, researchers have produced a useful typology of food sharing for any city willing to map existing sharing activities within its territory and an interactive open access database – the SHARECITY100 Database – of more than 4000 initiatives across 100 cities around the world.

In a new publication the researchers explore the characteristics of these food sharing initiatives with the goal of making them more visible to stakeholders keen to support the development of more sustainable urban food systems; a fundamental pre-requisite for understanding what they do and the impacts they create.

Food sharing is not only about food

The SHARECITY team analysed what was shared in these initiatives. Food, of course, comes first. This can take several forms, from the unfortunately all too familiar features of emergency food relief such as soup kitchens and food banks (where food is given or sold at a very low price to lower-income households) to novel Apps that share the location of untapped urban harvests or connect people who want to experience new food cultures, share meals and meet new people.

The redistribution of surplus food is at the core of many food sharing initiatives (although not all). New technologies have allowed new initiatives in this space to emerge, such as FoodCloud, which is a web platform matching businesses with surplus food to local charities and community groups in Ireland and the UK.

Technologies have also made often informal practices of gleaning and foraging easier, as they enable information (about places where food may be found, for instance) to circulate amongst a greater amount of people. However, whether this leads to more sustainable food systems is not clear with fears around over-exploitation of our urban food resources.

Interestingly, the initiatives gathered by the researchers showed that food sharing was not only about the material ‘stuff’ of food. Initiatives are also often involved in a great array of interactions such as:

• Sharing spaces and kitchen devices: some initiatives pool common resources in the preparation of food. For instance, Capital Kitchens in Austin (USA), provides commercial co-working spaces with a commitment to zero waste. Meanwhile, in Portland (USA), Kitchen Share provides a public library of kitchen utensils that “strives to build community through the sharing of tools, traditions, skills and food”. It aims to be a place where community members can borrow equipment and share in the joy of processing, preserving, and serving food.
• Sharing knowledge and skills. For instance, The People’s Kitchen in Detroit (USA) aims at sharing cooking skills (making cheese, preserving food, etc.) and at enabling people to cook together. Community kitchens, which can, for instance, teach children to cook healthy meals, are also a way to bring people together around food. Falling Fruit, provides a global, collaboratively developed map of urban harvests. The map already points to over a half million food sources.

Analysis of the database showed that initiatives usually share several things, with more than half sharing some kind of knowledge or skills beyond food items.

Therefore, this project unveils the breadth of this “sharing infrastructure” that enables urban dwellers to access food or food-related activities beyond mainstream monetary exchanges.

Gifting, bartering, selling, collecting

Echoing the diversity of what is shared is that of how sharing is taking place. This can take four main forms:

• Gifting: i.e. giving without expecting a return. Researchers found that nearly half of the initiatives they surveyed had adopted this form of sharing. Gifting is about giving food, but also peoples’ time, for instance when people volunteer in food surplus redistribution.
• Bartering: i.e. exchanging food or food-related items against other good and services, without the use of money. This encompasses, for example, the time given by collective food buying groups participants to work on the farmer’s land or by people involved in community supermarkets.
• Selling: some initiatives sell food with the goal of making a profit, while others adopt a not-for-profit model that still involves monetary exchange.
• Collecting: e. gleaning, skip-surfing and dumpster diving

How are new technologies affecting this sharing infrastructure? They can allow organisations to extend their activities, for example to reach more people, quicker through their website or to recruit participants (through Facebook events, newsletters etc.). ICT are also allowing specific, “online only” services through Apps. Only 10% of the initiatives identified were Apps, but given the recent development of this particular on-line technology this is clearly an emergent slice of the food sharing sector. Two-thirds of the Apps identified were for profit, making them very much part of the emergent “sharing economy”. One explanation for the decision to opt for a for-profit model in these cases could be that such hi-tech start-ups require considerable up-front investment to be developed, or it could be that the initiatives have fundamentally different value systems. However, there also are examples of non-for profit Apps. A good example is the Byhøst App in Copenhagen (Denmark) that supports urban foraging. Whether such for-profit food sharing activities will experience similar challenges as other sectors of the for-profit sharing economy certainly needs further examination.

Towards a food-sharing ecosystem?

The SHARECITY100 database provides an important landscape level view of the food sharing in cities and to complement this the team have recently completed in-depth ethnographic data collection with thirty-eight initiatives in nine case study cities. Their next step is to interrogate the current goals and reported impacts of these initiatives and begin the process of co-designing a toolkit to encourage greater transparency around the sustainability potential of ICT-mediated food sharing initiatives.

However, according to Anna Davies, who is leading the project, some advice can already be provided to cities willing to give more space to sharing in their food policies:

• First, cities can map existing initiatives on their territory. This creates greater visibility of activities and it can also identify opportunities for new sharing initiatives to be developed.
• Second, city managers could think about how such initiatives could be better connected into a food-sharing ecosystem to optimise their impacts. There is scope for creativity! For instance, Anna Davies could well see how an equivalent of the League of Urban Canners, a Boston-based organisation that harvest fruit from private yards to make jams and preserves, could complement FoodCloud’s activities in Ireland if it were to reach limits in its capacity to redistribute fresh food with a limited shelf-life.
• Third, city managers could learn from successful food sharing cities. Some cities have a high rate of food sharing per capita, pointing to local environments that are more supportive to food sharing, and this suggests a key role for local authorities. Cities can look at the SHARECITY database for inspiration.
• And finally, the SHARECITY project will produce a tool for initiatives, and cities that work with them, to improve the assessment and communication of their impact. A Beta version of the tool will be available in 2019.

THE SHARECITY PROJECT

“SHARECITY: The practice and sustainability of urban food sharing” is an Horizon 2020 research project (Project Number: 646883) and an affiliated project of the Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production Knowledge Action Network (SSCP KAN) of Future Earth.

Its objectives are to establish the significance and potential of food sharing economies to transform cities onto more sustainable pathways the project by:

• Developing deeper theoretical understanding of contemporary food sharing
• Generating comparative international empirical data about food sharing activities within cities
• Assessing the impact of food sharing activities
• Exploring how food sharing in cities might evolve in the future

The project has also developed the first, international an open-access interactive database of more than 4000 food sharing initiatives from across 100 cities around the world providing a platform to inspire new initiatives, to foster learning between initiatives and to  begin the process of classifying and categorising different practices; a fundamental pre-requisite to conducting any impact analysis.

A Special Issue documenting the findings from the case studies will be published in the journal Geoforum in 2018.

City officials can get in touch to share their experience about working with food sharing initiatives.

 More information at:

http://sharecity.ie/

Albane GASPARD – January 2018

NB: the author would like to thank Anna Davies for her inputs and comments.

Source: Davies, A. , Edwards, F. Marovelli, B., Morrow, O. Rut, M., Weymes, M. (2017), “Making visible: Interrogating the performance of food sharing across 100 urban areas”, Geoforum, Vol. 86, pp. 136-149

DOWNLOAD THIS ARTICLE as PDF

Photo by lynn dombrowski

The post The diversity of food sharing in the city appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The map’s creators say they envision an equitable distribution of land and resources in the country. According to the nonprofit Urban Institute, the wealth of White families was seven times greater than that of Black families in 2016.

The following article was written by Jean Willoughby and originally published by YES! magazine

Jean Willoughby: Last month, Dallas Robinson received an email from someone she didn’t know, asking if she would be open to receiving a large sum of money—with no strings attached. For once, it wasn’t spam. She hit reply.

Robinson is a beginning farmer with experience in organic agriculture, and has had plans to establish the Harriet Tubman Freedom Farm on 10 acres of family land near her home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Located in an area where the poverty rate hovers at nearly 20 percent, according to census data, and where both food insecurity and obesity rates are even higher, the farm will focus on serving the needs of the surrounding community by producing vegetables, herbs, and mushrooms.

The gift from the stranger arrived thanks to a new online map, the Black-Indigenous Farmers Reparations Map, a project to promote “people-to-people” reparations.

Robinson’s project was the first to be fully funded, says Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm, which created the map. Penniman credits Viviana Moreno, a farmer from Chicago, for suggesting the idea.

“This past summer at our Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion program, we were all talking about two farms given by White people to farmers of color as examples of reparations and restoration, and Viviana said we need more of this people-to-people giving,” she says. Moreno’s own Catatumbo Cooperative Farm is listed on the map, and as a fellow graduate of the program, Robinson was invited to list her farm. The map now includes more than 40 projects, which are all directly connected to farming organizations led by people of color.

The map’s creators say they envision an equitable distribution of land and resources in the country. According to the nonprofit Urban Institute, the wealth of White families was seven times greater than that of Black families in 2016. Penniman cites data from the USDA Census, which show that about 95 percent of farms are operated by White farmers.

“This map will catalyze the voluntary transfer of land and resources to people of color as a means to rectify this injustice,” she says.

Robinson says that she’s eager to connect with those who’ve contributed to her project.

“The person who wrote to me, Douglass DeCandia, mentioned hearing me speak at the keynote that Mark Bittman gave at the Young Farmers Conference and at the group dialogue that happened afterward,” Robinson recalls, referring to the conference that was held in December. DeCandia wrote that he would be honored to support her project.

“I started crying,” Robinson says. “Then I wrote back and said, ‘Yes, please,’ and sent my information.” Within days, she received a check for all that she had asked for in her listing.

Now she wants to know more about what moved DeCandia to give. “Because,” she says, “there are millions of people who don’t understand that so many of us, especially young people, are struggling.”

DeCandia says it started with a question posed at the conference: “How do you hold yourself accountable to communities of color and vulnerable communities?”

Both Robinson and DeCandia were in the audience at the conference, at Stone Barns Center in New York, where chef and educator Nadine Nelson directed this question to Bittman, author and former New York Times food columnist. Noting that Bittman spoke often about racism and sexism in the food system, Nelson said she wanted to know what he was doing to hold himself personally accountable.

At first Bittman responded only with “fair enough,” then sat in silence until Nelson asked if he was going to answer, to which he replied that he didn’t know what “hold yourself accountable means.”

It was after listening to this tense exchange that Robinson addressed the room: “Your dismissal was hurtful. It was enraging,” she said. “Y’all don’t listen to us.” She also offered her support to Black people and other people of color in the audience.

“I really wanted to say to Black people: ‘I got us.’”

Robinson explains that several White speakers, Bittman included, had been saying things like “we’re all friends here,” “we should be grateful to be here,” ignoring the racial dynamic of what happened.

But, Robinson says, “accountability means that we listen to each other. Friendship is about being able to have hard conversations together.”

Nelson’s question at Stone Barns has led to such conversations taking place with more urgency and resolve among communities of color and White people.

“Nadine putting her neck out like that and getting ignored led to about 30–40 White people coming together afterward and asking what they could do,” Robinson says.

Two offshoot groups formed, with people of color meeting to discuss their frustrations and needs, and White people gathering to create a list of resources they could share, “a reparations list.”

“That was a powerful moment,” DeCandia says. “As a White, cisgendered, middle-class male, I’ve been asking myself how I’m actually holding myself accountable.”

Since the event, he says, he’s started asking that question of others—at work, the farmers market, and at home. He and others in his community have also used video of the Nelson–Bittman exchange as a teaching tool.

When a friend sent him the Black-Indigenous Farmers Reparations Map, it reignited the question he’d been asking himself.

“I opened the map, and the first project I saw was the Harriet Tubman Freedom Farm,” he says.

The combination of the Stone Barns incident and the reparations map has given DeCandia a new framework for understanding accountability.

“I realized I have to start mobilizing in White communities, my family, my friends,” he says, “and doing that in direct accountability with folks who are most impacted, meeting stated needs rather than creating some idea in my head about who needs what and what needs to be done.”

Several articles have been published since the Stone Barns conference, and the National Black Food & Justice Alliance responded with a statement echoing the need for accountability.

Bittman apologized on Twitter, and Nelson says that he has also reached out to her personally.

But she would still like for him to respond to her question.

“He should also ask his contemporaries: Michael Pollan, Anna Lappé, Tom Colicchio, and others,” Nelson says. “He could do a roundtable, a podcast, whatever works. I want him to dig in and help present the responses.”

In sum, Nelson wants Bittman to organize in his community among his peers.

As for herself, Nelson was inspired by what happened. She recently launched “Stir the Pot,” a series of community cooking and conversation events. Hosted in collaboration with the New Haven Food Policy Council, each gathering uses an essay from Julia Turshen’s Feed The Resistance as a starting point for conversation. Nelson sees it as a model other communities can borrow.

“This is an isolating field to be Black, young, and gay in,” Robinson says, speaking of her farming experience. “If you’re a male farmer, you’ve got more people to identify with. If I want to find women or people of color to learn from or work for, it’s harder.”

She hopes that will change with her Harriet Tubman Freedom Farm, which she envisions as a place of cultural connection, drawing on what she describes as a transformative experience she had training at Soul Fire Farm.

“We learned about the agricultural geniuses that our ancestors were,” she said. “Farming is part of our culture.”

As for Soul Fire Farm, they’ve just given the country at least one way to resolve a $6.4 trillion debt to Black America.

If Black people had been paid for their agricultural labor, rather than enslaved, today they would have at least that much in the bank. For those unfamiliar with reparations math, that’s the lowest major estimate. It was originally made by Martin Luther King Jr., who calculated that $20 per week since the late 1700s for 4 million slaves would total $800 billion, about $6.4 trillion today.

Along with people-to-people reparations, Penniman says, creating equity in the food system will take social movements, better farm policies, and legislation like H.R. 40, a bill introduced repeatedly by Rep. John Conyers since 1989 to research the impact of slavery and discrimination in order to “recommend appropriate remedies.” She says that the new map complements a larger effort coordinated by the National Black Food & Justice Alliance to promote reparations.

Such efforts will require answering difficult questions, but at least asking them acknowledges their importance.

“Because of Nadine’s question,” Robinson says, “I was able to get all that I asked for, because of her belief in the importance of asking this question.” She also gained something intangible, a sense of connection.

“We went through something together. We all got closer and got to experience some healing as Black people.”

About Jean Willoughby

Jean is a writer and film/video producer. She co-wrote and produced the documentary film Under Contract: Farmers and the Fine Print (2017). Her latest book is Nature’s Remedies: An Illustrated Guide to Healing Herbs (Chronicle Books, 2016). Her writing has been published in Food Tank, MAKE: Magazine (online), and The New Farmer’s Almanac. Follow her on Twitter @jean_willo.

The post A Digital Map Leads to Reparations for Black and Indigenous Farmers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This site is about foraging in the city. It promotes the idea that cities can become edible. That edible cities are a commons that all urban actors should strive to produce together.

Adrien Labaeye is taking the lead on this great new initiative dedicated to foraging and the urban food commons. The following texts are extracted from the Edible Cities website. which, among other things, features best practices, maps and resources.

Edible Cities Manifesto

We citizens of the cities claim the right to feed ourselves and find medicine from the urban landscape;

We call the city our garden;

We are aware that while foraging people reconnect with their food, its origins, its seasonality, and shape in nature;

We dream of growing edibles everywhere in the city;

We plant and disperse seeds without waiting for a public administration to tell us so;

We care for the edibles we feed from;

We pay attention to local regulations that protect sensitive areas and endangered species;

We are generally against commercial urban foraging (picking to sell) unless its for the common good;

We demand cities free of soil and air contamination, and free from any fertilizers and pesticides;

We share the knowledge of plants with everyone who is genuinely interested;

We find peace and comfort among nature, we honour and show gratitude to the plants and trees;

We respect the claims of all living creatures, human and non-human, to feed from plants and trees, but see the claim for life of any plant and tree superior;

We are part of nature, we are nature.

Edible Cities Resources

Resources. It lists various resources that are useful to learn about foraging: links, books, etc.

Maps. It provides an introduction to all the maps that can be used for foraging.

Manifesto. This is a manifesto of a group of committed foragers outlining what urban foraging can do to cities and the people who live there.

Good practice. This is a collection of principles on how to be a conscious forager.

The Edible Cities Indicator. It introduces the concept that the edibility of a city can be a good indicator of how sustainable a city is. Contact us to know more.

The post Urban foraging: Commoning the edible city appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The maps serve many purposes at once. They help amass new groups of commoners by giving them shared digital platforms. As the maps become dense with user-contributed information, they show the growth of horizontal, participatory power, especially in reclaiming rights to manage shared resources. These resources include everything from valuable urban spaces and lakes to fruit orchards accessible to anyone, environmental projects and hackerspaces. The many maps depicting commons and people-centered economic projects tell the story of communities rejecting the status quo, reconnecting with the places they inhabit, and creating a renaissance through new relationships.

Below, we describe some of the more notable projects that map commons. (A complete list of maps and weblinks is included below.)

A significant number of mapping projects focus on urban commons. Mapping The Commons(.net), founded in 2010, uses an open-workshop process to ask people to identify important common assets in their cities. Developed by principal investigator Pablo de Soto in conjunction with local research fellows, the Mapping the Commons workshop methodology has been used in Athens, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, Quito and Grande Vittoria. Workshop participants describe their relationship to each city’s commons and name the unique natural resources, cultural treasures, public spaces, digital commons and social actions that matter to them. Short videos are then produced and overlaid on an online map of the city. De Soto’s paper, “Mapping the Urban Commons: A Parametric & Audiovisual Method,” received the Elinor Ostrom award in 2013 in the category of “Conceptual Approaches on the Commons.”

Italians are forging some of the most innovative projects. World of Commons is a map that identifies forms of collective governance that constitute “best practices” for a variety of resources such as housing, public space, pastures, forests, and lands that have been treated as common property since medieval times. The project was created by LabGov, the LABoratory for the GOVernance of Commons in Rome, which itself is a collaboration between Labsus (Laboratory for Subsidiarity) and LUISS Guido Carli Department of Political Science. LabGov is attempting to develop experts on commons govern­ance and new institutional forms. To promote its ideas, LabGov offers a series of educational workshops in partnership with the cities of Rome, Bologna, Taranto, and the province of Mantua. The Bologna Lab has been particularly focused on developing new types of collaborative governance for urban commons. It has mounted a campaign to bring the principle of “horizontal subsidiarity” to Italian cities as a way to give citizens a constitutional right to participate directly in all levels of government.

Another mapping project in Italy is Mapping the Commons(.org) – unrelated to the Pablo de Soto venture of the same name. The mapping initiative was part of the initial unMonastery project launched in Matera in early 2014. The unMonastery is a social commune that is trying to help communities suffering from unemployment, empty buildings and a lack of social services.¹ The project engages skilled people and local citizens in a collaborative process to develop innovative solutions. Mapping the region’s cultural assets, local traditions, knowledge and stories are used to assist this process.

The Great Lakes Commons Map is unique in its focus on a bioregional ecosystem. The map was launched in May 2012 by Paul Baines, a teacher in Toronto, during a multicity educational tour organized by the Council of Canadians, an activist group that focuses on water as a commons. The Great Lakes Commons is a collaborative effort among many groups – including the Council of Canadians, On The Commons, indigenous peoples, municipalities, and urban and rural citizens – to create effective stewardship and governance of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Commons Map invites people to tell their own stories of personal experience and community healing and environmental harm at various locations around the lakes. The map includes lively videos and narratives as well as map layers that identify the locations of First Nations, pipelines and bottled water permits as well as supporters of the Great Lakes Commons Charter. The map is itself a commons in several respects: its stories and data come from people who love the Great Lakes, the map is shareable under a Creative Commons license, and the map platform is powered by Ushahidi, an open-source crisis mapping platform.

The P2PValue project maps a wide variety of digital projects created through Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP), which is a form of online social collaboration among large numbers of people in producing valuable information and physical products. P2PValue was created by a consortium of six academic partners to support the creation of public policies that benefit the commons.² P2PValue has identified over 300 CBPP projects from which it has identified best practices and favorable conditions for horizontal collaborative creations. Because digital commons as artifacts of cyberspace cannot be mapped geographically, P2PValue’s projects are listed in a searchable directory. The project is open to public contributions, and all project data and source code are freely available.

Some mapping projects focus on resources and organizational forms in the “new economy” and solidarity economy. Shareable and its global Sharing Cities Network have hosted dozens of “mapjams” in 2013 and 2014 to bring together urban commoners to compile notable sharing projects. The mapjams produced more than seventy urban maps that identify local coops, commons, public resources, and sharing-oriented platforms and organizations. Shareable cofounder Neal Gorenflo says, “Taking stock of your resources is frequently a precursor to action. Such maps indicate an intention, change the mindset of participants, and are a practical organizing tool.”

The focus of Vivir Bien’s mapping project is the solidarity economy and a variety of noncapitalist, not-for-profit initiatives and organizations. Founded in Vienna in 2010 by the Critical and Solidarity University (KriSU), the Vivir Bien mapping project has a European focus. The project website is Creative Commons licensed and utilizes OpenStreetMap.

The explosion of new mapping projects is itself creating new challenges that are currently being addressed. One of the most remarkable is surely TransforMap, which emerged in early 2014 from a collaboration of programmers and various people developing alternatives to the prevailing economic model in Germany and Austria. They concluded that all the maps being created need a common digital space. So they began working on an open taxonomy based on the criteria of human needs, which can be used globally. The global mapping process is guided by the motto: “There are many alternatives. We make them visible.” TransforMap is intended to make it just as easy for people to locate the closest place for sharing, exchanging, or giving things away in their own neighborhood as it is to find the nearest supermarket. Standardizing the datasets – a mid-term goal – will make it possible to amalgamate data from various existing maps into a single, open and free map, most of which will be made available on OpenStreetMap.

CommonsScope is a project of CommonSpark, a Texas-based nonprofit. CommonsScope features several collections of maps and visualizations about commons and common-pool resources. The website is a portal to several hundred commons-related maps including ones focused on food, community land trusts, social movements, public assets, indigenous cultures and sharing cities. Some of the more notable maps of specialized concerns include FallingFruit (a global map identifying 786,000 locations of forageable food), a map of Free Little Libraries (free books available in neighborhoods around the world), a global Hackerspace map, a global Seed Map, a map of all Transition communities, and several Community Land Trust directory maps. CommonsScope also features in-depth profiles for existing commons projects. The TransforMap initiative and the P2P Foundation also steward large collections of commons and new economy maps.

Thanks to many enterprising cartographers, a growing universe of commons and new economy maps is helping people see and reclaim all sorts of resources that have been systematically destroyed by colonial and capitalist cultures. The maps are also helping people create new forms of community self-governance and increase awareness of commons stewardship. Taken together, these maps tell the big story of this historic moment – how system-change originating from the grassroots is radically altering civilization from one that exalts private wealth to one where wealth is shared. The maps are far-seeing tools that empower us with the means to accelerate the emergence of a just and thriving world.

Ellen Friedman (USA) is project lead and founder at CommonSpark. Her work as an activist and professional counselor focuses on individual and collective wellness and liberation.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources. 

Photo by rvacapinta

The post Patterns of Commoning: Mapping Our Shared Wealth: The Cartography of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.