Cities have been caught in the middle of a clash: they are stuck competing for business investments while, simultaneously, seeking to meet the needs of their inhabitants through access to public goods and social services. For this reason, there is no surprise in seeing two opposite trends growing globally: on the one hand, the commodification of cities — where public spaces are sold to private buyers at the expense of citizens fenced out by these transactions; on the other hand, and likely in reaction to this privatization, there is a growing trend where cities are turning into ecosystems for collaboration, cooperation, and sharing.

Pressure is especially mounting from social movements that are asserting claims to urban governance by invoking a “Right to the City” — a slogan proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book, “Le Droit à la ville.” This can be generally characterized as the collective right of urban inhabitants to have control in the decision making processes concerning public spaces, city resources, and other factors that shape their lives. The “Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto” in Brazil, Reclaim the Streets in the UK, and the Gezi Park protests in Turkey are all examples of this. Yet, the effectiveness of these movements has been limited, due to a lack of conceptual or legal frameworks that could connect their movements and advance their claims to a Right to the City.

In “The City as a Commons,” Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione propose an urban commons framework that provides new ways of seeing and creating the city, itself, as a commons. It is also a valuable way of thinking about how people can exercise their Right to the City. They explain how if collective action of a community is what creates common wealth from a shared resource, then the activities themselves are what creates wealth from the city. This can be a way to grant each person a right to that wealth, and a right to any decision making processes regarding the distribution of that wealth. This is distinct from commoning — a type of governance that is based on self-organized sharing arrangements — which is characterized by the sharing of authority, the sharing of power, and the sharing of control, relying wholly upon collective action and collective accountability. —Ryan T. Conway and Marco Quaglia

1.  Open Source App Loomio Used to Govern 200-person Artist Collective

Gängeviertel Collective emerged in 2009 following the occupation of 12 buildings in the center of Hamburg, Germany, next to the European headquarters of Google, Facebook, and Exxon-Mobile. The original motivation for the occupation was to create affordable space for local artists to live and work while saving the historic buildings from development. The collective is governed by a weekly general assembly which every member can attend, and where they can speak out, and vote. However, for more complex decisions requiring detailed preparation, the community uses Loomio, an open-source collective decision-making app created by the Loomio Cooperative. This online tool can quickly and easily take input from all community members and, after adequate feedback collection and deliberation on Loomio, bring the decision back to the main assembly for a final vote. The software was used for decisions about the potential ownership structure of the collective’s housing and remodeling of the main gathering place. —Neal Gorenflo

2. Neighborhood Partnership Network: Empowering Residents to Participate in City Planning

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina revealed longstanding economic and racial inequalities in New Orleans, with low-income people of color having been left most vulnerable to the disaster. Even those who managed to escape the storm returned to find public services had become privatized, their housing demolished by developers, and their access to basic needs almost nonexistent. Amid the chaos, many people self-organized to support and provide mutual aid to each other. From this, the Neighborhood Partnership Network (NPN) emerged to empower residents to take part in city planning. Since 2006, the NPN has connected neighborhoods through regular meetings, a weekly newsletter, and a self-published journal. NPN has held a Capacity College that builds individual and organizational capacity through workshops and classes on topics ranging from stormwater management to filing public records requests. Furthermore, it was a pivotal advocate for pushing through changes to New Orleans’ City Charter, which requires the city to implement “a system for organized and effective neighborhood participation in land-use decisions and other issues that affect quality of life.” —Ryan T. Conway

3.  Club of Gdansk: Cross-Sector Collaboration for Urban Administration and Planning

While the port city of Gdansk in Poland was ravaged by World War II, a majority of its population was either lost or displaced during its many years of heavy conflict. Today, however, the Polish city is a modern and vibrant urban center in eastern Europe. Having only relatively recently caught up with other European cities in terms of economic development, the city looked for ways to improve its quality of life. The city created the Club of Gdansk, an informal think tank for civil society groups and grassroots organizers to collaborate with city leaders to design and develop the Gdansk’s long term strategy. What began as an experiment in enabling bottom-up processes to identify priority issues, eventually became a fixture of the city’s administration. Core to the Club’s civil society and government members is their commitment to a set of values, which includes transparency, self-determination, and “courage to act.” Over the years, the Club of Gdansk has transformed the city and brought about a wave of institutional reorganization supported by the city administration. It has successfully involved tens of thousands of citizens and made them active co-creators of city policies. —Ryan T. Conway

4.  LiquidFeedback: Free and Open-source Civic Engagement Software

E-governance is the state’s use of communication technology to provide information and services to the public. Many cities have successfully implemented such systems to give people access to ongoing policy discussions, provide input on local policies, or even make proposals for official consideration. Though these efforts can enhance civic engagement, the bulk of the digital consultation platforms are proprietary and, therefore, carry a hefty price tag that many cities cannot afford. LiquidFeedback is a collaborative decision making software based in Wunstorf, Germany, that is both free and open-source. That means it is freely available for anyone to install, maintain, and modify — although they may need the help of a computer technologist to put it into place. The Public Software Group in Berlin had initially developed it for use within political parties and community organizations, but in 2015 they scaled it up to expand its application to e-governance. Since then, several cities in Germany and across Europe have incorporated LiquidFeedback into their digital consultation systems. —Ryan T. Conway

These four short case studies are adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

Header photo by Lyndsey Marie on Unsplash

The post 4 examples of why commons are important for Sharing Cities appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Anke Schwarz

PART I: Interview with members of the Tapullo collective, Genoa

29 May, 2017 — Building something together is in itself a good way to create a community

Wireless community networks have been around for a while, but are regaining some attention these days as means of strengthening local interaction and community organizing. The Tapullo project in Genoa was established in 2016 by a group of people, some of them members of the FabLab at the Laboratorio Sociale Occupato Autogestito Buridda squat, with the aim of setting up a DIY wireless community network. The name is reflective of their approach: in Genoese dialect, tapullo roughly refers to a quick and simple improvision (such as repairing a broken frame with Gaffa tape). What is interesting about Tapullo is that rather than providing internet access, it was designed as a purely local mesh network from the very beginning, hosting a local service in the form of a publicly accessible community forum. In technical terms, the network’s nodes consist of ordinary Wi-Fi routers (either the TP-Link TL-WDR3500 or the much cheaper TP-Link Archer C50 model), and a LattePanda single board computer which acts as a web server for the Tapullo forum. Tapullo’s routers run a combination of OpenWRT software, a specific Linux distribution for embedded services including wireless routers, with LibreMesh installed in top. A first access point was installed at the home of a Tapullo host in a building at Piazza dell’Erbe in downtown Genoa in January 2017, with additional nodes to follow in late 2017.

The interview with members of the Tapullo collective was conducted in written form between March and May 2017, and has been edited for clarity.

Tapulli at Piazza dell’Erbe, Genoa 2017

Let us begin with the most obvious question: Why did you opt for a purely local mesh network, as opposed to one (also) offering internet access?

We decided to avoid providing internet access because we recognize that it is already available almost everywhere in an affordable (or even free) and easily accessible manner. Our idea is to re-connect people on a local and physical level. We wanted to create a network allowing for communication on a level that is disconnected and not mediated by the infrastructures of large corporations. We also wanted to build a network that is not interested in collecting and profiling your data. By making our network from scratch, we intent to take a step back to look at what really constitutes a network and to show digital communication at its core, without 20 years of infrastructure built on top of it. Basically, it is a local, organic, additives-free network.

With respect to your programmatic name, which are the cracks in the urban fabric that you hope to ‘fix’ by implementing a local community network in Genoa’s city center?

We hope to ‘fix’ sociality at a local level, by extracting a tool (in this case, a Wi-Fi network and an internet forum) from the ecosystem of the internet, cleaning it and bringing it closer to the physical space, thus making it available just to those people who are present in a specific place in a specific moment in time. In our case, that is Piazza dell’Erbe in downtown Genoa (for now). The internet is a global discussion forum, whereas we as Tapullo hope to be a new, local forum. We believe in communication and sociality at a local level. Another issue important to explore is the medium itself, in this case the network.

How does it work? How can it be used properly? And how can we learn new tricks, to be employed elsewhere afterwards?

We take so many things for granted, but relatively few people really know and understand how our hyper-connected reality works. We want to change that by bringing infrastructure closer to the people who are using it.

Please go a bit into detail here: What exactly needs such ‘fixing’ in Genovese society? I understand that the stereotype is one of a rather introvert community – but what are the main local issues and struggles as you see it?

What we believe needs fixing is, firstly, what is already happening in every city: The isolation occurring between people even when they are physically socializing together. Tapullo allows you to de-isolate yourself using the same medium that is currently generating the isolation in the first place. It generates the possibility to interact on ludic-practical matters with the same people that you’re physically sharing a space with at that very same moment. Secondly, it tries to ‘fix’ the typical introvert/antisocial attitude of the Genoese, which is sometimes visible in the way they deal with ‘the other’, represented by people from other regions, international tourists or migrants. By making a platform that it is local yet accessible to all, we hope to bring down the barriers in our own mentality.

How far does the actual ‘power’ of a communication infrastructure go? To what extend could an instrument like Tapullo actually play a role in processes of (local) social transformation?

We don’t know yet, but we believe in the idea that building something together is in itself a good way to create a community, and by building a communication instrument like a Wi-Fi network, we want to push for something that is close to the community itself. Moreover, it can generate new interactions between different sectors or parts of society that normally do not communicate often (or at all).

Tapullo’s first node was installed at Piazza dell’Erbe in February 2017. What are you first experiences? How do you get people to use your network? Who uses Tapullo so far, and for which purposes?

At the moment, we don’t have enough data to answer this question. The project launched recently and for now, there are only a few active users. We launched Tapullo with a small campaign (stickers, postcards, word of mouth) but apparently, that was not enough to generate a critical mass. We plan to organize more events in the near future to increase the number of users and generate interest in the platform. A few of the proposals being currently discussed are an alleycat race, a treasure hunt, a photography contest, and audio/video/book sharing.

Have you thought of ‘hybrid’ strategies in which access to the internet is available, but is used in a different way (e.g. a website that can be ‘written’ by only those having access to the local network but read online by everyone)?

We are working on something similar: A public internet blog (http://tapullo.net/) where we will discuss the activities happening in the local network. This should make it easier for new people to discover Tapullo and also to keep users informed about what is going on without having to be at Piazza dell’Erbe all the time.

Will you organize any ‘physical’ events to discuss about the network with outsiders?

Yes, we are currently planning one or two theoretical and practical workshops on mesh networks. We want to discuss what these networks are and show how to build antennas and reflash Wi-Fi routers. Hopefully, that should bring more people in and also help us share the technical knowledge amongst ourselves.

As yet another social network, a critic could assume that Tapullo leads to ever more people glued to their screens, rather oblivious of their surroundings. What are your observations so far: Does communication via Tapullo and face-to-face interaction indeed blend over?

Tapullo has only a few active users for now. Yet we believe that users will not be overwhelmed by too much content, as the network is localized and only people physically present at Piazza dell’Erbe can add content. Practically, you can’t lose yourself scrolling down the page as you might in big social networks, at least for now. However, the amount of content is of course linked to the number of users and to the ease of adding new content. The fact that Tapullo is localized restricts these two factors and limits the abuse. If we consider the Internet a window open to the world, our network wants to be like a stroll: you leave the house to change your perspective. That includes an active practice (going out, walking) instead of a more passive one (looking out of a window, browsing the Internet).

How could an alternative communication infrastructure such as Tapullo support ongoing local struggles over the right to the city, for instance with respect to squats and affordable housing in Genoa?

On a philosophical level, we build a virtual space in the same way that you would occupy an abandoned building to repurpose it as a social center for the greater good of the community. In that sense, by re-appropriating them, we want to state the idea that spaces, whether physical or virtual, belong to the communities that inhabit them. Moreover, the virtual space of Tapullo itself may serve as a virtual board or display, increasing the visibility of local struggles.

Are you in contact with local ‘right to the city’ (or other) urban activists, and if yes, has it been easy to communicate Tapullo’s vision to these people engaged in similar struggles in a different context?

Over the past months, we have been talking about the project with many activists, some of them involved in urban struggles, but we haven’t yet built anything together. We do believe that it is fundamental to have a broad, diverse group of activists collaborating on the project, and that this is going to happen organically, over time, as soon as the network builds enough momentum.

You are based in Genoa’s FabLab, but how strongly is Tapullo actually about making or peer production? Aren’t you acting more like a service provider, at least in the beginning?

As we said above, we want to return to the basics of the tool itself. Obviously, our platform is open and accessible to everyone, but the main idea is to bring attention to the method and potential of the tool itself by sharing knowledge on how it works, how to expand it, how to offer more services. Offering services by making them, step by step.

The Tapullo collective is from a leftist/autonomous context, yet you deliberately adopted a neutral stance when launching the community network – rather than explicitly linking it to the FabLab, for instance. Why did you opt for this position?

We decided not to put it under the Buridda or FabLab name because that was never discussed on a general assembly in these two groups. You might say the collective doesn’t represent the whole but only a subset of it. Plus, the idea of installing the network in the city center (instead of in the squat, which is in a different neighborhood) made us think that it doesn’t make sense to directly link it to Buridda or FabLab if we wanted to give it a broader audience in the city.

In technical terms, which are the lessons learned from other wireless community networks? Why did you develop your own hardware/software set-up instead of simply implementing one of the existing concepts such as Ninux (Rome) or AWMN (Athens)?

Our setup is quite simple actually. The Wi-Fi part is handled by the LibreMesh firmware running on a TP-Link router. That same firmware is developed and used by Ninux. For the forum we are using a LattePanda board, which is slightly more powerful than a Raspberry Pi. Why that specific board? Because that’s what we had at hand without having to buy new hardware.

Please explain how you deal with the challenges of operating a wireless community network. What are your thoughts about governance issues related to data storage and private information once the Tapullo network grows? For instance, do you keep any records or user data that might be accessed by friendly or hostile third parties?

We have no plans to collect traffic data, that much is clear. All data ending up on the forum is by definition considered public and thus available to everyone to read. Also, there is no ‘real name policy’, so everyone is free to register an anonymous/pseudonymous nickname. We don’t have any privacy-sensitive service running at the moment, though we might have some in the future. We haven’t really planned much beyond this point (yet) – beside the fact that we do not want your data, now or in the future.

What next for Tapullo? What are your thoughts about the network’s future ownership in terms of its operation, maintenance, and expansion?

We would like to have more users and share the knowledge required to maintain and expand the network with them. Our dream is that Tapullo grows up over time, like a child, so that at some point in the future it becomes autonomous and independent, self-organizing – until the very moment when we can finally shut down the first Wi-Fi router without affecting the network’s functionality because the network itself will have made this first node redundant.

PART II: Remaking Genoa? Urban DIY Mesh Networks and the Right to the City

31 October, 2017

To the visitor, Genoa’s historical center sometimes resembles a confusing set of narrow, cobbled alleyways, with sky-high medieval palaces and densely arranged buildings often creating a canyon-like impression. On the ground, orientation can be difficult, with hardly any clear sky or celestial bodies in sight. Depending on the location (and perhaps more important these days), GPS and mobile internet access are also limited, disrupting digital navigation attempts. An urban environment apparently so hostile to mobile communication and digital services might somehow help keep the destructive effects of mass tourism at bay. However, it also harbors the wireless community network Tapullo. As the walls bespeak the rich social activity and urban movements the area is traditionally teeming with, this seems only logical. Until recently, street corners and sign posts in the Centro storico were covered with posters and stickers for a variety of leftist and autonomous events and causes, from punk concerts, collective dinners and workshops at one of the squatted social centers to the Movimento di lotta per la casa’s marvelous crowbar logo.

Piazza dell’Erbe

I first interviewed members of the Tapullo collective in May 2017. A first node of the prospective mesh network had just been installed in Piazza dell’Erbe, a relatively large public square in downtown Genoa, packed with bars and brimming with mostly younger people in the evenings. This seemed to be the perfect crowd to engage in a local mesh network based on both virtual and face-to-face interaction: Social-media-affine youngsters at their favorite watering hole. There was a palpable enthusiasm in the collective. Yet when I returned in October 2017, the mood had somewhat changed. In a curious turn of events, Tapullo’s one and only node had been damaged: The transformers of both the Wi-Fi router and the LattePanda single board computer had completely burned out, along with laptops, fridges, and a bunch of other electrical devices in the building where the Tapullo host lives. The damage was caused by a flawed power line installation by a technician from ENEL, Italy’s leading energy provider. Consequently, the equipment had to be removed for repairs, and the Tapullo forum was down for several weeks. This episode serves as a reminder to the multiple manners in which other urban infrastructures and social networks underpin a seemingly independent DIY mesh network. Moreover, it draws attention to the effort and time required to install and maintain such a wireless network as Tapullo moved away from its reliance on a single access point. A second phase, where the signals from individual nodes are woven into a mesh, was imminent – just as a notable shift in urban governance in downtown Genoa highlighted the need for collective social (inter)action. Ever since a change in city government in June 2017 brought an entrepreneur running as an independent candidate for the populist right-wing alliance between Forza Italia and Lega Nord into the position of mayor, a 1990s-style law-and-order approach to public space seemed to be gaining pace. After decades of social democratic rule by the Partito Democratico and its predecessors, this represented a rupture for the city home to one of the major seaports in the Mediterranean and once known as a leftist bastion. Some of Genoa’s seven occupied centri sociali may soon face the threat of eviction – and this development comes at a time when neofascists are seeking to establish two new premises in the city. Given the present political situation, it is not hard to predict an increase in urban struggles in the near future. This applies in particular (but not only) to the historical center, where a new regulation prohibiting the consumption of alcohol in public is being discussed. On a more symbolical level, the removal of political posters and graffiti is combined with a widening of an existing city marketing campaign, launched in 2014 under the somewhat comical slogan ‘Genova – more than this’. As the scraped-off posters illustrate, such attempts to sanitize public spaces and render leftist and progressive autonomous voices invisible form part of the new city government’s strategy. Meanwhile, parts of the new administration are pushing an anti-migrant and zero tolerance discourse.

Contested wall

Parts of downtown Genoa are traditionally home to poorer inhabitants and migrant communities, and apart from the centri sociali (which are typically located in derelict industrial or private buildings outside the city center) there are several ‘silent’ occupations of flats exclusively for housing purposes. The existing struggles against marginalization and displacement are captured nicely in the spirit of a graffito that reads “44.000 vacant homes, let’s occupy!”. For Tapullo, the present situation raises interesting questions over the platform’s future audience and usership in its second, increasingly more networked phase. Will it merely evolve into some kind of small, independent service provider, feeding a pattern of individual consumption – or accomplish a more collective approach?

44.000 vacant homes, let’s occupy!

If we wish to read the right to the city, at its core, as a collective rather than individual “right to change ourselves by changing the city” (Harvey 2008: 23), this is precisely where DIY mesh networks like Tapullo come into play. In the present historical situation, defending our ‘digital rights to the city’ (as a recent collection of essays edited by Shaw and Graham 2017 has it) against big tech companies and governmental intrusion alike is certainly paramount. Yet instead of evoking notions of data mining, privacy breaches, surveillance and control typically related to the most widespread information and communication technologies (ICT), such collectively owned digital platforms may well support and further different urban futures (for details, see Antoniadis and Apostol 2014; De Filippi and Tréguer 2015). As Paolo Cardullo observes in his recent study of London’s wireless community network OWN, these networks “operate by strengthening social interactions and relations on the ground, rather than in an imaginary cloud-space. The cultural disposition of people directly involved in using the wireless network is (…) the crucial element that sustained the mesh” (Cardullo 2017: 7). An insurgent peer production of the urban is nourished by social interactions in a material and virtual sense, based on common interests and/or a shared cause. Given both the existing social movements and the looming wave of contestation over public space and centri sociali in Genoa, a host of potential alliances could be activated and deepened by weaving this network tighter, and thus assembling a city for all. Not only in name, the “patchwork improvisation” (Cardullo 2017) of the Tapullo mesh network is thus both dependent on and productive of an urban commons. In October 2017, four fresh routers lay in wait to be installed as new Tapullo nodes in the city center. As members of the collective were in the process of recruiting future hosts amongst local organizations and pubs, probably one of the most pertinent questions for the near future is: Who is remaking Genoa, and in which image?

References

Antoniadis, P. and Apostol, I. (2014): The Right(s) to the Hybrid City and the Role of DIY Networking. In: Journal of Community Informatics 10 (3), http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1092/1113

Cardullo, P. (2017): Gentrification in the mesh? An ethnography of Open Wireless Network (OWN) in Deptford. In: City. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1325236

De Filippi, P. and Tréguer, F. (2015): Expanding the Internet Commons: The Subversive Potential of Wireless Community Networks. In: Journal of Peer Production #6 http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-6-disruption-and-the-law/peer-reviewed-articles/expanding-the-internet-commons-the-subversive-potential-of-wireless-community-networks/

Harvey, D. (2008): The Right to the City. In: New Left Review 53, 23-40. https://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city

Shaw, J. and Graham, M. (eds.) (2017): Our Digital Rights to the City. Meatspace Press. https://meatspacepress.org/our-digital-rights-to-the-city/

PART III: The future of Tapullo

31 January, 2018

The members of the Tapullo collective wish to continue their effort to build a local mesh network and if they succeed to keep their project running you will be hearing about their progress at:

http://tapullo.net (in Italian)

About the author

Anke Schwarz is an urban geographer and postdoctoral researcher at Technical University of Berlin. She is mainly interested in processes of urban transformation, urban infrastructures and everyday life. Her book ‘Demanding Water. A Sociospatial Approach to Domestic Water Use in Mexico City’ was published in 2017. https://ankeschwarz.net/

* All pictures by Anke Schwarz

The post Urban DIY Mesh Networks and the Right to the City: An Interview with the Tapullo Collective appeared first on P2P Foundation.

AureaSocial’s entrance

SELF-MANAGEMENT SPACE OPEN TO THE WORLD FROM 2O11

We date back to 2011 when the Cooperativa Integral Catalana (CIC) was consolidated after a year of work and having actively participated in the mobilizations of the 15M, a movement formed by people who are free and independent from the political parties, which made the possibility of practicing self-organization resonate in the minds and consciences of many people and made it possible to remember that only people save people.

In this context, we found that the CIC’s permanent assembly began to run a space which a family with close affinity to social movments had ceded to them, to stop the Banco Popular from evicting the property. This bank was attempting to halt the mortgage agreement that they had with this family business.

As it was all done confirming to legality, after some time the court of Barcelona issued a judicial resolution where the Xarxa Integral de Profesionals y Usuaries SCCL, a cooperative tool of the CIC became the holder of the rental contract until 2023.

Here began a new stage based on self-management, which meant without subsidies nor from the state neither any regional or municipal aid of any kind.

During all this time, Aurea Social, a local of 1400 squaremeters located in the Poblet neighborhood (Sagrada Familia) is linked to, related with and  visited by all kinds of activists, communication and media channels, researchers of many different fields coming not only from Catalonia and Spain but from all over the planet earth.So much so that we have received visits and invitations to explain our self-managed experiences to places all over Europe, America, Asia, Africa and even Oceania.

Anthropologists, Sociologists, Political Scientists, Journalists, Universities, Cooperative Federations from all over the world have visited and communicated with us. We have been in touch with many different people, even with those who have not invented anything but have simply decided to make reflections, decisions and action for a way of life with parameters opposed to capitalism from a constructive and inclusive attitude with those people and collectives who understand that the real revolution is not possible without an individual and collective transformation based on mutual support, assembly, and horizontal and non-hierarchical organization

In this journey we have tried to be honest and sincere with ourselves and we have promoted and continue to promote individual and collective self-managed projects and the concept of the common as theoretical and practical reference.

In fields such as Health, Housing and Education we have collaborated with many people who wanted and felt the need to manage their lives from the sovereignty and not from the submission to the criteria of the system. Not everything has been a success, precisely in these aspects that we have been most self-critical and we have observed that our proposals in this respect without the necessary resources were simple intentions.

For this reason, the bet of giving shelter to productive projects throughout Catalonia when many of them were not viable within the capitalist system,within the networks generated by the Integral Cooperative became possible, it could be said that in these years we have put our legal tools at theservice of more than two thousand projectsto many different types of activities that one can imagine…

This is where our self-management strategy has proven most effective.

We have promoted a social economy outside the capitalist system in social currency that has moved the amount of 400,000 units only in last year

Today, after 7 years we are at a crossroads.

The Capital is once again putting pressure on the self-managed organizations and on our spaces.

We want to make a call to all the organizations of activists, self-managemened projects, anti-authoritarians, foundations, grassroots organizations, popular and libertarian associations from all over the world to support Aurea Social in this moment of attack of the Bank (Banco Popular /Santander) and the Capital against the self-managed spaces.

Now more than ever we need your support and not only your political but also your financial support to face this attack that wants to expel the Cooperativa Integral from a neighbourhood of Barcelona where we the witnesses that another way of life is possible.

We have generated an oasis of self-management in the midst of a capitalist, gentrified and submissive context with the forms and customs of domination that we neither share nor promote.

We need spaces where freedom of expression can be guaranteed, where in order to be free it is not necessary to be submissive to the authorities that are daily violating civil rights in Catalonia and in the Spanish state, in the present situation and in the future it is very important to maintain liberated spaces that do not depend on the state or in any of its instances in order to ensure that the culture of freedom is not threatened by the economic power of Capital.

We, therefore urge you to participate within your best ability in the crowfunding that we have set in motion which aims to raise funds for the collectivization of AureaSocial so that it does not become the property of the Bank.

Union, Action and Self-Management!!!

Photo by Fotomovimiento

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Overview of Thematic Working Groups

Participatory Tools for Democracy

Commons and democracy are intimately linked. This workshop addresses civic participation and ways to foster citizens’ involvement in the production of their cities through engagement with public bodies and direct forms of political action.

Lately, technology and digital tools are integral to these initiatives to enhance democratic processes. This workshop will consider this dynamic and look at the co-production of public policies and projects through digital platforms.

Participants are interested in analyzing changes produced by these new collaborative processes. They have experience in the production of tools and resources such as online maps, collective storytelling, repositories of experiences, and initiatives designed to support political decentralization and co-production, with and without support from political institutions. This work also includes the development of charters, contracts and structures between different urban actors involved in urban commons.around civic causes in this domain, and participate in telecommunications technological projects.

Currencies and financing of commons

This theme promotes currency and finance as fundamental to the commons and solidarity economy. How are alternative currencies and digital tools and platforms at work, and what are the infrastructures and material environments that support communing and collective responsibility in this sphere? The workshop will examine how we can multiply or upscale some of the initiatives, methods, frameworks, and formats that have already been explored locally.

Participants have expressed interest in strengthening networks and collaborative projects, developing tools to develop an economy based on the commons, as well as strategies and methodologies on P2P mechanisms of value assessment and exchange. They have experience in time-banking and various cooperatives, have developed crypto-currencies and mobilized economic resources and human partnerships; contribute to community building, disseminate and create awareness and commitment around civic causes in this domain, and participate in telecommunications technological projects.

Data commons and the collaborative city

This workshop brings together the topics of control of (civic) data and the collaborative economic models that depend on online platforms. There is increasing interest in exploring alternatives that respect data and promote its civic control, taking into account possibilities for different modes of production & collection of this data. In what way can we facilitate data management and control in line with the social common good?

The workshop will take into account how regulations and policies on open source and open data, on the one hand, and those on technology and decentralized infrastructure, on the other, can play a role in facilitating data sovereignty and new forms of local cooperativism.

Moving away from large corporation and capital-led city development, we have to rethink the Smart City model and imagine data commons that socialise the value of data. How do initiatives like guifinet and Fairbnb fit in?  The starting point for the workshop will be recent experiences in Barcelona and Amsterdam.

Embodied productions of commoning: Food, Health, and Leisure

This workshop takes a holistic view of health creation to include also food production and distribution as well as sport and leisure activities. It will address the different determinants of our physical and mental condition, based on social justice, solidarity economy, and respect to biophysical limits of ecosystems. The commons approach underlines the importance of self-organised, locally rooted, inclusive and resilient community networks and civic spaces in order to re-think the practices and the development of public policy-making in this domain.

Participants have experience and are interested in the interrelationship at all points of the journey from “Land to Fork”, including access to land, nutrition, food sovereignty, cultivation, etc.; new forms of distribution, including for recycling; access to medical knowledge and patient-guided health policies and services; democratization of healthcare and self-organization of citizen efforts to reduce bureaucratic hurdles; and reclaiming the field for grassroots sports while challenging norms to inspire new models of recreation.

Law for the Commons

In order to guarantee the protection and development of commoning practices, legal opportunities and tools need to be located and addressed. This workshop deals with the search for these opportunities in relation to pre-existing and potential urban commons projects. This can draw from existing knowledge and institutional analysis in management of traditional commons, as well as contemporary legal practices for local, national and European legislation. It can also investigate instances where these concepts have been applied at the local scale.

These include participants’ experiences in, for example, production of municipal regulations for shared administration, which protects urban commons (squares, gardens, schools, cultural commons, streets, etc.) and compels local governments to collaborate with citizens. Participants propose the generation of platforms to exchange existing knowledge and experiences in legal mechanisms, as well as the production of practical tools to be used at European and local levels in relation with legislation, norms and institutional interaction.

Right to the City (Public Space and Urbanism, Housing, Water & Energy)

This theme brings together different aspects of the configuration of the city: Public Spaces & Urbanism, Housing, Tourism, Water & Energy and Culture. Understanding the Right to the City as a collective and bottom-up creation of a new paradigm can help to provide an alternative framework to re-think cities and human settlements on the basis of social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability. The workshop will discuss processes of commercialization and privatization of public and common goods and resources; how commons can create forms of democratic urban management; and how re-municipalization processes of urban infrastructures can be linked to the commons discourse. It will also consider the policy frameworks for commons that can be implemented, how spaces can be collectively used for the common good and what kind of legal and economic frameworks are needed to stabilize communing practices.

There is a great diversity of experiences and interests within the group. Proposals include trans-local collaboration to develop perspectives on: urban rights, cultural ecosystems for integration within the city, commons-based housing plans, fighting gentrification and damaging tourism, among others. There is emphasis on sharing examples and tools and promoting the connection of practitioners, researches, professionals, and citizens with project initiators and grassroots actors. Participants draw from experiences including the redevelopment of brownfields and vacant properties, the creation of political platforms and public campaigning and engagement, and construction of community gardens and other spaces as learning environments for communing. Given the wide range of interests and backgrounds, for this theme we can also imagine a mix of general discussions and more specific working spaces, to be decided by the participants themselves, either in organizational process before the meeting or in situ.

Solidarity as a commons: Migrants and Refugees

In many countries, migrants and refugees are confronted by very repressive policies, and in some cases violence. In certain places, citizens are responding by getting involved in local activities to distribute food, clothes and other commodities, to provide information about asylum procedures or how to meet basic needs and human rights, to facilitate the inclusion of migrants or refugees in cities and cohabitation between people in neighborhoods, etc. At a time when policies about immigration and refugees in most European countries are inadequate and troubling, these mobilizations are extremely important and sharing experiences is key.

The purpose of this workshop is twofold. First, it aims to share experiences and knowledge about local citizen-developed initiatives to help migrants and refugees across Europe. In addition, the workshop will be an opportunity to discuss solidarity with migrants and refugees as a commons. Themes to discuss include: the effects on policies and policy makers of the production of solidarity by citizens, the modalities of governance among civil society organizations around their initiatives, and the forms of interactions with municipalities around the initiatives of civil society actors.

Participants have experience in local initiatives of solidarity and hospitality with migrants and refugees; are engaged in research and activism on urban commons focusing on migrant rights; or are involved in initiatives like ecovillage movements, commons support for artists at risk, or community social centers that work to develop new forms of participative work and cooperation to build solidarity.

The post European Commons Assembly Madrid: The Workshops appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For more information about the program, click here.

In cooperation with the Transeuropa Festival and MediaLab Prado, the assembly features 4 days of workshops, visits to local commons initiatives, debates, talks, art and parties in the heart of Madrid. An eclectic mix of commons activists from all over Europe will get together to discuss the commons and the future of Europe.

The European Commons Assembly starts on Wednesday (the 25th of October) and ends with a closing assembly on Friday (the 27th of October). Saturday (October 28th) will be filled with trips to local commoning sites around Madrid and exciting sessions organized by Transeuropa Festival in the afternoon.

Workshop themes include ‘Participatory Tools for Democracy’, ‘Right to the City’, ‘Law for the Commons’, ‘Data Commons and the Collaborative Economy’, ‘Food’, ‘Health and Leisure’, and ‘Solidarity as a Commons: Migrants and Refugees’.

For more updates, follow us here on Twitter or join the event here on Facebook.

We hope to see you in Madrid!

Photo by Tom.Lechner

The post The next European Commons Assembly will be in Madrid on October 25-28 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

To date, popular opposition to Trump has been expressed largely through mass demonstrations and street protests. On the day of Trump’s inauguration, an estimated 2.9 million people marched throughout dozens of US cities. These watershed moments, such as the Women’s March or the March for Science, present people with much-needed opportunities to feel catharsis, express solidarity and recognize shared values. Yet, as protests, they are inherently limited. Specifically, they fail to bring about a program for the deep institutional transformation that our society so desperately needs.

Beneath highly visible mobilizations, grassroots and municipal forms of opposition to Trump are also taking shape. Under the banner of “sanctuary cities,” community-based organizations, faith groups, legal advocates, workers’ centers and engaged citizens have been setting up crisis networks to support immigrant families living under the threat of deportation. These projects, structured largely on a neighborhood-to-neighborhood basis, challenge dominant assumptions about political participation and raise the crucial question of what it really should mean to be a citizen.

Meanwhile, mayors and city officials have surfaced as some of Trump’s most vocal opponents. This past June, nearly 300 mayors, including nine of the ten largest cities in America, disobeyed the president’s wishes and re-committed to the Paris Climate Accord. Whether these declarations amount to genuine acts of political defiance or merely symbolic gestures by local elites looking to advance their careers is tangential. What matters is that during a period of unprecedented political turmoil people are calling upon local officials to act on behalf of their communities — regardless of citizenship — rather than according to the wishes of a far-right regime. They are looking to their own municipalities as sites of grounded political action and moral authority.

The Municipalist Alternative

In the midst of this milieu, a small constellation of civic platforms have emerged with the purpose of transforming how US cities and municipalities are actually run. Blurring the lines between social movement and local governance, these municipalist experiments organize on the basis of existing municipalities or districts, demanding socially just and ecological solutions to issues that concern the community as a whole. Yet their common agenda extends far beyond electing progressive parties to local office. Patiently, through a combination of political education, grassroots mobilization and reform, municipalists seek to place decision-making power back in the hands of citizens. Municipalism is not simply a new strategy for local governance, but rather is a path to social freedom and stateless democracy.

The term “municipalism” itself derives from “libertarian municipalism,” coined during the 1980s by social theorist and philosopher Murray Bookchin. By claiming the label “libertarian,” Bookchin invoked its original meaning from nineteenth-century anarchism. In his view, essential concepts like “liberty” and “freedom” had been wrongly subverted and appropriated by the right wing, and it was time for leftists to reclaim them. Nonetheless, the label “libertarian” has been dropped by many of the new municipal experiments. Most recently, the Catalan citizen’s platform Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) has popularized municipalism as part of its political project in Catalonia, Spain. Their version of municipalism also ties closely to the theory and praxis of the commons, which they marshal to defend the city against runaway tourism and urban development.Municipalism is distinguished by its insistence that the underlying problem with society is our disempowerment. Capitalism and the state not only cause extraordinary material suffering and inequality, they also rob us of the ability to play a meaningful role in our own lives and communities. By seizing the power to make decisions, they deprive us of our own humanity and sense of purpose — they deprive us of meaning.

The solution, as municipalists see it, is direct democracy. To achieve this, we can cultivate the new society within the shell of the old by eroding the state’s popular legitimacy and dissolving its power into face-to-face people’s assemblies and confederations. This means having faith that people are intelligent and want things to change. In Bookchin’s words, libertarian municipalism “presupposes a genuine democratic desire by people to arrest the growing powers of the nation state.” People can, and ought, to be the experts regarding their own needs.

Not all movements that align with a municipalist program refer to themselves as such. For example, the Kurdish freedom movement advocates a very similar model under the term “democratic confederalism.” Bookchin himself later adopted the label “communalism” to highlight the affinity between his views and the 1871 Paris Commune. Virtually every region and culture of the world is fertile with some historical legacy of popular assemblies, tribal democracy or stateless self-governance. The question is how do we revive those legacies and use them to erode the dominance of capitalism and the state over the rest of society.

The Role of Cities

Municipalities, towns, villages, city wards and neighborhoods provide the actual physical scale at which such an empowering politics can flourish. Historically, cities have drawn people together, facilitating diversity by encouraging cross-cultural interaction. This inherent feature infuses cities with a humanistic sensibility — and by extension also with radical potential. As Hannah Arendt put it, “politics is based on the fact of human plurality.” Cities weave many different kinds of people together into a rich tapestry of everyday life.

Fear and distrust of cities has been a central pillar of Trump’s far-right movement. The Trumpists are afraid of immigrants, black people and those who play with gender norms. They fear elites, political domination and the economic precarity that ruthlessly dazzling cities represent. A whole gamut of caricatures are arranged in one foreboding image of a decadent cosmopolitanism.

These antagonisms are all the worse for the stark inequality found in major metropolitan areas. “Gentrification” comes nowhere close to describing the mass internal displacement taking place throughout the US. In San Francisco, a small, modest home costs about $3.5 to 4 million; simple one-bedroom apartments range from $3,500 to $15,000 per month to rent. Beneath the shimmering towers of tech billionaires, tent villages wedge precariously between the concrete pillars of highway underpasses. Meanwhile, the working poor are banished to isolated suburbs, where there is little street life and often no viable public transportation.

While European movements call for preserving urban residents’ “right to the city,” in the US we are the position of figuring out how to simply insert ordinary people back within the urban landscape. Capitalism has birthed distorted American cities. Their vast, jutting shapes convey the helplessness and alienation of capitalist social relations. What little livable space does exist in recent years has been gobbled up by real estate and high finance. This distorted rendering of urban life expands ever outward, converting farmland into parking lots, family-owned shops into Walmarts and tight-knit rural communities into dull suburban hinterlands.

Municipalism can combat the tendency for working people in rural areas to distrust cities — and the diverse people who occupy them — by putting power back into the hands of the people. Within cities, municipalists can advance programs to transform their inhumanly scaled physical and material characteristics. A municipalist agenda would ultimately seek to reclaim urban areas as places where people actually live, not simply go shopping. In rural and suburban contexts, municipalists can offer a vision of decentralization and independence from the state that is void of bigotry and abuse. Rural allegiances to extractive industries can be broken by offering ecological ways of life tied to local, civic decision-making. These are not easy tasks, but they are essential to the holistic social change we so direly need.

Organizing for Municipal Power

The municipalist movement in the US today is like a seedling. It is small and delicate, fresh and brimming with potential. Although we often look for leftist leadership in big cities like New York City or Chicago, these new municipal leaders are rooted in relatively smaller cities including Jackson, Mississippi and Olympia, Washington. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. As big cities are emptied of their original inhabitants and character, small and moderate-sized cities are offering relatively more opportunities for communal interaction and organization.

This summer, I had the opportunity to meet leaders from several municipal projects, including Cooperation Jackson, the Seattle Neighborhood Action Councils (NAC), Portland Assembly, Olympia Assembly and Genese Grill’s District City Councilor campaign in Burlington, Vermont. Consistently, these activists brought sophisticated analysis, raised challenging questions and shared innovative approaches to organizing. But what I found most striking was their ability to articulate utopian ideas with common-sense policies aimed at actually improving people’s lives. Their political aspirations are serious and grounded in the belief that popular power really can offer superior solutions to difficult social issues.

In Seattle, the Neighborhood Action Coalition (NAC) formed during the dramatic aftermath of Trump’s election. Like many anti-Trump groups, their primary goal is to protect targeted groups against hate crimes and provide immediate services. Yet instead of convening big, amorphous “general assemblies” like Occupy Wall Street, the NAC delineates its chapters according to Seattle’s dozen or so city districts. Each neighborhood chapter is empowered to select its own activities and many groups have evolved through door-to-door listening campaigns.The NAC is creating new forms of encounter between citizens and city officials. Seattle is currently in the midst of a mayoral election with no running incumbent. The NAC is thus hosting a town-hall series called “Candidate Jeopardy,” during which candidates are quizzed on a selection of citizen-authored questions. Like the game show Jeopardy, they must select within a range from easy questions to difficult. “Who will pick the low-hanging questions?” reads an event callout in the Seattle Weekly, “Who will pick the hard ones? Will we have a Ken Jennings [a famous Jeopardy contestant] of the 2017 elections? Come find out!”

The NAC may eventually find a friendly face in office. Nikkita Oliver, one of the front-runners, is a Black Lives Matter activist running on a platform of holding local officials accountable to the public. If she wins, Seattle’s situation may begin to resemble Barcelona, where radical housing rights activist Ada Colau holds the mayorship.

In Portland, Oregon, the organization Portland Assembly uses a similar “spokes-council” model and enrolls new members to Portland’s existing neighborhood associations. They are currently working to create a citywide, pro-homeless coalition; they advocate for radical reformation of the police. This spring, friends of Portland Assembly made newspaper headlines with the project “Portland Anarchist Road Care.” Following a record-breaking winter, activists in familiar “black bloc” attire — with all-black clothes and bandanas covering their mouths — took to the city streets with patch asphalt and fixed potholes. Anarchist road care playfully disrupts the notion that those who advocate for a stateless society are reactive, destructive and impractical. It is also an excellent example of what Kate Shea Baird calls “hard pragmatism” — the use of small gains to demonstrate that real change is truly possible.

Perhaps the largest and most promising municipal movement in the US currently is Cooperation Jackson, a civic initiative based in America’s Deep South. In a city where over 85 percent of the population is black while 90 percent of the wealth is held by whites, Cooperation Jackson cultivates popular power through participatory economic development. Over the course of decades, Cooperation Jackson and its predecessors have formed a federation of worker-owned cooperatives and other initiatives for democratic and ecological production. This economic base is then linked to people’s assemblies, which broadly determine the project’s priorities.

Like Seattle’s NAC, Cooperation Jackson engages in local elections and city governance. Jackson, Mississippi’s new mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, comes from a family of famous black radicals and has close ties to the movement. Lumumba has endorsed Cooperation Jackson’s initiative to build Center for Community Production, a public community center that specializes in 3D printing and digital production.

Municipalism’s Revolutionary Potential

These are just a few of the municipal experiments taking place throughout the US. Do these initiatives signal the birth of a revolutionary democratic movement? Will they rescue us from the jaws of fascism and realize our potential for a truly multicultural, feminist and ecological society? Perhaps — and we should all hope so. Indeed, something like a new municipal paradigm is taking shape with the recognition that anti-racism, feminist liberation, economic justice and direct democracy are intertwined. Enthusiasm for this paradigm brews at the city level, where diverse peoples are encouraged by their surroundings to hold humanistic views.

However, there are good reasons for municipalists to be wary and cautious. While radical leftists lay the groundwork of grassroots political engagement, liberal and “progressive” reform organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible are poised to absorb and divert this energy back into party politics. Ambiguous terms like “participatory democracy” are effective tools to engage people who are uncomfortable with terms like “radical” or “revolutionary.” Yet they can also be easily exploited by institutions like the Democratic Party, who, humiliated and sapped of credibility, now look hungrily upon city and municipal elections.

Thus, engaging with “progressive” movements will no doubt be something of a chimera. On the one hand, they may be important allies in municipal campaigns and points of entry for political newcomers. On the other, they may crash a popular movement. And when these state-centered schemes fail, people will become upset and disillusioned — potentially re-channeling their dissatisfaction to support for the far right.

We do not need, as The Nation gleefully calls it, a new age of “big city progressivism.” We need a non-hierarchical way of life that confers abundance and freedom to all. For today’s municipal movements this means that:

• We must valorize the city not as it is, but as it could be.
  We must infuse the idea of citizenship with new meaning and call for radical citizenship based on participation within the municipal community, and not upon a state’s bureaucratic approval.
• We must resist the temptation to impute our faith in benevolent mayors and other personalities, no matter how charismatic or well-intentioned, unless they seek to dissolve the powers they hold.
  Revolution is patient work. We are all of us unlikely to live to see the revolution we seek. Yet we have more tools at our disposal than we realize. The United States’ own mythology is one of decentralization. In his book The Third Revolution, Murray Bookchin recounts the waves of popular assemblies that broke loose from their base in rural New England during the American Revolution and swept down to the Southern colonies. The Articles of Confederation and the Bill of Rights were concessions to popular pressure. Confederal thinking persists in the popular imaginations of even some of the most seemingly conservative individuals of our society.

Today, most people believe that nothing can be done about their government. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The bitter lesson of Trump’s victory is that change — be it for better or worse — is the only constant in human affairs. As the science fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. LeGuin so eloquently put it: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” The municipalist movement may be small, but its potential is revolutionary.

Eleanor Finley

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #6, “The City Rises“.

Lead Illustration by David Istvan.

The post The New Municipal Movements appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Abstract

“This study is an effort to contribute to the current urban studies debate on the way to conceptualize the city by advancing a rights-based approach and to suggest that to build such vision one needs to reconceive the city as a commons, which is to say that the city serves as an infrastructure enabling the “pooling” of city inhabitants actions, energies, resources and the cooperation between city inhabitants and other four urban actors thereby embedding a “quintuple helix” or “pentahelix” approach in the governance design of the city.

Part I articulates the three most prominent visions or paradigms of the city of the 21st century and the “metaphors” that are currently used to conceptualize the city. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this part then discusses some complications and emerging key points that deserve further reflection.

In Part II, the article argues that a rights-based paradigm or vision in the conceptualization of the city is emerging. It does so through the analysis of urban laws and policies adopted in exemplary case studies such as Naples and Barcelona, on one side, and Bologna and Turin, on the other side. Two main rights-based approaches seem to emerge: the rebel city model and the co-city model.

In Part III, to better define this fourth urban paradigm and in particular the second approach, a focus on the key concept of commons and a review of the main bodies of literature is provided which are key to carve out the concept of “pooling” as a form of cooperation that encompasses both sharing of congestible resources to avoid scarcity and collaboration around non congestible, constructed resources to generate abundance. Building on the existing literature of a particular subset of studies on infrastructure commons, the concept of pooling is extracted from the observation of how pooling as a demand-side strategy can both expand or leverage the idle “capacity” of an infrastructure to avoid congestion and at the same time generate abundance. Pooling is particularly effective in explaining the main features of one of the rights-based visions of the city, the co-city approach, ultimately envisioning the city as an enabling infrastructure for social and economic pooling.

Part IV offers concluding remarks and proposes the idea of the “right to the co-city” to build a body of urban laws and policies advancing “urban rights to pooling” as a key legal tool to structure a commons-oriented interpretation of the fourth vision of the city, the rights-based approach.”

Find the full article here.

Photo by ThoroughlyReviewed

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Turning a profit is not its goal, as stated in the international Fab Lab Charter drafted in 2007 by Fab Lab founder Neil Gershenfeld. Another important point mentioned in the Charter is open access to the tools. We make that possible every Thursday on Open Lab Day.

The visitors and users of the Lab include school and university students who want to make models for educational projects, engineers and natural scientists who want to find out more about the technologies, and tinkerers who make new things or fix old ones. The Lab also offers neighborhood youths the opportunity to find out about technical jobs. And there are a lot of creative people in the area who use the Fab Lab to build prototypes or models. They experiment with printing materials, print sample copies, or develop a finger for a robot, for example.

The same conditions, developed by the association, apply for everyone: Whoever puts their hands on something takes on the responsibility for it. That works well in general. People only pay for the materials they use. The time other people take to support them is free of charge. However, the Lab does not offer people the opportunity to use its space and machines for ongoing commercial purposes. New knowledge gained in the Lab is supposed to be transferred back to the community.

Fabulous St. Pauli considers itself a networking node, a place where people and neighborhood initiatives active in societally relevant areas such as energy (KEBAP energy bunker), waste, traffic, or urban gardening, can jointly use the technologies they need in order to develop individual and locally adapted solutions for very different problems. For example, a freight bicycle was developed in collaboration with the urban gardening project Gartendeck.

Fabulous St. Pauli intentionally grapples with the role of production in the city of today, thereby taking part in the discussion about a new form of development of the city in the Hamburg network Recht auf Stadt (“right to the city”). Yet collaboration goes beyond Hamburg and Germany: the global Fab Lab network also provides ongoing exchange of ideas and software as well as visitors from Fab Labs around the world.

The Fab Lab thrives on exchange and on its members’ willingness to share their time and their knowledge about using and repairing the machines, in addition to paying their monthly fee. We started out with seven members and have about thirty today, up to eight of whom are most active. Specifically repairing machines is important, because some of our machines were donated by industry and require regular maintenance. Most machines, however, are provided by the members themselves. Individuals’ motives differ: some are most interested in talking shop and trying things out, others in carrying out their own projects. Still others believe in offering access to new production processes to as many people as possible.

Right now, it would be difficult to run the Lab without the opportunity to rent space cheaply in a self-governed center. That is why municipal policy is very important if self-organized spaces for experimentation are to succeed. With the resources and the knowledge of the active members, who have backgrounds in computer science, electrical engineering, design, journalism, and numerous other areas, and with an affordable, centrally located venue, a Fab Lab like the one in St. Pauli has the potential to take production into its own hands – at a high technological level. Here, at Fabulous, people can try out and implement individual, innovative products and alternative concepts, independent of market conditions. If supported by public funding, then this potential can develop, as the example of Fabrica, a do-it-yourself project to make cellphones, showed in the autumn of 2014.

The Fabrica Project

The Fab Lab hosted the project “Fabrica—Technology meets art meets DIY culture” from August 13 to September 7, 2014. 3D printing and laser cutting are fun, without question. But this is about more than maker-hype gimmicks. Fabulous St. Pauli also wants to be able to make complex devices that everybody uses – for example, cellphones, the consumer product parexcellence. They are short-lived, status-laden, produced under questionable circumstances, and locked in black boxes so that consumers have to rely on whatever the manufacturers put inside.

We set up a temporary, decentralized high-tech cellphone factory with a view of the city’s harbor. We wanted participants to be able to produce 5 percent of St. Pauli’s cellphone demand themselves. The circuit boards were assembled and soldered following the template of an open source phone, the Arduino-based DIY phone developed by David Mellis (M.I.T.). A high-end laser cutter and various 3D printers were available for producing individually designed casings. We wanted to find out what people wanted in terms of future, decentralized production of their high-tech products, and also how nonexperts could participate in producing simple cellphones at a professional level. Finally, we wanted to experiment with the freedom to use components from fair production in our cellphones, gradually increasing their share in each device. What we had in mind was “Fair IT.” A lot of people were interested in understanding the products they carry around every day, and even designing and assembling them.

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.

Astrid Lorenzen (Germany) has been an independent industrial designer for sustainable product design since graduating from the Muthesius University in Kiel. She has been active in the FabLab St. Pauli since 2012. In addition, she is involved in the Sustainable Design Center and

The post Patterns of Commoning: Fab Lab St. Pauli in Hamburg appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Try: feminised politics, proximity, ecology and community. As we turn off ‘post-truth’ politics, face-to-face meeting, listening and community-building supported by safe technologies are some of the salves for human-scale democracy. While New Zealand is facing a national election, it’s worth considering other forms of democracy, namely engaged local politics, currently being called municipalism in Europe.

Jump to Barcelona in June — where 700 people from 180 countries converged in inaugural Fearless Cities summit on municipalism — organised by the current political movement, Barcelona En Comu.

If you’re not one for party politics, municipalism is attractive — it’s about designing a process of involving all citizens in the self-organising of their communities, towns or cities, not so much about creating new policies and group think from the top down. My interests: developing self-empowered societies, commons-building and in art processes that develop communities. After registering and paying 20 Euros online, I found myself connected to and hosted by the Corbella family who — mother, sister, son, father are all involved in the movement of people-driven democracy.

The summit was hugely powerful — not only connecting us to a major international network but giving visibility to residents, activists and councillors who have been elected from the ground up — from Europe and North America, Middle East and Africa, all encouraging us to continue work with people to eliminate fear that divides citizens. All the summit sessions can be found at You Tube here.

I attended sessions on non-state institutions, on sanctuary cities and on municipalism in towns and rural areas, thinking always, how might New Zealand might relate to this new movement?

Try these recurring themes from the summit:

1. Feminised politics. The new municipalisism is radicalising the process of representation and it is female-led. It will grow from those experienced in listening to their communities. Barcelona City Councillor, Laura Perez Castaño suggested that no matter how we look at it, women’s needs are different to men’s. Issues such as mobility and working hours are different for women and our political positions different. New Zealand knows about historic suffrage; and we should start to recognise the new community-driven leaders who are women.

2. Proximity is a key asset when it comes to municipalism. Having access to all the members of our small communities allows for genuine engagement. We talk about New Zealand’s ‘2 degrees’ social geography and this is powerful. The traditional elite have used proximity in recent times and it can be just as easily employed. Recommended reading: Joan Subirats on Proximity (included here the book Cities in the 21st Century).

3. Ecology and people are connected. Legendary Indian activist Vandana Shiva spoke about forests self-organising and that the natural state for people too is also to self-organise within their urban ecosystems. To quote US activist Debbie Bookchin, “We can’t address ecological problems without resolving our addiction to domination and hierarchy.” We know this in New Zealand: the mauri of the land is connected to the mauri of the people. That means the people and land stay well together.

4. As community organisers, don’t rely on the mainstream media to reach your people or reflect your community. Organising at community level is the way to connect where you are dealing with people at a personal level. It’s time consuming -get used to it. Barcelona En Comu was largely ignored by the TV and newspapers until the election. Trust your community networks and not the media.

Leading European examples

Barcelona En Comu started out as movement of self-organising groups and Barcelona’s Mayor Ada Colau is one of the more public faces of it. Back in 2014 she was part of organisation, Platform for Mortgage Victims, working to stop people being evicted from their homes by banks.

Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau at #FearlessCities

Connecting with other groups, the Platform members became more politically active when they realised that it wasn’t just about tackling banks — that public institutions had to change too. Running for Barcelona Council, initially under the banner Guanyem Barcelona (We will win Barcelona) they didn’t meet in secret or in members’ sitting rooms. They held meetings in the squares, in the streets, and in all neighborhoods. For more history see this Guardian piece How to win back the city.

Although Barcelona en Comu evolved to become a political party, their connection between the people and political process continues fluidly. Oriol Corbella, one of my young hosts, sent me a message as he was attending a recent meeting in his neighborhood with the elected members of Barcelona En Comu, reporting back after two years in Council. He described how the room was separated into five circles (each circle a subject), with the respective politicians explaining “the goals we had accomplished, the difficulties and the future. There are many difficulties for the ones in government to communicate what they do to the people from the party.” But intention is there.

Participatory democracy is fast-shaping the operations of other local governments over Europe, and it may be that smaller towns are easier to manage than cities. At the session Municipalism in towns and rural areas I learned that in the UK, in Buckfastleigh, Devon, Pamela Barrett, Mayor of Buckfastleigh, was elected once her community collectively developed 8 new initiatives and Council raised rates by 1 pound a week (equating to an 100% rise) without backlash. Buckfastleigh runs its meetings in football clubs, in parks and the streets, and allows members of the public to contribute in a Roman-style ‘polis’.

In Torrelodones, Spain, Marina Vicen, Councilor for Youth and Education, spoke of how the Council has established a drop in centre to deal with issues immediately — same day if possible.

In Celrá, we heard from Mercè Amich Vidal, Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP), Councilor for Youth and Equality at Celrà City Council where their constituency asked them to ring the elderly residents every morning to wish them good morning and will check-in on them personally if they don’t respond. They call this the Bon Dia service.

In Celrá, 10o% of local budget (outside of Council staffing) is allocated participatorily. The town has since been trialing an online app — Celrà participa — which will assist.

Municipalist Councillors from Spain and UK: Marina Vincen, Mercè Amich Vidal, Pamela Barrett

In London, the Right to the City campaign started before the UK general election and has similar principles to municipalism, with a certain pick up especially since the tragedy of Grenfell Tower. Yet it feels as if class and power issues could take a while to be fully shaken from the English psyche — see Caroline Molloy’s damning piece on UK local politics.

Surely it’s possible for those of us in NZ to leave behind the colonial psyche of ‘us’ and ‘them’?

New Zealand community-driven politics?

Our New Zealand local governments are generally approachable. I’ve found Councils responsive and Councillors increasingly open minded. In Wellington I often see our Councillors in community events, football games, coming readily to invited meetings through my varied involvement in several community-driven planning programmes. The organisation I co-direct, Letting Space, for example, has worked with Wellington City, as well as Dunedin City, Masterton District, and Porirua City on a platform for community voice — the Urban Dream Brokerage*, a place for all-comers to suggest good ideas for vacant city spaces.

And in terms of political advocacy the work of New Zealand organisation Action Station has begun to reveal the possibility of crowd-sourcing support for specific causes. It’s work is driven by what people want to see happen and has had huge effect in selected areas.

There are many groups who see themselves as legitimate voices of the land, and thousands of Friends’ groups who inadvertently become the main caretakers for the rivers, streams and wilder habitats of our country. Many of recent our environmental victories have been thanks to our nation of volunteers. Yet these groups are at arms length from politics. We’re just playing in the shallows with what is possible. We need to connect voice and ideas with real politics.

Perhaps we don’t perceive the need for radical transformation in New Zealand like those in bigger cities and countries. Perhaps we don’t perceive we have an issue with corruption or access to power.

And yet we still have major problems — hugely disempowered communities and those whose needs are not being met. We’ve seen the rate of homelessness at world-beating levels, of cities too expensive for average wage earners to live in, increased mental illness, youth suicide at record levels and huge disenfranchisement in society. Many of these problems lie in Central government policies. But some issues can be met in our local towns and cities.

With the majority of the New Zealand population saying they think that traditional parties and politicians don’t care about them, we need to find new ways for people to have a voice.

Political commentator Bryce Edwards suggests:

“The idea of participatory and decentralized ways of doing politics are particularly apt for contemporary New Zealand, because the political system has become the opposite of that — it’s currently very centralized and elite. Few people are involved in the political process, and power is highly concentrated. So, we desperately need to be talking about and trialing ideas like municipalism.

“Municipalism might well be a philosophy and practice tailor-made for contemporary politics in New Zealand…People are increasingly either disenchanted with how politics currently works, or at least highly suspicious about democracy and authorities in general. There is a backlash forming against the status quo of how decision-making occurs, and about who has the power. That means that people are particularly open to new ideas about running society — and so concepts like municipalism have a very good chance of resonating with a wide variety of people. It could indeed resonate with many of those on both left and right, with young and old, and with many different types of communities (rural, provincial, urban, etc).”

The movement toward municipalism in Europe tells us that it is at the local level that we can really address peoples’ needs. Cities and towns have more connection with our daily lives. It is not the direction that New Zealand has been heading with recent attempts at reforms.

What would full municipalism look like in New Zealand? Listening and working collectively requires open-mindedness. It would require people to put aside their cynicism and their egos. Would it be more Āotearoa hui-style politics that we adapt? It needs people who are disempowered being given the platform to speak openly and for those with more resource to listen and finding solutions together, from the ground up.

Could we imagine ourselves like Celrá, where our local Councils fund services that we ourselves have prioritised? Imagine — if it were not just our elderly but also the unwell and fearful being phoned every morning to see how they were. Could we imagine participatory budgeting at a large scale, to decide what we spent our money on?

Imagine regular, official Council meetings in our parks and squares (or vacant sites if the weather is bad) where our communities come to talk about their local needs for, say good local food, or cheaper activities or safer traffic and these were addressed directly by the neighborhood representative? Engaging Maori tikanga would be vital and important- hui are the ideal reference point for the practice of listening hearing each other.

Barcelona en Comu have a step by step guide about how to organise a municipalist driven culture. Is New Zealand is ripe for a truly people-led approach to politics?

For more writing on the Fearless Cities summit, I recommend fellow Wellingtonian Richard Bartlett’s snapshot How a Global Network of #FearlessCities is Making Racist Colonial Nation States Obsolete.

Author Sophie Jerram in Barcelona

*My experience has been in the transformation of space from private to public. We need more spaces to debate and meet in. We’ve witnessed first-hand the submission of hundreds of new ideas for public life. Often all is needed is space and encouragement.  has helped people launch ideas, taught new skills, redistributed resources, connected property owners with creative makers, and moreover given people the chance to practise their ideas in public space free of commercial pressure. I’ve been in Europe talking with the local city of Helsingør about how this ‘radical’ programme handing over spaces to people with ideas could be adapted to Danish life.

*

Photo by BarcelonaEnComu

The post What Municipalism and #FearlessCities could mean for New Zealand appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The video is part of our series of video presentations on the different thematic work areas of the ECA. We are also sharing our proposal on the Urban Commons in the text below. Finally, you can also read and comment on the proposal on the Commons Transition Wiki.

Urban Commons

A proposal by David Gabriel[1] for the European Commons Assembly

Background

Europe is one of the most urbanised places in the world. Actually, more than 75% of the European population lives in cities. Daily life in cities has combined with the historic struggle of inhabitants to create urban commons. Many groups across the EU reclaim their urban commons, like public space or housing, and try to create new ones. Recently, several movements have been fighting for the right to housing and the right to the city in Europe. In this way, urban commons stand as alternatives to speculation, gentrification, and enclosure in cities.

Urban Commons Issues

• Housing
• Public Space
• The right to the City
• Social facilities
• Policy without school segregation
• Inclusion of the migrants and refugees
• Localizing human rights
• New Municipalism

Practices of urban commons  

One of the main ideas reclaimed by the urban commoners is the Right to housing and the Right to the City. The first formulation of a right to the city dates back to Henry Lefebvre during the 1960’s. Since then, networks and civil society organizations have defined “the right to the city as the equitable use of cities according to the principles of sustainability, democracy, equity and social justice. It is a collective right of the inhabitants of these cities, especially for vulnerable and disadvantaged groups who gain legitimacy of action and organization based on their use and customs with the objective of achieving, in practice, the right to free self-determination and an adequate level of life” (definition of the Global Platform for the Right to the City). The occupation of public space is also a new practice of urban commoners, with important consequences in Egypt (Tahrir), Turkey (Taksim), Spain (15M), the United States (Occupy Wall Street) and France (Nuit Debout). Nowadays, many urban commoners are debating about the use, role and importance of public space in the exercise of democratic rights and in ways of challenging capitalism.

Actors involved

Inhabitants, citizen and theirs organizations are involved in the right to the city movement and also networks, foundations, and multilateral organizations. One strategic orientation of the social movement is to achieve alliances with the local authority and networks of cities. The following organizations are some examples:

• Europe: European coalition for the right to housing and the city
• Spain: Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca / iniciativa legislativa Popular por la Vivienda Digna
• Belgium: Habitat et Participation
• England: Radical Housing Network
• France: Droit au Logement / Coordination Pas Sans Nous / Atelier Populaire d’Urbanisme
• The Netherlands: Bon Preaire Woonvormen
• Portugal: Habita – Colectivo pelo Direito a Habitaçao e à Cidade
• Turkey: Istanbul Urban Movements

Urban Policy and the EU

The European Union has no formal authority over urban policy. But given the crisis of the European Union, the cities could become the new scale to implement European policies and to create democratic relations among the citizens. The former European Parliament already called for an Urban Agenda for the EU in 2011. During the Netherlands presidency of the EU in 2016, member states, cities and the European Commission signed a new political agreement – the Pact of Amsterdam – to cooperate in four fields: air quality, housing, inclusion of the refugees and migrants, and urban poverty. Presently, civil society and citizens are not involved in the definition and implementation of the new urban agenda. Nonetheless, the urban common process could be a way the co-produce and implement the NUA.

Supporting and scaling urban commons

Each inhabitant or citizen could be involved in protecting and developing the urban commons. To reinforce the movement, we need to create new relations with the inhabitants and communities, particularly with the people who live in the popular neighborhoods. Community organizing and advocacy planning could be useful methods to rely on. We also need to propose social leader trainings focused on urban commons issues. The articulation between local, national and regional levels is also decisive in scaling up the local campaigns and sharing knowledge. With the institutions, we must re-open the debate around planning theory.

Institutional change

Introducing urban commons in the European urban agenda is the first difficulty. A new alliance between social movements, progressive cities and some European deputies would help. To put the EU agenda into practice, the issues of governance of the urban commons are central and need to include the citizens and the civil society. We are aiming at a cultural change of the European, national and local institutions.

Resources

We need money, methodology and human resources. Concerning methodology, we must share our different practices like community organizing, chartering, advocacy planning, and occupation of spaces. Finally, we need a European center for training new organizers with various capabilities (emotional, relational, rational, etc.)

[1] David Gabriel (Grenoble, France) contact: [email protected]

Photo by kika13

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