This article by Pål Steigan was originally published here. Translated by Graham Healey.

The paintings of goatherds and farm animals amongst the ruins of infrastructure and temples from classical Rome are like pictures of people moving among the remains of a high-tech civilisation that they no longer have the ability to match. The city of Rome had at its height a population of a million people. That required a very advanced infrastructure for water and food supply, transport, goods delivery, trade and so on. The city was, at the time, the foremost example of a building materials industry, that had the capacity, and level of competency, to deliver the enormous amount of building materials that such a city required.

When the empire collapsed, the infrastructure was no longer maintained. The aqueducts broke down and towns and cities lost their water supply. Roads and bridges deteriorated and were not repaired. Goods transport and trade was reduced from a surging river to a quiet brook. 1200 years after its days of glory Rome was a ruined town with a population of less than 10.000.

The Etruscans, and later the Romans, had drained swamps to increase food production. Thereby they also removed malaria. But when the empire broke down, the drainage ditches were no longer maintained and malaria returned. It wasn’t until the 1930’s, after the fascists came to power, that the swamps were drained again and malaria disappeared from Italy again.

The ’empire’ of today is extremely vulnerable

We, who live in a a time when another empire shows many of the same tendencies towards disintegration that the Roman empire had towards the end, have all reason to give it some thought.

The Roman emperors mixed more and more lead in the silver coinage (denarius), so that eventually there was almost  no silver left. That was the hyperinflation of the time. Roman citizens no longer wished to fight in the army, so the army became based on mercenaries. The word soldier comes from this. A soldier was someone who received money to fight (solidus – gold coin). In order to pay the soldiers more money had to be minted. The empire’s wars were expensive and the empire was large, so the problem was solved by minting coins that were ever more worthless.

The world is dominated today by the American empire. It affects everything about global production, the money system, world trade, agriculture, the energy system and so on.

The empire passed it’s high watermark around 1971. That is when USA gave up the gold standard. After that the empire’s growth was built on printing more and more paper money, and now digital money. But the empire is also based on the rest of the world accepting these symbols as the real thing. US wars in the 21^st century are largely financed by selling American government securities to China, in other words on China lending money to the American state.

The globalized production and trade system is finely tuned to deliver goods and components just-in-time. Norwegian meat production for example is dependent on a boat arriving at Fredrikstad with soya from Brasil once a month. If the boat did not arrive there would be a full-blown crisis in  Norwegian meat production.

When the so-called horse-meat scandal broke in 2013 the Financial Times showed how the European trade and transport systems for meat work.

Slaughterhouses are capital intensive and energy demanding, and therefore there are fewer and fewer slaughterhouses delivering to a more and more global market. The margins are paper thin, so they cut corners wherever they can.

The big supermarket chains want to buy the cheapest food raw materials available at any one time. Their brokers are continually on the phone to make best wholesale purchases. FT quotes professor Karel Williams at the Manchester Business School, who explains how refrigerator trucks queue up in front of the slaughterhouses in the Netherlands at the end of the week, with the drivers having no idea where they are going until the last minute. Each broker has 10-20 slaughterhouses he buys from. One week he buys from one place and the next week from somewhere else. The deals are made at the last moment for the driver to get his delivery orders. “We have a continual European trade where animal parts are driven around in 40-ton trailers.”

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation – UN) says that there are something like a quarter of a million edible plants that could be cultivated. But humanity has become dependent on just 3% of them.

The worlds food supply is dependent on 150 plant species. Three quarters of all energy we get from plant food comes from just 12 of them. Competition and the need to increase production has resulted in a drastic reduction in genetic diversity. The system also demands more and more energy, minerals and rare raw materials at an exponentially increasing rate.

This makes today’s empire extremely vulnerable. Agriculture may well experience crises similar to the Potato Famine that hit Ireland in 1847, when a million people died of starvation. It is easy to imagine how devastating and dramatic it will be.

In short: when this system collapses, it will, just as in the Rome empire, experience the collapse of much of the critical infrastructure. It will simply not be possible to feed as many people as before. The result can be widespread starvation disasters to an extent that humanity has never seen before. There are 37 megacities in the world today and the largest of them have over 30 million inhabitants. If there is a breakdown in water supply, or energy or food delivery, then such cities will become uninhabitable.

Food and water are fundamental. Without food and water we cannot live. But many of our systems are also extremely dependent on oil and rare earth minerals that there are less and less of. When this system collapses, it could easily have dramatic consequences. The example of the Roman empire shows that it might well take a long time before anything else takes its place.

It is easy to show that today’s growth based capitalism is living on borrowed time. It is a long way from being robust or sustainable. On the contrary it is very vulnerable and unstable. This is one of the reasons that it is necessary to work towards replacing the system as soon as possible and learning how to run society in a healthier and more sustainable fashion.

Globalists of right and left bemoan the fact that people turning their back on the globalism they have preached for decades. They are turning instead to populist politics and are so “reactionary” that they want to preserve their nation states, local production and more. But it is the globalists who are playing Russian roulette. It is their system that has made us so extremely vulnerable. To ensure food-security and viable local communities, to restore the broken metabolism between society and nature, is what is truly progressive. That is the future, and we need to urgently get rid of the empire and it’s economy of spongers and freeloaders.

If we don’t then perhaps landscape painters in a few hundred years time will be painting goat-herders grazing their animals under the twisted remains of skyscrapers and motorway bridges.

The post It hurts when empires fall appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Photo by Luc Mercelis

The post Funding the Cooperative City in Rome appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is an excerpt from the upcoming book Funding the Cooperative City: Community finance and the economy of civic spaces.

In the past decade, with the economic crisis and the transformation of welfare societies, NGOs, community organisations and civic developers – City Makers – established some of the most important services and spaces in formerly vacant buildings, underused areas and neglected neighbourhoods. Consolidating their presence in the regenerated spaces, these initiatives are increasingly looking into the power of the local community, the dispersed crowd and new financial actors to invest in their activities.

Two years ago, the cultural centre La Casa Invisible collected over 20.000 euros for the partial renovation of the building including the installation of fire doors and electric equipments to assure the safety of their revitalized 19th century building in the centre of Málaga. A few months later, East London’s Shuffle Festival, operating in a cemetery park at Mile End, collected 60.000 pounds for the renovation and community use of The Lodge, an abandoned building at the corner of the cemetery. In order to implement their campaigns, both initiatives used the online platforms Goteo and Spacehive that specialise in the financing of specific community projects. The fact that many of the hundreds of projects supported by civic crowdfunding platforms are community spaces, underlines two phenomena: the void left behind by a state that gradually withdrew from certain community services, and the urban impact of community capital created through the aggregation of individual resources.

The question if community capital can really cure the voids left behind by the welfare state has generated fierce debates in the past years. This discussion was partly launched by Brickstarter, the beta platform specialised in architectural crowdfunding, when it introduced to the public the idea of crowdfunded urban infrastructures. Those who opposed Brickstarter, did in fact protest against the Conservative agenda of the “Big Society”, the downsizing of welfare society and the “double taxation” of citizens: “Why should we spend on public services when our taxes should pay for them?”

Nevertheless, in the course of the economic crisis, many European cities witnessed the emergence of a parallel welfare infrastructure: the volunteer-run hospitals and social kitchens in Athens, the occupied schools, gyms and theatres of Rome or the community-run public squares of Madrid are only a few examples of this phenomenon. European municipalities responded to this challenge in a variety of ways. Some cities like Athens began to examine how to adjust their regulations to enable the functioning of community organisations, others created new legal frameworks to share public duties with community organisations in contractual ways, like Bologna with the Regulation of the Commons. In several other cities, administrations began experimenting with crowdfunding public infrastructures, like in Ghent or Rotterdam, where municipalities offer match-funding to support successful campaigns, or with participatory budgeting, like in Paris, Lisbon or Tartu. Yet other public administrations in the UK, the Netherlands or Austria invited the private sphere to invest in social services in the form of Social Impact Bonds, where the work of NGOs or social enterprises is pre-financed by private actors who are paid back with a return on their investment in case the evaluation of the delivered service is positive.

Largo Residencias, Lisbon. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Alternatively, some cities chose to support local economy and create more resilient neighbourhoods with self-sustaining social services through grant systems. The City of Lisbon, for instance, after identifying a number of “priority neighbourhoods” that need specific investments to help social inclusion and ameliorate local employment opportunities, launched the BIP/ZIP program that grants selected civic initiatives with up to 40.000 euros. The granted projects, chosen through an open call, have to prove their economic sustainability and have to spend the full amount in one year. The BIP/ZIP project, operating since 2010, gave birth to a number of self-sustaining civic initiatives, including social kitchens that offer affordable food and employment for locals or cooperative hotels that use their income from tourism to support social and cultural projects. In 2015 the experience of the BIP/ZIP matured in a Community-Led Local Development Network, as identified by the European Union’s Cohesion Policy 2014-2020, which will grant the network access to part of the Structural Funds of the City of Lisbon. The CLLD is a unique framework for the democratic distribution of public funds: it foresees the management of the funding to be shared between administration, private and civic partners, with none of them having the majority of shares and votes.

While, as the previous cases demonstrate, the public sector plays an important role in strengthening civil society in some European cities, many others witnessed the emergence of new welfare services provided by the civic economy completely outside or without any help by the public sector. In some occasions, community contribution appears in the form of philanthropist donation to support the construction, renovation or acquisition of playgrounds, parks, stores, pubs or community spaces. In others, community members act as creditors or investors in an initiative that needs capital, in exchange for interest, shares or the community ownership of local assets, for instance, shops in economically challenged neighbourhoods. Crowdfunding platforms also help coordinating these processes: the French Bulb in Town platform, specialized in community investment, gathered over 1 million euros for the construction of a small hydroelectric plant in Ariège that brings investors a return of 7% per year.

ExRotaprint, Berlin. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Besides aggregating resources from individuals to support particular cases, community infrastructure projects are also helped by ethical investors. When two artists mobilised their fellow tenants to save the listed 10.000 m2 Rotaprint in the Berlin district of Wedding, they invited several organisations working on moving properties off the speculation market and eliminating the debts attached to land, to help them buy the buildings. While the complex was bought and is renovated with the help of an affordable loan by the CoOpera pension fund, the land was bought by the Edith Maryon and Trias Foundations and is rented (with a long-term lease, a “heritable building right”) to ExRotaprint, a non-profit company, making it impossible to resell the shared property. With its sustainable cooperative ownership model, ExRotaprint provides affordable working space for manufacturers as well as social and cultural initiatives whose rents cover the loans and the land’s rental fee.

Creating community ownership over local assets and keeping profits benefit local residents and services is a crucial component of resilient neighbourhoods. Challenging the concept of value and money, many local communities began to experiment with complementary currencies like the Brixton or Bristol Pounds. Specific organisational forms like Community Land Trusts or cooperatives have been instrumental in helping residents create inclusive economic ecosystems and sustainable development models.

Homebaked, Liverpool. Photo (cc) Eutropian

In Liverpool’s Anfield neighbourhood, a community bakery is the symbol of economic empowerment: renovated and run by the Homebaked Community Land Trust established in April 2012, the bakery – initially backed by the Liverpool Biennale – offers employment opportunities for locals, and it is the catalyst of local commerce and the centre of an affordable housing project that is developed in the adjacent parcels. Similarly, a few kilometres east, local residents established another CLT to save the Toxteth neighborhood from demolition. The Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust, with the help of social investors and a young collective of architects (winning the prestigious Turner prize), organised a scheme that includes affordable housing, community-run public facilities and shops.

The economic self-determination of a community has been explored at the scale of an entire neighbourhood by the Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative in Southern Rotterdam. The cooperative is an umbrella organisation that connects workspaces with shopkeepers, local makers, social foundations, and the local food market: they have developed an energy collective in cooperation with an energy supplier that realises substantial savings for businesses in the neighbourhood; a cleaning service that ensures that cleaning work is commissioned locally; and a food delivery service for elderly people in the neighbourhood.

With community organisations and City Makers acquiring significant skills to manage welfare services, urban infrastructures and inclusive urban development processes, it is time for their recognition by established actors in the public and private sectors. The EU’s Urban Agenda, developing guidelines for a more sustainable and inclusive development of European cities, can be a catalyst of this recognition: it can prompt the creation of new instruments and policies to enable such community-led initiatives. While the Cohesion Policy 2014-2020 has developed the CLLD framework, not many Member States chose to use this instrument. The Urban Agenda could therefore envision the adoption of more methods to be experimented by City Administrations, to allow for a more sustainable and inclusive allocation of resources. Whether through matchfunding, grant systems, or simply removing the legal barriers of cooperatives, land trusts and community investment, municipalities could join the civil society in developing a more resilient civic economy with accessible jobs, affordable housing, clean energy, and social integration.

Lead image from homebaked.org, Liverpool UK. All other images from Eutropian.

The post Community Capital in Action: New Financial Models for Resilient Cities appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Abstract:

“Community Networks (CN) are an emerging world-wide phenomenon that is receiving growing attention from a number of different disciplines. A CN is an infrastructure for digital communication, an alternative to the mainstream approach of commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs). It resembles a scaled-down Internet and is used to interconnect a community of people who share particular goals and motivations. By developing a multidisciplinary perspective at the intersection between science and technology studies, law and informatics, this paper analyses the cultural, technical and institutional features of Ninux.org, the most important Italian CN. Ninux.org, based on wireless technology, is made up of more than 320 nodes all over Italy, although mostly concentrated in Rome. This paper provides insights into the political, technical and legal issues of the network, highlighting how tightly interwoven these are, to the extent that they cannot be properly understood in isolation. The paper starts by describing the phenomenon of the CNs; sketching its historical development, the motivations underlying the foundation and use of these networks, their functioning and main legal implications. This introduction is followed by an examination of the specific case of Ninux.org, looking at practices, discourses, and interactions among activists participating in the project. On the basis of this analysis, the paper moves on to consider some technical characteristics and specifications of the network, revealing how the technological infrastructure only partially realises an effective decentralisation and horizontal organisation of the network. We also consider some of the legal constraints imposed by the Italian and European normative frameworks, and the need for Ninux.org to address regulatory issues in the near future. Finally, on the basis of our multi-perspective analysis of this Italian CN, the paper outlines some ways in which the community network could be strengthened, and its participants helped to develop reflexive tools to implement their initial vision of decentralisation.”

This article has been originally published at the Journal of Peer Production (available here).

Find the complete special issue on “Alternative Internets” here.

Photo by INCITE

The post Hacktivism, Infrastructures and Legal Frameworks in Community Networks: The Italian Case of Ninux.org appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Occupiers of Rome’s Teatro Valle want to move Italy’s cultural policies in the direction of the commons.

The proposed privatization of the grand public theater in Rome, Teatro Valle, has been defeated – but perhaps more importantly, the historic three-year occupation of the building has succeeded in achieving many of its primary goals, including the recognition of its demands to establish a new theater commons, after weeks of contentious negotiations.

The struggle was noteworthy because it pitted municipal authorities in Rome, whose austerity policies had resulted in severe cutbacks at the theater, against self-identified commoners who want to run the historic theater in far more open, participatory and innovative ways.  At stake was not just the continuance of performances at Teatro Valle, but the governance, management practices, purpose and character of the theater.  Shall it be a “public good” managed by the city government, often to the detriment of the public interest, or a commons in which ordinary people can instigate their own ideas and propose their own rules?

Beset by budgetary problems, the mayor of Rome had proposed privatizing the management of Teatro Valle.  But protesters who had occupied the building in 2011 adamantly resisted such plans.  Their protests inspired an outcry not just among many Romans and Italians, but among an international network of commoners, human rights advocates, political figures, scholars and cultural leaders.

In July, the city government threatened to evict occupiers and issued an ultimatum with a July 31 deadline.  Thus began a series of negotiations.  Commoners were represented by Fondazione Teatro valle Bene Comune, which entered into talks with the city government and Teatro di Roma, the public entity that runs the systems of the theaters in Rome.

The municipality and Teatro di Roma balked at the idea of letting the Fondazione manage Teatro Valle, but they did seem to accept the idea of it running a “special project” of participatory, experimental theater, with details of governance to be worked out.  But the municipal government wanted to close the theater for at least ten months to allow the refurbishing of the facility.  Apparently many commoners, including the Fondazione, were wary of this idea lest it be used as a subterfuge to get the occupiers out of the building without offering any enforceable political promises.  The Fondazione proposed instead a shared program of refurbishment while keeping the theater open.

The resulting impasse led to many large public assemblies hosted by the Fondazione.  A measure of the significance of the entire controversy can be seen in the support given to the Fondazione by Italy’s former Deputy Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court, the former Minister of Cultural Affairs, and prominent art historians.  As the July 31 deadline approaches, law scholar/commons activist Ugo Mattei pressed for an extension in order to find an acceptable solution.

Last night (August 10), I learned that Teatro Valle would be abandoned by the occupants.  My source reported:  “Only a permanent presidium will be kept open in front of it until things clear up a little more. There will be a night sleepover with all the citizenship in the street and tomorrow at 11 am during a press conference the theater will be transferred from the occupants to the City of Rome and from the City to the Teatro di Roma .”

The Fondazione issued the following press release:

“The Valle Theater ends the state of occupation to begin a new phase in the mobilization  and in the Foundation. The members of the Foundation, together with all the population will build a roadmap to face the new phase reached by the negotiation, a phase in which to develop a genuine dialogue with institutions on the new models of participated governance of the commons to decide together the future of the Theater.”

Ugo Mattei noted, “This is an important sign of the political maturity of the commons movement in Italy,” adding that the agreement provides “some much-needed democracy in a phase in which Italy is going down a dangerous authoritarian road.”

All sides agreed to the following three points:

1) That the city government will recognize the “political, artisticand organizational experience” of the occupation and the role of Fondazione Teatro Valle Bene Comune;

2) That the Fondazione will be entrusted with the autonomy to initiate an experimental project of participatory theater, and to manage the theater space in cooperation with the artistic director of the Theater of Rome; and

3) That the theater will be kept open throughout the year and all day, even outside of show times, and that the space will be acessible to commoning and other citizens’ initiatives.

An attempt to get a special contractual regime for the theater’s workers was only partially successful because that issue is not within the jurisdiction of the City of Rome government.  The idea was to eliminate precarious temporary employment, reinvest profits from theater operations and provide special ticket prices to enhance wide public access to performances.

A final demand to let the Fondazione be housed at Teatro Valle was rejected.

The president of Teatro di Roma Marino Sinibaldi said that this deal would be honored only if occupiers left the theater by midnight, August 10 – which apparently happened.

A statement by the Fondazione reads:  “Teatro Valle ends the state of occupation to begin a new phase in the mobilization and in the Foundation. The members of the Foundation, together with all the population, will build a roadmap to face the new phase reached by the negotiation, a phase in which to develop a genuine dialogue with institutions on the new models of participated governance of the commons to decide together the future of the Theater.”

We will be watching closely to see how this bold new experiment in commoning unfolds.  It has the promise of pioneering new models of collaboration between city governments and commoners, in the management of public facilities, and in the political mobilization of commoners to achieve such ends.

Originally posted at bollier.org

The post The Teatro Valle Occupation Ends — and a New Theater Commons Begins appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It’s time for the international community of commoners to take a public stand against this very real threat. The mayor has summoned Italian law scholar Ugo Mattei to meet with him on Monday to negotiate a resolution. In advance of that meeting, Mattei and Salvatore Settis, President of the Advisory Board of the Louvre Museum in Paris, have prepared an international petition calling on the mayor to back away from his proposal and to allow this historic experiment in commoning to continue.

Below is a copy of the petition.  You can express your support by sending you name and affiliation to Ugo Mattei at matteiu /at/ uchastings.edu.

A number of human rights scholars around the world are keenly interested in Teatro Valle.  Noted human rights scholar Anna Grear alerted the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and Environment that “the attempted denial of popular ‘ownership’ of ‘place’ is fundamental to the cultural and material enclosures enacted by privatising and controlling agendas.”  She added that “closing down an important, even iconic, example of a fundamentally vernacular, community-based engagement with place (a vibrant, evocative commons) is entirely consistent with the deeper logic visible in moves such as the attempt to control the world seed supplies and breeds, to extend the corporatisation of the social spheres, to privatise urban space in ways that shut ordinary human beings out of them in central and important respects.”

For more on the backstory of Teatro Valle, here is a previous blog post on the occupation from February 2013.  Below is the petition now circulating.  Sign it!

The commons “Italian Style” must continue their experimentation! An International call to protect the Teatro Valle Foundation from Eviction.

Since June 14 2011, a community of artists and militants has transformed the Teatro Valle, the oldest and most prestigious in Rome, then at high risk of privatization, into the “Teatro Valle Occupato,” one of the most advanced experiments of merger between political struggle and performing arts in the current world. A trust-like legal entity, the “Fondazione Teatro Valle Bene Comune,” was created in the interest of future generations, with a membership of almost 6,000 people by a genuinely new process of cooperation between some well-known jurists and the Assembly of the occupants. While a notary has recognized the Foundation, the Prefect of Rome has denied its moral personality on the assumption that possession was not a sufficient title on the Valle premises.

Nevertheless, in three years the occupation, though formally never authorized, has succeeded in becoming a new institution of the commons, studied by scholars worldwide and the object of many publications. Because no authority in Rome has ever asked the occupants to leave and the municipality has paid the energy bill (roughly 90,000 Euros per year), it would be difficult to deny that the occupation was largely tolerated (even by the previous post-fascist major). Certainly the occupants have taken very good care of the ancient Theater, including paying for small renovations, and have  generated three years of exceptionally interesting shows, performances, meeting, educational programs that the population could attend on the basis of a donation system according to the possibilities of each one. The Valle experience has also inspired similar actions to protect theaters and public spaces through Italy; it is promoting a nation-wide experiment of codification of commons institutions involving some twenty of the leading academic lawyers in Italy; it has produced its own shows performed Europe-wide and has attracted to the Valle some of the best-known artists and intellectuals in Europe.

The European Cultural Foundation, among others has granted the prestigious Princess Margritt Award to the Teatro Valle and the ZKM of Karsrhue has devoted to that experience a stand in a recent major International exhibition on social movements worldwide.

After the European Elections last May, possibly as a consequence of an ill-conceived legalistic stance by the new Government, early negotiations to settle the dispute concerning the title to the Theater have been suddenly terminated as the Assessor of Rome responsible for culture in Rome has been removed and not replaced. As a reply to the Foundation request to resume negotiations, the new major of Rome, a member of the ruling Democratic Party and a well-known academic doctor, has released two days ago a statement asking the occupants to leave, threatening police intervention and proposing a public auction to privatize the management of the space.

This cannot happen! The city of Rome, as a cultural center of the world deserves a better solution to the Valle issue. We strongly plea the Italian political authorities to look for a method which facilitates rather than repressing institutional and cultural experiments to run the commons.

Ugo Mattei, Professor, The University of California, Hastings and Università di Torino.

Salvatore Settis, President of the Advisory Board of the Louvre Museum, Paris.

Please sign this international petition with affiliation.

Originally posted at bollier.org

The post Save the Teatro Valle Commons in Rome! appeared first on P2P Foundation.