Executive summary by Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation, research) and Yurek Onzia (project coordination)

This study ^[1] was commissioned and financed by the City of Ghent, a city in northern Flanders with nearly 300,000 inhabitants, with the support of its mayor Daniel Termont, the head of the mayor’s staff, the head of the strategy department, and the political coalition of the city which consists of the Flemish Socialist Party SPA, the Flemish Greens (Groen) and the Flemish Liberal Party (Open VLD).

The request was to document the emergence and growth of the commons in the city, to offer some explanations of why this was occurring, and to determine what kind of public policies should support commons-based initiatives, based on consultation with the active citizens in Ghent.

The authors of the report are Michel Bauwens as investigator and Yurek Onzia as coordinator of the effort.

Timelab, an artistic makerspace under the leadership of Evi Swinnen, and the Greek scholar of the P2P Lab Vasilis Niaros, played important supportive roles in the realization of this project. Wim Reygaert and partners provided the graphics used in the original report. Annelore Raman coordinated the connections within the city council.

The consultation, which took place during the spring of 2017, took the form of:

1. A mapping of 500 or so commons-oriented projects per sector of activity (food, shelter, transportation, etc), through a wiki, which is available at http://wiki.commons.gent
2. 80+ one to one interviews and conversations with leading commoners and project leaders
3. A written questionnaire that was responded to by over 70 participants
4. A series of 9 workshops in which participants were invited per theme, ‘Food as a Commons’, ‘Energy as a Commons’, ‘Transportation as a Commons’, etc ..
5. A Commons Finance Canvas workshop, based on the methodology developed by Stephen Hinton, which looked into the economic opportunities, difficulties and models used by the commons projects

The report consists of four parts.

The first part provides the context on the emergence of urban commons, which has seen a tenfold increase in the Flanders in the last ten years. It focuses on the challenge it represents for the city and the public authorities, for market players, and for traditional civil society organisations, and how the new contributive logic of the commons challenges (but also enriches) the logic of representation of the European democratic polities, in this specific case, at the level of a city. It also looks at the opportunities inherent in the new models such as more active participation of inhabitants in co-constructing their cities, in solving ecological and climate change challenges, and in creating new forms of meaningful work at the local level.

The second part is an overview of urban commons developments globally, but especially in European cities, and takes a closer look at the experiences in Bologna (with the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons, now adopted by many other Italian cities), Barcelona (the pro-commons policies of the new political coalition of En Comu), Frome, UK (for its civic coalition that replaced the political parties in the running of the city), and Lille, for its experience with a Assembly of the Commons as a voice and expression of the local commons.

The third part is the analysis of the urban commons in Ghent itself, highlighting some of its strengths and weaknesses.

And finally, in the fourth part, based on our analysis in the three first parts, we offer our recommendations to the City, in terms of an institutional adaptation of the city to the new commons-centric demands that emerge through the commons activities. It’s a set of 23 integrated proposals for the creation of public-commons processes for citywide co-creation. In some way, it represents the shift from urban commons to a more ambitious vision of the ‘city as a commons’.

The P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens and Vasilis (Billy) Niaros

The context for the Emergence of the Urban Commons

We define the commons as a shared resource, which is co-owned or co-governed by a community of users and stakeholders, under the rules and norms of that community. There is no commons without active co-production (commoning), and without an important measure of self-governance. Thus, it differs from both public and state- or city-owned goods, and from private property managed by its owners. Both a Dutch study by Tine De Moor (Homo Cooperans), and a study for the Flanders by the Oikos think thank have confirmed a steep rise in the number of commons-oriented civic initiatives (commons-oriented means that important aspects of the initiatives have commons’ aspects). This rise is related to a growing awareness amongst a layer of citizens that a social and ecological transition is necessary given the relative state and market failures, but also by the effects of the great economic and systemic crisis of 2008, which has seen an austerity-driven retreat from public authorities in terms of common infrastructures.

These new urban commons however do not exist ‘on their own’ as fully autonomous projects and entities but by necessity interact with both public and market forces, for access to resources and support.

Thus the commons is a challenge for the other institutions as well:

• It is a challenge for the city, as commons are a claim to both public and private resources that were governed by the city, or which may have been private properties currently in disuse . Self-governance in the commons most often takes a contributory logic, i.e. the contributors and participants manage the projects, but this doesn’t necessarily involve all the citizenry. This also poses a challenge for representative democracy. Conversely, commoners may want support, but may resent control and limitations to their autonomy.
• It is a challenge for market forces, which may feel challenged by commons projects as alternatives to privatized provision, or may profit from them in ways that are considered extractive by the commoners, or their actions may ‘enclose’ and destroy the commons, creating conflictual relations.
• But is is also a challenge to established civil society organisations, which were based on memberships, a professional cadre, and bureaucratic forms of organisation and management; elements which are often rejected in the commons initiatives.

The commons requires a ‘partner’ city, which enables and empowers commons-oriented civic initiatives. It also requires generative market forms which sustain the commons and create livelihoods for the core contributors as well as facilitative types of support from civil society organisations.

An important discovery in our analysis of the 500+ urban commons projects in Ghent, is that their structure strongly resembles that of the commons-driven digital economy. This means that at the heart of urban commons we find:

• Productive communities based on open contributions.
• That these urban commons and their platforms may generate (and are obliged to if they are to be resilient and self-sustaining over time) generative market forms — i.e. entrepreneurial coalitions that have a positive relationship with the commons and the commoners.
• The communities, platforms and possible market forms require, and receive, facilitative support from the various agencies and functionaries of the city, and the Civil Society Organisations, which have adapted to the needs of the new citizen-commoners.

This relationship is shown by the following graph:

Graphic 6: Polygovernance model.

This graph shows the five entry points of the commons economy in which the city is actively intervening (bottom), the 3 elements of the commons economy, and the public-commons processes and institutions which could be set up as a meta-structure to frame the cooperation between the city, the commoners and the generative economic entities.

It is also clear that the commons initiatives and their emerging economy, hold great potential for the social and economic life of the city.

The three main potentials are in our opinion the following:

1. The commons are an essential part of the ecological transition: shared and mutualized infrastructures have a dramatically lower footprint than systems based on ‘possessive individualism’, but on the condition that ‘it is done in the right’ and systemic way. A good counter-example is how the competition between drivers in the Uber model negates the environmental advantages of ride-hailing. Huge reductions in the material footprint (and carbon footprint) are possible with the commons-centric models.
2. The commons are a means for the re-industrialization of the city following the cosmo-local model which combines global technical cooperation in knowledge commons with smart re-localization of production; an example is how city procurement could be used to reintroduce healthy local meals for children in public schools (5 million a year, not counting other anchor institutions which could join); a combination between procurement from the urban/rural short-circuit farmers in the organic sector, carbon-free transportation (Ghent is flat, which allows for bike-cargo transport), and local cooking, would create hundreds of jobs for the local economy. Socially, this means jobs not just for the technically-savvy but for the desperate blue collar workers who have been hit hard by the ecologically unsustainable neoliberal globalization model
3. Representative democracy is, for a number of interlocking reasons, in deep crisis and facing a crisis of trust. And the world of production is still nearly entirely un-democratic. The commons however are based on the self-governance of the value producing systems and are therefore one of the few schools of true democracy and participation. Inclusive and diverse commons could be at the very least an adjunct to representative democracy, creating a system of Democracy+, augmented with participation , deliberation and multi-stakeholder governance models in cooperation with the commons initiatives.

The analysis of the situation in Ghent

The city of Ghent is a dynamic city of nearly 300k inhabitants including a huge number of young people and students. It’s a city in which the commons already have a distinct presence, with support from an active and engaged city administration.

• A tradition of center-left coalitions have created a distinct political and administrative culture with many engaged city officials. The city is actively engaged in carbon reduction, traffic reduction, and has neighborhood and social facilitators, connectors in schools, street workers and other types of staff that is actively engaged in enabling roles at the local level. This includes different kinds of support for commons-initiatives.
• The city has an important policy to support the temporary use by community groups of vacant land and buildings.
• The city counts around 500 commons-oriented initiatives in all sectors of human provisioning, such as food, shelter, mobility, etc. Many of these are active around the necessity of socio-ecological transitions in their respective domains and neighborhoods.

These positive aspects should be tempered by the following issues:

• Both the efforts of the city and the commoner’s initiatives are highly fragmented;
• There are many regulatory and administrative hurdles to hinder the expansion of commons initiatives, for example in the field of mutualized housing; (for example, we received a 7 page memo of such obstacles from housing activists).
• Though there are a number of fablabs/coworking spaces and some craft-related initiatives, there is at present a lack of activity around open design linked to real production;
• Though blessed with a large university, which is active around sustainability issues, there is very little evidence of relations between the university and the commons projects, and some of its spinoffs and players are sometimes distinctly hostile to open source and design projects;
• Though many of the leading commons activists are facing precarious lifestyles and incomes, they usually have good social and knowledge capital and mostly consist of long established inhabitants. There are many commons project in the post-migration communities, but they are mostly limited to ethnic and religious memberships, and there is as yet relatively little cross-over. They are however successful counter-examples such as the initiatives in the neighborhood Rabot.
• Old and newer Civil Society Organisations play a significant infrastructural and support role for maintaining urban commons projects, but perhaps perceive them to be mainly directed towards vulnerable population groups and not as key and highly productive resources.
• Despite the city support, the major potential commons are largely enclosed and vulnerable to private extraction; the current models do not challenge the mainstream consensus but find a way to co-exist with the major imbalances.
• Despite its long history of self-organization with the guilds in the middle ages and a very strong labor movement in the 19th century, the cooperative sector and its support mechanisms are quite weak; there is a weak if not inexistent support infrastructure for a specifically generative and cooperative economy that could work with commons infrastructures.

The proposals for the city administration

The general logic of our proposals is to put forward realistic but important institutional innovations that can lead to further progress and expansion of the urban commons in Ghent in order to successfully achieve its ecological and social goals. We propose public-social or public-partnership based processes and protocols to streamline cooperation between the city and the commoners in every field of human provisioning.

We are not summarizing all proposals here, merely the underlying logic.

Graphic 7 (“proposed transition infrastructure for the city of Ghent’”) shows the general underlying logic.

Graphic 7 (“proposed transition infrastructure for the city of Ghent’”) shows the general underlying logic.

Commons initiatives can forward their proposals and need for support to a City Lab, which prepares a ‘Commons Accord’ between the city and the commons initiative, modeled after the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons. Based on this contract, the city sets-up specific support alliances which combine the commoners and civil society organisations, the city itself, and the generative private sector, in order to organize support flows.

Graphic 9 describes a cross-sector institutional infrastructure for commons policy-making and support, divided in ‘transition arenas’.

Graphic 9 describes a cross-sector institutional infrastructure for commons policy-making and support, divided in ‘transition arenas’.

The model comes from the existing practice around the food transition, which is far from perfect and has its problems, but nevertheless has in our opinion the core institutional logic that can lead to more successful outcomes.

The city has indeed created an initiative, Gent en Garde, which accepts the five aims of civil society organisations active in the food transition (local organic food, fairly produced), which works as follows. The city has initiated a Food Council, which meets regularly and could contribute to food policy proposals. The Food Council is representative of the current forces at play, and has both the strength and weaknesses of representative organisations. The Food Council contain a contributive ‘food working group’ which mobilizes those effectively working at the grassroots level on the food transition by following a contributive logic, where every contributor has a voice. In our opinion, this combination of representative and contributory logic is what can create a super-competent Democracy+ institution that goes beyond the limitations of representation and integrates the contributive logic of the commoners. But how can the commoners exert significant political weight?. This requires voice and self-organisation. We therefore propose the creation of an Assembly of the Commoners, for all citizens active in the co-construction of commons, and a Chamber of the Commons, for all those who are creating livelihoods around these commons, in order to create more social power for the commons.

This essential process of participation can be replicated across the transition domains, obtaining city and institutional support for a process leading to Energy as a Commons, Mobility as a Commons, Housing, Food, etc.

We also propose the following: (not exhaustive)

• The creation of a juridical assistance service consisting of at least one representative of the city and one of the commoners, in order to systematically unblock the potential for commons expansion, by finding solutions for regulatory hurdles.
• The creation of an incubator for a commons-based collaborative economy, which specifically deals with the challenges of generative start-ups.
• The creation of an investment vehicle, the bank of the commons, which could be a city bank based on public-social governance models.
• Augmenting the capacity of temporary land and buildings, towards more permanent solutions to solve the land and housing crisis affecting commoners and citizens.
• Support of platform cooperatives as an alternative to the more extractive forms of the sharing economy.
• Assisting the development of mutualized commons infrastructures (‘protocol cooperativism’), through inter-city cooperation (avoiding the development of 40 Uber alternative in as many cities).
• Make Ghent ‘the place to be’ for commoners by using ‘Ghent, City of the Commons’ as an open brand, to support the coming of visitors for commons-conferences etc.
• As pioneered by the NEST project of temporary use of the old library, use more ‘calls for commons’, instead of competitive contests between individual institutions. Calls for the commons would reward the coalition that creates the best complementary solution between multiple partners and open sources its knowledge commons to support the widest possible participation.

We also propose

• A specific project to test the capacity of ‘cosmo-local production’ to create meaningful local jobs (organic food for school lunches) and to test the potential role of anchor institutions and social procurement.
• The organisation of a CommonsFest on the 28th of October, with a first Assembly of the Commons.
• A pilot project around ‘circular finance’ in which ‘saved negative externalities’ which lead to savings in the city budget can directly be invested in the commons projects that have achieved such efficiencies (say re-investing the saved cost of water purification to support the acquisition of land commons for organic farmers).
• The setting up of an experimental production unit based on distributed manufacturing and open design.
• Projects that integrate knowledge institutions such as the university, with the grassroots commons projects.

^[1] A slightly graphically improved version of the official Dutch language version of the report can be found here. Suggested citation: Commons Transitie Plan voor de Stad Gent. Michel Bauwens en Yurek Onzia. Ghent, Belgium: City of Ghent and P2P Foundation, 2017
Header photo by estefaniabarchietto

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This is the third part of a series that presents egalitarian communities, mainly Acorn community in Virginia, to shed some light on the way that the postcapitalist mode of production in the physical world could work. It should be noted that the opinions presented here are not necessarily those of the founders or members of the community where I have done research. I interpret my findings with regard to their significance for this economic change and their reflection on the postcapitalist mode of production. Acorn community does not define itself as a peer production project so the following analysis is not an evaluation of the implementation of peer production theory into practice. It is instead an extrapolation from their practice to how peer production organizations in the physical world could operate in the current system and in the future.

The term peer production refers to various ways of organizing production that are distinct from the state and market logics. The main characteristics of this form of production are: 1) Self-selected spontaneous contribution of participants in the production process;{1} 2) creation of use value rather than exchange or market value, which results in free access to public goods; {2} 3) non-delegation and distributed coordination, in contrast to hierarchical state and market providers. The first article of this three-part series focused on the consequences of self-selected spontaneous contribution as a model of organizing work and the second one presented a model of producing the use value despite the necessity to survive in the capitalist system. In this article, I will examine how the principles of non-delegation and distributed coordination can be translated in the reality of the physical world. Clearly, there are some elements of Acorn’s governance that resemble this model.

Non-delegation and distributed coordination

Peer production organizations operate beyond the principle of delegation, which contrasts with hierarchical state and market providers. Peer production can create nonrepresentational democratic structures. The way the governance is organized in p2p projects has been studied, mainly based on the examples of online peer production and hacker spaces. The question of authority and the mechanisms of control and influence has been in the center of scholarly attention{3}.

Acorn community is an example of a peer production model where the majority of the decisions and execution of the decisions is based on non-delegation and decentralized coordination. In contrast to other examples of peer production, the decisions and the way of functioning of the community affects the lives of the members. In other cases of peer production, volunteering constitutes a small part of volunteers’ lives and does not affect their life conditions. Therefore, studying this example may help to imagine a system where peer production is the dominant mode of production.

During the weekly meetings, community inhabitants propose changes to the life and organization of the community. Issues that affect diverse aspects of community life are discussed. Every member must agree to a proposal for it to be passed, or a compromise must be made that everyone is comfortable with. Full members may block proposals.

Non-delegation implies that there is a small number of fixed rules. The decision making and rules are conversation-based and changeable. One of the rules is the 42-hour weekly labor quota (I wrote about it more in the first post). There are some rules for the counting of one’s working hours (although the accounting is almost purely for personal use as no one requests the report). The community has defined such activities as going to a doctor and exercising for up to two hours per week as labor-creditable. However, some of my interviewees considered the labor quota to be simply a measure to avoid exhaustion. One of the interviewees said that probably a case of physical violence would lead to expulsion but even this is not certain. It would be dealt with during a meeting.

Because of the non-delegation principle, it is impossible to use authority in order to enforce someone’s work contribution and choices. Therefore, members sometimes utilize other means of influence, such as indirect pressure or strike. If certain work is needed for which a specific person has skills, such as reparation of a device, they may feel pressure to do it without being ordered to do it explicitly. Being asked to step in is often enough of a motivation to pursue a task even if it would not be this person’s first choice. Another way of enforcing work contribution is giving up a task with which one feels overwhelmed and wait until other people find it necessary to step in. Or not.

Abundance and redistribution as governance model

David de Ugarte outlines in a post on June 8, 2015, a vision for a community where abundance solves the problems related to decision making on redistribution. By avoiding the conflicts over the use of resources, the need for collective decision making is reduced.
“That is, where one person’s decision does not drastically reduce others’ possible choices, the sphere of the decision should be personal, not collective. Collective choices, democratic methods and voting are ways of managing situations where, more or less explicitly, there is a conflict in the use of resources. They are a “last resort” imposed by scarcity. The point is to avoid, as much as possible, the homogenization that they involve.”

Indeed, collective decision making may consume a lot of time and life energy. One interviewee mentioned that someone’s membership had probably been refused because this person’s personality would imply spending a lot of time on decision-making and discussions. It is not clear whether this was the only reason to exclude this person but mentioning this example shows that members are wary of spending too much time on decision making.

The question about how resources are redistributed in the communities popped up quite frequently when I presented the experience to people curious about the community. For instance, someone asked what if someone eats a lot. Remembering how much food was composted during my stay at the Acorn, I could not imagine that this could be an issue. However, there are latent conflicts over food in the community. Some people are vegetarian or vegan, so they need an accommodation in their menu. There is a consensus that every day a vegan option should be prepared by the cook. For example, the community buys or produces animal products and buys beans to accommodate vegetarians. Some, however, would like the community to be completely self-sufficient and use home-grown animal products rather than buy vegan meat replacements.

The community has not yet arrived at a stage where money is not an issue. There is still a perception that some spending is made at the expense of other possible spending. The way money is spent is a source of discontent for many members that I interviewed. Some wished that certain investments in infrastructure and production tools had not been undertaken. One of the members said that this type of “collective” decision may cause temporary disengagement and frustration but in such moments, he considers what he has: he does not want to have an apartment and a job, so putting up with some decisions is a fair trade off for this comfort.

Voting with hands and feet

Operating with minimum delegation or non-delegation implies that governance is produced in either daily actions or big ruptures. I call it a system of voting with hands or feet.

Voting with hands: Acorn’s members have contrasting views on the extent to which the community should participate in the money economy. While there is a consensus that the community needs to run the enterprise, there is a difference of opinion whether their subsistence should be financed by money or whether the community should engage in self-sufficiency. The members that prefer to limit dependence on money can decide to work less for the enterprise and more for achieving autonomy. For instance, one of the members who deals a lot with food defines the creation of food autonomy for the community as one of the main objectives of his work. Since there are enough volunteers who want to care for animals, the community can produce their own animal food. In this way, people can vote by their choice of activities on where the community is going.

Voting with hands has an impact on the way the community operates, so it can be considered as a decentralized decision making system. A story of a “policeman on strike” can illustrate this point. The community used to have a system of controlling expenses. Someone was “appointed” for the position of an accountant to check the expenses. This person did not enjoy the role of “policeman” and gave up this task. Since no one took over the position, in the end, the expenses are noted by everyone using the community’s money and are accessible for review. A system of transparent decentralized control has emerged. However, voting with hands can cause some animosities, which the example of one member changing the website without anyone else’s permission illustrates.

Voting with feet: Long term frustration may evolve into bringing a new community into being. For instance, some members of Twin Oaks community did not like the structured labor system in there, so they started Acorn to accommodate their more anarchist leanings. Living Energy Farm, a radically environmental community that is being created in the vicinity of these two communities is a response to frustrations about the use of resources in these communities. Voting with feet looks easy on paper but it may be preceded by longish frustration for both those leaving and the ones who stay in a community. Some Acorners told me about a group of members that used to live in the community and then left. They were close together and made well-elaborated proposals that were probably discussed among them. The rest had an impression of being dominated.

The inner transformation for a non-delegation democracy

One of my interviewees described what the governance and work organization implies for the members in emotional and psychological terms. Sometimes it may feel lonely to be the only person caring about certain work domain or project that he committed to. Since there is no way of forcing people to be more interested, he needs to make efforts to promote what he cares about. It takes systematic work and engagement to build up a reputation that gives one more influence and support for one’s project. The non-hierarchical relations imply a lot of self-responsibility but also a feeling of empowerment. There is always a recourse and possibility to intervene. Dealing with difficulties requires more dialogue – more taking into consideration the other side. Non-hierarchy stimulates personal development.

Endnotes

{1} Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Expanded Edition (London: Athlantic Books, 2008), 36. Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age (Random House, 2002).
{2} Michel Bauwens and Sussan Rémi, Le peer to peer : nouvelle formation sociale, nouveau modèle civilisationnel, Revue du MAUSS, 2005/2 no 26, p. 193-210.
{3} Mathieu O’Neil, Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes ( London: Pluto Press, 2009); Mathieu O’Neil,, ‘Hacking Weber: legitimacy, critique, and trust in peer production’, Information, Communication and Society, 2014, vol. 17, no. 7, pp. 872-888; Kostakis, V., Niaros, V. & Giotitsas, C., Production and governance in hackerspaces: A manifestation of Commons-based peer production in the physical realm?, International Journal of Cultural Studies, February 2014, vol. 13, pp. 1-19.

What is Acorn community?

Acorn community is a farm based, egalitarian, income-sharing, secular, anarchist, feminist, consensus-based intentional community of around 32 folks, based in Mineral, Virginia. It was founded in 1993 by former members of neighboring Twin Oaks community. To make their living, they operate an heirloom and organic seed business, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (“SESE”), which tests seeds in the local climate and provides customers with advice on growing their own plants and reproducing seeds. Acorn is affiliated to the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, a US network of intentional communities that commit to holding in common their land, labor, resources, and income among community members.

Information on sources

I spent three weeks in August 2014 at Acorn community in Virginia where I conducted interviews with 15 inhabitants of this community (accounting for about half of the membership). The interviews will be used in my book analyzing a scenario of a postcapitalist mode of production from a personal perspective. It will be published in Creative Commons license. My research trip has been co-financed by a Goteo crowdfunding campaign. Some inspiration comes from four public meetings with a member of East Wind community, which I organized in October 2014, in Strasbourg, France. In total, 47 people participated in these events.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my interviewees, Couchsurfing hosts, and Acorn community for their hospitality and their time. The following people have contributed to the Goteo crowdfunding campaign: pixocode, Daycoin Project, Olivier, Paul Wuersig, María, Julian Canaves. I would like to express my gratitude to these and eight other co-financers. I would like to thank for the editing and suggestions from GPaul Blundell, communard of Acorn, instigating organizer of Point A DC.

About the Author

Katarzyna Gajewska is an independent writer interested in wellbeing, alternative economy, food politics, and other issues. She focuses on personal and daily life in order to stimulate collective imagination and democratic debate.

For updates on my publications, you can check my Facebook page or send me an e-mail to the address to get updates by e-mail: k.gajewska_comm AT zoho.com

The post An intentional egalitarian community as a small-scale implementation of Post-Capitalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The selection of the papers for publication will be done by the editors of this special issue: Alexander Hamedinger (Assistant Professor, Centre of Sociology, Department of Spatial Planning) and Lukas Franta (Assistant, Centre of Sociology, Department of Spatial Planning).

Full papers (4.000-8.000 words) will undergo a double-blind peer review process.

“In context of the economic and financial crisis, which is profoundly reshaping Europe and its Cities and Regions, alternative forms of social and economic organisation are increasingly discussed in urban and regional research and practice. Particularly commons are (again) hotly debated as an alternative way to organize the production, distribution and consumption of certain resources. Recently, a number of urban, regional as well as planning studies have been devoted to the analysis and evaluation of commons in spatial development, using a range of different theoretical rationales. These include amongst others research inspired by the pioneering work of Elinor Ostrom to theories which deviate from methodological individualism e.g. more political-economic (David Harvey) and sociologically coined strands of thought. Commoning basically means the processes and practices of collectively self-regulating the production and/or distribution and/or consumption of resources, often with the aim of improving social cohesion and solidarity in societies. From a planning perspective commons are often interpreted as a new way of steering and coordinating collective action between state and market, of improving the efficiency of production and consumption of environmental resources, facilitating the accessibility of basic goods and services, empowering of local residents, improving social cohesion through building social capital or strengthening citizens’ participation in planning projects. However, they also are described more critically as part of a neoliberal spatial development or as niche product for a small urban elite.
This special issue wants to contribute to this discourse through critically reflecting on the potentials and challenges of commons and commoning practices mainly in the space- and planning-related fields of housing, public space and regional food. It welcomes theoretically and empirically as well as practice-focused/-oriented papers; contributions are welcome from across the social sciences and the application of different scientific angles to explain commons in urban and regional development is encouraged, e.g. economics, sociology, political science, geography, spatial planning, development studies, feminist studies, community studies or law.
The papers should address some of the following questions in the context of commons in housing, public space or local/regional food systems:

• Spatiality of Commons: How is spatiality constructed through commoning and collective action?
• Governance of the Commons: which actors and regulatory systems are characteristic for which action field of commoning?
• Legitimation of Commoning: who benefits from commoning practices? Who is included in/excluded by these practices?
• Contextualisation of Commons: which factors are influencing success or failure of commons?
• Planning and Commoning: how is state-led spatial planning related to commoning in urban and regional development?
• Commons and the city region: how do commoning practices influence economic and social relations between city and region?
• Added value of Commons: how do commons contribute to achieve the goals of social cohesion and environmental protection in spatial development? How can commons contribute to alter local and regional economic and social structures?
• Financing of Commons: Where do monetary and nonmonetary resources in commons come from, how is their internal and external exchange organized, and which provisions are taken to ensure long-term financial sustainability?”

The timetable for this special issue is:

• Aug 9, 2016 – Deadline for the submission of abstracts
• Sep 9, 2016 – Notification of acceptance, invitation for full papers
• Dec 9, 2016 – Deadline for submission of full papers start of review process
• Feb 2017 – End of review process information for authors
• April 7, 2017 – Final deadline for revised papers
• June 2017 – Publication (open access and print)

Photo by denisbin

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A guest post by our friend and colleague Silke Helrich and written for her keynote at the recent City as a Commons Conference, held in Bologna, Italy.

I was delighted to give a key-note talk at the First IASC Thematic Urban Commons Conference last week in Bologna. Here are my speech and the slides. The most beautiful ones were produced by Nikolas Kichler.

In 2040, one generation from now, I will be more than 70 years old and hopefully surrounded by my first great-grandchildren. What I’d like to share with you this morning is how I imagine* the Urban Commons will be by then – and how I’d like my grand- and great-grandchildren and me to enjoy them and care for. Actually, first of all: While rethinking the issue of this conference, I realized that it should read: Imagining the “Rurban Commons.” Because this seems to be one of the most important patterns: Interconnecting Urban and Rural. The so called Urban Agriculture or rural Maker-Spaces like the OTELOs throughout Austria are pioneering this inter-connection.

• THE SLIDES: Imagining the (R)Urban Commons in 2040
• (The effects of the presentation have unfortunately gone with the conversion to pdf.)

So, to share how I imagine the future of the rurban commons, I’d like to invite you to take a collective walk with me – a walk through an environment that we can co-create, that in fact can only be co-created. Step by step and adapted to the local circumstances. Designing such an environment doesn’t automatically ensure or guarantee “urban commons”, but it can provide the conditions and infrastructures for commoning.

This is crucial for the insight that Peter Linebaugh phrased as follows: There is no Commons without Commoning. I believe, that the most challenging and indispensable factors, which make commons come true, are to (learn how to) think like a commoner and practice “how to common” at the same time. And this, in turn, requires a specific attitude. An attitude based on the recognition of a simple truth: We are all related to each-other!

“I am because you are”, or “I am through the others.” Also known as ubuntu. Just have a closer look at the word “I“. This is a relational term. Saying “I” doesn’t make sense if there is no “You”. This is at the very core of the paradigm shift that the commons-debate contributes to. To put it differently: Human beings are free in relatedness but never free from relationships. That’s the ontological bottom line. Relation precedes the things being related to, i.e. the actual facts, objects, situations and circumstances. Just as physics and biology are coming to see that the critical factors in their fields are relationships, not things, so it is with commons.

From this insight, we can then see that, commoning can be conceived as a way of living. It is a life-form that (potentially) enacts freedom in relatedness, which is a sometimes hurtful, mostly bumpy and always complex social process. And a process that requires us to constantly swim upstream, against all odds, because in a capitalist society we tend to systematically disregard the capacities and skills we need for it.

Anyway: Commoning means: take collective action to enact the Commons. The more consciously and self-consciously this happens, the better.

To what extent is this relevant for this conference?

One of the aspects that distinguishes the modern commons-debate from the debates 150, 40 or only 20 years ago is, that there is more and more interest in exploring and understanding how free cooperation (commoning) works among strangers, and how it can be made stable and durable. People also want to understand how commoning might work in nontraditional communities; in networks, in the digital world, in multiethnical contexts, among “nomadic citizens” such as hackers and migrants, and so on. The bet is: this is perfectly possible…

• if the Patterns of Commoning are as well understood as the (Ostrom) Design Principles for Commons Institutions;
• if they are appropriated and cultivated and become an embodied experience;
• and if we dispose of (free) communication tools to enable our cooperation.

Commoning is beyond the just “being together” (more than Geselligkeit, as we would say in German). In fact, it may be the only way in which we can systemically confront the dysfunctions and corruptions of the market/state system that now govern us.

Now, let’s beam into the year 2040 and start our walk.

Picture the city you live in or a city you know well. Focus on a certain neighbourhood and remember the bustle in the streets. Remember how this place sounds and smells like and what people are doing there…. A city is fluid, which means that such a neighbourhood is changing constantly. People move in and out. Buildings are bought and sold, shops close down and others open up. Infrastructures change sometimes more quickly than we wish them to do. Once there was a factory. Now there is a cultural centre. People disconnect from traditional work-places; they work at their home office or in the co-working space next door. Each change of the kind is also an opportunity to “commonify” the city.

You may find this an odd statement. So let me show you what this might look like. First and foremost: The main focus is on rethinking use. In fact, a commons approach can make new constructions unnecessary. There are surprising solutions to underuse. Everywhere. “Zwischennutzung” (in-between-use?) is only one of them.

Or apartments can be converted into co-housing projects (yes, this is different from Airbnb). Co-housing means; sharing basic housing infrastructures according to peoples needs, in a self-determined and durable way, not renting a flat every now and then. This has two major effects: it helps people to become more independent from the housing market. And this in turn helps to “free” the houses or apartments from concentrated market control, speculation and artificially high prices.

Of course, there is an endless number of legal forms from housing cooperatives to community land trusts. But the crucial point here is to make sure that once something is in the commons, it shall remain in the commons and not fall back into the market. In Germany, there is a robust and growing institution called “Mietshäusersyndikat” (sth. like the Federation of Housing Commons). It has more than 25 years of experience in co-facilitating the self-organization of hundreds of housing units all over the country. They co-created a solidarity and co-financing network among housing projects. But what makes them really special is the legal tweak, the smart legal arrangement they’ve developed to protect the buildings/houses themselves as a commons. It has been done in such a way that it is very difficult to resell a co-housing project back into the market. What the federation of housing commons is basically doing is: to elevate the freedoms of commoners at the expense of investors, speculators and often, governments. They protect the freedoms that money can’t buy.

To me: Mietshäusersyndikat is kind of the Copyleft for Housing projects.

Why is this important? Because doing this means widening the sphere of the commons with a long term perspective. And widening the sphere of the commons entails shrinking the sphere of the market and vice versa. So, remember: Each Commons needs protection!

Let’s walk on

Everybody needs not only shelter but also something to eat. And a decisive part of the reintegration of rural and urban functions is certainly more food production in the city. In my great-children’s Rurban Commons, there will be spaces for experimental gardening and herb commons – you might already know the concept of an edible city. All this would be part of.

There would be a bee and wild bird yard, the already famous community gardens and intercultural gardens. There would be flower fields, fruit tree zones … you name it. And, of course, CSAs. CSA means Community Supported Agriculture. This is crucial, because – as in the co-housing case – the functioning of many CSAs successfully disconnects food-production from the imperatives of the market and instead initiates a kind of “pool & share” approach.

As you might have noticed, for me, the commons is much more than a concept of togetherness: it also describes a new mode of production. Of potentially everything: housing and food, software and hardware, furniture and machines, health and educational services; if possible in a distributed (not decentralized) way. Decentralization is better than centralization, but still a top – down approach. A distributed scheme of production is different. This is what we can learn from the P2P communities.

One could say: We are witnessing a worldwide field try, and an expansion of locally proven models of this new way of production. Open hardware projects are mushrooming, as CSAs do. They often use different concepts and wordings. This is part of why the common DNA of all these experiments, the patterns of commoning, often remain unvisible.

Let’s have a closer look.

In the place I will live in 2040, there will be a repair-café, a laundry saloon, outdoor workshops for whatever purpose, a tool lending library, fab labs a building physics workshop, a hackerspace, a fabric sharing & tailoring space, and so on.

The infrastructure will be controleable and controlled by the neighbourhood: there is (distributed) renewable energy production, a sewage purification plant, Open Wifi and Open Network. There are fire brigades, health & first aid associations and much more. There is a common pattern (I refer to patterns as used in the Patterns Theory and Pattern Language approach by Christopher Alexander) in the kind of infrastructure I think of: platforms are/platform use is free of discrimination.

Such platforms are based on the principle that more money doesn’t entail more use rights (compare it to the concept of net-neutrality; you could call it platform-neutrality).

Let’s continue strolling around the neighbourhood:

There are the cultural spaces for the unfolding of cultural activities, reading circles, an open theatre, a contemplation area, a library, an open permaculture and a commoning school and so on. Many of them are simply open spaces for non determined uses. And finally, we need to get around within and beyond the neighbourhood. I imagine mobility in a rurban commons as a combination of bikes, p2p car-sharing and good connectivity to public transportation.

So, is this realistic? Or is it utopia, that is: a “non-place”?

I think it is something that the German philosopher Ernst Bloch calls: “Concrete Utopia”. We can already grasp such a transformation. The experiences are there, still scattered, and named in great many different ways. But they are there. The needs are there as well. And the commons is a needs-based approach (more than a rights based approach). From where what is now “individual property” [and a tragedy of the anticommons – the fragmentation of property rights, and thus a social and economic paralysis] can be transformed into shared possession, according to people’s needs and decisions.

That’s what the commons framework is all about: in essence it’s a way to meet people’s needs at all levels. It’s a way of provisioning that doesn’t need to be achieved through:

• individual property as default position
• nor mediated through the so called “market mechanisms”. (In fact, mechanistic metaphors are very misplaced when we try to understand and address the complexity of social relationships)

So, how do we get there?

Let’s go back to the year 2015 and have a look at where it all began: part of this emerging Rurban Commons era was the First IASC Thematic Conference on the Urban Commons.

And let’s have a look at what’s out there.

OMNI-COMMONS

You see, the experiments are there, the concepts are there. And even mapping tools to make visible what’s still invisible.

We need more than an Omni-Commons everywhere. We need to discover the common patterns of the initiatives that experiment with a rurban commons approach and we need to help to connect them – not necessarily in physical terms, but mentally and politically. Because one thing is for sure: we are not just for dealing with “the left overs”, or in urban terms with “vacant terrain” – or what used to be called “wastelands.” It is not about the peripheral undefined edges of the city. It’s about rethinking the rurban environment as commoners. Social and cultural realities are not facts, they are something we co-create.

So: connect commons ? confederate the hot spots of commoning ? create commons-neighbourhoods ? commonify the city. In short: Widening the space for the commons while shrinking the space of the market is feasible. It needs to be enabled, done and (politically and academically) supported. Of course, such an approach needs a consistent framework, so that people feel mirrored in it, so to speak.

This is where commoners on the ground need the help of scholars, of engaged scholars as you are. Scholars who don’t just study what they do and what they don’t do, but co-facilitate the co-creation of a free, fair and sustainable society. As Ezio Manzini put it last night:

“Commons are fluid forms. To enact them we should focus on enabling conditions, not on fixed designs.”

That was precisely what I was trying to do: take you on a walk through a non-fixed design that is meant to create the enabling conditions for commons in a rurban environment. A “design” that is open and allows for constant adaptation. It was called: CITY OF WORKSHOPS. And it was not me who did it. But two young participants of this conference who care for commons and the creation of enlivened rurban environments: Nikolas Kichler and David Steinwender from Austria.

So, there is hope, not only for one generation from now but within the next generation.

There is power in the Rurban Commons if there is Power in the Communities, that make, care for and protect them. Therefore: Keep calm and Keep Commoning.

*words in bold are illustrated on the slides.

Update Nov. 13: Blogpost with more information on the Conference: The City as a Commons by David Bollier

Images by Nikolas Kichler and Brian (Ziggy) Liloia: Main image “Botanical apartments in Phuket Thailand”, author unknown.

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