The international debate on the commons has a long history but only in recent years has it started gearing towards the definition of Urban Commons and what their role is in shaping our society, especially at the wake of the economic crisis. This debate developed strongly in Italy as a result of a referendum refusing the privatisation of water infrastructures. Following this, many city administrations have brought forward this debate at local level. The concept of commons has extended from water to many other resources, both physical and immaterial, inspiring regulations of the commons in several Italian cities. Experiences from Italy, in turn, have inspired the discussion about the commons in other parts of Europe.

By Daniela Patti:  “Commons are those resources that apart from the property that is mainly public, pursue a natural and economic vocation that is of social interest, immediately serving not the administration but the collectivity and the people composing it. They are resources that belong to all the associates and that law must protect and safeguard also in virtue of future generations.” (Lucarelli 2011) According to Alberto Lucarelli, a professor in constitutional law in Naples, commons are defined by rights and by the management models rather than simply the property model. Urban Commons provide a complex scenario in which both property and management of these collectives resources require new legal framework, increasingly provided by legal experts, municipalities and activists in various parts of Europe. As Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione, scholars of the commons point out, “[…] the urban commons framework is more than a legal tool to make proprietary claims on particular urban goods and resources. Rather, we argue that the utility of the commons framework is to raise the question of how best to manage, or govern, shared or common resources”. (Foster, at al., 2015).

This debate developed strongly in Italy as a result of the Referendum on the Privatisation of Water, which saw a victory with 95% from the position supporting water as a commons to be protected in public interest and not to be privatised. Following this episode, which has not yet seen a clear policy developed at national level, many city administrations have brought forward this debate at local level. The concept of commons has extended from water to many other resources, both physical and immaterial. In terms of physical spaces, open public spaces are rather unanimously recognised as urban commons and regulations in many cities have been developed to legislate the community use of urban gardens, as an example. Such spaces do not prove to be unproblematic as even through the property remains public, the collective access and the management costs are interpreted differently across the country. In Rome, the Regulation of Green Spaces adopted by the City Council in 2014 foresaw that all running costs, such as water, and ordinary maintenance, such cutting the grass, should be responsibility of the communities adopting the green space, where open public access must be nevertheless be guaranteed. Given the poor condition of maintenance of public green spaces in Rome, many people accepted these conditions to improve their living standards. Within this context, the regulation of buildings appears to be far more complex, given the higher number of variables in which the civic and the Public should find terms of agreement. To respond to these challenges, some cities developed a Regulation of the Commons, that would provide a framework for civic organisations and the public administration to find agreements on the shared management and use of urban commons.

The City of Bologna has had a long tradition in terms of citizens’ participation in decision making over the city’s development, but especially as a result of the economic crisis and the subsequent reduction on welfare expenditure, citizens have become increasingly active in the city. Responding to such inputs, the City Council has over recent years developed a series of relevant participation processes, Open Data initiatives, a participatory budgeting platform and the Regulations of the Commons, this last having gained much visibility both at national level and abroad. The reason for the Regulation of the Commons having gained so much attention was because this was the first of its kind ever being developed and was then adopted, with small variations, by a large number of cities across the peninsula.
The Regulation of the Commons is an application of the Principle of Subsidiarity foreseen by the art.118 of the Italian Constitution, that foresees that public administrations should support citizens in the development of autonomous initiatives aiming towards the collective interest. Therefore in 2014, Bologna’s City Council officially adopted the Regulation on the collaboration between citizens and the public administration on activities aiming at the care and regeneration of urban commons. The Regulation acts as a general framework within which citizens, both individuals or groups, can submit proposals for projects to be developed on a spontaneous basis with voluntary effort for the involved parties, putting competences, resources and energy available to the collective good. Such projects are disciplined by the Regulation through a series of specific agreements, called Collaborations Pacts, in which both the citizens and the Public Administration agree to the terms of their cooperation for the safeguarding of the commons. The commons targeted by this Regulation are material spaces as public squares, green areas or schools, immaterial commons, such as education and social inclusion, and digital commons, such as applications and digital alphabetisation.

The value of this pioneering Regulation has been to attempt to provide a legal framework to the activities and projects promoting the commons that were taking place spontaneously in the city, often outside if not even in contrast to the existing regulations. At the same time, this Regulation has the limitation of addressing only the less problematic situations of collaboration between civic and public stakeholders when promoting the urban commons. In fact, collective cleaning of public spaces, paintings of murals or creation of street furniture have been valuable initiatives taking place even more frequently thanks to the legal clarity in which they can take place, but are rather unproblematic in social and political terms. Urban Commons involving higher stakes in terms of ownership, management and economic conditions, as in the case of public buildings or even private ones, are not part of the scope of the Bologna Regulation of the Commons.

Theatre rehearsal at the Cascina Roccafranca. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Such a challenge was instead recently taken on by the City of Turin, which as many other Italian cities adopted the Bologna’ Regulation of the Commons with very small adjustments in January 2016. Within the framework of the Co-City project supported by the Urban Innovative Actions program, Turin aims at developing the experience of the commons towards the creation of an innovative social welfare that will foster the co-production of services with community enterprises. Low cost urban regeneration activities in open spaces as well as buildings will take place and will be financially supported through the European-funded project. Having the project officially started only at the beginning of 2017, it is still early to appreciate any results but it is nevertheless worthy to say that its ambition is strongly embedded within a longer experience in terms of civic-public collaboration, as testified by the experience of the Network of the Neighbourhood Houses, which are also a key partner in the Co-City project. This network of community spaces, started in 2007, gathers eight spaces across the city with different functions and management models, some being public and others privately-run. For example, Cascina Roccafranca is a multi-functional community centre operating in a building owned by the City of Turin. Partly financed by the municipal budget, the centre is managed through cooperation between public and civic actors: a scheme that offers a valuable governance model while providing a wide range of social and cultural activities. As the staff member Stefania De Masi stated: “Our status as a public-private foundation is an experiment, an attempt of close collaboration with the municipality.”

The network of Neighbourhood Houses in Turin. Image (c) Case del Quartiere

An experience stemming from a different background to the one of Bologna is the Regulation of the Commons in Naples. It was in this city that for the first time in 2011, the juridical definition of Commons was introduced in the City Council’s Statute, referring especially to the case of water, which had been object of the national Referendum that same year. The following years, the “Regulation for the Discipline of the Commons” and the “Principles for the government and management of the Commons” were established. According to these, “each citizens should concur to the natural and spiritual progress of the city”. The focus towards the urban commons was explicit in 2013, when the City Council adopted the Public Space Charter, elaborated by the Biennial of Public Space held that same year in Rome, which aims at the creation of concrete processes towards the promotion of the urban public spaces.

It is in 2014 that the current regulation deliberating on the urban commons in Naples was approved by the City Council. This regulation outlines the identification of the commons and the process of collective management for their civic use and collective benefit are outlined. This regulation has foreseen the recognition of ongoing civic initiatives pursuing projects in spaces identified as urban commons. This approach therefore attempts to foster a logic of self-governance and experimental management of public spaces, aiming at recognising these spaces as commons of collective interest and fruition. In 2016 seven locations in Naples were identified as commons because of the collective commitment of citizens in their regeneration after a long period of abandonment. Before such recognition these spaces were officially identified as illegal occupation of public properties, for which all people involved were subjected to legal persecution. The innovation of what is happening in Naples stands basically in the fact that the ancient tradition of the Usi Civici (Civic Uses) applied since medieval times to the forests for people to access and harvest wood or collect food, is now applied to urban spaces. This is the case of the Je So’ Pazzo initiative taking place in the old mental asylum in the city centre of Naples, where a group of inhabitants, many of whom youngsters, have taken over the space to provide a series of local services, such as music classes, sports facilities and many other community-run activities. Currently the agreement with the Municipalities implies that utility costs of the space are paid by the City Council but all activities related expenses are responsibility of the users. In terms of property rights, the space remains in public ownership and users are granted freely access as long as the activities remain of public interest and open to all citizens.

At first sight the Regulations of the Commons of Bologna and Turin and the one of Naples could appear to be rather similar, having been developed at the same with an overall same objectives, yet they greatly differ in terms of concepts of property and usage of the commons. Bologna and the blueprint in Turin, do not effectively intervene on the property model of the public estates, that remain an asset exclusively managed by the Authority, albeit in the public interest. Even in terms of what is the usage model of these properties, this remains unaltered as the Authority is ultimately responsible for the refurbishment of the estates or for the development of social and economic functions. For this reason, it can be said that the civic-public collaborations to be activated tend to take place in open public spaces with a low conflict threshold. Instead, Naples has attempted to pursue a different model of property and management of the commons. in fact, to be identified as a commons are the buildings themselves, based on a series of social and cultural elements, and not the communities operating in them, therefore avoiding conflicts in terms of public procurement in assigning tenants to a public property. The activities currently taking place within these identified Urban Commons are accepted by the Administration as long as they respect the Commons ethics and guarantee access to citizens.

These experiences from Italy are also inspiring other parts of Europe, allowing for an increasing international exchange to take place. From a more institutional perspective at European level, not only has the recently started Urban Innovative Actions European program have financially supported the Co-City project in Turin, but also other European programs are recognising the relevance of such experiences for a European audience. This is the case of the URBACT capacity building program for cities that recently awarded the Good Practice title to the Commons initiative in Naples, based on which knowledge transfer networks of cities could be financially supported throughout Europe starting from 2018. Civic initiatives were also inspired by the work in Italy, as the model of LabGov, the Laboratory on the Governance of the Commons that supported the elaboration of the Bologna Regulation, is collaborating with the Pakhuis de Zwijger to develop an Amsterdam-based branch. The European Alternatives network has initiated a research mapping local governments that are promoting participatory governance in their institutions, in which Naples is thoroughly covered. These Italian applications of regulating the Urban Commons well depict the political positions and the solutions that may be adopted to regulate a form of property that is neither public nor private, but collective.

References
Foster, Sheila and Iaione, Christian, The City as a Commons (August 29, 2015). 34 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 281 (2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2653084 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2653084

Lucarelli, A.,2011, Beni Comuni, Dalla Teoria All’Azione Politica, Dissenzi – own translation

Header image: Urban Center, Bologna. Photo (cc) Eutropian

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In 2011 Shareable organized the Share San Francisco conference to promote the city as a platform for sharing, which in turn inspired the “Sharing Cities” movement. The goal of Sharing Cities was to create horizontal linkages between local communities and serve as a platform to coordinate policies for encouraging the growth of sharing economies. Shareable itself, under the “Sharing Cities” tag, highlighted commons-based projects like open-source hailing platforms and other shared mobility projects, coworking spaces, participatory budgeting, multi-family cohousing/coliving arrangements, tool libraries, community land trusts, neighborhood gardens, shared renewable energy, municipalist projects like those in Barcelona and Jackson, hackerspaces and repair cafes, and many more.

Shareable created the Sharing Cities Network as a support platform for the project. According to the project’s website:

Fifty cities around the world began mapping their shared resources in October and November 2013 during Shareable’s first annual #MapJam. This was just the beginning of the Sharing Cities Network – an ambitious project to create one hundred sharing cities groups by 2015.

As of this writing, there are seventy-three cities worldwide listed on their Community Maps page, each one with a detailed map of sharing projects and assets. In addition, the movement led to a series of Sharing Cities Summits, the second of which in 2017 set up the Sharing Cities Alliance — which includes thirty-odd cities worldwide — as a standing body.

The book Sharing Cities is the outgrowth of these nine eventful years. Following an introduction by Gorenflo, in which he summarizes the background of the Sharing Cities movement, states its basic principles and assesses its significance, the book — a collaborative effort by fifteen people — provides over two hundred pages of case studies of local sharing economy projects in dozens of cities.

The case studies, organized topically into eleven chapters, offer fairly comprehensive and systematic coverage of sharing projects in pretty much every functional subdivision of local economies, including land ownership and housing, food, cooperative finance, micro-manufacturing, transportation — and, well, everything else.

As Gorenflo notes in the introduction, the commons “was part of, but not the core of,” the initial Share San Francisco meeting. This changed, he says, because of the realization that “sharing” functions could and would be coopted by the above-mentioned corporate Death Star model if the movement did not explicitly embrace open and commons-based models.

Even more so, it changed because of the Sharing Cities movement’s interaction and cooperative engagement with a number of other commons-based movements. From organizations like the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives (P2P Foundation) founded by Michel Bauwens, to scholar-advocates of commons-based municipal economies like Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione (the closest thing the municipalist movement has to organic intellectuals), and even actual large-scale municipalist policy efforts (those emerging from M15 in Barcelona and Madrid, commons-based movements in Bologna and Amsterdam, older movements like Cooperation Jackson and the Evergreen Initiative in Cleveland, and the efforts that have since proliferated in hundreds of other cities), the Sharing Cities project has drawn inspiration from many areas.

In addition this ecosystem of movements includes a number of Autonomist thinkers like Massimo De Angelis who emphasize the commons as the kernel of an emerging post-capitalist society. And the role of the city in post-capitalist transition has been a theme in the work of thinkers ranging from Murray Bookchin to David Harvey.

All these things coming together amount, between them, to Steam Engine Time for commons-based municipal economies. This is more true than ever in the last couple of years. As even nominally leftist governments like Syntagma in Greece show their impotence or unwillingness to act in the face of neoliberal assault, and fascist or fascist-adjacent leaders come to power in a growing share of the West, municipal platforms and networks of such platforms have become the primary base for popular empowerment.

The importance of the urban commons to cities today is that it situates residents as the key actors — not markets, technologies, or governments, as popular narratives suggest — at a time when people feel increasingly powerless. To paraphrase commons scholars Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione, the city as a commons is a claim on the city by the people. Furthermore, a commons transition is a viable, post-capitalist way forward….

And if the various strands of municipalism add up to an ecosystem, Shareable and Sharing Cities occupy a vital niche in that ecosystem.

On the purely theoretical side, commons-based scholars of post-capitalist transition (De Angelis, for example) have done superb work on the commons as a new mode of production growing within the interstices of capitalism. But aside from general recommendations like growing the commons by incorporating a growing share of the material prerequisites of physical and social reproduction into its circuit, they have been light on the nuts and bolts of institutional examples of such practice. And activists like Chokwe Lumumba and Ada Colau have done amazing work in building local municipal platforms to promote a commons-based model of economic development. But when it comes to developing the full range of tangible alternatives and integrating them into a cohesive commons-based economy, such local movements have been quite uneven in identifying the possibilities. For example Cleveland and Jackson have focused heavily on incubating cooperative enterprises under the inspiration of Mondragon, but have in my opinion failed to take advantage of the potential of open-source information and cheap open-source micromanufacturing machinery for community bootstrapping.

The combined and coordinated development of all the possibilities for sharing economies within a community’s discretion, to the full extent of its discretion, would be revolutionary beyond anything we have seen. What if a municipality incorporated all vacant municipal land and housing into community land trusts, and acted as a cooperative enterprise incubator on the Cleveland and Jackson models, and used the surplus capacity of city and public utility fiber-optic infrastructure to provide low-cost community broadband, and made the unused capacity of public buildings available as community hubs, and implemented participatory budgeting and citizen policy platforms, and facilitated the creation of open/cooperative sharing platforms as alternatives to Uber, and facilitated the creation of hackerspaces and repair cafes and Fab Labs and garage factories, and required government offices and public education facilities to use open-source software and mandated that all publicly funded research and scholarship be in the public domain? All at the same time? It would amount to an entire commons-based economy, comprising a sizeable core of the entire local economy, with synergies and growth potential beyond imagining.

This is where Shareable comes in, and where it has done more than anyone else to kick-start needed action. Shareable took the lead not only in encouraging municipalities to become platforms for supporting and facilitating local sharing economies. It also promoted concrete mapping projects in individual cities to systematically identify and catalog all the potential assets for incorporation into a commons-based economy, and publicized concrete examples of commons-based praxis in all areas of social, economic, and political life from around the world. The subsequent emergence of other efforts at urban commons mapping and commons-based development policies in specific cities around the world (particularly notable is the P2P Foundation’s efforts in Ghent) is arguably the fruit of a seed planted by Shareable.

If scholars like De Angelis point to the commons as the core of the post-capitalist economy, and Barcelona and Madrid point to the municipality as the primary locus for facilitating commons-based projects, then Shareable has taken the lead in cataloging and sharing the full range of specific examples of such projects and encouraging others to follow their example.

Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons embodies this cataloging and sharing project. Given the number of localities with municipalist movements, and the number of local activists and tinkerers worldwide developing commons-based projects, there are more projects on the ground than would fit into a thirty-volume encyclopedia, let alone one book. But the survey in Sharing Cities is a representative sample of the full range of what’s being done; every case study can be taken as a proxy for what others are doing in countless other communities around the world.

In short, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in what’s being done on the ground to build the society of the future.

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The International Association for the Study of the Commons – the academic body founded by the late Professor Elinor Ostrom and other scholars – is helping organize World Commons Week from October 4 to 12. At many locations around the world, commoners will host public talks and discuss various aspects of the commons, especially from a scholarly perspective.

Three main activities are planned: a policy seminar and conference in Washington, D.C., several dozen local events in different places worldwide, and a marathon of webinar talks for 24 straight hours by commons scholars. (I’ll be doing one of the talks!)

The policy seminar will take place on October 4 at the International Food Policy Research Institute, in Washington, D.C., organized by Dr. Ruth Meinzen-Dick of the Institute. The next day, October 5, you may want to attend the conference “Celebrating Commons Scholarship” at Georgetown University on October 5, co-organized by Professors Sheila Foster and Brigham Daniels.

The local events range from teach-ins and workshops to mini-conferences and talks delivered by local scholars or commons practitioners. In Mexico, there will be a conference on watershed sustainability. In Germany, a talk on “Pseudo-Commons in Post-Socialist Countries.” In Africa, an examination of transboundary wildlife protection, “Commons Without Borders.”

If you’d like to host your own event and have it noted on the World Commons Week website, contact Professor Charles Schweik of the UMass Amherst School of Public Policy at cschweik /at/pubpol.umass.edu.

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Monica Bernardi: Commons represents an issue which has been subject of many studies and discussions. LabGov used to deal with the topic of the commons and its co-founders themselves (Prof. Sheila Foster and Prof. Christian Iaione) talk of  “The City as a Commons”.

Today, indeed, we witness a rise of commons-oriented civic initiatives as a result of a growing inadequacy of Market and State. A commons can be intended as a shared resource co-governed or co-owned by its user community according to their rules and norms. In both Bollier, Bauwens and Helfrich’ opinion there is no commons without commoning, namely without active co-production and self-governance.

A commons emerges from the dynamic interaction of three related aspects: a resource, a community that gathers around it, and a protocols for its stewardship. As pointed by Bollier, it is simultaneously:

• a social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and the community identity;
• a self-organized system by which community managed resources with no reliance on the Market or State; the wealth that we create and pass on to the next generation (based on gift of nature, civic infrastructure, cultural and creative works, traditions and knowledge);
• a sector of the economy that create values in ways that are often taken for granted – and often jeopardized by the Market-State.

The commons becomes a challenge for the city, that should become what Bauwens defines a “partners city”, enabling and empowering commons-oriented civic initiatives. For the market, that should sustain the commons and create livelihoods for the core contributors; and for the civil society organizations, that still have bureaucratic forms of organization and management, not in line with the commons initiatives.

Bauwens has recently released a report based on the study of the City of Ghent, conducted together with Yurek Onzia – project coordinator and editor-in-chief, with the support of an artistic makerspace (Timelab), the P2P Lab scholar Vasilis Niaros and Annelore Raman from the city council. The study was commissioned and financed by the City of Ghent, in the northern Flanders, with the support of the mayor, Daniel Termont, of the head of the mayor’s staff, the head of the strategy department, and the political coalition of the city (Flemish Socialist Party SPA, Flemish Greens – Groen, and Flemish Liberal Party – Open VLD).

The main request of the administration was to document the emergence and growth of the commons in the city and identify strategies and public policies to support commons-based initiatives, involving the citizens. The three-month research took inspiration from other cities (such as Barcelona, Seoul, Bologna) already engaged in the recognition and promotion of commons practices. It culminates in a Commons Transition Plan that describes the role, the possibilities and the options for optimal public interventions in terms of reinforcing citizens initiatives.

During the research, the team:

• Mapped 500 commons-oriented projects per sector of activity (from food to transportation, energy, etc.) using a wiki
• Interviewed 80 leading commoners and project leaders
• Administered a written questionnaire to over 70 participants
• Managed 9 open workshops divided per theme (Food as a commons, transportation as a commons….)
• Developed a Commons Finance Canvas workshop based on the Hinton methodology (economic opportunities, difficulties, models used by the commons projects)

Bauwens described the city of Ghent (300,000 inhabitants) as a city with a distinct presence of commons-oriented initiatives (more than 500), a lively urban tissue sprinkled by smart young, as well as coworking, fablabs and maker spaces, active civil society organizations that support urban commons projects, and an active and engaged city administration. The city indeed is already involved in actions for carbon and traffic reduction, and it has a staff of social facilitators, connectors, street workers engaged in enabling roles at the local level. In addition, there is an important policy to support the temporary use of vacant land/building by community groups.

Nevertheless, the research highlighted some weakness points of the city:

• the initiatives are often fragmented;
• there are some regulatory and administrative obstacles (especially about the mutualized housing);
• fablabs and coworking spaces lack of real production’s activities;
• there is no connection between university and the commons project, neither a propensity to open source and design projects;
• many commons-project are set in post-migration communities and limited to ethnic and religious memberships;
• civil society organizations often perceive the projects as mainly directed towards vulnerable categories and not as general productive resources; the cooperative sector gives a weak support; the major potential commons are vulnerable to private extraction.

Despite these weakness points, the City showed a great commitment in finding ways to improve and expand the urban commons at local level since it is aware of its potentials for the social and economic life:  1. “the commons are an essential part of the ecological transition”;

2. they “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”;
3. they “are based on self-governance of the value producing systems and are therefore one of the few schools of true democracy and participation”

The report is divided in four parts:

1. The context on the emergence of urban commons (largely increased in the Flanders in the last ten years). This part provides information on the challenges for the public authorities, for the market players and for the traditional civil society organisations and on the opportunities related with the spread of the commons (i.e more active participation of citizens as city co-creators, in solving ecological and environmental issues and in creating new forms of meaningful work at local level).
2. An overview of urban commons developments globally and especially in European cities.
3. The analysis of the urban commons in Ghent with its strengths and weaknesses.
4. A set of 23 integrated proposals for the creation of public-commons processes for citywide co-creation.

The part 3 with the map of the urban commons projects highlights some similarities with the commons-driven digital economy, demonstrating some specificities:

1. productive communities are based on open contributions;
2. the urban commons and their platforms may bring to generative market forms;
3. 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.

About the proposals in the part 4, the report presents:

• some public-social or public-partnership based processes and protocols to streamline cooperation between the city and the commoners. Taking as example the Bologna Regulation for the Care and the Regeneration of the Urban Commons, the report suggests that commons initiatives present their projects and ideas to a City Lab in order to sign a “Commons Accord” with the city. With this contract the city sets-up specific support alliances combining the commoners and civil society organisations, the city itself, and the private sector;
• a cross-sector institutional infrastructure for commons policy-making and support divided in transition arenas and based on the model of a pre-existing practice around the food transition.

Among the recommendations and suggestions listed in the report there are:

• 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”.

In addition, the team 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.

The report is the executive part of a short book on the Ghent experience that will be soon available. Many useful indications and more precise recommendations can be found in the “COMMONS TRANSITION AND P2P: A PRIMER”. This Commons Primer co-published with the Transnational Institute, explains the Commons and P2P, in terms of interrelations, movements and trends, and how a Commons transition is poised to reinvigorate work, politics, production, and care, both interpersonal and environmental.

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I am especially impressed by a new scholarly essay in the Yale Law and Policy Review, “The City as a Commons, by Fordham Law School professor Sheila R. Foster and Italian legal scholar Christian Iaione. The piece is a landmark synthesis of this burgeoning field of inquiry and activism. The 68-page article lays out the major philosophical and political challenges in conceptualizing the city as a commons, providing copious documentation in 271 footnotes.

Foster and Iaione are frankly interested in “the potential for the commons [as] a framework and set of tools to open up the possibility of more inclusive and equitable forms of ‘city-making’.  The commons has the potential to highlight the question of how cities govern or manage resources to which city inhabitants can lay claim to as common goods, without privatizing them or exercising monopolistic public regulatory control over them.”

They proceed to explore the history and current status of commons resources in the city and the rise of alternative modes of governance such as park conservancies, community land trusts, and limited equity cooperative housing.  While Foster and Iaione write about the “tragedy of the urban commons” (more accurately, the over-exploitation of finite resources because a commons is not simply a resource), they break new ground in talking about “the production of the commons” in urban settings. They understand that the core issue is not just ownership of property, but how to foster active cooperation and relationships among people.

“The value of a resource that is collectively produced results from human activity and is contingent on the ability of people to access and use the resource,” they write, noting the principle of “the more, the merrier.” Understood in this sense, commons can be seen as a rich, enormous generator of value for cities – if they can only recognize this fact and craft appropriate policies and support.

Another important work recently published is a book anthology edited by Jose Ramos, The City as Commons:  A Policy Reader. The book, available for free pdf download, contains 34 contributions focused on policy options and strategies for creating cities as commons.  Among the topics:  urban design, public libraries, community currencies, time banks, platform cooperatives, “cosmo-localism,” “civic union land,” open data, the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons, and commoning and tax-delinquent private property.

Just last week another book on the commons arrived, The Illustrated Guide to Participatory City, by Tessy Britton and illustrations by Amber Anderson. This accessible, fun-to-read book tries to show how “participation culture” can revive cities and make them more resilient. The book shows the value of small-scale participation projects, and argues that, taken together, they could help address many larger, interconnected social problems.

Participatory City, the British project that released the book, explains that it is currently trying to develop a large “demonstration neighborhood” to try to scale up practical participation and document the transformative benefits that research indicates is needed.  It is looking for a city of 200,000 to 300,000 residents to participate in a five-year project.

Recently I’ve been active on the city-as-commons front myself.  On September 1, I gave a public talk on the topic at Pakhuis de Zwijger, an Amsterdam cultural/civic center. This was followed by a lively discussion by a panel of four experts on the topic – Chris Iaione of LabGov, David Hammerstein of the Commons Network, Marleen Stikker of the Waag Society, and Stan Majoor of Grootstedelijke Vraagstukken bij HvA.  You can watch a 2 hour, 15 minute video of the event here.

A project called “Exercises in Urban Reconnaissance,” which offers methodological tools for looking at cities in different ways, has a nice definition of the city as a commons:

“The city is a commonwealth, a collaborative environment based on shared resources, free knowledge and collective practices. “Commoning” is a constitutive process of urban organization, establishing and reproducing communities, and defining boundaries, protocols and principles of distribution. Urban commons are hybrid institutions for the management of material and relational resources subject to exhaustion, obsolescence and expropriation; they must be constantly cared for, reclaimed and regenerated.”

I’m eager to see the next turn of the wheel on this topic.  I hope to learn more at the Smart City Expo in Barcelona, at which I am giving a keynote talk on November 17.

Photo by E.G.Tsatsralt

The post A Surge of New Work on the City as a Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

III. Re-imagining the Polity for a Networked Humanity

However promising the new forms of open source governance outlined above, they do not of themselves constitute a polity. The new regimes of collaboration constitute mini- and meso-systems of self-organization. They do not comprise a superstructure of law, policy, infrastructure and macro-support, which is also needed. So what might such a superstructure look like, and how might it be created? Can we envision some sort of transnational polity that could leapfrog over the poorly functioning state systems that prevail today?

A first observation on this question is that the very idea of a polity must evolve. So long as we remain tethered to the premises of the Westphalian nation-state system, with its strict notions of absolute sovereignty over geographic territory and people and its mechanical worldview enforced by bureaucracies and law, the larger needs of the Earth as a living ecosystem will suffer. So, too, will the basic creaturely needs of human beings, which are universal prepolitical ethical needs beyond national identity.

It may simply be premature to declare what a post-Westphalian polity ought to look like – but we certainly must orient ourselves in that direction. For the reasons cited above, we should find ways to encourage the growth of a Commons Sector, in both digital and non-virtual contexts, and in ways that traverse existing territorial political boundaries. Ecosystems are not confined by political borders, after all, and increasingly, neither are capital and commerce. Culture, too, is increasingly transnational. Any serious social or ecological reconstruction must be supported by making nation-state barriers more open to transnational collaboration if durable, effective solutions are to be developed.

While states are usually quite jealous in protecting their authority, transnational commons should be seen as helping the beleaguered nation-state system by compensating for its deficiencies. By empowering ordinary people to take responsibility and reap entitlements as commoners, nation-states could foster an explosion of open-source problem-solving and diminish dependencies on volatile, often-predatory global markets, while bolstering their credibility and legitimacy as systems of power.

But how might we begin to build a commons-friendly polity? After all, the most politically attractive approaches have no ambitions to change the system, while any grand proposals for transforming neoliberal capitalism are seen as political non-starters. I suggest three “entry points” that can serve as long-term strategies for transformation:

1) begin to reconceptualize cities as commons;

2) reframe the “right to common” (access to basic resources for survival and dignity) as a human right; and

3) build new collaborations among system-critical social movements so that a critical mass of resistance and creative alternatives can emerge.

These three general strategies are not separate approaches, of course, but highly complementary and synergistic.

1. Cities as a Workshop for System-Change

One of the most promising places to start building a new polity is in cities. In Barcelona, Bologna, Seoul, and many other cities, citizen movements based on the ideas of “the city as a commons” and of “sharing cities” are taking root. Both approaches assert the shared interests of ordinary residents over those of the usual overlords of city government – real estate developers, economic elites, “starchitects” and urban planners.[44] They recognize the city and its public spaces, communities and opportunities as products of commoning. A commons framing is deliberately invoked to make new moral and political claims on common resources in urban settings – to demand a “right to the city”[45] – and so inaugurate a self-feeding spiral of social practice and a new discourse. Citizens acting as commoners can insist on greater citizen participation not just in policymaking but in directly developing innovative projects and solutions. Network platforms can foster all of these goals.[46]

In Bologna, for example, the city government is undertaking a landmark reconceptualization of how government might work in cooperation with citizens. Ordinary people acting as commoners are invited to enter into a “co-design process” with the city to manage public spaces, urban green zones, abandoned buildings and other urban resources. The formal legal authority for this innovation, the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons, is now being emulated by other Italian cities.

City governments could augment this general approach by building new tech infrastructures that enable greater citizen engagement. For example, instead of ceding the software infrastructure for taxi service or apartment rentals to Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and other well-financed “gig economy” corporations, city governments could require the use of shared open platforms for such market activity. This could enable multiple players to compete while improving regulatory oversight of basic labor and consumer protections, and privacy protection for personal data.

City governments could also take advantage of the new “Top Level Domains” – better known as TLDs – that are now available on the Internet for city names. TLDs are the regions of the Internet denoted by .com, .org and .edu. Over the past few years, the little-known Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) – which manages TLDs — has been pushing the idea of TLDs for cities. The idea is that cities could use their unique TLDs like .rome or .paris to improve access to various aspects of city life. For instance if you were new to Brooklyn Heights, you could go to brooklynheights.nyc and find all sorts of civic, community and commercial website listings for that neighborhood – the library, recycling resources, parking rules, links to relevant city officials. And yes, the businesses.

City TLDs are a potentially transformative civil infrastructure that could be as consequential as the “street grid” layout of Manhattan adopted in the 1800s. Why should this enormous planning authority, which has such far-reaching implications for the life of a city, be auctioned off to private domain-name vendors, who would then re-sell “Brooklyn.nyc” and “hotels.nyc” to the highest bidder with minimal city oversight? It essentially cedes the future of a city to short-term commercial imperatives. TLDs should be treated as commons infrastructure and used to enhance neighborhood identities and bottom-up participation.

Network platforms are an especially attractive way to actualize the idea of “the city as commons” because they can enact all sorts of open source principles: low barriers to participation, transparency of process, bottom-up innovation, social pressure for fair dealing and resistance to concentrated power and insider deals.

One powerful way to advance commoning in cities is through the skillful use of open data. The ubiquity of computing devices in modern life is generating vast floods of data that, if managed cooperatively, could improve city life in many creative ways. Open data systems could be used to host participatory crowdsourcing, interactive collaborations among citizens and government, and improvements in municipal services (street repairs, trash removal, transportation).

The City of San Francisco recently used an open source model to explore how best to transform its busy Market Street thoroughfare into a more pedestrian-friendly, traffic-free promenade. To help ascertain what might appeal to ordinary city residents, the city issued an open call to artists for proposed street installations along a two-mile stretch of the boulevard. This elicited dozens of clever ideas – performance spaces, relaxation zones, even a six-sided ping-pong table. City planners chose fifty of the projects for a real-world experiment over the course of three days in 2015 to see how people would actually engage with the artworks. The Market Street prototyping helped enlist a large and diverse group of the public to generate ideas that might otherwise seem too daring or unusual.

The City of Los Angeles has been another pioneer in using open networks, open data and crowdsourcing of information to improve city life. The city’s open data portal, DataLA, offers data for everything from the city budget and the regional economy to crime locations, building inspections, property foreclosures, parking citations and even checks written by the city government. The data portal has helped people measure the effectiveness of government and build public trust in government. It has also been used in creative ways to solicit people’s knowledge in providing “geo-references” to historic photos. The HistoricPlacesLA project has been described as an “open-source, web-based, geospatial information system for cultural heritage inventory and management.”[46] The City has also created a special smartphone app, PulsePoint, which can help deal with medical emergencies anywhere in the city. It identifies a patient’s location and any CPR-trained individuals who may be nearby, while providing CPR guidance. The app suggests a way that cities could use smartphones to coordinate needs with responses instantly: a versatile model for the future.

Using smartphones to crowdsource real-time data is another way that a city could use commoning to reinvent the role of government. The City of Los Angeles’ fascinating (non-financial, non-exclusive) collaboration with Waze, a Google-owned traffic and navigation smartphone app offers several lessons. The system is used by an estimated 30 percent of Los Angeles drivers to learn about traffic accidents and other road situations, and its massive usage has made it a de facto infrastructure tool for city transportation and data managers. The City gives Waze timely data about active road construction projects in order to alert drivers about potential or actual traffic delays – and Waze, for its part, collects crowdsourced reports about traffic and sends them to city transportation officials every two minutes. (There is no collection of any personally identifiable information.) Even though this is a public/private partnership – not a true commons – it suggests the great power of bottom-up sharing on network platforms. Of course, such data aggregation is no substitute for real investment in the physical commons of transport infrastructure and public space, but used wisely it could facilitate more citizen-focused improvements.

City governments (or state or federal governments, for that matter) could leverage bottom-up, interactive collaborations such as these by developing their own open APIs (application programming interfaces) on electronic networks – similar to those used by the iPhone and other platforms. This would enable governments to collect real-time data and make more dynamic, responsive choices “in cooperation” with its citizens. City governments could also perform automatic oversight of regulated entities without the complexities of conventional regulation. Sensors for water or air quality, for example, could provide real-time data portraits of an airshed or watershed. By using tamper-proof data-flows from remote devices, some of the expense of in-person inspections could be avoided and the quality of enforcement improved.

The huge potential of open data networks raises important questions about governance structures, however. How should crowdsourced information be managed and governed – by proprietary companies? City governments? Citizens as commoners? As the controversial growth of Uber and Airbnb has shown, there are great risks in such power being held by a few large tech companies answerable primarily to investors. Yet very few city governments have shown leadership in using networked systems to advance public designs for public purposes. There is a need to set forth some commons-based governance alternatives because they are the most likely to align civic needs and realities with the ultimate policies and decisions.

Fortunately, there are a number of pacesetter projects experimenting along these lines. In addition to the Bologna Regulation mentioned above, the European Cultural Foundation is actively exploring the role that artistic and cultural commons can play in improving cities. The Ubiquitous Commons project is developing a prototype legal/technological toolkit to empower people to control the personal data they generate from countless devices, especially in urban contexts. The Open Referral Initiatives is developing a common technical language so that information systems can “speak” to each other and share community resource directory data. The beauty of these and other initiatives is that they invite broad participation and address immediate, practical needs while contributing to a very different paradigm of governance – one that fosters commons and commoning.

2. The Right to Common as a Basic Human Right

The “right to the city” asserted by commoners is essentially a human right – a moral and political claim of access to resources that are essential to life, and to a right to participate in their use and management. So it is worth situating this entire struggle in the context of human rights law and social movements. The goals of commoning and human rights law have, in fact, a very long, entangled history. They go back at least 800 years, when King John adopted the Magna Carta and its lesser-known companion document, the Charter of the Forest, as a way to settle a bitter civil war. The Charter of the Forest (later incorporated into the Magna Carta) recognizes the claims of commoners to the common wealth that belongs to them as human beings, and who depend upon certain resources for their everyday subsistence.

For example, the Magna Carta formally recognized in writing the right of commoners to access and use forests that the King had previously claimed as his alone. It helps to remember that commoners in the thirteenth century relied on forests for nearly everything – wood to cook their food and build their houses, wild game to eat, plants to feed their cattle, acorns to fatten their pigs. The problem is that their long-standing customary use of the forest and other common resources was not legally recognized – and so the King and his lords could (and did) arbitrarily ignore the moral and human rights of commoners. The Magna Carta was a frank acknowledgment that commoners indeed have human rights – the right to use the forest, the right to self-organize their own governance rules, and civil liberties and rights to protect them from the sovereign’s arbitrary abuses of power.[48]

There are other strands in this legal history of human rights and commons that are too involved to discuss here; my co-author Burns H. Weston, an international human rights and law scholar, and I explore them more fully in our book Green Governance. Suffice it to say that it is entirely consistent with human rights law for it to squarely embrace the right of universal access to clean air, water, food and other resources and ecosystems that are essential to life.

The problem is that human rights champions have historically sought to fulfill these rights within the prevailing system of law and commerce, i.e., the neoliberal state and markets. But given its commitments to individual property rights, “free markets” and economic growth, it should not be surprising that the actual vindication of human rights is a problematic affair. The idea of human rights has been aspirational, frequently stymied by hostile structures of the state, law and commerce. Surely it is an apt moment to consider how various types of common-based governance (as described above) could actualize human rights in more robust, stable ways.

To try to advance human rights law in such directions, Weston and I in 2013 proposed a Universal Covenant Affirming a Human Right to Commons- and Rights-based Governance of Earth’s Natural Wealth and Resources.[49] It is our attempt to win recognition for the human right to “green governance” – to manage resources as commons, and thus to actualize human rights more reliably than existing systems of national and international law now do. A related effort should be the “reinvention of law for the commons,” a topic that I addressed in a 2015 research memorandum.[50] The paper calls for a new field of inquiry and legal innovation — commons-based law – to consolidate the disparate areas of law that are trying to protect collective resources and practices from enclosures while providing affirmative legal support for people to enter into commoning.

3. Building a Convergence of System-Critical Movements

The third strategic approach I want to suggest for building a new polity supportive of the commons is through an ongoing convergence and alignment of diverse system-critical social movements. The failures of neoliberal capitalism are coming at the very time that promising new modes of production, governance and social practice are exploding, especially through decentralized, self-organized initiatives on open networks that can often out-perform both the market and state.[51] The people developing these new systems are essentially creating a new parallel economy – sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, as in Greece and Spain. The innovators are not politicians, CEOs or credentialed experts, but ordinary people acting as householders, makers, hackers, permaculturists, citizen-scientists, cooperativists, community foresters, subsistence collectives, social mutualists and commoners: a vast grassroots cohort whose generative activities are not really conveyed by the term “citizen” or “consumer.”

Through network-based cooperation and localized grassroots projects, millions of people around the world are managing all sorts of bottom-up, self-provisioning systems. There are also many new types of citizen-actors and mobilizations seeking system change, ranging from cultural surges such as Occupy, the Arab Spring and Las Indignadas to more durable long-term movements focused on cooperatives, degrowth, the solidarity economy, Transition Towns, relocalized economies, peer production, and the commons.

These movements are developing new visions of “development” and “progress,” as seen in the buen vivir ethic in Latin America, for example, or in “go local” movements in the US and Europe, and the FabLabs and makerspaces. The new models also include alternative currencies, co-operative finance and crowdequity investments to reclaim local control, transition and indigenous peoples’ initiatives to develop sustainable post-growth economies, the movement to reclaim the city as a commons, and movements to integrate social justice and inclusive ethical commitments into economic life.

These movements are not only pioneering new types of collective action and provisioning, but also new legal and organizational forms. The idea of “generative ownership” as a collective enterprise is being explored by leaders of co-operative finance, community land trusts, relocalized food systems and commons-based peer production. Each is attempting to demonstrate the feasibility of various commons-based ownership structures and self-governance – and then to expand the use of such models to show that there are attractive alternatives that can mature into a new economic ecosystem.

The general approach here is to change the old by building the new. The demonstration of feasible alternatives (renewable energy, cooperativism, relocalization, etc.) is a way to shift political momentum, constitute new constituencies for system change, and assert a new moral center of gravity. To work, however, the alternatives incubated outside the existing system must achieve a sufficient coherence, intelligibility, scale and functionality.

The commons can act as a shared meta-language among these highly diverse groups because the commons expresses many of the core values and priorities of many “system-change” movements. Like DNA, which is under-specified so that it can adapt to local circumstances, the commons discourse is general enough to accommodate myriad manifestations of basic values and principles. More than an intellectual framework, the commons helps make culturally legible the many social practices (“commoning”) that are often taken to be too small and inconsequential to matter – but which, taken together, constitute a different type of economy. In this fashion, the commons discourse itself has an integrative and catalytic potential to build a new type of networked polity. Michel Bauwens, Founder of the P2P Foundation, and his colleague John Restakis argue that the state can be reinvented as a “Partner State” in support of commons and peer production. Bauwens cites Bob Jessop, arguing that:

One the one hand, market competition will be balanced by cooperation, the invisible hand will be combined with a visible handshake. On the other hand, the state is no longer the sovereignty authority. It becomes just one participant among others in the pluralistic guidance systems and contributes its own distinctive resources to the negotiation process … official apparatuses remain at best first among equals. The state’s involvement would become less hierarchical, less centralized and less directive in character. The exchange of information and moral suasion become key sources of legitimation and the state’s influence depends as much on its role as a prime source and mediator of collective intelligence as on its command over economic resources or legitimate coercion.[52]

The idea of the partner state is intriguing, but will require further theoretical elaboration and investigations in how it might be politically actualized. One serious attempt at this in the context of digital commons is the Commons Transition Plan prepared by Bauwens in conjunction with a research project sponsored by the Government of Ecuador in 2014.[53] It attempts to envision state policies that could help bring about “a society and economy that functions as common pools of shared knowledge in every domain of social activity.”

Conclusion

A new polity is not something that can simply be declared or imposed. It must be co-enacted over time. We must co-evolve into it by living as commoners. It is therefore difficult to project what a new polity might look like today; too many developmental realities must occur. It will be emergent, which is to say, it will manifest a different structural logic and organization than we presume is possible today. Standing at the base of a never-ascended mountain, we cannot really know which path to take and what the view from the peak will look like.

In the meantime, it is clear that the nation-state as a governance regime is facing serious new pressures. It exists in a highly interconnected world in which transboundary interactionsare extensive and routine. Transborder flows are not just commercial in nature, but also involve transfers of ideas, values, projects, policy initiatives, and visions for humanity. As the peer-to-peer velocity of cross-border exchange reaches new intensities, the nation-state and international treaty systems will face new insurgent pressures from below. How could it be otherwise? The question is whether the needs of people at the micro, everyday level can be brought into closer alignment with the conduct of macro-institutions.

The Internet and digital technologies are certainly bringing this issue to a head as they catalyze and organize new sorts of bottom-up political and cultural energies. It remains unclear whether those energies will fracture the old polity and its governance systems, and give rise to a new commons-based techno-economic social paradigm and polity – or whether the Googles and Facebooks of the world, and their corporate brethren, will succeed in reinventing capitalism in the age of electronic networks, assuring their ongoing mastery, perhaps in more ominous, unequal and coercive forms.

I do believe that fostering the social practices and norms of commoning may be one of the few pathways to develop transformational change. It offers many points of access for participation. It energizes bottom-up pressures and innovation from the edge. It can generate goods and services to meet real needs outside of capitalist structures, or through more benign localized market hybrids and systems of mutualized support. It provides a flexible, evolving template for change that works in diverse contexts and yet it articulates a core set of principles with a post-capitalist logic.

We have lived as vassals within the massive market/state edifice and its cultural matrix for so long that it somehow surprises us to have the pilot come on the intercom and announce that we’re all in this together, and that our agency as individuals acting collectively will be the only way to secure our future. It is entirely appropriate, then, that we turn to our neighbors on either side of us, introduce ourselves, and begin the formidable task of reinventing new types of commons. In the process, the eventual inter-networking of commons will give birth to an emergent global polity whose dimensions cannot be fully imagined today but which aspires to emancipate humanity from the limitations of modernity. The commons is no magic talisman, nor a panacea. Nor are network platforms. But they do enable us to rediscover that sovereignty does not ultimately reside in the state or market (especially in these times), but within ourselves, together.

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Footnotes

The post Transnational Republics of Commoning 3: Re-imagining the Polity for a Networked Humanity appeared first on P2P Foundation.