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

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Anna Bergren Miller: The City as Commons is an important new resource for urban commons activists. (Graphic by Scott Boylston)

The cover of The City as Commons: A Policy Reader, published recently by Melbourne, Australia’s Commons Transition Coalition, features a repeated pattern of overlapping spirals and circular clusters of node-and-line shapes. The graphic, explains designer Scott Boylston (SCAD professor and president of Emergent Structures), was inspired by biophysicist Harold Morowitz‘s proposal of the how the preconditions for life on Earth may have been created. “The human city reminds me of Morowitz’s description of an open and vital membrane that creates conditions for the emergence of new ideas,” writes Boylston, who contributed a chapter on the re-use of construction waste to the book. “I see urban commoning as a ‘new’ metabolism that has the potential for generating new forms of life/living/being.”

Edited by José Maria Ramos, The City as Commons is a reference for individuals and groups who, like Boylston, believe that a re-imagining of shared resources (from intellectual property to real property) through a lens that prioritizes social and environmental sustainability over financial profits can transform the lives of humans for the better. It is also an important record of some of the commons-centric projects and policies already underway or in development around the world. The “urban” emphasis of “urban commoning” refers to the central role played by cities in the commoning process, both as the collectors of the most urgent physical, social, and environmental needs, and as the geographical and governmental entities arguably best equipped to drive change.

The 34 contributions to The City as Commons are divided into sections including Space, Value Exchange, Production, Governance, Land, Knowledge, Culture, and Accounts. The categories necessarily overlap, and the content itself is somewhat rough around the edges, with variations in voice, format, and point of origin (some are repurposed blog posts or other publications; at least one summarizes a conference). Rather than weakening the total product, these irregularities affirm the book’s identity as a conversation starter, a work-in-progress designed to encourage experimentation and revision even as it seeks to pin down some of the recent theoretical and practical developments in urban commoning.

Though the “Accounts” section, to which Shareable’s co-founder Neal Gorenflo contributed, is most explicitly framed around real-world examples, all of the authors include strategy and/or policy recommendations in their chapters. The geographical and topical scope of The City as Commons is impressive, as is the list of commentators and practitioners who have contributed to the collection. These include P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens, Prosper Australia project director Karl Fitzgerald, 596 Acres founding director Paula Z. Segal, and Julian Agyeman and Duncan McLaren, authors of Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities. The City as Commons deserves a place on the bookshelf (or hard drive) of activists already involved in contemporary commoning, as well as of citizens more generally interested in promoting the physical, social, and environmental wellbeing of their communities.

Glenwood Green Acres is a community garden built on formerly vacant land in North Central Philadelphia. (Tony Fischer / Flickr)

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