In his recent speech at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, researcher, activist, and author David Bollier argued that urban enclosures, which he says is the “privatization of shared wealth,” create jam-packed cities by commodifying shared resources.

Bollier presented a new vision for cities — one driven by bottom-up engagement, citizen participation, and innovative ways of thinking about shared spaces and resources.

Bollier argued that to reclaim our cities as commons we need to treat our vital urban resources as shareable common wealth. Doing so creates more long-term value as people have the opportunity to be empowered and to do things themselves. He pointed to several examples supporting the urban commons, including:

• Creative Commons Licensing, which enables people to share and freely use creative works
• FabLabs and Makerspaces, which are new social forms for creating valuable stuff through a commons-based collaboration
• Platform Cooperatives, which create shared platforms “as an antidote to the so-called death stars” of the sharing economy
• Alternative Currencies as a way to retain some of the value created regionally as opposed to having it siphoned away
• Non-digital commons projects, including land trusts, urban agriculture and community gardens, and participatory budgeting projects which empower citizens to work with city leaders to create budget priorities

Bollier concluded by emphasizing that cities can be incubators for developing new solutions to systemic problems and that transnational partnerships between cities around the world will be an important element to further the movement of cities as a commons.

Video description: “A new type of citizen economy is emerging – the City as a Commons. This is not a tech platform or economic strategy as such, but a bold re-imagining of the city as a living social organism that invites everyone to co-create, open-source style. Through FabLabs, data sharing, platform co-operatives and many participatory systems, innovative urban commons are transforming city governance, commerce, design, social services, and everyday life.”

By Cat Johnson; cross-posted from Shareable

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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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