Michel Bauwens believes that because societies are complex adaptive systems, the only way to move towards a new, stable system is through a chaotic transition. The current pandemic shock will serve as a wake-up call, exposing the fallacies of our current systems. What we need forward are strong commons-based institutions that can provide a complimentary, counter-balance to powerful nation-states and existing multilateral organisations.

Podcast notes

In this with Michel Bauwens, we explore both the epistemological and political/regulatory layers of the transition from the “old” to the “new” ways of organising society. We dig into concepts like “trans-national institutions” and explore the changes we could expect in both regional and international governance of the economy and society.

Michel Bauwens is founder and director of the P2P Foundation, research director of CommonsTransition.org (a platform for policy development aimed toward a society of the Commons) and a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group.

Michel is a real lighthouse when it comes to collaborative, commons-based production models and works tirelessly since more than a decade in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property.

Here are some important links from the conversation:

> Michel Bauwens, Corona and the Commons http://liminal.news.greenhostpreview.nl/2020/03/23/corona-and-the-commons/

> Michel Bauwens and Jose Raomos, “The pulsation of the commons: The temporal context for the cosmo-local transition” (Draft), https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sHhuecKxfB8HRH8o9aOfdlKNqaPQ8lc91502FXXv8e4/edit#heading=h.99i7fcsrn7tf

> Bologna regulation for the care and regeneration of the urban commons, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Bologna_Regulation_for_the_Care_and_Regeneration_of_Urban_Commons

> P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival — Commons Transition, https://commonstransition.org/p2p-accounting-for-planetary-survival/

> REPORTING 3.0, https://reporting3.org/

> Robert I. Moore (2000), The First European Revolution: 970–1215, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/712195.The_First_European_Revolution

> Bernard A. Lietaer, The Mystery of Money, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8198838-the-mystery-of-money

> Material flow accounting, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_flow_accounting

> Resources, events, agents (accounting model), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resources,_events,_agents_(accounting_model)

> David Ronfeldt, Tribes, Institutions, Markets and Networks, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2005/P7967.pdf

> Jamie Wheal in Rebel Wisdom: War on Sensemaking 3, the Infinite Game, https://youtu.be/mQstRd7opv4

> French land trust “Terre des Liens”, https://terredeliens.org/

> Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40203892-the-neganthropocene

Key insights

1. There are two main layers of the transition from the “old” to the “new”: Epistemological and Political/Regulatory:

– The epistemological layer needs a new educational approach, since the current one is largely reductionist and rooted in the “old” system.

– The political and regulatory space need stronger commons-based institutions and governance protocols, where the nation state becomes a “partner state” and you have a public commons protocol, like for example in the Bologna regulation for the care and regeneration of the urban commons in Italy.

– We will also see the emergence of trans-national institutions that connect local constituencies globally and virtually and which are able to protect planetary boundaries.

2. We’re moving towards a mutation of consciousness where Western countries are increasingly questioning modernity/progress paradigm, while many Asian countries still think they can get capitalism right (modernity-nature). Nonetheless, the fact that we’re currently consuming five times our planetary resources to maintain the capitalist economic model might indicate that we’re moving towards a next “pulsation”, or regenerative reaction, to a period of unsustainable extraction.

3. There’s a need of coherence driving decision-making mainly based on accounting using energy flows, which go beyond double-entry accounting — creating winners and losers — making transparent the three-dimensional, real impact of activities.

 Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.

This podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Stitcher, CastBox, RadioPublic, and other major podcasting platforms.

Transcript

This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host, Stina Heikkilä.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript which has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Michel, is such a pleasure to have you on this podcast! We know each other I think from, you know, the early 2010s, probably something like that. So it’s almost 10 years, maybe more. And, you know, when we started this podcast, we really wanted to have the conversation on the on the commons and P2P commons based production into this conversation into this podcast. And, you know, as you know, I am also personally very much passionate about this idea of open source, for example, and open collaboration, based on the commons. So my question for you as a starting point, say to explore the world of P2P commons based production is is much more related to try to understand with you why this is not as big a deal as it should be, you know. And so, what are the structural issues that, as for your understanding, are harnessing the further development of these paradigms in the world?

Michel Bauwens:
Right. Well, I guess to start with, I’d like to basically maybe even challenge what you just said. Because, you know, you have to remember where it came from right, where basically we just had open source movements in the early 2000s. Now we have urban commons — and I did a study in Ghent which show the tenfold increase in urban commons from 50 to 500 in just one city — that’s one thing. Then we have the makerspaces, the fab labs and something that’s called a multi factory. There’s about 120 of them in Europe right now already and this is like real production, where craftspeople mutualise their you know, production in a common space using open source principles. And also, I would like to say that there’s already a lot more political expression of this, right, there is the regulation in Italy in 250 different cities, there is a whole plank of activity in France around the municipal elections, and you know, with a real commons political program at the local level. So, of course, we’re not where we want to be, but I just want to stress that we also have been growing at the same time. So I just want to make sure that that is said.

Simone Cicero:
For sure.

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, yeah. But so I, you know, I think of course one of the issues and that’s one of the statements we wanted to discuss is, is about the value regime, right? So my analysis is that we live in a world that only recognizes extracted value. So in other words, in order to create value, you either work with people or with natural resources and you extract a surplus. And that surplus is translated in financial wealth. And then we are going to do philanthropy or we’re going to do taxation. And so we’re doing redistribution. And this, this has a number of paradoxical effects. And one of the profound effects is that if you do generative work, if you do care work, you don’t get funded unless you get this redistributive money. So a typical example would be, you have in France a community land trust called Terre des Liens. They have 775 million Euro in capital and you know, they buy land from the markets and put it in a trust and then they give cheap rent and ecological contracts with organic farmers. They have already in 2016 published a report showing that the fact that they don’t use toxic pesticides in their form of agriculture means that they’re saving the French state 300 million euros per year. So that’s, you know, amount of money in water pollution, depollution that is not spent, because they do this generative activity. And I hope you can see the problem there. Right. So if you’re a farmer, and you’re destroying your soil year after year, and some studies say there’s like 60 harvests left in Western Europe, you know, if we continue with this, de-substantiation of minerals in our soils. You’re going to be basically getting, you know, billions in European funding from the agriculture program, but if you’re an organic farmer you’re not going to get this. So I want to say this is important because the common in some ways and an alternative to capital, but you still need capital. So capital privatizes the commons, that’s how capitalism emerged. And so what people are doing right now, I would say is using the commons as an alternative to capital because they don’t have capital. Right? So if you don’t have capital, then you’re going to use mutualization as an alternative. This combined idle sourcing, combined many, many, many small contributions to try to, to get at a substantial amount of infrastructure. And so, why is this important because as long as the current system works, as long as the extractive system works even if it is destructive, it kind of creates a structural situation where generative activity is marginalized. And this is just, you know, a fact of life. Right? And now, if you agree with me — or maybe don’t agree with me — that we are reaching a point of no return in the current system. In other words, continued extraction at this scale, an overuse of the planetary resources at this scale, creates resource issues, creates future problems with food and water, creates climate change and — as we see nowadays — creates a huge issue around pandemic distribution. So, I would say that it might be that the time you know before these alternatives, you know, become more important is not so far away as we think. Now, so the first argument would be around structural weaknesses for me is the value regime, right? In which value regime are we operating? And what is it favoring? And what is it de-favoring?The second issue, though, I think, is that we live in a hybrid economy, in a hybrid society. So we have different ways of exchanging value. We have the pricing system, which you know, only is dominant for the last two centuries. It wasn’t before; it was a it was itself marginal until two centuries ago. You know, we have maybe 10% people in the cities and 90% people in the countryside were almost not affected by the pricing system. We have the gift economy, which is, I think, quite marginal. Then we have commoning, which is working on a shared resource, and then we have redistribution. So those are four different ways of exchanging value. And I think one of the critiques you know, like self-critique we could make of the commons movement is the idea that it’s a, it’s a totalistic alternative, right? So what I would argue differently is that the commons on its own is not sufficient, just as the market on its own is not efficient, sufficient. And the states on its own is not efficient. Even more so, I would argue that believing this is a form of totalitarianism, so you’d have fascism and communism as an absolutism of the state. We have a bit of right wing libertarianism and neoliberalism as a absolutism of the market. We also could have commonism as some kind of absolutism of you know, of horizontality. And so I think it’s much more fruitful to think of combinations. In other words, if you’re a market player, you could start thinking, you know, how can we use the commons. And actually, of course, we see that capitalists actually doing that, right. I mean, all the new — the things you do with your platforms and, you know, normally most of the platforms are capitalistic, what I call net article platforms — that’s exactly what they do. And they have become commons extracting economic systems. They directly,you know, get value from cooperating humans, right? So if you look at Uber, Airbnb, they no longer just hire people to produce, they actually let us exchange and then they get taxed from our exchanges, broadly speaking. So capitalism is certainly doing that. And so what I’ve been suggesting for the last 10 years is that commoners should do the same. One of the historical theories about capitalism is that it emerged in Europe because we had, you know, medieval cities, free medieval cities where the merchant guilds had autonomy, which didn’t happen in any other region in the world, because always the market forces were subsumed and dominated by the Empires and the Royal, the monarchic forces. But in Europe, we had a distributed system, fragmented system, of power in the Middle Ages and that allowed the merchant classes to slowly create a world that worked for them. And so basically, what I’ve been suggesting is that commoners should do the same; that we should be thinking not about, you know, doing on our own 100% pure way, but we should be thinking: what kind of markets work for commoners? What kind of state form works for the commons?

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, that’s, sorry I’m interrupting you, but I want to bring you some first reflection that reconnects with some older interviews that we’ve been recording the last few days. So, for example, when you say that the commons doesn’t need to be totalistic, you know, not approach that somehow like we need to do it alone outside of the society of markets, but more something that can appear on top of existing markets. It reminds me about David Ronfeld’s tribes, institutions, markets and networks. So this idea that essentially they evolve on top of each other and this is something that we also had the chance to discuss quickly with John Robb a few few days ago. And if I connect with your remarks at the start, that it’s a value issue and also you say, you know, as long as we have extracted value, it’s hard to imagine that, you know, something different comes up as long as society somehow praises this kind of extractive approach. And this is really interesting, I think. I mean, when you say for example, care work is not funded, it makes me think about Bernard Stiegler’s Neganthropocene idea, that care needs to become central. And, and so somehow this brings us this reflection that if we don’t see more commons based production, you may also be an epistemological problem. We may also be dealing with to this idea of, you know, as Heidegger’s said we face the world as standing reserve that we just want to consume or basically we just can think about consuming. So it’s these big, these huge epistemological issues related to science and rationalism. And so this is one of the big issues. And on the other hand, that is a political issue. Because when you say, you know, basically, if this information needs to come on top of existing institutions and markets, it means that we need to take it politically, we need to have a political discussion on how we run our markets and what kind of production we, I would say we encourage with our policies. So there are these two topics. And you also mentioned the point of no return so at some point, we were going to figure it out that if it doesn’t change, we’re gonna have very hard times and we are already living through hard times. You mentioned the pandemic. It’s crazy, today we are all three of us at some level of lockdown, you know, you’re locked down in a room because you’re finishing your quarantine, and me and Stina we’re locked in our houses in Paris and Rome. So I feel like the point of no returning somehow is already here, for some reasons, but so the question is: how do you see that happening? Is the epistemological transformation really key? And is this aspect of cosmology and integrating the technology and the cosmological vision as we are seeing for example in China somehow, something needed? Is it something that you see happening? How do you see that unlocking? Is it a political procedure? Epistemological? That sort of thing.

Michel Bauwens:
Let me give you some examples. So I just finished writing an essay, which I really happy about is called “The pulsation of the commons”. And so I’ve been looking at different schools of thought like biophysical economics and cliodynamics, which is a historical school, and the cognitive cycles and the movement of Karl Polanyi. And they all come to a very similar conclusion, which is basically saying that history moves In waves, in pulsating pulsation, so you have extractive moments in history and then you have regenerative reactions, and typically for regenerative reaction is the revival of the components. So in, you know, 10th century 11th century Europe in 12th century Japan in 15th century China, what you see is that the extractive regime has done so much damage that there is a huge popular revolt that in that time takes on a religious and spiritual language. And so, basically, you know, we can take Japan also in the 16th century and happen again. So, you have like a completely deforested country, which will be subject to civil war and then, you know, so many people have died and then the Shogun takes power. And for three centuries, Japan has succeeded in creating it’s called the Tokugawa period, a nation that lives within its regional planetary boundaries. And it has a stable population. So it can be done right, it’s actually possible to have a civilizational form that lives within natural boundaries with a stable population. It’s been done in the past. And so that’s that’s like something that you see happening all the time. So for example, I was reading a book is called the first European revolution, it’s in 975, after the period of capitalization and you know, all these feudal lords are fighting and killing each other and raping their the women in their population and everything and stealing the gold from the churches. You have the monks and the people organizing demonstrations and within 70 years, the whole of European Society has changed. And so this kind of pulsation between extraction and regeneration is not unusual. It’s actually I would say the rule now with capitalism because of technology, because of oil, you know, we kind of thought we were out of it, right? We thought we escaped this, but this is no longer the case. We can’t escape it. We, you know, we use four or five planets, use five times more resources than the earth can regenerate. We have climate change. So basically, I believe we have now reached that point on a global scale. Now there is a difference between Asia and Europe, in Asia, in Europe, we already have at least one third of the population in Europe that questions all the ideals of modernity. So there’s already kind of a mutation in consciousness, I would say. In Asia, they are still much more believing in the system, and they think finally they can get there. So they, so that I would say that the the majority of the people in Asia believe in capitalism, and that a majority of the people in Europe are losing their faith in capitalism. And so you see all these people changing how they do health, how they do, you know, think about young people in work today. I mean, this is a real issue, where most young people cannot find meaning in a traditional job, or they they want something else, they want to live other values. So I would say in general, that we actually see mutation of consciousness. And let me end with one example because I think it’s important. So mutation in consciousness is not just a continuation of the old. So when we have the Christians coming after the Roman Empire, in the Roman Empire workers or slave work is something bad, is something that a free person doesn’t have to do. But in the Christian world, in a feudal world, Ora Labora, so you have to pray and work at the same time. So actually working is transforming the world, is making the world a better and more divine place. So that’s a complete complete shift in consciousness. And I think today, a lot of people want to care for the earth, want to be at the surface of the planet. And the system hasn’t yet changed to make that possible. But I think the desire is already there.

Simone Cicero:
So we can say maybe that, for your understanding, we are witnessing this epistemological change. So maybe it’s the time to see how it plays out to the political level?

Michel Bauwens:
Well, it plays out I think at the moment, first of all, with a total lack of trust in the institutions, right. 20 years ago, 70% of people were saying, I trust politicians, I trust doctors, I trust hospitals. Today’s more like 17%. So they, I think the majority of the people do not see it, have not a clear vision of the alternative. But they already have a clear vision of what they reject. And you probably remember this quote from Gramsci where it says the old system is dying but is not dead yet and a new system is being born but it’s not born yet, so it’s a time of monsters. You know, citation like that and he was living in the same moment we are living now because at the moment he was living is you had in the 19th century had Smithsonian capitalism, which was a total domination of capital over labor and why workers in the 1850s were dying at 30. And, you know, World War I and World War II were a transitional periods where two new regimes — fascism and communism — were competing to offer something new because the old system wasn’t working. And then we got a huge change which was the welfare system, right. So after 1945 we have a compact between capital and labor, and it creates — at least in the western states — it creates a welfare state. Well, then the way I formulate this is that the change now is, we need a compact with nature, because the compact between capital and labor was done at the expense of nature by not recognizing externalities. And then so politically — and this is one of the terms that we wanted to discuss — is we don’t have a nation state system that’s territorial. So people live in a territory they, they like their locality. So at least some people do, they feel attached to the region, a lot of people feel attached to their nation. And then we’ve built a multilateral system that is on top of that. And that is, so we have political and economic institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, that were mediating institutions, and they’re not working anymore. They’re not working well anymore. Then we have another world, which is the word that I think you and I work with, which is a transnational trans-local world, which is where people live in virtual territories. So let’s say you do permaculture so you at some level you’re local. You’re you know, you’re doing your garden. But then when you communicate about permaculture you’re communicating with the global permaculture community. And in that world, the nation state doesn’t even exist. It’s just invisible. It’s not part of your view. Right. And so that second world for me is the word that we’re building with the commons with Knowledge Commons. And so we talk about Cosmo local, global order, which is everything that’s global is everything that’s light is global and shared and everything that’s heavy is local, which is an alternative to both neoliberal globalization which is a globalization of matter and people moving around the world all the time. We spend three times as many on transportation, I’m making things now. And then we have a world of national protectionism of “okay, let’s keep the foreigners out. Let’s do everything locally”. And so what we try to present is a third view, right, is a view of “Yes, we need to re-localize a lot of our production”. Because if you look at corona, the reason we are such a mess is that we have neoliberal just-in-time systems that are totally dependent on the weakest link and then when China you know, got in crisis, we didn’t get our medications. And there’s no supply line to create the making of ventilators and masks and so we lost every resilience that we had in terms of combating disruption anyway. So, yes, so what I’m saying is that the open source germ form shows how we can do it. We have a global cooperation of experts globally about ventilators. And then we need to find local places where we can make it. What we don’t want is to isolate ourselves, you know, from the knowledge that’s available in all of humanity.

Stina Heikkila:
Thank you. I will jump in with a question. I thought it was — you already answered to some of the questions that I had — but I was reading the other day your a piece that you wrote in Liminal on the corona and the commons. And there were some interesting remarks that you made about, you know, that for sure the systems that we have are sort of failing, like the nation state and, and the multilateral system. There’s a lack of trust that is growing but still, that things might have been even worse if we didn’t have these systems in place, because somehow they are doing their role. So I’m curious to hear about that coexistence and how you see that will pan out. What will be the frictions between the old and the new?

Michel Bauwens:
Right, so I think we have a two fold-problem: one is that we have, you know, weak, commons institutions. We don’t have strong commons institutions yet. And the other problem is that we have state forms which cannot cooperate with these commons, right? And I think Italy has given some examples of how this could be done, because after the Bologna regulation, the regulation for the care and regeneration of the urban commons, you have 250 cities which took it over and according to the calculation between 800,000 and 1 million people who are involved in these projects. So you have there already what I call a “partner state protocol”, a public commons protocol. So you have in Italian cities, a way in which citizens can do a project that can be recognized by the state and can be supported in what they call the five, the quintuple governance multi-stakeholder model. So this is a typical thing that exists in Italy but doesn’t exist in other countries yet. And I think it’s a good example of, you know, how you can smooth the cooperation between those two worlds. Because what we have now is we have all these open source communities now with all the expertise that is needed to this ventilators and valves, but we also see that the government are not ready or able to work with them. So there are several issues. And of course, one of the issues is certification regulations, which should probably be relaxed in an emergency time because even if an alternative is not 100% effective, it can still save a lot of lives that you can’t if you don’t have anything. But you know, beyond just emergency measures, what it shows us is that what is lacking today is the interface between the state and the civil society, the state and the commons. There is no interface and I think that’s a huge weakness on both sides, because right now the state would — and also maybe say that in some more theoretical ways I think the state can see territory, it cannot see flows — and so we need a partner state with which is not just the issue of, you know, being a partner with civil society and allowing civil society to be autonomous, but it’s also related to the ability of the state to see things and accept the fact that flows enrich the nation. I am not sure that beyond the neoliberal market flows, commodity flows, that people in the states and traditional politicians are actually able to see how open source and international global maker spaces can enrich a territory can enrich, you know, the wealth of a nation state. I don’t think they see that work well.

Simone Cicero:
That’s a very important point, as for my understanding because so far I think what we have been seeing in the last — you know, basically from forever — is that, you know, gradual (something that you also mentioned), this gradual integration of institutions up until we reach this supranational let’s say multinational transnational state, you know, with the UN, for example, as a way to somehow take over this role of controlling and regulating and at the same time. What you mention is that this trend basically disconnected the citizen from the policymakers and from the regulation, regulatory process itself. On the other hand, maybe it’s a good idea to borrow Daniel Schmactenberger’s considerations on on the fact that when you have this huge power growing at the edge of the system, so where basically every nation state -but within time I would say every individual — has technological potential to create such a big harm and often coupled with Guerilla like, you know, basically biological warfare or like we said, you know, we’ve witnessed that with the drone attacks to the Saudi plants, you know.

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, that was amazing, yes.

Simone Cicero:
So the question is, when these two trends, let’s say generate friction between each other so that they need to to scale our need for a coherent regulation for example, at a multinational transnational level, and at the other hand, we have this need to probably go back into a more indigenous and local context of of creating wealth and managing the commons. Are we left with some kind of, you know, conundrum that we cannot solve?

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, okay. I you know, I won’t imply that it’s easy, but so let’s take the example with corona. So we can criticize the state and there were many failures and everything. But imagine that there is no state, then, you know, in the US, you would have every state out of the 50 states will be competing with each other. They wouldn’t take into account each other. One city would do social isolation and the other wouldn’t. I mean, that’s not acceptable either, right? There are some challenges that do require transnational frameworks. And in some way, you could say that the nation state system already works that way. And that’s not so bad. So the fact of the WHO, you know, was able to advise, and it’s an international organization. And it is followed by a lot of states. But it’s an international expression, right. And I want to say something else, which is that the regime that we are living with is, you know, it’s weak multilateralism, and it’s only economic and political. So the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, and they are mediating institutions to keep the peace because before World War II, they didn’t have them. And so they thought “We want to keep the peace we need these mediating institutions”. Now, one mediating institution that I know we need right now is actually some institution that could protect planetary boundaries. And I’ve done a report last summer called p2p accounting for planetary, was again, “p2p accounting for planetary survival”. And the theme is that we need accounting tools — share the accounting tools — that enable us to see the world differently. And that allows us to see externalities. And of course, they are not externalities, but the economy — our current economy — sees these things as externalities. So the thing is the economy is the center and then these marginal things on the outside, but actually the planet is primary. And we know we are guests. So we are actually at the edges in a certain way. And so that kind of reversal of perspective, I think needs to be institutionally validated. And so one project that I really like and I think is totally on the mark is called Reporting 3.0. And one of their proposals is called the Global thresholds and allocations Council. This is a form of, they call it multi capital accounting. So you don’t financialized but we have to see the metron energy flows in our systems. And so what they propose is basically that this group of scientists and experts, the global thresholds and locations Council, would be in charge of setting the limits in which states and individuals and companies and coops can operate right, because your freedom stops where you endanger the life of another. I think international is not good enough because if let’s take the human rights issue, right, we you have the UN Human Rights Council, but then there’s China and Saudi Arabia are members. And now human rights are very important, but it only affects some people, but the planetary survival affects everyone. And so this is sort of a vision I have is to have this to have globally shared accounting platforms, and shared supply chains where we can actually do Stigmergy, right. And that’s that I would say it’s an institution of the open source movement that works very well in free software. And once we have accounting, we can also apply it to production. That’s a huge, huge shift in perspective.

Simone Cicero:
Can you add a little Michel, on how would you see Stigmergy playing out in progress?

Michel Bauwens:
Yes, so if we move to open collaborative systems — and I think the blockchain systems are already that right — so that means like open source, everybody can come in and can leave at any time. So there is no single company that integrates the whole system that dominates our system. It’s an ecosystem. And it’s an open ecosystem. So what we see in these ecosystems is sort of all contributive accounting, which is practiced by different open source systems, which is where you can recognize non market generated activity as having its own value. So if you look at human history, and Bernard Lietaer talks about this in his book, The mystery of money: it talks about Yin and Yang money, male and female, warm and cold currencies. So now we only have cold currencies, extractive currency, he says we need to go back to the double system, which we had until the Middle Ages in the 14th century, which is we need warm currencies, which recognize non market generative care activities. So for example, in Indonesia you have money systems which regulates the watershed: people are paid to care for the watershed, and they can use that currency. So in the system that Reporting 3.0 proposes — this is more like a thermodynamic accounting systems — but again, it’s an open system everybody can see. So the theory is the following: in order to be in a steady state economy, so an economy that keeps the level of resources for the next generations, we cannot grow more than 1% a year otherwise it’s exponential. So basically, you calculate, you know, like the all the chemical elements of the table of Mendeleev. And that already exists. You can find it online. The American Chemical Association follows the flows of matter in these different elements. And so you’d have a commission of experts that would follow this, you know, how much copper is there, how much copper do we expect to find every year? What is the bio-circularity of copper? 70%. Every time you use copper, you re-use it, you can only use 70% of the copper. And that gives you boundaries, right? And within these boundaries, you’re free, but you cannot cross those boundaries. And stigmergy is that if I, let’s say I make shoes and I need leather. I can see all the other leather producers as well. So I can adapt in real time my behavior to the behavior of the ecosystem. And so there is another kind of accounting it’s called flow accounting. REA (resources, events agents), which no longer has double entry, and this is an important point. So if you use double entry accounting, you only see what is coming in and out of your own entity. And it’s a narcissistic accounting because the ecosystem doesn’t exist for you. Once you have flow accounting or REA accounting, you see the whole 3D ecosystem. You see every transaction, how it fits in the 3D ecosystem. Now, I want to go one step further, if you don’t mind. Because what we want to avoid is eco-fascism, right, a kind of planned economy where everybody is rationed. So here’s a potential solution to this. Let’s say you want to decarbonize and what we do now in the neoliberal economy is to do everything with competitive bidding. Competitive Bidding is anti-holistic because you win the competition by externalizing as much as you can. So you solve one problem, but you create anothers. In order to win, you have to be really reductionist. If you do a circular finance, let me explain what that means. You create a public ledger, that public ledger allows every citizens every collective to have its decarbonisation efforts to be verified. So you have it verified, you have been tokenized. And it either through taxation, or through contributions, those who profit from that positive externality, you fund these tokens and you create a circle. It can be very easy. I’ll give you an example Belgium, a small city — 20% of the kids used a bicycle. So it creates pollution because, you know, 80% cars. You create traffic accidents, noise, everything. SO “okay let’s pay these kids mileage mileage based currency” — I forgot the name but, you know, it exists in Bonheiden — they let them then use that currency in the circular economy, the local circular economy, so recycle makerspaces, Fab Labs. So, now they went to 60%. So considering cycling generative as compared to the extractive effects of cars and you recognize it creates value, so you have a priority but you leave people free to choose how they’re going to do it. You know, to use their creativity in answering those societal challenges. I hope that makes sense.

Simone Cicero:
No, it makes a lot of sense. And I think maybe my last question for this conversation today, or my last reflection that I want to offer — and maybe Stina wants to add more — but, you know, every time that we talk about for example, this moving out of competitive bidding into circular finance, and we speak about, you know, the need for institutional enforcement, you know, multinational institutions to enforce these regulations, which is of course, very meaningful — I find it very meaningful — but, you know, for example you will have witnessed that in the last few weeks, there were lots of people talking about how corrupt is the World Health Organization. So, there is this issue — I’m not saying that — but I’m saying that a lot of people are saying, you know, these are corrupt institutions not telling us for example, that masks are useful, you know, because they don’t want to make us, you know, freak out or something like that. So, in general, I think the question on potentially dealing with the corruption of the institutions, and in general the scarce capability to work, because of the complexity of the matter that they regulate. It is something that should make us think about, you know, what is the other route? And when I was talking with John Robb — we were talking with John Robb a few days ago — he made a reflection with us, basically saying “I want to be able to connect with the global system on my own terms”. If I am, you know, creating a local system — for example, caring about my resilience — I can connect with me on my own terms. And this is quite different as an approach or an epistemological political approach, you know, either we end up with these multinational institutions that everybody trusts, which is I believe a very difficult, you know, a very improbable outcome, or we may end up with these local institutions that connect with, connect between each other on their local own terms. So, maybe these connections that we are going to create, these multinational inter-networks and connections are more like you know, gonna be produced as tools.

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, yeah, I think this is the thing that, you know, fundamentally libertarian people like John Robbs don’t get. This is actually the core of what I’m trying to tell you, that you have the two: we are living through physical bodies, and we live in a territory. And that territory is not just a local, it’s no, it’s a historically evolved situation where the communities that were destroyed by capitalism became the imagined community of the nation states. And we shouldn’t underestimate the attachment of most people to this identity, right? And we see, actually today that forces that represent the revival of the nation state are winning. They’re not losing, they’re winning. And the people who, you know, usually on the left who don’t feel this identity with a nation state, they’re losing. And then on the other hand, you have the libertarian view, right? And it’s all about networks iner-connecting networks. And I think what is missing is that the nation state is a very contradictory institution, but it also represents a “common good” institution. It’s a social contract between different parts of the population. Because what you have in the virtual world is just the same. You know, it’s not an ideal place. It’s a place with hackers — you know, I mean bad hackers now — the kind of people who steal your credit cards and stuff. So, it’s the interaction between the two, right? So we need strong, commons institution. I’m trying to give you a few examples of what I see as potential new commons institutions. And then we need to work on the interrelationship between both. Because for example, you talk about WHO, you say they’re corrupt. Why are they corrupt? They are corrupt because they are international. So Western countries don’t have enough masks. So they want to preserve the masks for the doctors and the hospital systems. So they have an interest in not pushing masks. In Asia where everybody has masks, the information we get is that masks work. In Belgium, I’m getting information that masks don’t work. I checked it: masks actually work. But the corruption of the WHO is because the nation states are the only agents that have power there. So they’re gonna negotiate. And there’s a nice term, it’s called “super competent democracy”. And so I think we need more independence for the trans-national expertise as a way of counter balancing the, you know, the corrupt selfish power of nation states. But we can’t have a completely new system that ignores nation state when the nation state is still dominant and powerful. Does that make sense?

Simone Cicero:
Totally, totally. I think one insight that I’m driving from this conversation is that we probably need to care about the local and indigenous regional, you know, many, many terms we are using to describe these systems where we as citizens, we can be more actively engaged in producing on top of the commons. But we also need to care about these interrelationships, inter-relational institutions that need to connect these nodes. That’s the part that I’m more concerned about, you know.

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, that’s what we’re missing and, you know, we had it in the Middle Ages and was called the Catholic Church. Right? This was an institution that existed in parallel with the regional powers that was organized on a European scale. And so it could identify with, let’s say the interests of Western civilization, not just, you know, not just a local perspective of the regional Lord

Simone Cicero:
Good point

Stina Heikkila:
This links well into the question that I had also because earlier you spoke about this mutation of consciousness that we can start to somehow see emerging, where people are tired of this endless capitalism that is destroying the planet. So I see the link between what you mentioned in terms of this kind of radical transparency, where you would be able to basically see the impact in real time of a decision, right? So what is the cultural shift in that mutation of consciousness? Like how could we nurture citizens who could, you know, look for the right kind of choices?

Michel Bauwens:
Well, I think it should start probably in school because right now, the modern school is an agent of alienation. You know, so we decided in the 16th century in Europe, that the body was separate from the mind that the human was separate from nature. And all our institutions reinforce this. So that’s what you learn in school. You know, you learn all the abstract knowledge. But you don’t know anything about cleaning your room and about growing stuff. And for example, if you live in a country like Thailand, you’d see that all the children of the farmers don’t want to be farmers anymore. Right? So there’s a complete break between tradition and the relationship to the land, local, and then when they go to the school, it’s all about the nation state and science and engineering and you know, all good stuff. But you know what I’m trying to say, right? So I saw this documentary — I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name of the city, but it’s in Finland, I believe, in northern Finland — and it’s the first carbon positive city in the world. And what you see there is that the children are involved in this. So the children think about heating, they think about eco, they think about organizing the school in a way that, you know, it doesn’t use so much energy. So they started building like, how to say, a warming system that works on the floor. And so the kids are inventing all kinds of things. And so they are really growing up with a different kind of consciousness. So I think that, you know, that a large part of the answer is generational. At some point, we’re going to have to educate our children in entirely different ways than ways we were educated. You know, we’re largely lost already, in a way, because we’re so used to consumption and to all these separations. So even if we are ideologically sympathetic to these innovations, to be honest, in our daily lives, very few of us are actually living differently. And so, you know, changing our mind is the first step but to actually change the whole body-mind has to be mobilized. And I think this is something — you have to do some kind of programming of a worldview — and that has to be done very early.

Simone Cicero:
Well, Michel, I think we covered a lot of ground in this conversation. So I’m happy to offer a little bit of a reflection to wrap it up. I think we’re witnessing again and again, the fact that it’s a generational issue, it’s an educational one. And it looks — I don’t want to say that it looks like we understand what needs to be done — but somehow, more and more we understand that aspects of the current system need to change. We need to re-embed most of our economy to our region on a local scale. We need to, you know, develop these regulations and we need to change the educational system, but sometimes it looks like — or at least it was — you know, a trajectory where it was very hard to stop for a moment and to rethink, you know, the new systems. And, you know, sometimes — I was afraid to say that — but sometimes when I see that the systems are recovering, rebounding after the corona first hit, first wave, I’m thinking, you know, maybe in the future we’ll miss the corona times, where we had to stay at home.

Michel Bauwens:
So we can reset our thinking, right?

Simone Cicero:
Exactly and like, my question is, are we doing it or not?

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, I think we’re doing it. So here’s the way for me to see it: you have a stable system and the only way to go to a new stable system is through a chaotic transition because societies are complex adaptive systems. So we are ready since 2008 in the chaotic transition. And then what we need is you know, pedagogical catastrophes. We are going to learn because we are going to be shocked. And corona is the first shock, the first true shock — maybe the second if you count 2008 — but corona is a wake up call, and I think that it will have long term effects. I think it is, you know, we’ll try to go back to normal in some way. But I think in many ways people have woken up, for example, to the fact that our state systems no longer work. That you know, we don’t have ventilators, we don’t have masks. How is that possible? The most advanced Western countries are not coping with this pandemic as they should. And they lost tens of thousands of people because they were not organized in the proper way. And a lot of people will lose their income, you know, they will have to rethink their place in the world. So I think this will be a multi year shock and it will have effects but it’s not enough to have one shock. We’ll have more, but maybe this is the first one.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, I mean, just as a closure, I think, you know, I was listening to Jamie Wheal a few days ago on a podcast and I think he said something interesting: that sometimes, you know, that there’s this conversation now around this idea of “Game B” — also this idea that we need to make transition towards a new civilization. And it’s interesting to say that, you know, parts of this new civilization are already here. And sometimes we iconise, let’s say we imagine this transition as something very different, while the reality is it’s gonna start by steps, you know, through maybe this new disruption that we are living through these days is going to push us in this direction. A little step, and then another one, and then another one. And we end up maybe in a few years with a system that is completely different. So hopefully.

Michel Bauwens:
I think that’s how it works, yes, there is no, you know, there is, okay…. So you know, I was quite unhappy as a youth and I went to therapy. And you know, I did it for about seven years, and there is not a single therapy where I felt “this is it”. And yet after seven years, I was different. You know what I mean? So, I suddenly realized that I had changed. But there was no there was no like, revolutionary moment. And I think in the West, we’re too focused on this idea of, you know, the revolution that comes from the French and the Russian revolutions. But actually, even those industrial revolutions were different in every country. And it was a religious civil war in England. It was, you know, the military class which took power in Germany. The Tsar then liberated the serfs in Russia. So it took so many different forms, right? And I think this is going to be the same. We, you know, we shouldn’t wait for this magic moment. You have all these little changes and at some time, it will feel “Wow. Now the logic is already different”.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, maybe maybe Michel we just need to give up our tendency to try to model everything because this transition is not gonna be modelled very easily. So Michel, thanks very much. That was an amazing conversation. And really, we thank you for this and I’m sure that our listeners will have lots of food for thought. And for sure we had it, so thanks again.

Michel Bauwens:
Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Stina, as well.

The post Commons-based peer production at the edge of a chaotic transition appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Eleni Katrini: Analysis: Imagine living in a neighborhood where you can learn from your neighbors, grow your own food, participate in your child’s education, and invest back to your community’s well-being through your daily transactions. If you’re reading this article, you’re probably interested in or already involved in a community garden, daycare cooperative, trade school, tool library, or other hyperlocal initiative. These projects, which can be found all around the world, allow communities to build their collective agency in solving everyday needs and create a local sharing culture, thus providing an alternative for more sustainable and socially just communities.

While the field of “urban commons” has been around for a while, there’s limited research that investigates the relationship between initiatives like those listed above and physical space. My doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, takes upon this exciting challenge of identifying spatial patterns of sharing practices. In my research, I’m drawing from the fields of the commons, social practices, human behavior, architecture, and urban design, while investigating four contemporary case studies of sharing culture in London, U.K., and Athens, Greece. I’m interested in learning what a daycare cooperative, an alternative currency, a cultural center, and self-governed refugee shelter have in common with regards to their spatial attributes. Some of my early findings might be useful to others researching sharing and the commons, but more importantly, I think they can be insightful to those who are on the ground, working on amazing sharing and collaborative initiatives.

So, what have I learned so far?

Space acquisition and appropriation: In their early stages, sharing programs tend to run into the challenge of acquiring a space. Many cities often limit themselves to residential and commercial uses, with very little opportunities for communal, nonprofit uses. Even after a group has found a space, it is usually a space not designed for sharing. Given the inherent dynamism of sharing initiatives’ activities, they tend to be creative in appropriating their spaces to accommodate emerging needs. Towards that end, a large open floor-plan space is usually preferred as it allows for flexibility and can afford a wide range of activities.  

Identity and interactions: Sharing initiatives aspire to engage with the wider public by being open and accessible to all. To this end, it’s important to consider the spatial attributes of a place — large, open doors, for instance, serve as porous spaces, inviting people outside of the group inside. However, beyond the physical “openness” of the space, there are non-spatial conditions such as territoriality and the projected identity of the group that can create barriers between the initiatives and the adjacent community. In those cases, the group needs to make an effort to engage with the neighborhood by extending its activities to adjacent public spaces. Nearby parks, sidewalks, or squares could be instrumental in providing a fertile ground for facilitating interactions between the initiative and those who may not have made it to the group’s physical location.

Local ecosystem: Finally, for an initiative to be fully supported, it needs to be embedded in the daily routine of the people involved. The proximity of people’s homes to the space is critical. That does not necessarily mean that sharing initiatives should be located in purely residential areas. Finding a place that has a good mix of residential area and local commerce is important for the initiatives to place themselves within a supportive ecosystem of people, organizations, and businesses.

This piece is based on the paper “Creating the Everyday Commons; Towards Spatial Patterns of Sharing Culture,” published by Bracket Magazine.

The post Creating the everyday commons: The need to consider space in sharing initiatives appeared first on P2P Foundation.

‘Shared Spaces’ features many concrete policy ideas for municipal leaders and lawmakers, as well as strategies and tips for urban commons pioneers. It was written by Jens Kimmel, Sophie Bloemen and Till Gentsch and designed by raumlaborberlin. The authors state:

We believe we need to actively protect and strengthen commons initiatives in European cities and build and promote a commons sector by transforming cities’ institutional and policy frameworks. Commons in the city involve people managing urban resources – such as space – together through which economic and, more importantly, social value is created. It is crucial to protect that value as it sustains the very social fabric of our cities. Urban commons strengthen existing communities and bring people together into new ones, they herald the era of pro-active citizenship and encourage participatory and democratic governance.

This paper is meant as an inspiration and tool for those involved or interested in the commons movement, as an urgent reminder for policymakers, as an invitation for politicians to think more concretely about the commons sector in their cities, and as the starting point for a constructive discussion about improving our cities by protecting and strengthening the commons in the urban environment.

You can read it in full, embedded below, or download the pdf here.

The post Shared Spaces: New Paper on Urban Commons (by Commons Network) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We are interested in talk about “establishing the commons” at A/UK, because the concept implies a very active form of citizenship.

People may transact through the marketplace, or they may rely on the state, but they are actively responsible for a commons. It’s a resource which is both maintained and kept up by the people, but whose ownership (whatever the asset is, both material and immaterial) belongs to posterity, the future of that community, rather than either commerce or the public sector.

As Alberto Lucarelli, a professor in constitutional law in Naples says: “commons are defined by rights”, and “by the management model rather than simply the property model”:

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.

We take these quotes from a site welcome to our eyes, called Cooperative City. Michel Bauwens has just brought our attention to this 2017 blog, Regulating the Urban Commons – learning from Italy. It shows how the awareness and strategy for making urban commons came about – particularly, it seems, from a crisis in the status of a public utility: water.

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 agreement on the shared management and use of urban commons.

See this primer on how Bologna triggered such a Regulation of the (Urban) Commons (the actual document here):

The Bologna Regulation is based on a change in the Italian constitution allowing engaged citizens to claim urban resources as commons, and to declare an interest in their care and management.

After an evaluation procedure, an “accord” is signed with the city specifying how the city will support the initiative with an appropriate mix of resources and specifying a joint “public-commons” management.

In Bologna itself, dozens of projects have been carried out, and more than 140 other Italian cities have followed suit. This regulation is radical in giving citizens direct power to emit policy proposals and transform the city and its infrastructure, as a enabler for this.

The key is the reversal of logic: the citizenry initiates and proposes, the city enables and supports.

The Cooperative City blog also tells a fascinating tale how different cities establish their commons, out of different modern (and even ancient) traditions. Take Naples:

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.

What is of interest to us at A/UK, looking for movement in society that can support a new political culture of autonomy and localisation, are the moment of opportunity that open up in top-down structures – whether it’s a national debate that has constitutional implications. Or a municipal philosophy that suddenly shifts, due to pressure from below, to a situation where “the citizenry initiates and proposes, the city enables and supports”.

We remain convinced that this happens best when there are self-generated and rich “citizens networks”, sustaining the full human agency of their participants, formulating agendas that more established power structures have to take notice of.

The story of Italian political life is as complex and trouble as it could be at the moment – but this is an example of how change can happen at very different paces.

The post What Italian cities can teach us about how to establish urban commons – and their value appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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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By Dirk Holemans et a. Oikos, 2018: In order to find responses to current societal challenges, citizens increasingly take control, including in the form of citizen collectives that produce goods or services themselves, usually as a quest towards a more sustainable alternative. With the support of the King Baudouin Foundation and in the context of its Observatory of Associations and Foundations (Observatorium van Verenigingen en Stichtingen), Oikos think tank carried out the first research on these collectives throughout the country: who facilitates them, how important are they and how do they position themselves among other actors in society such as the classic civil society, governments and companies? With a desk study, a survey and in-depth interviews, Oikos mapped citizens’ collectives established in 2015 and 2016.

Increasing number of establishments

In 2015 and 2016, 249 citizen collectives in Belgium were launched spread over the entire country (map available). 127 among them answered the survey and 106 (48 from Flanders, 36 from Wallonia and 22 from Brussels) completed questionnaires were included in the analysis (21 respondents were found not to comply with the definition or were not established during the study period). Of those 106, most are active in areas such as food, agriculture, energy, social inclusion and the sharing economy; more than half classifies their activity under the label ‘environment and sustainability’ (graph available).

This is the first comprehensive investigation for the French-speaking citizen collectives. On the Dutch-speaking side, Oikos, on the other hand, has historical figures from 2004 onwards (graph available), indicating that 2009 was a turning point : the number of establishments has grown strongly ever since and nothing points to a stagnation of this growth.

What is a citizen collective?

Not all activities that citizens organize together are citizen collectives. A neighborhood barbecue or a temporary action group against logging is not. Then what is? Some elements are necessary to be able to speak of a citizen collective:

• to meet local needs, with the aim of long-term structural results;
• the members take control of the production / execution of the goods or services themselves (although sometimes it is possible to call on paid (service) suppliers);
• citizens are the promoters and determine who belongs to the group, and who can use or manage the resources, goods or services;
  the members have a say in the form, the organization and the action lines for the future;

A few examples: with a social grocery, cooperative library of things, or community supported agriculture where consumers are closely connected to a farmer and are committed to reducing production, or even participating in the harvest.

Pioneers: highly educated working M/F/X in their thirties and forties

Citizen collectives are largely the work of 25- to 45-year-olds, and the real pioneers are usually 36 to 45 years (graph available). Young people and seniors are hardly represented. There is a balance in the participation of women and men, and single people, cohabitants and married couples are fairly equal (graph available).

Among the pioneers in citizen collectives, highly educated people are strongly overrepresented: 86.3% have at least a Bachelor’s degree (graph available– compared to 45.6% of the population aged between 30 and 34 years according to Statbel’s figures). Most pioneers (84.8%) combine their engagement with a job (of whom four out of ten half-time).

53.7% of the respondents are politically engaged. Half of the respondents (48.6%) estimate that the political preference of the pioneers of their citizens’ collective is left on the political spectrum (graph available).

Relationship with government and industry: a healthy distance

Most citizen collectives (58%) are self-sufficient. 78% came about without public participation. But they think a good relationship with the government is important (80%). Approximately 1 in 3 consults with the municipal authorities about the activities and services they offer. The relationship with the (local) government does not always go smoothly: some are satisfied (“the city made our operations possible”), others less (“we mainly got headwinds”).

According to a minority (16.8%) of the citizen collectives, companies see them as competitors. They themselves see their own role in relation to the business sector as additional (in Wallonia), cooperative (in Brussels), or innovative (in the three regions). (graph available).

Little inclusive

The sectors in which they operate show that citizen collectives often strive for a more sustainable society. They inspire other actors from industry, government and civil society. Partly because of their urge for proximity and small scale in their approach, they still play a modest role as an alternative to production and / or consumption,  alongside those (more) dominant actors.

If citizen collectives really strive for a sustainable and inclusive society, then consideration must be given to ways of involving disadvantaged citizens in this citizens’ movement.

Photo by European Parliament

Photo by European Parliament

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Wed 21 November 2018, 18:15 – 20:30 GMT

Makespace Oxford: 1 Aristotle Lane, Oxford OX2 6TP, United Kingdom

REGISTER HERE

Building upon Shareable’s years of experience covering the ‘sharing ecosystem’ and the 137 model policies and case studies curated for the new book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons,” Tom Llewellyn, strategic partnerships director of Shareable, will show how the real sharing economy is already connecting people together, empowering community-led disaster recovery efforts, and working under the radar to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Tom Llewellyn is a lifelong sharer, commoner, and storyteller who travels the globe inspiring and empowering communities to share for a more resilient, equitable, and joyful world. He’s the Strategic Partnerships Director for Shareable.net, executive producer and host of the podcast documentary series The Response, and co-editor of the book “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons”.

Following the presentation, attendees will participate in an interactive ‘World Café’ style discussion, working together to evaluate Oxford by exploring the state of things, the available resources, the needs of residents, and what the steps might be to meet those needs together.

This workshop is for anyone interested in exploring how we might activate Oxford’s urban commons together to address some of our city’s most pressing needs. Please bring your enthusiasm, ideas, and any examples of projects you’re already aware of to share and connect with others.

This event is in partnership with the Solidarity Economy Association, an Oxford-based organisation supporting the growth of the UK’s solidarity economy through education, research, and awareness raising projects. The solidarity economy is made up of grassroots organisations, informal meetings, local community groups, co-operatives, associations and networks of organisations in every sector of our economy. They have been created to meet a need within their community, or broader society, that isn’t being met by our mainstream economy, or because those needs are being met in unethical or unsustainable ways. These initiatives all share a set of values that include equal decision-making, equity, sustainability, pluralism, and solidarity, and they are working towards a just and sustainable world, one that puts the real needs of people and our planet first.

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Cities have been caught in the middle of a clash: they are stuck competing for business investments while, simultaneously, seeking to meet the needs of their inhabitants through access to public goods and social services. For this reason, there is no surprise in seeing two opposite trends growing globally: on the one hand, the commodification of cities — where public spaces are sold to private buyers at the expense of citizens fenced out by these transactions; on the other hand, and likely in reaction to this privatization, there is a growing trend where cities are turning into ecosystems for collaboration, cooperation, and sharing.

Pressure is especially mounting from social movements that are asserting claims to urban governance by invoking a “Right to the City” — a slogan proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book, “Le Droit à la ville.” This can be generally characterized as the collective right of urban inhabitants to have control in the decision making processes concerning public spaces, city resources, and other factors that shape their lives. The “Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto” in Brazil, Reclaim the Streets in the UK, and the Gezi Park protests in Turkey are all examples of this. Yet, the effectiveness of these movements has been limited, due to a lack of conceptual or legal frameworks that could connect their movements and advance their claims to a Right to the City.

In “The City as a Commons,” Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione propose an urban commons framework that provides new ways of seeing and creating the city, itself, as a commons. It is also a valuable way of thinking about how people can exercise their Right to the City. They explain how if collective action of a community is what creates common wealth from a shared resource, then the activities themselves are what creates wealth from the city. This can be a way to grant each person a right to that wealth, and a right to any decision making processes regarding the distribution of that wealth. This is distinct from commoning — a type of governance that is based on self-organized sharing arrangements — which is characterized by the sharing of authority, the sharing of power, and the sharing of control, relying wholly upon collective action and collective accountability. —Ryan T. Conway and Marco Quaglia

1.  Open Source App Loomio Used to Govern 200-person Artist Collective

Gängeviertel Collective emerged in 2009 following the occupation of 12 buildings in the center of Hamburg, Germany, next to the European headquarters of Google, Facebook, and Exxon-Mobile. The original motivation for the occupation was to create affordable space for local artists to live and work while saving the historic buildings from development. The collective is governed by a weekly general assembly which every member can attend, and where they can speak out, and vote. However, for more complex decisions requiring detailed preparation, the community uses Loomio, an open-source collective decision-making app created by the Loomio Cooperative. This online tool can quickly and easily take input from all community members and, after adequate feedback collection and deliberation on Loomio, bring the decision back to the main assembly for a final vote. The software was used for decisions about the potential ownership structure of the collective’s housing and remodeling of the main gathering place. —Neal Gorenflo

2. Neighborhood Partnership Network: Empowering Residents to Participate in City Planning

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina revealed longstanding economic and racial inequalities in New Orleans, with low-income people of color having been left most vulnerable to the disaster. Even those who managed to escape the storm returned to find public services had become privatized, their housing demolished by developers, and their access to basic needs almost nonexistent. Amid the chaos, many people self-organized to support and provide mutual aid to each other. From this, the Neighborhood Partnership Network (NPN) emerged to empower residents to take part in city planning. Since 2006, the NPN has connected neighborhoods through regular meetings, a weekly newsletter, and a self-published journal. NPN has held a Capacity College that builds individual and organizational capacity through workshops and classes on topics ranging from stormwater management to filing public records requests. Furthermore, it was a pivotal advocate for pushing through changes to New Orleans’ City Charter, which requires the city to implement “a system for organized and effective neighborhood participation in land-use decisions and other issues that affect quality of life.” —Ryan T. Conway

3.  Club of Gdansk: Cross-Sector Collaboration for Urban Administration and Planning

While the port city of Gdansk in Poland was ravaged by World War II, a majority of its population was either lost or displaced during its many years of heavy conflict. Today, however, the Polish city is a modern and vibrant urban center in eastern Europe. Having only relatively recently caught up with other European cities in terms of economic development, the city looked for ways to improve its quality of life. The city created the Club of Gdansk, an informal think tank for civil society groups and grassroots organizers to collaborate with city leaders to design and develop the Gdansk’s long term strategy. What began as an experiment in enabling bottom-up processes to identify priority issues, eventually became a fixture of the city’s administration. Core to the Club’s civil society and government members is their commitment to a set of values, which includes transparency, self-determination, and “courage to act.” Over the years, the Club of Gdansk has transformed the city and brought about a wave of institutional reorganization supported by the city administration. It has successfully involved tens of thousands of citizens and made them active co-creators of city policies. —Ryan T. Conway

4.  LiquidFeedback: Free and Open-source Civic Engagement Software

E-governance is the state’s use of communication technology to provide information and services to the public. Many cities have successfully implemented such systems to give people access to ongoing policy discussions, provide input on local policies, or even make proposals for official consideration. Though these efforts can enhance civic engagement, the bulk of the digital consultation platforms are proprietary and, therefore, carry a hefty price tag that many cities cannot afford. LiquidFeedback is a collaborative decision making software based in Wunstorf, Germany, that is both free and open-source. That means it is freely available for anyone to install, maintain, and modify — although they may need the help of a computer technologist to put it into place. The Public Software Group in Berlin had initially developed it for use within political parties and community organizations, but in 2015 they scaled it up to expand its application to e-governance. Since then, several cities in Germany and across Europe have incorporated LiquidFeedback into their digital consultation systems. —Ryan T. Conway

These four short case studies are adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

Header photo by Lyndsey Marie on Unsplash

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By Anke Schwarz

PART I: Interview with members of the Tapullo collective, Genoa

29 May, 2017 — Building something together is in itself a good way to create a community

Wireless community networks have been around for a while, but are regaining some attention these days as means of strengthening local interaction and community organizing. The Tapullo project in Genoa was established in 2016 by a group of people, some of them members of the FabLab at the Laboratorio Sociale Occupato Autogestito Buridda squat, with the aim of setting up a DIY wireless community network. The name is reflective of their approach: in Genoese dialect, tapullo roughly refers to a quick and simple improvision (such as repairing a broken frame with Gaffa tape). What is interesting about Tapullo is that rather than providing internet access, it was designed as a purely local mesh network from the very beginning, hosting a local service in the form of a publicly accessible community forum. In technical terms, the network’s nodes consist of ordinary Wi-Fi routers (either the TP-Link TL-WDR3500 or the much cheaper TP-Link Archer C50 model), and a LattePanda single board computer which acts as a web server for the Tapullo forum. Tapullo’s routers run a combination of OpenWRT software, a specific Linux distribution for embedded services including wireless routers, with LibreMesh installed in top. A first access point was installed at the home of a Tapullo host in a building at Piazza dell’Erbe in downtown Genoa in January 2017, with additional nodes to follow in late 2017.

The interview with members of the Tapullo collective was conducted in written form between March and May 2017, and has been edited for clarity.

Tapulli at Piazza dell’Erbe, Genoa 2017

Let us begin with the most obvious question: Why did you opt for a purely local mesh network, as opposed to one (also) offering internet access?

We decided to avoid providing internet access because we recognize that it is already available almost everywhere in an affordable (or even free) and easily accessible manner. Our idea is to re-connect people on a local and physical level. We wanted to create a network allowing for communication on a level that is disconnected and not mediated by the infrastructures of large corporations. We also wanted to build a network that is not interested in collecting and profiling your data. By making our network from scratch, we intent to take a step back to look at what really constitutes a network and to show digital communication at its core, without 20 years of infrastructure built on top of it. Basically, it is a local, organic, additives-free network.

With respect to your programmatic name, which are the cracks in the urban fabric that you hope to ‘fix’ by implementing a local community network in Genoa’s city center?

We hope to ‘fix’ sociality at a local level, by extracting a tool (in this case, a Wi-Fi network and an internet forum) from the ecosystem of the internet, cleaning it and bringing it closer to the physical space, thus making it available just to those people who are present in a specific place in a specific moment in time. In our case, that is Piazza dell’Erbe in downtown Genoa (for now). The internet is a global discussion forum, whereas we as Tapullo hope to be a new, local forum. We believe in communication and sociality at a local level. Another issue important to explore is the medium itself, in this case the network.

How does it work? How can it be used properly? And how can we learn new tricks, to be employed elsewhere afterwards?

We take so many things for granted, but relatively few people really know and understand how our hyper-connected reality works. We want to change that by bringing infrastructure closer to the people who are using it.

Please go a bit into detail here: What exactly needs such ‘fixing’ in Genovese society? I understand that the stereotype is one of a rather introvert community – but what are the main local issues and struggles as you see it?

What we believe needs fixing is, firstly, what is already happening in every city: The isolation occurring between people even when they are physically socializing together. Tapullo allows you to de-isolate yourself using the same medium that is currently generating the isolation in the first place. It generates the possibility to interact on ludic-practical matters with the same people that you’re physically sharing a space with at that very same moment. Secondly, it tries to ‘fix’ the typical introvert/antisocial attitude of the Genoese, which is sometimes visible in the way they deal with ‘the other’, represented by people from other regions, international tourists or migrants. By making a platform that it is local yet accessible to all, we hope to bring down the barriers in our own mentality.

How far does the actual ‘power’ of a communication infrastructure go? To what extend could an instrument like Tapullo actually play a role in processes of (local) social transformation?

We don’t know yet, but we believe in the idea that building something together is in itself a good way to create a community, and by building a communication instrument like a Wi-Fi network, we want to push for something that is close to the community itself. Moreover, it can generate new interactions between different sectors or parts of society that normally do not communicate often (or at all).

Tapullo’s first node was installed at Piazza dell’Erbe in February 2017. What are you first experiences? How do you get people to use your network? Who uses Tapullo so far, and for which purposes?

At the moment, we don’t have enough data to answer this question. The project launched recently and for now, there are only a few active users. We launched Tapullo with a small campaign (stickers, postcards, word of mouth) but apparently, that was not enough to generate a critical mass. We plan to organize more events in the near future to increase the number of users and generate interest in the platform. A few of the proposals being currently discussed are an alleycat race, a treasure hunt, a photography contest, and audio/video/book sharing.

Have you thought of ‘hybrid’ strategies in which access to the internet is available, but is used in a different way (e.g. a website that can be ‘written’ by only those having access to the local network but read online by everyone)?

We are working on something similar: A public internet blog (http://tapullo.net/) where we will discuss the activities happening in the local network. This should make it easier for new people to discover Tapullo and also to keep users informed about what is going on without having to be at Piazza dell’Erbe all the time.

Will you organize any ‘physical’ events to discuss about the network with outsiders?

Yes, we are currently planning one or two theoretical and practical workshops on mesh networks. We want to discuss what these networks are and show how to build antennas and reflash Wi-Fi routers. Hopefully, that should bring more people in and also help us share the technical knowledge amongst ourselves.

As yet another social network, a critic could assume that Tapullo leads to ever more people glued to their screens, rather oblivious of their surroundings. What are your observations so far: Does communication via Tapullo and face-to-face interaction indeed blend over?

Tapullo has only a few active users for now. Yet we believe that users will not be overwhelmed by too much content, as the network is localized and only people physically present at Piazza dell’Erbe can add content. Practically, you can’t lose yourself scrolling down the page as you might in big social networks, at least for now. However, the amount of content is of course linked to the number of users and to the ease of adding new content. The fact that Tapullo is localized restricts these two factors and limits the abuse. If we consider the Internet a window open to the world, our network wants to be like a stroll: you leave the house to change your perspective. That includes an active practice (going out, walking) instead of a more passive one (looking out of a window, browsing the Internet).

How could an alternative communication infrastructure such as Tapullo support ongoing local struggles over the right to the city, for instance with respect to squats and affordable housing in Genoa?

On a philosophical level, we build a virtual space in the same way that you would occupy an abandoned building to repurpose it as a social center for the greater good of the community. In that sense, by re-appropriating them, we want to state the idea that spaces, whether physical or virtual, belong to the communities that inhabit them. Moreover, the virtual space of Tapullo itself may serve as a virtual board or display, increasing the visibility of local struggles.

Are you in contact with local ‘right to the city’ (or other) urban activists, and if yes, has it been easy to communicate Tapullo’s vision to these people engaged in similar struggles in a different context?

Over the past months, we have been talking about the project with many activists, some of them involved in urban struggles, but we haven’t yet built anything together. We do believe that it is fundamental to have a broad, diverse group of activists collaborating on the project, and that this is going to happen organically, over time, as soon as the network builds enough momentum.

You are based in Genoa’s FabLab, but how strongly is Tapullo actually about making or peer production? Aren’t you acting more like a service provider, at least in the beginning?

As we said above, we want to return to the basics of the tool itself. Obviously, our platform is open and accessible to everyone, but the main idea is to bring attention to the method and potential of the tool itself by sharing knowledge on how it works, how to expand it, how to offer more services. Offering services by making them, step by step.

The Tapullo collective is from a leftist/autonomous context, yet you deliberately adopted a neutral stance when launching the community network – rather than explicitly linking it to the FabLab, for instance. Why did you opt for this position?

We decided not to put it under the Buridda or FabLab name because that was never discussed on a general assembly in these two groups. You might say the collective doesn’t represent the whole but only a subset of it. Plus, the idea of installing the network in the city center (instead of in the squat, which is in a different neighborhood) made us think that it doesn’t make sense to directly link it to Buridda or FabLab if we wanted to give it a broader audience in the city.

In technical terms, which are the lessons learned from other wireless community networks? Why did you develop your own hardware/software set-up instead of simply implementing one of the existing concepts such as Ninux (Rome) or AWMN (Athens)?

Our setup is quite simple actually. The Wi-Fi part is handled by the LibreMesh firmware running on a TP-Link router. That same firmware is developed and used by Ninux. For the forum we are using a LattePanda board, which is slightly more powerful than a Raspberry Pi. Why that specific board? Because that’s what we had at hand without having to buy new hardware.

Please explain how you deal with the challenges of operating a wireless community network. What are your thoughts about governance issues related to data storage and private information once the Tapullo network grows? For instance, do you keep any records or user data that might be accessed by friendly or hostile third parties?

We have no plans to collect traffic data, that much is clear. All data ending up on the forum is by definition considered public and thus available to everyone to read. Also, there is no ‘real name policy’, so everyone is free to register an anonymous/pseudonymous nickname. We don’t have any privacy-sensitive service running at the moment, though we might have some in the future. We haven’t really planned much beyond this point (yet) – beside the fact that we do not want your data, now or in the future.

What next for Tapullo? What are your thoughts about the network’s future ownership in terms of its operation, maintenance, and expansion?

We would like to have more users and share the knowledge required to maintain and expand the network with them. Our dream is that Tapullo grows up over time, like a child, so that at some point in the future it becomes autonomous and independent, self-organizing – until the very moment when we can finally shut down the first Wi-Fi router without affecting the network’s functionality because the network itself will have made this first node redundant.

PART II: Remaking Genoa? Urban DIY Mesh Networks and the Right to the City

31 October, 2017

To the visitor, Genoa’s historical center sometimes resembles a confusing set of narrow, cobbled alleyways, with sky-high medieval palaces and densely arranged buildings often creating a canyon-like impression. On the ground, orientation can be difficult, with hardly any clear sky or celestial bodies in sight. Depending on the location (and perhaps more important these days), GPS and mobile internet access are also limited, disrupting digital navigation attempts. An urban environment apparently so hostile to mobile communication and digital services might somehow help keep the destructive effects of mass tourism at bay. However, it also harbors the wireless community network Tapullo. As the walls bespeak the rich social activity and urban movements the area is traditionally teeming with, this seems only logical. Until recently, street corners and sign posts in the Centro storico were covered with posters and stickers for a variety of leftist and autonomous events and causes, from punk concerts, collective dinners and workshops at one of the squatted social centers to the Movimento di lotta per la casa’s marvelous crowbar logo.

Piazza dell’Erbe

I first interviewed members of the Tapullo collective in May 2017. A first node of the prospective mesh network had just been installed in Piazza dell’Erbe, a relatively large public square in downtown Genoa, packed with bars and brimming with mostly younger people in the evenings. This seemed to be the perfect crowd to engage in a local mesh network based on both virtual and face-to-face interaction: Social-media-affine youngsters at their favorite watering hole. There was a palpable enthusiasm in the collective. Yet when I returned in October 2017, the mood had somewhat changed. In a curious turn of events, Tapullo’s one and only node had been damaged: The transformers of both the Wi-Fi router and the LattePanda single board computer had completely burned out, along with laptops, fridges, and a bunch of other electrical devices in the building where the Tapullo host lives. The damage was caused by a flawed power line installation by a technician from ENEL, Italy’s leading energy provider. Consequently, the equipment had to be removed for repairs, and the Tapullo forum was down for several weeks. This episode serves as a reminder to the multiple manners in which other urban infrastructures and social networks underpin a seemingly independent DIY mesh network. Moreover, it draws attention to the effort and time required to install and maintain such a wireless network as Tapullo moved away from its reliance on a single access point. A second phase, where the signals from individual nodes are woven into a mesh, was imminent – just as a notable shift in urban governance in downtown Genoa highlighted the need for collective social (inter)action. Ever since a change in city government in June 2017 brought an entrepreneur running as an independent candidate for the populist right-wing alliance between Forza Italia and Lega Nord into the position of mayor, a 1990s-style law-and-order approach to public space seemed to be gaining pace. After decades of social democratic rule by the Partito Democratico and its predecessors, this represented a rupture for the city home to one of the major seaports in the Mediterranean and once known as a leftist bastion. Some of Genoa’s seven occupied centri sociali may soon face the threat of eviction – and this development comes at a time when neofascists are seeking to establish two new premises in the city. Given the present political situation, it is not hard to predict an increase in urban struggles in the near future. This applies in particular (but not only) to the historical center, where a new regulation prohibiting the consumption of alcohol in public is being discussed. On a more symbolical level, the removal of political posters and graffiti is combined with a widening of an existing city marketing campaign, launched in 2014 under the somewhat comical slogan ‘Genova – more than this’. As the scraped-off posters illustrate, such attempts to sanitize public spaces and render leftist and progressive autonomous voices invisible form part of the new city government’s strategy. Meanwhile, parts of the new administration are pushing an anti-migrant and zero tolerance discourse.

Contested wall

Parts of downtown Genoa are traditionally home to poorer inhabitants and migrant communities, and apart from the centri sociali (which are typically located in derelict industrial or private buildings outside the city center) there are several ‘silent’ occupations of flats exclusively for housing purposes. The existing struggles against marginalization and displacement are captured nicely in the spirit of a graffito that reads “44.000 vacant homes, let’s occupy!”. For Tapullo, the present situation raises interesting questions over the platform’s future audience and usership in its second, increasingly more networked phase. Will it merely evolve into some kind of small, independent service provider, feeding a pattern of individual consumption – or accomplish a more collective approach?

44.000 vacant homes, let’s occupy!

If we wish to read the right to the city, at its core, as a collective rather than individual “right to change ourselves by changing the city” (Harvey 2008: 23), this is precisely where DIY mesh networks like Tapullo come into play. In the present historical situation, defending our ‘digital rights to the city’ (as a recent collection of essays edited by Shaw and Graham 2017 has it) against big tech companies and governmental intrusion alike is certainly paramount. Yet instead of evoking notions of data mining, privacy breaches, surveillance and control typically related to the most widespread information and communication technologies (ICT), such collectively owned digital platforms may well support and further different urban futures (for details, see Antoniadis and Apostol 2014; De Filippi and Tréguer 2015). As Paolo Cardullo observes in his recent study of London’s wireless community network OWN, these networks “operate by strengthening social interactions and relations on the ground, rather than in an imaginary cloud-space. The cultural disposition of people directly involved in using the wireless network is (…) the crucial element that sustained the mesh” (Cardullo 2017: 7). An insurgent peer production of the urban is nourished by social interactions in a material and virtual sense, based on common interests and/or a shared cause. Given both the existing social movements and the looming wave of contestation over public space and centri sociali in Genoa, a host of potential alliances could be activated and deepened by weaving this network tighter, and thus assembling a city for all. Not only in name, the “patchwork improvisation” (Cardullo 2017) of the Tapullo mesh network is thus both dependent on and productive of an urban commons. In October 2017, four fresh routers lay in wait to be installed as new Tapullo nodes in the city center. As members of the collective were in the process of recruiting future hosts amongst local organizations and pubs, probably one of the most pertinent questions for the near future is: Who is remaking Genoa, and in which image?

References

Antoniadis, P. and Apostol, I. (2014): The Right(s) to the Hybrid City and the Role of DIY Networking. In: Journal of Community Informatics 10 (3), http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1092/1113

Cardullo, P. (2017): Gentrification in the mesh? An ethnography of Open Wireless Network (OWN) in Deptford. In: City. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1325236

De Filippi, P. and Tréguer, F. (2015): Expanding the Internet Commons: The Subversive Potential of Wireless Community Networks. In: Journal of Peer Production #6 http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-6-disruption-and-the-law/peer-reviewed-articles/expanding-the-internet-commons-the-subversive-potential-of-wireless-community-networks/

Harvey, D. (2008): The Right to the City. In: New Left Review 53, 23-40. https://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city

Shaw, J. and Graham, M. (eds.) (2017): Our Digital Rights to the City. Meatspace Press. https://meatspacepress.org/our-digital-rights-to-the-city/

PART III: The future of Tapullo

31 January, 2018

The members of the Tapullo collective wish to continue their effort to build a local mesh network and if they succeed to keep their project running you will be hearing about their progress at:

http://tapullo.net (in Italian)

About the author

Anke Schwarz is an urban geographer and postdoctoral researcher at Technical University of Berlin. She is mainly interested in processes of urban transformation, urban infrastructures and everyday life. Her book ‘Demanding Water. A Sociospatial Approach to Domestic Water Use in Mexico City’ was published in 2017. https://ankeschwarz.net/

* All pictures by Anke Schwarz

The post Urban DIY Mesh Networks and the Right to the City: An Interview with the Tapullo Collective appeared first on P2P Foundation.

An open and self-organized gathering, this event is structured into 3 modules:

COMMONS, MUNICIPALISM and RIGHTS TO THE CITY and MAPS and SYNERGY meetings, both dedicated to making digital tools for the commoners. The CommonsCamp will end with a workshop dedicated to identify possible follow-ups or next steps. Two exhibitions will be held during the event : “Les communs” (Commons) and “Les voies de la démocratie” (Ways of democracy).

This CommonsCamp will be focussing on actionable knowledge and skills in the field of urban commons. It intends to stimulate the emergence and the realisation of concrete projects and collaboration between the commoners.

For more information, have a look at the program:

Program in FRENCH
Program in ENGLISH

And to the list of contributors/participants

All the information (program, preparation, contributors, actions, budget already online) is accessible here.

There will be interpreting in FR and EN during the plenary meetings. For the other activities, the organisers and facilitator will make sure that everybody will be able to participate (ex.: through whispering interpreting).

Documentation (note taking, photos, audio/video) will be a collective endeavour, everybody being invited to contribute to our collective pool of knowledge. A group of volunteers will assist the harvest and publishing of the content on the web, on a daily basis.

You can already start to contribute by sending messages by editing a pad or by sending requests or materials to:
Mélanie Pinet:  pinet.melanie75 (at) gmail (dot) com   or

FrédéricSultan: fredericsultan (at) gmail (dot) com

Flyer CommonsCamp VF.1-1 shared by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Photo by THEfunkyman

The post CommonsCamp: Grenoble, France August 22 – 26 appeared first on P2P Foundation.