Republished from Rosa Luxemburg New York.

Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria: Following the celebration of the “creative city” (as described by Richard Florida), the “smart city” has become the new flavor of the month—and a brand. It makes clever use of resources, and it attracts money, corporate power, and private industries. Offering us cheap, effective solutions to social and political problems, the smart city is functional, optimized, and safe rather than participatory, sustainable, and fair.

As Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria point out, however, the problem is not merely the regulatory impulse of smart technologies. Coming from a political-economic rather than a purely technical perspective, the authors argue that the smart city can only be understood within the context of neoliberalism. In order to remain competitive in the era of austerity politics, cities hand over the management of public infrastructure and services to private companies, both de-centralizing and de-personalizing the political sphere.

How can cities regain control not only over technology, data, and infrastructure, but also over the services that are mediated by smart technologies—such as utilities, transportation, education, and health? Offering a wealth of examples and case studies from across the globe, the authors discuss alternative smart city models, which rely on democratic data ownership regimes, grassroots innovation, and cooperative service provision models.

Evgeny Morozov is a prominent critic of digital capitalism, dealing with questions of how major technology companies are transforming society and democracy. The author of several books, he also writes for various newspapers, including The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. With a background in social science and innovation economics, Francesca Bria is an expert in digital strategy, technology, and information policy, who is active in various innovation movements advocating for open access, open technologies, and digital rights. She is currently Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer at the Barcelona City Council.

Laying out what works and what doesn’t in the smart city of today, the authors do not simply advocate for a high-tech version of socialism in the fifth publication of our “City Series.” By carefully assessing what is at stake and for whom, this timely study offers practical solutions for how cities can be smart while retaining their technological sovereignty.

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT  (English)
DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT  (German)

Photo by chibitomu

The post Essay of the Day: Rethinking the Smart City : Democratizing Urban Technology appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The goal of the voting is not to put one experience above others; there is no prize for the one with more votes. This is an exercise of Coopetition, meaning that we seek cooperation but have introduce an element of competition to encourage public interaction and engagement that we hope will amplify transformative practices that we would like to see flourish worldwide.

Regardless of the vote results, we recognize the hard work, successes and victories of all 9 initiatives as well as the others portrayed in the Atlas of Utopias.

Transformative Cities aims to support these initiatives by giving them visibility in our website and allied organizations and partners, which includes:

• A long piece written by commissioned journalists under a media partnership between Transformative Cities and Open Democracy,
• the production of photos and graphics based on their initiative and,
• the organization of collective learning spaces, either online via webinars or physically in events like the annual New Politics conference organized by TNI and its partners.

Last but not least, the transformative Cities process is open and we aim to improve it along the way, please do contact us if have any suggestions or comments so the next edition contains even more collective intelligence.

The post Transformative Cities 2018 People’s Choice Award. Vote Now! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Karun Cowper speaks with urbanist, activist and “Audacities” initiator Sharon Ede on “cosmo-localisation” in the New Economy in Australia and beyond.

About Sharon Ede

Sharon is an urbanist and activist who works to build the sharing/collaborative movement in Australia and beyond. In 2017, she established AUDAcities, a catalyst for relocalising production of food, energy and fabrication in cities, in ways that enable more wealth to be retained and fairly distributed in the local economy: www.audacities.co

In 2012, she set up Share Adelaide, the first presence in Adelaide about the sharing and collaborative movement, and is the ‘ideator’ of ShareNSave, an initiative of the South Australian government which maps community sharing assets, and which has been made open source.

In 2010, she co-founded the Post Growth Institute to help spark a movement for ‘the end of bigger, the start of better’. Post Growth initiatives include Free Money Day, a global stunt designed to spark conversations about sharing; the EnRich List, a cheeky take on the Forbes Rich List, which instead celebrates those whose life and work contributes to enriching futures for all; and How On Earth, a book about how not for profit enterprise will become the primary business model by 2050.

For several years, she wrote a blog on helping change agents become more effective with communication and change for sustainability at Cruxcatalyst (crux = the heart, catalyst = change).

She has had a long association with Global Footprint Network, learning from GFN founder Mathis Wackernagel during an internship in the US in 2001.

During her university days, she spent five years working as a full time volunteer with Urban Ecology Australia, a nonprofit community group that promotes the development of ecological cities through education and example, which initiated Adelaide’s ‘piece of ecocity’, the international award winning Christie Walk.

Originally published in Perth Indymedia

Photo by NichoDesign

The post Sharon Ede on “Cosmo-localisation” in the New Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series of articles on the Urban Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 16 “Talk of the Town: Exploring the City in Europe”. In this instalment, Pablo Servigne, an agronomist and expert in ecology, behaviour and evolution of social insects, examines the role of the city on the midst of a convergence of ecological and social crises.

Cities around the world today face a whole host of grave threats: from pollution to climate change, resource scarcity to overpopulation, and many more. Growing awareness of this has led to a proliferation of ‘solutions’ such as ‘green’, ‘sustainable’, ‘smart’, ‘resilient’, ‘zero-carbon’ projects, as well as ‘eco-neighbourhoods’. But how effective can these initiatives hope to be, in light of the scale of the problems faced? Our vision of the future is in dire need of being injected with a good dose of realism. The vision of a ‘linear’ urban future is in effect fed by the imagery of abundance forged during post-war reconstruction. Yet the conditions of such prosperity are no longer in place. A closer look at the principal threats facing cities can serve as a base from which to devise potential future scenarios. By stimulating our imagination, it is hoped that this conceptual framework will help us design urban policies which are more credible and less unsustainable than those we have witnessed so far.

Cities under threat

The risks of global warming are well known. According to the UN, more than 60 per cent of cities with populations of over 750,000 are exposed to at least one major risk. One of the latest reports from the IPCC describes one major risk, amongst others – of climate and environmental shocks breaking down the industrial food systems that feed most European towns. [1] 

Resource shortages (metals, water, wood, energy, etc) also fall within these major threats. In fact, there is nothing simpler than seriously disrupting a city: it’s merely a matter of blocking its food and energy supplies. These are amongst the worst threats a city can face, because the social, economic and then political effects are felt almost immediately (within a matter of days). Hence the prioritisation of food security by all governments over the centuries.

Serious threats are also posed by certain types of pollution. As well as the heavy metals and organic compounds polluting the soil, and aerosols already rendering certain towns unliveable, there is the risk of major industrial accidents forcing entire urban populations to be evacuated. Cities must learn to anticipate all this, to absorb the shocks, to recover, and to learn from these events, most of which are already happening in certain parts of the world. Simply to achieve this, they need resources, energy and a degree of social order, which are increasingly hard to guarantee.

In fact, all these threats can be considered to come from outside the city (external threats). But there is another equally serious, and less well known, type of threat: internal threats. These arise mainly from vulnerable infrastructure and social conflict. It is well-known to historians and archaeologists that a town’s capacity to grow and thrive depends on its capacity to safeguard good communication, transport, and distribution networks. Today, much of the transport, electricity, and water infrastructure in OECD countries is over 50 years old (over 100 years old, in some cases), and is already operating well beyond maximum capacity. [2] The extent of its interconnection, complexity, and homogeneity, and the speed of movement of the components of city life, have also increased the vulnerability of this infrastructure. It is thus also easily destabilised by one-off events such as floods, hurricanes, and terrorist attacks.

When, following the rise in the price of diesel in the year 2000, 150 striking lorry drivers blocked major fuel depots in the UK, the consequences rapidly made themselves felt: “Just four days after the start of the strike, most of the country’s refineries had ceased operation, forcing the government to take steps to protect the remaining reserves. The following day, people rushed into shops and supermarkets to stock up on food. One day later, 90% of filling stations had stopped serving, and the NHS [National Health Service] started to cancel elective surgery. Royal Mail deliveries stopped, and schools in many towns and villages closed their doors. Major supermarkets such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s introduced rationing, and the government called in the army to escort convoys of vital goods. In the end, public pressure led the strikers to end their action”. [3]

In the cities of industrialised countries – including, need we add, Europe – it is highly likely that we will reach ‘peak urbanisation’ over the next decade.

The social order of a city can falter rapidly, even when networks don’t break down. All it takes is an economic or political crisis, leading to a collapse of industrial activity, massive job losses, housing crises, the bursting of a speculation bubble, riots, community or class conflicts, terrorist acts, and so on. These events have become frequent because of the significant increase in economic and social inequality within countries, [4] and even within cities. [5] This is nothing new, but seems to have been forgotten; archaeology shows us that the economic and political elites of great civilisations have often caused the inexorable degradation of their environment, due to the pressure they put on people and natural ecosystems. [6]

Last, but not least, all these threats are interdependent, and nowadays operate at a globalised level. Large, homogeneous, fast-moving, deeply interconnected international networks have – paradoxically – become more resistant to small disturbances, but more vulnerable to major disruptions, which, when they occur, can trigger a domino effect throughout the system, leading to collapse. [7] Scientists speak of a new kind of risk: the ‘systemic global risk’ inherent in these extensive complex networks, and, as major nodes in these global networks, cities are very exposed to these risks.

Scenarios for the Future: Forwarned is forearmed

With that in mind, four scenarios can be envisaged. The aim is not to alarm, nor to predict the future, but to stimulate the imagination and test the effects of these threats against possible futures. These scenarios are to be taken as signposts, pathways or stages, like the points of a compass. They are archetypes for the future, to help illustrate trends and provide insight into what might lie ahead. The division into four scenarios arises from two forward-looking works: Future Scenarios by David Holmgren, [8] and Resilient Cities, by architects and planners Newman, Beatley and Boyer. [9] The first work describes the possible trajectories in relation to peak oil and climate change.

If climate change has a gradual effect (providing enough room for manoeuvre to transform society), there are two possible scenarios: a ‘green tech’ transition, which, if resources decline slowly, could be relatively comfortable, or a radical and rapid change, known as ‘earth stewardship’, in the case of a brutally rapid decline in energy resources. By contrast, if climate change has rapid and violent effects, society will tip into a ‘brown tech’ future, where the powers that be would muster all their force to maintain ‘business as usual’. Or, even worse, society could completely collapse – the ‘lifeboat’ scenario – if these catastrophes coincided with a rapid loss of resources.

The second publication focuses exclusively on the end of oil, and analysing its effects on cities. It explores the following question: knowing that cities are completely dependent on oil, and have a massive carbon footprint, what would be the consequences for modern industrial cities of the end of the oil age? Two areas in particular are explored: transport and food security. The authors describe four scenarios, similar to those of Holmgren: the resilient city (corresponding to the ‘green tech’ scenario), the divided city (‘brown tech’ scenario), the ruralised city (‘earth stewardship’ scenario), and the collapsed city (‘lifeboat’ scenario).

However, both of these forward-looking publications only consider scenarios based on external threats (climate and oil), without taking account of internal threats. The latter have been explicitely included in the following proposed synthesis. [10]

The ecotechnical city

If the impact of global warming turns out to be gradual, and an ‘energy descent’ [11] can be managed, society can adopt ‘green’ technologies, ensure a successful transition, and work towards distributed renewable energy systems, without conflict or disasters. This would lead to a resurgence in regional, rural economies, more sustainable agriculture, more horizontal political systems, and more compact cities that prioritise public transport and the local economy. A balance would be found between reducing consumption and slowing economic growth, thanks to energy efficiency technology and a relocalisation of the economy. However, it is only possible for a city to take this route if it already has a resilient, well-maintained infrastructure, and if it avoids major political, economic and social upheavals. This is clearly the most desirable scenario in terms of maintaining the living standards and security that our democratic societies rely on. To sum up, in the absence of significant obstacles, even in the context of an energy descent, an efficient transition is still possible. The city can prepare, slowly but surely, for the ‘storms’ ahead.

The ecovillage city

A rapid decline in resources, including oil and natural gas, could trigger a crisis that would bring the world economy to its knees. This global collapse could create political instability, which would in turn lead to serious social problems, but also, paradoxically, to an end of greenhouse gas emissions. Local resilient communities would then emerge in some rural areas (following a massive rural exodus). This would be achieved through agro-ecology and permaculture techniques, and above all by sustaining their capacity for local democracy. It is possible that the major megalopolises would still contain rich, private, gated neighbourhoods, by developing urban agriculture within suburban gardens. In this scenario, no-one believes civilisation can be preserved as it stands; people will have moved on, to work for something radically different. Cities would return to being semi-rural, meeting many of their food and energy needs very locally, along the lines of self-sufficient medieval towns. Peri-urban belts would be made up of ecovillages, supplying the town and recycling waste, much like the Parisian market gardeners of the 19th century. However, this ‘radical resilience’ policy will only be practicable if massive disasters (hurricanes, uprisings, revolutions, etc.), that could destabilise the political and social order are neither too intense nor too frequent. If they do occur, the organisation of the city could change radically, whilst retaining a chance of avoiding breakdown and chaos, and maintaining a semblance of democracy, albeit at increasingly local levels. In this scenario, the city is instantly transformed, yet without being wiped out by the ‘storms’.

The enclave city

A slow decline in energy supply could leave influential power structures in place, thus thwarting any chance of real transformation. The combination of an authoritarian state and greedy private business would foster an extraction industry rush for non-renewable resources, with predictably catastrophic consequences. But then the climate and environmental crises would be so overwhelming that all of society’s energy and resources would be needed to keep the ship afloat, due to policies that are centralised, securitised, militarised, and inegalitarian. The city would splinter; the rich, cocooned in their safe neighbourhoods, would maintain access to increasingly expensive supplies, protecting themselves from climatic variations with new technology. The poorest in society would be left to their own devices in semi-rural areas (with survival vegetable plots providing resilience), or even shanty towns, with less and less reliable access to resources. In this scenario, the economic elite (the rich) and political elite (the government), in their opulent enclaves, would use violence and fear to maintain their privilege. These elites would have no choice than to bring in ever more oppressive laws. Those in the most precarious situations would gradually lose the means to protect themselves from environmental and social disasters, and certain districts (crowded with arriving migrants) would become shanty towns, and police no-go areas. Political cohesion, and thus democracy, would be the first victims, leaving the field open for the expansion of the private sector and its irresistible machine for generating ever more privilege and social division – in other words, social chaos. The city crumbles, the rich ‘manage’ the crisis, everyone else endures it, and the former control the latter by increasingly undemocratic means.

The collapsed city

If rapid economic and political collapse (the Ecovillage scenario) is compounded by severe environmental and climate crises, it is too late to take the resilience route; collapse is inevitable. History shows that a lack of preparation combined with a succession of various disasters will end up getting the better of any city. There is no lack of examples of dead cities, such as Ephesus, the port and second largest town in the Roman Empire, abandoned in around the year 1,000 when the river dried up after all the trees on the surrounding hills had been felled. War, illness, and famine have always cleared cities of their inhabitants, and this can still happen. In Syria and Libya, armed conflict has devastated entire towns, which have still not recovered. When the shock is too brutal, some of the urban population flee, and those who cannot, stay, prey to shortages and chaos. Epidemics and/or conflict can reduce social life to clans controlled by local warlords. Some small population clusters would survive in exceptionally favourable conditions (such as a healthy river, stable damn, fertile fields, or an isolated monastery). These small islands (Holmgren’s ‘lifeboats’) would be humanity’s only chance to find a way through a dark period and retain the hope of renaissance in a few decades, or centuries. In this scenario, unpredictable and irreversible domino effects lead to the rapid breakdown of the city.

A rupture in our imagination

This four-scenario compass provides us with a new way of looking at the future. It enables us to see more clearly what is at stake: from a hardening of class relations, de-industrialisation of towns, urban exodus, and infrastructure collapse to the development of green technologies. Even if the details of these trajectories are not specified, global trends are clear: towards catastrophes, or what some might term collapse. These narratives differ from the more common forecasts, based on myths around technological progress, and luring us with a future ever more connected to the virtual, and thus in the end disconnected from the natural. But we have clearly run up against the limits of this approach (and of earth-system science), and now we must prepare for a future of rupture and interruption.

In the cities of industrialised countries – including, need we add, Europe – it is highly likely that we will reach ‘peak urbanisation’ over the next decade. In other words, we cannot carry on in this ultra-urban direction. The future of industrial towns will more likely be one of depopulation, reconnection with green belts and the countryside, an overdue reduction in social inequality, and the re-localisation of the economy. It is up to us to tip the balance in favour of a particular scenario.

Even if the precise nature of these scenarios is not clear, we can be sure that the urban future has to be resilient. [12] Cities will have to weather various kinds of ‘storms’, some with more ease than others, and this will radically transform how Europeans design and inhabit their cities. Anticipating these ‘storms’ today, feeling and imagining them, equips us to be prepared, and thus avert disaster.

This is a revised version of an article that was first published on barricade.be.

• 1. P. Servigne (2017). Nourrir l’Europe en temps de crise. Vers de systèmes alimentaires résilients, Babel.
• 2. I. Goldin & M. Mariathasan, (2014). The butterfly defect: How globalization creates systemic risks, and what to do about it. Princeton University Press, p.101.
• 3. P. Servigne & R. Stevens (2015), Comment tout peut s’effondrer. Petit manuel de collapsologie à l’usage des générations présentes, Seuil, p. 116.
• 4. R. Wilkinson, & K. Pickett (2009). The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Allen Lane.
• 5. O. Razemon (2016) Comment la France a tué ses villes, Rue de l’échiquier.
• 6. For example, the salinisation of land during the third millennium BCE in Mesapotamia, or, today, the living stands of rich Europeans destroying
  tropical forests. See N. B. Grimm, et al. (2008). Global change and the ecology of cities, Science, n°319, pp. 756-760.
• 7. P. Servigne & R. Stevens (2015), op. cit.
• 8. D. Holmgren (2009), Future scenarios, How communities can adapt to peak oil and climate change, Green Books
• 9. P. Newman et al. (2009) Resilient cities. Responding to peak oil and climate change, Island Press.
• 10. Here, armed conflict is not included in external threats, and civil war not included in internal threats.
• 11. In the context of a post-peak oil transition, this refers to the shift away from an increasing use of energy to a reduction.
  https://www.transitionculture.org/essential-info/what-is-energy-descent.
• 12. A. Sinaï et al. Petit traité de résilience locale, 2015, Éditions Charles Léopold Mayer.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 2nd article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

The post Gathering Storms: Forecasting the Future of Cities appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The report consists of four parts.

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

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

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

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

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

The context for the Emergence of the Urban Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This relationship is shown by the following graph:

Graphic 6: Polygovernance model.

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

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

The three main potentials are in our opinion the following:

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

The analysis of the situation in Ghent

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

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

These positive aspects should be tempered by the following issues:

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

The proposals for the city administration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We also propose the following: (not exhaustive)

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

We also propose

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

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

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Extracted from: http://www.audacities.co/#about-audacities

Productive Cities are Prosperous Cities

Cities are where the battle for a sustainable, equitable world will be won or lost.

The majority of people in the world live in cities, and cities are now the epicentre of economic power (600 cities will generate 60% of GDP by 2025) as well as the primary drivers of impacts on planetary life support systems.

Cities are positive human creations in so many ways, but right now, they are also often extractive and destructive to both people and planet in how they are built and maintained.

We need to rebuild cities from the inside out so that they are regenerative.

Remaking Cities

Creating prototypes of more self-sufficient cities, through relocalised and distributed production of food, energy and manufacturing, will help cities progress towards carbon and waste reduction objectives.

Relocalised production can also help contribute to developing more meaningful, secure livelihoods for people in a world where traditional jobs are fast disappearing, through automation, offshoring, casualised work, and an increasing number of people working as freelancers.

Enabling people to produce more of what they need for themselves – through providing open access to productive technologies, fostering a circular economy, and the availability of a shared design commons – can contribute to making cities regenerative.

This approach is known as ‘design global, manufacture local’.

Extracted from: http://www.audacities.co/#what-we-do

Prototypes
AUDAcities will establish a prototypes in interested Australian cities based on the Fab City Global Initiative’s Poble Nou district in Barcelona, which aims to demonstrate how relocalising production of food, energy and manufacturing can work. These ‘fractals’ of self-sufficient, productive cities can help inform and catalyse a wider agenda of industrial and economic transformation.

Photo by michelle-robinson.com

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Combining nine of the blocks proposed by Ildefons Cerdà in the 1859 plan (very different from those realised) they are meant to reduce car traffic in the streets and squares inside the superblock’s perimeter, confining it to the perimetral streets, in order to create a solution for the serious problems deriving from pollution, the near absence of green areas, the minimal space for pedestrians caused by the omnipresence of cars.

The “supermanzanas” (superblocks, literally ‘superapples’) project aims at creating four squares in every superblock converting the inner part of the intersections in areas mostly dedicated to pedestrians. This is a proposal that —if completely fulfilled— will radically change the city.

The central part of the issue is the following: are we facing a change that is going to confirm the elements of the neo-liberal city, limiting to correcting them with the introduction of – essential and very helpful – measures for the reduction of air and acoustic pollution and for the creation of pedestrian areas? Or is it an opportunity to criticise the neo-liberal economy through urbanism, its production structure, its voracity, its unfamiliarity with ethics, its inequality and its destruction of the environment?

The international attention towards the project has been accompanied by the recent —and predictable— anger of a part of the residents of the site of the first superblock in Poble Nou, due to the concentration of traffic. This has remained unchanged in its quantity and quality because of the habits of people that use cars for travelling around the city, in the perimetral streets and due to the absence of areas dedicated to (for) the sacred rite of parking. These criticisms should make us slow down and reflect.

Here we are not going to analyse technical issues, flows of cars, directions, signalling, number of parking areas. On the contrary, we want firstly to focus on the resistance and on the criticism towards the superblocks made by the inhabitants, then we are going to analyse the elements that could turn the “supermanzanas” into a feature for a significant change.

The opposition towards the project can be explained through two elements. The first one, with deep roots, is the cultural educational problem: perhaps the blind rage caused by the offence to the sacred nature of car reveals an underlying problem in the (mis)educational system, whose main prerogative is teaching to accept the “status quo” of the neo-liberal society without asking, without knowing its bases, silencing any search for different horizons?

The still sacred element of our times —the automobile— despite its obvious destructive action towards the city life, is the main issue. This strange God continues to be venerated by the majority of people. Nevertheless, like every God, the automobile limits freedom —even more than the city does— increases air pollution, threatens our peace with its hypnotic noise, threatens our lives with accidents and with its support to the oil industry, to the pharmaceutical industry, to psychological treatments, to insurance companies, to the loans from banking institutions, among other things. It constrains freedom: as it has been known for decades —or as it should be known and taught during the compulsory education— the real speed of an automobile is 6 kilometres per hour.

«The typical American devotes more than 1600 hours per year to its automobile: sitting in it, in motion or stationary, working for paying it, for paying fuel, tyres, tolls, insurance, infringements and duties for federal highways and communal parking. They devote four hours per day in which they use it, look after or work for it […] But if we ask ourselves how these 1600 hours contribute to its circulation, the situation changes. These 1600 hours serve up to make a 10 000 kilometres ride, that is to say 6 kilometres in one hour. It is the same distance that people that live in countries without transport industry can reach . But, while North Americans dedicate to circulation one quarter of their available social time, in non-motorised societies time allocated for that purpose is between 3 and 8 percent of the social time. What distinguishes the circulation in a rich country and in a poor country is not a greater efficiency, but the obligation to consume in high dose energies related to the transport industry.»
Ivan Illich, Energy and equity [1974]

The substitution of the automobile with the bicycle in the city is an urgent need since decades.

The substitution of the automobile with the bicycle in the city is an urgent need since decades. The high energy efficiency of bicycle, its critical presence towards neo-liberal economy, its independence from fossil fuel —i.e. wars and environmental devastation— and from everything related to the automotive industry are fundamental elements for the boost of a radical change in the approach to the problems of our times. The issue of the veneration of the automobile could be solved with real educational action opposing the bombing from mass-medias in support of the automotive industry, insurance companies, etc. —who finance newspapers through advertising and content sponsored by brands— an educational action carried out in the streets, in parks, courts, social centres, truly independent and critical newspapers can help us understand the problems of our society, a process that requires time and effort. The disputed “supermanzana” could represent the beginning of the end of automobiles e in the city if it becomes the catalyst of profound cultural change.

The second element of the protests that we want to highlight is the inadequate feeling of appropriation of the project by the people who live in that area, due to the insufficient participation throughout its genesis and realisation. In order to feel comfortable in a place —public or private— it is necessary for this to be created, modified, lived, penetrated. The feeling of being subjected to the imposition of a project, or the insufficient participation in its creation and fulfillment, will always create direct or indirect opposition. Although there have been moments of conversation with the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, apparently these have not been sufficient, in quantity or in quality.

In order to convert “supermanzanas” in an instrument for a deep change, disrupting the structure of the neo-liberal city, schooled and submissive towards those in power, and in order to contribute to the establishment of a city that is human, cooperative, supportive, equal and respectful towards the delicate natural equilibrium, we have to take into account a very important element: urban agriculture. We are not talking about organising urban gardens to enhance the image of the city, which would immediately become a sustainable model for other cities; we are not talking about gardens so that “elderly people” —considered to be a problem when it comes to production, instead of being respected and considered repositories of wisdom and memory— keep themselves busy after a life of subordinate employment. We are even less talking of creating a new empty and commodified fashion, sap of the neo-liberal economy which consumes everything. We are saying exactly the opposite.

Urban agriculture can catalyse a slow and deep transformation of the city overall

Urban agriculture can catalyse a slow and deep transformation of the city overall, on different grounds, from food sovereignty and environmental protection to the economy, from a proper education to the win-back of personal autonomy and mutual peer support, at one condition: that this would be proposed, organised, lived, and actively shared among the people who live the city.

Barcelona has 1076 hectares of parks and public gardens (without counting the Collserola), which means an average of 6,64 m² of green areas per inhabitant, much less than what other cities can offer. Prague, for example, has 2650 hectares of urban parks – without counting natural parks and woods – meaning an average of 21.34 m² per inhabitant). In the Eixample district numbers are noticeably lower: 1.85 m² per inhabitant, due to —among other factors— the distortion and denaturalisation —in its literal meaning— of the Plan Cerdà during its implementation —speculation, certainly, was its main cause. The lack of green areas in the Eixample district is serious and requires urgent and energetic action so that people can live in a fair and healthy way.

In a city like Barcelona, in which —despite the many and laudable initiatives adopted by the city council to address the problems of the city— the number of people living in serious difficulties is high, the growing of food in the city would, on the one hand, carry a high symbolic value and be an opportunity to overcome the passive acceptance of a devastating system; on the other hand, it would bring an incredible number of positive effects on the short term and would be an impulse for change on the long term.

Among others:

• It would offer free food to people – in the program of Barcelona en Comú the intention of “ensuring the right to basic feeding” is outlined.
• It would make the quality of air and microclimate better. The presence of thousands of fruit-bearing trees would clear the air —reducing the levels of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, particular matter PM10— and would bring important benefits for health, it would attenuate noise, provide areas of shade, enrich wildlife in the urban perimeter, it would reduce the levels of carbon dioxide contributing to the fight against climate change and would naturally regulate the temperature on the microclimate level, additionally bringing beauty in each season.
• It would push for cooperation, social relations, mutual support and peer dialogue in a society in which competition rules on every level, from the cradle to the grave —in school, work, relationships, politics, university, social activities, sport, etc. Using the words of Richard Sennet: “a city obliging people to tell each other what they think and realising from this form a condition of mutual compatibility.”
• It would enhance personal relationships through nature, its understanding, the culture of biodiversity as opposed to the logic of monoculture imposed by corporations and to the conquering and devastation of nature for profit-making.
• Together with the substitution of the car by the bicycle and the commitment to degrowth, urban agriculture would contribute to ease the energy problem, by reducing the consumption of fossil fuels to transport food between regions and countries —or even continents— as well as it would diminish traffic in the city due to the transportation of food.
• It would boost the vegetarian and vegan philosophy beyond fashion and commodification to reflect on the relationships between human beings and animals and the defense of the rights of the latter —who are not machines in the service of humanity, despite what Descartes thought; to reflect also on the ethical and environmental problems, contributing to the fight against climate change —being the production of meat and milk one of the main causes of global warming and of the processes of destruction of rainforests for the production of animal feed.
• It would contribute to boosting education in and through the city, outside of schools, transforming the city in a learning place. The observation of the process of food growing, from seed —defending biodiversity, using traditional patent-free local seeds, recovering traditional wisdom on harvesting— would change the perverse idea of food as a good coming from a conveyor, packed by unknown distant hands (often) with no rights, in a plastic bag with a barcode, sold by some speculator who harvests the fruits of the work of some other person. The city programme “Huertos escolares” (‘School gardens’), no doubts useful and positive, would be no longer necessary as it would have become part of the city life, without recourse to school. It is necessary to give to the city its educational role. The organisation of spaces for urban agriculture in the Eixample district would be a catalyst for the de-schooling of the city, for the collapse of a whole system of values that the so-called compulsory education teaches —dressed up as freedom of choice— through the acceptance of the neo-liberal society as it is.
• It would spread organic cultivation methods, the knowledge of the ecosystem, the understanding of the delicate natural balances, a new sensitivity towards life, nowadays unknown.

The city council would have the only role of presenting, through an honest, deep and detailed information the problems, not only on the urban level, but also on a larger scale, to discuss, propose and coordinate the actions of people in a real participatory democracy.

In the context of a weakening of democracy, that we have been living over the past decades —we are de facto living in an oligarchy— the role of urbanism is to contribute to breaking the ties between the city and the markets and to act in order to destabilise the current oppressive system towards the weakest by offering individual and collective tools to realise a participatory democracy, without excluding anyone. The only work that the city council would need to put in place, with a high symbolic value, would be to draw a circle in the middle of each crossroad in the Eixample district and remove the asphalt layer. Before an empty space, in the middle of each crossroad, a place in which market and power are not present, a space that nobody can sell, buy, exploit, rent or use as a parking, around this space we should think how to organise the city all together, without exclusions. It would mean taking away the asphalt layer , that for decades kept us apart from the land, waterproofing the entire city, waterproofing our sensitivity, and putting at the centre a source of public free quality water, a common good outside of the market, and around the source to grow vegetables and fruits for those who need them, apples that feed without calculating. The apple is here, hanging on a tree, a possibility to change into a new era. An apple that is a fruit of the social economy, with no barcode, each apple with a different taste. The apple, fruit of the land, redeemer of the metropolis, feeds people regardless of their passports and bank accounts. This would be the starting point to overcome the commodification of life and to go back to having a relationship with these natural elements in the urban context of the XXI century. Food and beauty for everyone, with no mediation, to take on a substantial slow and deep change.

It is necessary to stop any relationship between the city and the banks

In the symbolic space where the power cannot enter —in the website of the city one can read that the urban gardens of the city are organised by the city council in collaboration with the Fundació La Caixa, a foundation managed by one of the best-known Spanish banks. Having seen the collusion between banks and political powers, it is necessary to stop any relationship between the city and the banks. Until the “cooperation with the La Caixa Foundation” is on, whatever change will automatically convert itself into a simulacrum that will not really impact the organisation of the city— in this space for the democratic life, the act of taking away the asphalt and presenting soil and water as a common good represents another possibility for a radically different city, and gives both a symbolic meaning and crucial practical effect.

Far from being a step backwards —as if history was a linear process and what comes after is unquestionably called progress— introducing urban agriculture and putting at its centre water as a common good, means considering the past as a tool to change the present. From the errors and horrors of the vast majority of urban planning in the XX century that forgot life, we should quickly learn how to change the fundamentals of the way to live the city, facing economic, feeding, climate, social, environmental, cultural, aesthetic problems in the context of participatory democracy among peers based on social and environmental justice, non-commodified health, food production outside corporations, commons, popular culture, memory, independent thinking, education as a libertarian process of liberation.

The shopping mall Illa Diagonal, designed by Rafael Moneo and Manuel de Solà-Morales in 1993, is located in the Eixample district. The first stone that was placed —as it is said on the website of the mall— contains an insurance policy and a certificate of deposit. The symbols of our era. Real progress, a slow and deep change, would start by taking away the asphalt layer, going back to the soil and substituting, as symbolic elements of a new era, the insurance policy and the certificate of deposit with a seeds and a source of public water.

This substitution of elements would benefit the majority of people, except speculators. As Orwell said, “Journalism consists of printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” In the context of the neo-liberal city one can say: “Urbanism consists in doing together things someone does not want you to do: everything else is speculation.”

Massimo Paolini is an architecture theorist and author of the Blog Perspectivas anómalas around the issues of relationships between city, architecture, ideas (and freedom). He contributes to journals in the field of critical thinking and he is advisor of Art in Translation | University of Edinburgh for what concerns arts and architecture.

Photo by Ibán

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How bad is our present political landscape? Let’s take stock. The crush of “lesser-evilism”? Check. Alt-right’s metastatic spread? Check. Once-radiant left options (like Syriza or Podemos) now tarnished, in part by their inability to make good on promises? Check. Overall, pretty bad.

The excesses of neoliberal capitalism may have finally eroded any remaining trace of its intellectual credibility. However odious, these excesses had become comfortable for many people, offering a false sense of security and predictable margins of action. Prolonged austerity politics and the pillage of the welfare state have left large numbers of people frustrated, hopeless, and angry, though, and the awakened right-populist movements have exploited this with alarming consequences. But without an apparent alternative, political engagement can seem limited to a pointless choice: scramble on loose rocks over the familiar but shifting ground of globalized capitalism, or hitch one’s wagon to a careening carload of 21st century hubris, i.e. Brexit, Trumpism, the alt- or far-right. Is it time to give up on the representative democracy experiment, or are there any active models for more humane, participatory politics?

The political context described above has been outlined in a good many contemporary books and articles, but sadly, there are seldom any viable alternatives offered to stem the tide of inevitable ruin. This article describes an attempt to reimagine our political systems emancipated from rollercoaster markets and bureaucracies. Based in existing, effective political movements that have been winning elections in a variety of locations, this is an account of radical innovations in governance, production, care work, the stewardship of our cultural, digital and natural heritage, and of a politics that lays a bedrock for bottom-up system rebuilding. This is the politics of the commons and peer to peer (P2P), an expansion on the shared creation and management of common resources, and its recent successful eruption in municipal governments.

Commons in the Time of Monsters

As Gramsci said (or didn’t say ^[1]), “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. After nearly 40 years of progressive neoliberalization and social decomposition, contemporary politics has been very publicly upended by a misogynistic, xenophobic and financially privileged “new right” intent on coupling its politics of hate onto the apparatus of state power.

So, where is the margin for action, if change from within is effectively blocked by the structural constraints of statist politics and the electoral arena? The Leninist notion of achieving state power with or without popular consent, and as a certain precursor to equitable and lasting social change, has proven misguided: the next system won’t just fall into place at the pull of a lever.

Amid this increasingly bleak political landscape, affinity-based networks and communities using P2P dynamics and building commons have been taking action. Small-scale innovations in many fields are paving the way for true, sustainable resource management and grounded social cohesion. In governance, food growing, service provision, science, research and development, education, even finance and currency, these community-enabled developments demonstrate how differently our lives could be organized. Many of these place-based efforts are being documented and replicated worldwide through the Internet, in the process re-seeding the knowledge Commons from which they draw. This is done through commons enabling, aka P2P (peer-to-peer, person-to-person, people-to-people) technologies, which are gaining momentum as forces for constructive change. They enable small group dynamics at higher levels of complexity and enable the reclamation of power.

Unfamiliar with the Commons? Click here to enlarge.

With this power, people can create innovations in production, open book accounting, and the stewardship of natural, cultural or digitally derived commons — but also in governance. Together, all of this forms the building blocks of a truly bottom-up system. Could all this really coalesce into something that, in the future, might be called “post-capitalism”? Only if those who identify as commoners recognize, promote and develop these systems and increase their cultural and, vitally, their political influence, while remembering that there are other players already on the field using similar means towards very different ends.

Prefigurative social arrangements and provisioning approaches are some of the key components for constructing sensible alternatives, but they are not developed in isolation. Instead, they are built within the constraints of existing systems. Likewise, whether through the enclosures ^[2] brought on by neoliberalism or through authoritarian, exclusionary hate politics, the ‘normal’ conditions people expect or aspire to will undoubtedly shrink. This would affect things people have taken for granted to some degree, including job security, pensions, unemployment, sensible working hours and conditions, fairness. As an effect, the ‘wiggle room’ assumed for the operations of those productive communities will inevitably compress.

Seen from outside the Western context, this wiggle room could be considered as ‘privilege’. Under the market-maximizing dictates of Brussels, such privileges seemed like they were on their way out in the EU. But the man behind the curtain was revealed in 2008, and a sudden flare of counter-political activity reached its peak of public attention in 2011. In 2017, the question is not theoretical, but hands-on practical: how do we build the new world in the shell of the old – and before the shell squeezes shut.

The post-2011 protest movements never quite got it together, politically speaking, well or quickly enough to counter the rising hate wave from the right. The contemporary European political landscape shows a populist reaction against global capitalism, but by harking back to a past that never was. Adding insult to injury, we see these xenophobic constructs have built their social base not just with deft internet and social media skills, but also by using P2P tactics. That’s a bit of salt in the wound, given that P2P tactics and tools have largely been promoted by people working for a more inclusive and just world, not one that seeks to “otherize” and exclude.

We cannot afford to forget that financial interests will always favor extreme right wing or fascist options that safeguard their stake, and that any redistributive political options will be harshly and publicly ridiculed, or worse. With the noxious spirit of the thirties rebounding, there’s not a moment to spare; patience now would be a deadly strategy. It’s time to occupy the collective cultural imagination with compelling and practical political alternatives and expose the normalization of neoliberalism as deadly propaganda; to expose the numbing spectacle (Brexit, Trump, etc.) as yet another synthetic opioid addiction.

This is why it’s time for the Commons movement to become more overtly politically active. Beyond self-organized production, care work, ecological stewardship, even beyond ethical generative markets, it’s time for more effective political engagement, not only to protect the essentials of the welfare state model, but to transcend it with a radically reimagined politics that facilitates social value creation and community-organized practices. There are models for this commons-oriented political engagement in Spain’s municipal movements, which the rest of this article will outline. To be clear, “political” describes not only political representation, but also the actionable rights of all those affected by political decisions – the public sphere. There’s a false dichotomy between wanting to build new alternatives now and wanting to enable change by hacking existing political channels. Both approaches, prefigurative and institutional, can work together.

Vanguardism: a 21st century cautionary tale

Now it’s time to look back at the origins of a particularly visible political party, one that offered the promise of a more inclusive, commons-oriented political process, but which eventually failed to deliver. The spirit of the commons was present in its nascence, though, in public assemblies. This factor is one to keep in mind while considering the eventual rise of municipalist parties.

In January 2014, a group of political science professors from the Autonomous University of Madrid found themselves gaining some popularity on Spanish national television. They announced the formation of a new political party, one that would demand:

“…a politics that goes back onto the streets that talks like the majority of people who have had enough. (…) Our demand for a greater generosity from representatives, for a greater horizontality and transparency, for a return of the republican values of public virtue and social justice, for the recognition of our plurinational and pluricultural reality is more real than ever. It is decades since our desire for making our own decisions and answering our own questions was so real.” (Mover Ficha Manifesto)

In the European Elections four months later, the new party won 5 seats in the European Parliament with more than 1.2 million votes.

Of course, that party is Podemos, whose trajectory indicates what a commons-oriented political party can — and more pointedly, should not — do. Their early months impart what is politically feasible in urgent circumstances, and show the power that can be harnessed by appealing to people’s’ hopes while articulating their needs and desires. The early success of Podemos is due to their work on two distinct-yet-related levels: mass media and network media.

Having cut their teeth on prime-time TV debates, Podemos’ most visible figures (chiefly male) made for great entertainment, clobbering the arguments of the chronic political class, which they dubbed la casta (“the caste”, a jibe implying a privileged class).

It wasn’t all show business. They were savvy enough to capture the networked, horizontalist politics of the 15-M movement. A staggering number of geographical- and interest-based assemblies (called “circulos”) were enabled and bolstered online through tools like Reddit, Loomio and others.

With its legion of tactics, Podemos became a totem appealing to many types. One type is the once politically apathetic actor, who sees in Podemos’ secretary general, Pablo Iglesias, a contrarian avatar through which to channel their disdain for the middle-class destroying “casta”. Next would be the old guard leftist, disenchanted with the Social Democrat (PSOE) party’s devotion to neoliberalism and austerity politics. Similarly, there are those who had been disillusioned after placing their bets on the more leftist outgrowths of the Spanish Communist Party. The last type, obvious but worth mentioning, is the activist, who found or rediscovered their political voice in the squares during 15-M and/or the preceding alter-globalization movement.

Of course, we’re not here to tell the story of Podemos. That story has turned darker and duller over time. Once high on the taste of popularity and leadership in the polls, the Podemos ruling committee slanted towards becoming a vanguardist “electoral machine”, taking power on behalf of those left behind. It began to look like Podemos would win the elections at all costs and bring liberation to the silenced masses — whether the masses wanted this imposed from above, or not.

Three years later, the results are plain to see. Surpassed by both the Social Democrats and the somehow-still-ruling Popular Party (a den of Franco apologists and Brussels bootlickers), Podemos failed to make “fear change sides”, as once they boasted.

Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean, Greece proffers another cautionary tale: SYRIZA, the party from the “little country that said ‘no’”. Except that, after saying ‘no’, the little country’s political representatives, now disconnected from the social movements that lofted them to power, kept on playing the rigged game rather than build one fresh.

The story does not end here. A new political milieu arose between 2014 and 2015, led by the third profile mentioned above: the post 15-M activists, stepping up and into politics. They wanted to be the creators of representative politics, not its recipients, and to act as facilitators for many other voices to be included. The genesis of Spain’s municipalist coalitions tells a new story, describing keys to a successful commons-based political strategy that creates tangible change.

Proclamations of a movement’s death, greatly exaggerated

The origins of this other story lie in the apparent decay of the 15-M movement. The word “apparent” is key here – as long as we are speaking of visibility, we must acknowledge the Occupy movement as part of this disappearing act.

In 2011, Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” was not Donald Trump, but the protester. This marked the apex of media-visibility for the networked movements demanding attention by standing their ground and announcing their presence through encampments, which provided a compact mass of human profiles against a mainstream media-friendly backdrop. Here, we should draw a distinction between how the 15-M and Occupy encampments disbanded and were disbanded.

In Spain, the activists took a page from the Art of War and voluntarily dispersed their large-scale occupations, decentralizing them into neighborhood assemblies. In the US, the FBI coordinated with the Department of Homeland Security, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, private sector players (notably banks), local law enforcement, and mayors of several prominent cities to first infiltrate and then violently dismantle the occupations. If we limit the import of Occupy to those few, highly visible months in the squares, we can see that it had not so much “died” as it was assassinated.

In both Spain and the US, the media — behaving as if geospatial proximity is the only thing holding affinity networks together— rushed to pronounce these and all their sister movements worldwide to be defunct. So much for the person of the year in 2011! This was not a natural passing but a brutal attempt at disappearing a large movement. However, to paraphrase Mark Twain, “proclamations of the movement’s death have been greatly exaggerated”. If these movements still live and breathe, though, we must ask ourselves with whose complicity and consent they have been labeled “failures”.

Think of a sugar cube. Held in your hand it is compact, with a recognizable shape and texture, easy to measure and describe. Drop the sugar cube into a coffee cup and stir that around. Magic! The cube has disappeared. Take a sip, though, and you’ll agree that the flavor has changed.

In a nutshell, this describes the argument that the 15-M/Occupy/Syntagma/various local movements are alive and well, albeit in distributed and less immediately apparent ways. For those willing to look, their effects are readily identifiable. Remember that not even six years have passed since the occupations; this is not a tale of hippies turning into yuppies. This is the story of a movement that refuses to take the news of its own demise as a binding contract.

In the US, you can perceive how Occupy infused the Bernie Sanders campaign (also undermined by entrenched interests), and recently we can see its influence in the Women’s Marches, strikes and parts of the anti-Trump movement.

In Spain, however, these activists, people with real memories and lived experiences, chose to politically organize, and they actually won – not once, but multiple times in multiple locations.

The Rise of the Urban Commons

In the spring of 2014, spurred on by Podemos’ success in the European elections, a group of activists met in el Patio Maravillas, one of Madrid’s most prominent occupied social centers. “We’re going to win this city”, they announced. They began organizing, enabling unprecedented levels of citizen participation and facilitating a common space for previously unaffiliated and disaggregated political actors. Anyone who agreed with the basic principles and wanted to be present could propose him or herself as a candidate on fully open and participatory electoral lists.

A month or so earlier, activists from Barcelona launched a manifesto to invite existing social movements and political organizations to converge around four fundamental objectives:

1. Guaranteeing the citizenry’s basic rights and a decent life for all,
2. Fostering an economy that prioritizes social and environmental justice,
3. The participative democratization of institutions,
4. To meet an ethical commitment towards citizens.

The call for convergence was an astounding success, and Guanyem Barcelona, publicly represented by anti-eviction and right to housing campaigner Ada Colau, begins its yearlong mutation into Barcelona en Comú, an “instrumental” electoral coalition comprising a variety of actors from social movements and anti-establishment political parties working together to take back the city.

Ignored or decried in the popular media, these coalitions, much like the 15-M and Occupy encampments, replicated themselves in other locales, forming alliances and swarming around shared values and beliefs. The process was messy, effervescent and busy. No one had tried this before and there is no instruction manual; in practice, it can only be written together.

Against poll expectations, a hostile media, and entrenched political interests, these parties overwhelmingly won in Spain’s main cities, not only Madrid and Barcelona, but also in Valencia, A Coruña, Zaragoza, and Cadiz. Podemos, although a participant in many of these coalitions, chose to run the regional (as opposed to the city) ballot on their own. The result? Zero victories in all the places where the citizens’ coalitions had triumphed. In the city of Madrid, where the same census group could vote for the city (Ahora Madrid) and regional (Podemos) ballot, Podemos got just half the number of votes won by Ahora Madrid.

Image by Maria Castelló Solbés. Click here for more on the origin of Spain’s municipalist movements.

Spain’s municipalist coalitions were the result of a number of movements representing changes in cultures, mindsets and relations to power. The most notable among these is 15-M and, unlike Podemos, the coalitions can be considered its true political byproducts. Prior to the 2014-2015 electoral cycle, 15-M had also developed strong transversal relations with movements around housing, public health and education and culture. Known as “las mareas”, or “citizen’s tides”, these were characterized by self-organized protests and capacity building that, although inclusive of traditional actors such as labour unions and political parties, were truly multi-constituent in nature. For example, the public health marea would include healthcare professionals, patients, civil workers, health reformers, hospital staff, specific disease-focused associations and help groups, etc., as well as all supporters of the public health service. 15-M itself was also a product of already existing tendencies, with people who had been working in digital activism, free culture, de-growth, the commons and a host of other movements.

Today, the municipalist platforms coordinate among themselves to share resources and best practices, functioning as trans-local affinity networks. Although mainly focused on providing real world solutions to their constituencies, the coalitions share a number of notable features. One of the most refreshing is that their attitude towards political discourse is considerably more feminized, a contrast to the old guard and masculine attitudes typically found in institutional politics.

The municipalist focus on participation and radical democracy, honed through many street assemblies, has been refined into a shared “código ético” or ethical code, which shapes the platforms behaviors within the institutions. The code acts as both a glue and draw for the participants, again not limited to party staff, but to all who want to feel involved. The main features are as follows:

• No revolving doors (no cycling through public/private positions)
• Salary cuts
• Participative program
• Open primaries — no party quotas, and open to anyone
• Voluntary/citizen self-financing, and rejection of institutional or bank financing

Beyond their local concerns and trans-local alliances, all the municipalist platforms have their eye on the transnational dimension in order to form a network of “Rebel Cities”. This, as a practice, mirrors the locally embedded but globally networked practices of P2P productive communities. In addition, the multi-constituent approach seen in the citizen tides is mirrored within the coalitions, which, although inclusive of established political parties, are notably non-partisan as they all reflect the interests of wide breadth of civil society actors.

And they lived happily ever after? Of course not: the activists-turned-political representatives face an unwaveringly hostile media environment, which exaggerates their blunders (or invents them when convenient) while burying their achievements. After four years of precarity and engaged activism, these individuals face 60+ hour workweeks while clashing against the entrenched realities of horizontalist bureaucracy, holding minority seats within electoral alliances with Social Democrats. The pluralistic nature of the citizens’ coalitions have unsurprisingly led to incoherencies and gaffes and, perhaps worst of all, a noticeable abandonment of direct-action tactics and counter-power building efforts. Still, they soldier on, and the list of benefits and advances (cancellations of public contracts with multi-nationals, participatory budgeting, more gender-balanced literature and representation, increased public spending, anti-gentrification strategies, basic income pilots, direct-democracy mechanisms…) is plain for all to see.

The best of the truly good news is that Spain’s municipalist coalitions are not alone. Progressive cities worldwide are enabling and empowering the act of commoning. Rather than directing what the citizenry can do for itself and its environments, these “Rebel Cities” or, “Fearless Cities” as a recent event called them, are listening to commoners’ voices and creating spaces for ordinary people to roll up their sleeves and manage those matters that concern them most directly. Cities like Ghent, Belgium; Bologna, Italy; Amsterdam, Holland; Frome, England; Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Naples, Italy; Montreal, Canada; Jackson, USA; Lille, France; Bristol, UK and Valparaiso, Chile are examples. Their people are increasing transparency, enabling participatory budgeting, turning empty lots into community gardens, co-creating skill and tool sharing programs, and facilitating the creation of social care co-ops among many other actions relevant in their local contexts.

Beyond the city level, we now also find pan-European efforts to bring the practices of commoning to the institutions, while not losing sight of the necessary mutual recognition needed for the Commons movement to emancipate itself from markets and state as it radically re-imagines these. In November 2016, a group of 150 commoners from all over Europe gathered in Brussels to lay the foundations for a united and strong movement, and the European Commons Assembly was born. Building on several weeks’ collective work in policy proposals, the Assembly sat in European Parliament to explore the ECA as a platform and the commons as a powerful paradigm for policymaking.

Commons Transition: Building the political lexicon of social governance from below

The lexicon and practices of commoning are evident in how these coalitions, Rebel Cities and transnational assemblies have formed and are articulating their governance. With a focus on transparency and citizen participation, and taking advantage of open-source P2P technologies, they prefigure many aspects of the politics of a better future. The challenge ahead lies in applying the network logics that have been so successful in Spain to recover the latent power of Occupy and 15-M and build resilient, more feminized and ethically coherent, transnational political movements.

In the same way that prefigurative strategies incorporate social and environmental priorities into their informal constitutions, without waiting for markets or state to deal with such ‘externalities’, the municipalist ethical code can form the kernel of a set of political guidelines to be hard-coded into commons-oriented coalition principles, bringing fresh accountability to contemporary politics.

Potential success is also about keeping it real and relatable. The old left has traditionally communicated in abstracts, which tends to create rather than solves problems. At the same time, the “new” populist left of Syriza, Podemos and Bolivarian Socialism seems satisfied making grand paternalistic promises, resorting to throwing blame rather than proposing participatory, unalienated and feasible actions. In a culture where the elderly self-organise affinity groups through social networks and informal, participatory communities emerge to address the shortcomings of a decaying welfare state, people are demonstrating that they want to have a say in how things are run. They do not want to have someone paid exponentially more to say it on their behalf. Can a Commons politics address and support this shift towards self-organization?

The vision is to develop the emerging commons and P2P political movement at higher levels of complexity — the regional, national and transnational levels — while preserving the characteristics of local, real-place dynamism. By engaging the creativity and input of those communities most affected by political processes, commons-based practices can nurture a sense of identity that can be harnessed for effective political action. The integrative narrative of the Commons invites citizens’ direct political engagement outside the restrictive bureaucracies of the market state and economies.

Imagine a radically reconfigured and democratically accountable structure. One that, while preserving the more desirable characteristics of the Welfare State — social and public health provision and large infrastructure management and upkeep — radically democratizes them. It would do away with the State’s cozy symbiosis with market entities, while deconstructing its pernicious monopolies over money creation and exchange, and property and judicial rights. A second radical set of measures would prohibit the structural enforcement of inequality and the often violent repression of emancipatory alternatives. This structure would function in much the same way as foundations do in the Open Source software economy: providing the infrastructure for cooperation and the creation and upkeep of commons but not directing the process of social value creation and distribution. In other words, it would empower and protect the practice of commoning.

This enabling metastructure — often referred to as “The Partner State” — would also take on new functions derived from already existing P2P/Commons practices. Among these, we would see a promotion of real, needs-oriented entrepreneurship, bolstered by explicit recognition and support of bottom-up productive infrastructures, such as Open Coops, mesh wireless networks or community renewables through public-Commons partnerships. It would allow commoners to repurpose or take over unused or underutilised public buildings for social ends while giving legal recognition to the act of commoning, whether through copyleft-inspired property-law hacks or through a longer process of gradually institutionalizing commons practices. Its grassroots democratizing ethos would create new financing mechanisms and debt-free public money creation, which, alongside social currencies, could fund environmentally regenerative work and the creation of new, distributed Open-source infrastructure. These would be supported by taxation schemes favouring the types of labor described above, while penalizing speculation, parasitic rents and negative social and environmental externalities. The overall system has to be kept in check through a pervasive culture of participatory politics — made feasible through its attendant pedagogy — to involve a newly enfranchised citizenry in the deliberation and real time consultation of political and legislative issues and budgeting. In issues of power, the Partner State shifts to being a fluid facilitator to assist and emancipate the bottom-up counter-power that keeps it in check.

Is this narrative Utopian? No more than the “what are their demands…?” proposals of Occupy and 15-M. In fact, many of the Partner State practices described above are already being enacted by the Fearless Cities. Accusations of utopianism are used dismissively to enclose the commons of the imagination. People need courage (and encouragement) to imagine something better in human nature, more than inevitable conflict and self-interest. History, despite its observable patterns, is not deterministic. Nothing suddenly materializes from detailed concepts into fully formed realities; there was no group of wise men sitting around in 15th century Florence proclaiming: “…and we shall create Capitalism! And it will progress through creative destruction! And we shall have high frequency algorithmic trading!” or any such nonsense. Instead, if we look, we can identify various socio-technological trends including the rise of the merchant class, the printing press, double book accounting, all of which would proceed from the 18th century to form what we recognize now as “capitalism”.

Back in our present-day chaos, applying a Commons Transition to the field of politics entails creating a new, inclusive political narrative that harnesses the best practices of three distinct progressive trends: Openness (e.g. Pirate parties), Fairness (e.g. New Left) and Sustainability (e.g. Green parties). The optimal game plan for building a new political vision fit for the challenges of our time involves building bridges between these three trends, precisely what the municipalists have achieved and translated into political and legislative power.

This vision for a new politics must also promote other underplayed concerns such as race, gender, and reproductive justice, and radically diversifying political representation in response to increased interest in balance — at the least, being sure that the representative picture is not always and only straight, white men, particularly in leadership roles. Take into account that women spearheaded the municipalist candidacies that triumphed in Barcelona and Madrid.

There is a need for deeper respect towards rural and deindustrialized areas, where P2P dynamics can usher in workable solutions and grounded, bio-regionally based political engagement. Inclusive by nature, the Commons as applied to politics can enable grassroots political participation by affected individuals and communities. However, this new narrative must be grounded in scalable, existing best practices that are accessible to change makers and civil-society organizations, not only to existing institutions.

Taken together, these successful municipalist occupations of power structures show that the logic of the Commons, coupled with democratic, participatory relations enabled by P2P systems, can reinvigorate and instill a new sense of purpose in today’s political field. If we can imagine a commons-oriented future including a commons politics, it practically becomes a moral imperative to do everything in our power to bring that better future to reality. In this fight in the time of monsters, the fight between David and Goliath, why not be David?^[3] He won after all and, after seeing what the municipalists had to overcome, perhaps so can we.

This article expands on themes showcased on Commons Transition and P2P: a Primer, a short publication from the P2P Foundation and the Transnational Institute examining the potential of commons-based peer production to radically re-imagine our economies, politics and relationship with nature. Download it here.

Images: Francisco de Goya, Choon Goon, Melissa Stanley, TOr ghEH, Elena Martínez Vicente, Barcex, Time Magazine, Maria Castelló Solbés, Ars Electronica, Scott Webb,

Footnotes

^[1] Did Gramsci actually say that? This hotly contested quote nonetheless captures the current world juncture.

^[2] From 1776 to 1825, the English Parliament passed more than 4,000 Acts that served to appropriate common lands from commoners, chiefly to the benefit of politically connected landowners. These enclosures of the commons seized about 25 percent of all cultivated acreage in England, according to historian Raymond Williams, and concentrated ownership of it in a small minority of the population. These “lawful” enclosures also dispossessed millions of citizens, swept away traditional ways of life, and forcibly introduced the new economy of industrialization, occupational specialties and large-scale production. Nowadays we use the term “enclosure” to denounce heinous acts such the ongoing privatization of intellectual property, the expropriation and massive land grabs occurring in Africa and other continents, the imposition of digital right management digital content, the patenting of seeds and the human genome, and more. This modern tendency towards enclosures and turning relationships into services, and commons into commodities, has been described by Commons scholar David Bollier as “The great invisible tragedy of our time”.

^[3] This idea was originally voiced by anti-fracking activist Sandra Steingraber.

Originally published at commondreams.org

The post Commons in the time of monsters: How P2P Politics can change the world, one city at a time appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Bologna, Italy – City of the Commons

What would it be like if city governments, instead of relying chiefly on bureaucratic rules and programs, actually invited citizens to take their own initiatives to improve city life? That’s what the city of Bologna, Italy, is doing, and it amounts to a landmark reconceptualization of how government might work in cooperation with citizens. Ordinary people acting as commoners are invited to enter into a “co-design process” with the city to manage public spaces, urban green zones, abandoned buildings and other urban issues.

The Bologna project is the brainchild of Professor Christian Iaione of LUISS, university in Rome, in cooperation with student and faculty collaborators at LabGov, the Laboratory for the Governance of Commons. LabGov is an “inhouse clinic” and think tank that is concerned with collaborative governance, public collaborations for the commons, subsidiarity (governance at the lowest appropriate level), the sharing economy and collaborative consumption. The tagline for LabGov says it all: “Society runs, economy follows. Let’s (re)design institutions and law together.”

For years Iaione has been contemplating the idea of the “city as commons” in a number of law review articles and other essays. In 2014, the City of Bologna formally adopted legislation drafted by LabGov interns. The thirty-page Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons outlines a legal framework by which the city can enter into partnerships with citizens for a variety of purposes, including social services, digital innovation, urban creativity and collaborative services.¹ Taken together, these collaborations comprise a new vision of the “sharing city” or commons-oriented city. To date, some ninety projects have been approved under the Bologna Regulation. Dozens of other Italian cities are emulating the Bologna initiative. The Bologna Regulation takes seriously the idea that citizens have energy, imagination and responsibility that they can apply to all sorts of municipal challenges. So why not empower such citizen action rather than stifling it under a morass of bureaucratic edicts and political battles? The conceptualization of “city as commons” represents a serious shift in thinking. Law and bureaucratic programs are not seen as the ultimate or only solution, and certainly not as solutions that are independent of the urban culture. Thinking about the city as commons requires a deeper sense of mutual engagement and obligation than “service delivery,” outsourcing and other market paradigms allow.

Instead of relying on the familiar public/private partnerships that often siphon public resources into private pockets, a city can instead pursue “public/commons partnerships” that bring people together into close, convivial and flexible collaborations. The working default is “finding a solution” rather than beggar-thy-neighbor adversarialism or fierce political warfare.

To Iaione, the Bologna Regulation offers a structure for “local authorities, citizens and the community at large to manage public and private spaces and assets together. As such, it’s a sort of handbook for civic and public collaboration, and also a new vision for government.” He believes that “we need a cultural shift in terms of how we think about government, moving away from the Leviathan State or Welfare State toward collaborative or polycentric governance.”

SSM Sozialistische Selbsthilfe Mühlheim (Socialist Self-Help Mühlheim), Germany

Sozialistische Selbsthilfe Mühlheim (SSM) is a self-organized residential and work project with a tradition and a vision. SSM evolved in the wake of a squat in an old Schnapps distillery in the Mühlheim district of Cologne. After negotiating with the city of Cologne for four years, SSM signed a rental contract for the distillery buildings. It took the legal form of a Verein, an association controlled by its members.

This arrangement has given SSM some assets that it can use to generate revenues to sustain itself as a nonprofit. It rents out one part of its hall for events, for example. And since one of SSM’s activities is liquidating households, another part of the building is used for furniture storage. The project also runs a secondhand store. The group has always taken pride in not becoming politically or financially dependent; it began without any supporting funding and is financially self-sufficient today.

Since its founding in 1979 about twenty people have been living on the SSM site. Their common space enables them to live independent lives without social isolation, and their community ethic is prized by members as a way to counter the capitalist, consumerist sensibilities of the surrounding city. SSM members seek not only to take control of their own lives, but to advance more humane, ecologically responsible urban policies. For example, SSM took a strong activist role in opposing the demolition of the Barmer Viertel neighborhood of Cologne – one of SSM’s many public-spirited initiatives that have earned it respect and admiration among city officials as well as the general population.

In light of such activism, the abbreviation SSM could reasonably stand for “self-help and solidarity come to life in Mühlheim.” The community has been providing communal housing since 1979 and creating jobs that conventional markets do not find lucrative enough to create. SSM members confidently use the term “socialist self-help” to describe their projects. SSM is a commons because it relies on self-organized governance and public-spirited action, combined with the self-reliance, sense of responsibility and ecological commitments of its members. It is a living social system that is independent and durable, and therefore able to enter into constructive engagements with both the market and state. Confirming its wide respect, SSM won the “Soziale Stadt 2012” prize (“Social City 2012”) from a business organization, the Association of German Housing and Real Estate Companies.

, Great Britain

For most city-dwellers, one of the great challenges they face is the high cost of living and housing expenses due to investor speculation. In the early twentieth century, Ebenezer Howard tackled this problem by proposing the idea of a “garden city” that would blend the benefits of both country and city living and be financed through collective ownership of land. The central idea of Letchworth is to keep land ownership in the hands of the community while allowing housing and other buildings to be sold or leased to individuals.

Garden City Letchworth² was started more than a century ago by ethical investors, Quakers and philanthropists and other socially concerned individuals. In 1903, founders Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker purchased 2,057 hectares of land near London at a reasonable price and then made it available to the members of the community for building. In this way, people came to own the roofs over their heads but co-owned the land on which their houses had been built. Despite low wages for many people, the community-oriented form of ownership made it possible to avoid high rents.

The collective ownership of the land also generated revenues through housing rentals and business leases. This in turn made it possible for the community to finance schools and hospitals. Everyone, not just investors, could benefit. Howard described his ideas in detail in his 1898 book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. For decades the economic value generated by Letchworth’s infrastructures – water, sewerage, gas, electricity, roads, schools, hospitals – were mutualized to benefit all of its inhabitants. This helped the city to become relatively self-sufficient. Inspired by the Letchworth example, other garden cities followed, such as the Welwyn Garden City in the 1920s.

Following World War II, the appeal of the garden city model declined. People still enjoyed living in leafy surroundings, but a more individualistic ethic replaced the idea of community in general and community ownership of land in particular. In 1995, the Garden City Corporation in Letchworth became the Garden City Letchworth Heritage Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that finances itself. The plots of the residences created in the beginning are still in the hands of the Community Land Trust (CLT). Today more than 33,000 people live in Letchworth, on land that belongs to the CLT.

In Europe and the US, there is a renewed interest in the idea of community land trusts as a way to decommodify land and mutualize the benefits of land ownership. In such discussions, Garden City Letchworth remains an inspiration and archetype. “There is indeed a wind of change now building for rethinking and updating the garden city model,” says British land trust expert and community researcher Pat Conaty.

In 1996, the people who lived in Sellwood neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, decided to reclaim a street intersection, Ninth Avenue and Sherrett Street, to create “Share-It Square.” They filled it with a tea stand, a children’s playhouse and a community library. This was the beginning of an ongoing volunteer project, the City Repair Project, a self-organized urban commons designed to foster a sense of community participation and make the urbanscape more inviting and sociable.

Every May, the City Repair Project hosts a ten-day series of workshops called “Village Building Convergence” in places around Portland. The events have created dozens of projects that enliven the city through “natural buildings” and permaculture designs. Thousands of volunteers have built benches and information kiosks using “natural materials” such as sand, straw and “cob” (unburned clay masonry). The kiosks are a place for sharing neighborhood information, such as requests or offers of services (babysitting, housecleaning, massage, gardening). They are also places where people can share their homegrown vegetables.

At first, city officials resisted the idea of a neighborhood claiming a public space for itself by painting the pavement and creating small structures. But then they realized that the convivial neighborhood life at at Share-It Square was a great way for people to become more involved with city life. In 2000, the City of Portland passed an ordinance authorizing “intersection repair” throughout the city. With the help of City Repair volunteers, a neighborhood that obtains the consent of 80 percent of its residents within two blocks of an intersection, can design paintings and creative public spaces for the centers of the intersection.

Much of the inspiration for the City Repair Project has come from Mark Lakeman, the self-styled “placemaking coordinator” of the initiative. The group’s stated mission is to facilitate “artistic and ecologically oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world. We are an organized group action that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live.”

In practice, this means everything from “intersection repairs” to public installations, block parties and conferences, and educational events and festivals. The commoning catalyzed by City Repair allows people to make decisions about their own immediate neighborhoods and to actively shape the future of the community. Sometimes that amounts to finding out the name of the neighbor who’s been living across the street for the past twenty years.

Vila Autódromo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

For more than thirty years, the Vila Autódromo favela community in Rio de Janeiro has been fighting the city government’s plans to evict everyone and build a new upper-middle class neighborhood. At first, the resistance came from fishers and other people with low incomes who had built their huts on the banks of Jacarepaguá Lagoon. Then, as real estate values rose in this area adjacent to the upscale neighborhood of Barra da Tijuca, developers wanted to build luxury apartments, highways or sports facilities in the Vila Autódromo.

The city government has offered a shifting set of reasons for eliminating the neighborhood – the needs of the Olympic Games in 2016, growing traffic, the environment. But the real reasons seem to be about money. As one commentator put it, “The general assumption is that skyrocketing land values have put pressure on city officials to make the space available to developers, the same interests that fund local politicians and newspapers. Yet the Brazilian constitution stipulates that those who occupy unused urban land for more than five years without contestation by land owners should be granted legal claim. And Vila Autódromo has been there since 1967.”³

Residents in Vila Autódromo are accustomed to doing things for themselves. Decades ago, they built their own houses, installing all of the electrical connections, water pipes, septic systems and telephone lines, with no government assistance. So it was not so difficult for them to form their own residential association. Their resistance helped them win formal land use rights from the government in 1994. But residents could never be sure that the government would not forcibly remove them. Many have already succumbed to the government’s strategy of paying residents large sums of money to move, leaving many parts of the neighborhood in a state of abandoned disrepair.

To propose a different vision for their neighborhood, the residents’ association came up with its own local development plan, a Plano Popular, in 2012, with the support of students and professors at state universities and the Rio de Janeiro university ETTERN.⁴ The grassroots proposal called for better infrastructure, restoration measures for the banks of the lagoon, and better-quality urban design for the community. In December 2013, the plan beat out 170 other applicants and received the Urban Age Award, presented annually by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank to creative urban initiatives.

Yet still the Vila remains under threat by a hostile city government and developers. In early 2014, construction of new housing, where the government plans to resettle the Autódromo residents, began just a kilometer away. Some residents accepted attractive cash compensation offers from the city officials, which had the effect of dividing residents and sapping energy from the protest. By January 2015, construction had begun for new buildings adjacent to the houses of residents still fighting the projects. Whether the residents will prevail in their resistance is uncertain, but they have already made one thing clear: it is best to pursue urban design with the active, collective participation of a neighborhood’s residents, in ways that meet their real interests and needs, than to sell off such “development” rights to the highest bidder.

Resident-Managed Housing, Astrachan, Russia

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, practically all of the state-owned housing stock in Russia was privatized in the early 1990s. While roughly 80 percent of the apartments are privately owned, managing the jointly owned stock – from the roof to the outdoor facilities – has generally remained either a responsibility of the state or has been handed over to private real estate companies. Maintenance and upkeep declined so greatly that approximately 40 percent of the apartments in Russia must now be completely refurbished. In some places the answer to the problem is being solved through self-governance by residents. This possibility arose in 2005 when the government passed a law enabling the residents to manage apartment buildings themselves or through housing cooperatives.

One early set of cooperators were residents of apartments in Astrachan, a city of 500,000 people in southern Russia. Residents of Eleventh Red Army Street in Astrachan decided to manage their apartments themselves through a council of residents known as Soyuz Zhiteley.⁵ The residents’ council levies a monthly charge of 8.7 rubles (roughly 17 euro cents) for every square meter of an apartment, which is then earmarked for repairs and maintenance.

Roughly one-fifth of Astrachan’s apartments, a total of 1,900 apartment buildings, are now managed by their residents. Similar initiatives exist in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi and many smaller provincial cities. Management by the residents is a good alternative to the often corrupt private real estate management companies. It also helps to counter the expropriation of adjacent green spaces between the prefab apartment buildings, which developers consider suitable land for high-priced high-rises.

Not surprisingly, President Vladimir Putin’s government is opposed to resident-managed repairs and maintenance in apartment buildings. He would like to overturn the 2005 law that authorized the arrangements and housing cooperatives. If successful, residents would become individually liable for repairs and maintenance again, leading to a decline in building upkeep. The residents’ associations would also be more vulnerable to fraud and embezzlement of their contributions for repair and maintenance.

The figures show what this kind of discrimination against residents’ management means in concrete terms: in 2007, the government promised 380 billion rubles to refurbish apartment buildings. However, these monies have been granted only to buildings managed by private real estate companies or cooperatives, and not a single ruble to housing managed by the residents.

Jannis Kühne (Germany) studies urbanism at Bauhaus University in Weimar where he does research on urban commons. He has done internships in Bamako, Mali (DRCTU) and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (NAPP) as well as a semester of study at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where he worked on the issue of favela upgrading andremoção branca (the displacement of residents in pacified favela).

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo of Vila Autódromo by CatComm | ComCat | RioOnWatch

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Cities and Technological Sovereignty 3 – Barcelona’s Strategy for Technological Sovereignty: Winning Back Technology for the People

(14 mins) Francesca Bria – While the platform economy has a clear potential to generate economic impact, there are several important issues that need to be resolved: first and foremost, around ownership, control and management of personal data. One key reason cities and municipalities have so far failed to foster local data-intensive platforms that can compete with Uber and Airbnb is missing access to raw data. Data has become a key part of the urban infrastructure. It helps make better, quicker, and more empirically sound decisions; it promotes socio-economic development and innovation; it improves public services and empowers citizens. But who should own it? Many technology firms aspire to turn data into a new asset class, the key ingredient of what has been called “surveillance capitalism.” But is this the only option? Can cities embrace a different model that socializes data and encourages new forms of cooperativism and democratic innovation? How can cities help ensure that such data is not locked in corporate silos, but is rather turned into a public good?

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