David Bollier

Why is the commons a useful perspective for thinking about urban design and architecture? 

Stefan Gruber, a Carnegie Mellon professor of architecture and urbanism, sees cities as a prime site of struggle between capitalism and commons, and at the same time more accessible than most national or international policy venues.

"The history of urbanization is intricately entangled with the history of industrialization and capitalism," said Gruber, citing thinkers like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells. "Cities provide access to a high concentration of labor and production, infrastructure, trade, finance, and consumption markets." 

Yet even though cities have contributed to capitalist growth, Gruber noted, "they have also been the arenas where the contradictions of capitalism, such as inequities, the environment, and class struggle, have played out most visibly." Much of Gruber's work has therefore focused on urban zones where the struggle between capitalism and commons is playing out, with an eye toward learning how commons can prevail, sometimes through commons/public partnerships. 

Gruber explores these themes in a course that he teaches, "Commoning in the City," which examines how transitions towards just, regenerative, and self-determined communities in the city might develop, beyond the paradigms of the market and state.  

With six co-curators, he has also helped launch a traveling exhibit called An Atlas of Commoning: Spaces of Collective Production, which showcases notable urban commons projects. The Atlas, now on a ten-year international tour, is part of an ongoing visual archive of initiatives that use participatory action, community design, and creative commons/public collaborations to reinvent city life. The Atlas is a collaboration with the German cultural organization ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and ARCH+, a German magazine for architecture and urbanism.

In a few days, the exhibition will have a major opening in Tbilisi, Georgia, a place where "the notion of commons is intertwined with the historical legacies of Soviet collectivism and traditional community practices," and then by rapid urbanization and privatization of public spaces following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Contemporary grassroots initiatives have therefore focused on reclaiming shared (non-state) stewardship of communal spaces, cultural heritage, social practices, and the environment.

The ambitious goal of the Atlas of Commoning is "to recapture and redefine the open and emancipatory space of 'us' as a concept." As the book's preface explains:

As human beings, we are both individuals and members of a community at once; we are interconnected, and that interconnection needs to be given expression—we need places that are dedicated to communal life and that we shape together, conscious of our shared responsibility for them, places where community becomes a lived reality. 

The author of the preface, Elke aus dem Moore, cites a Hamburg, Germany, project in the 1990s, "Park Fiction," which invited citizens to articulate their wishes for a future park in pictures or words. The initiative became a participatory art project and then a political vehicle for asserting the needs and desires of residents, eventually defeating the plans of privileged commercial interests.

In my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #55), I talk with Stefan Gruber about the Atlas of Commoning, special challenges of stewarding commons in cities around the world, and his philosophical approach to the topic.

The conservation movement has always lived within the contractions of the capitalist political economy. Much of it celebrates the global system of market growth, private property, and profit-making while trying, in irregular, PR-driven ways, to compensate for the appalling ecological destruction of this system by creating nature preserves. 

More recently, the conservation establishment has explicitly come to embrace market-based forms of conservation, such as eco-tourism, hunting, and the patenting of exotic plant genes. Land is recast as "natural capital" and made to pay tribute to markets to assure its own protection.

The problem with both of these approaches to conservation is that they regard humans as entirely separate from nature, a premise that is biologically absurd. 

So what if humanity instead were to begin to see itself as an integral, engaged part of nature – a force that could engage respectfully with more-than-human life and even restore and regenerate it?

That's the vision that Bram Büscher, an activist-scholar in The Netherlands, has for reinventing conservation. As Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University, he wants to move beyond the extractive logic of capitalism itself to develop a more commons-based approach  that changes the very premises of how land is protected.  

Büscher's vehicle for this mission is an ambitious, newly launched international project, the Convivial Conservation Centre.  

A growing legion of renegade conservationists, ecologists, farmers, activists, and academics have joined him in rejecting the idea of "fortress protection" for land, through wilderness preserves, as well as the idea of converting landscapes into money-making "natural capital." Convivial conservation wants new practices and policies that can reintegrate people with nature in constructive ways, nourishing wholeness, while addressing the eco-pathologies of capitalism itself.

Urbánika is an international collective of tech commoners that calls itself an "immersive activism school." Led by Humberto Besso-Oberto Huerta of Mexico, the group wants to help build peer-governed, climate-resilient smart cities and communities, especially in Latin America. For this ambitious goal, Urbánika has nearly finished kitting out a climate-positive "SolarPunk Bus." The amazing vehicle will serve as a mobile learning center as it tours Latin American cities in coming months. More about that in a moment.

But first, some news about another innovative Urbánika initiative: an educational video series, "PostCapitalism and the Commons." This course consists of fifteen short videos in which I introduce the commons and commoning in its many dimensions.

The course starts with a brief history of the commons and a survey of contemporary commons, and then moves on to discussing the Market/State and many anti-social, anti-ecological enclosures of commons.

The series also discusses commons as a relational social system that helps people carry out their own provisioning and peer governance. This challenge requires people to understand the need for making an OntoShift – a shift of worldview in understanding what a commons entails, namely, new types of relationships, social practices, and ethical commitments. The last segments of the video series address bioregionalism, land, and urban commons. More episodes are planned in the coming months.

The course is meant for changemakers, especially for those who are already aware of the serious limitations of the Market/State system and the need for developing new ways of life. You can find the entire series online here. 

What a delight to encounter the work of the British artistic duo Cooking Sections, two British artists whose virtuoso artworks effortlessly blend art with activism, local commoning, and eco-stewardship in the service of climate-friendly foodways.

Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual -- Senior Research Fellows at the Royal College of Art in London – create distinctive works of art about modern food that are also enmeshed in the fabric of everyday life:  land, intertidal waters, restaurants, buildings, social festivals. The canvas for their art is large and unconventional: the bioregional theaters of the world where food is grown and harvested, from Scotland and Istanbul to southern Italy and South Korea, and beyond.

Cooking Sections' projects – exhibited at prestigious venues such as Tate Britain, Serpentine Galleries, and biennales and triennials in Taipei, Venice, Istanbul, Shanghai, and Los Angeles, among other cities – reveal disturbing insights into the nature of modern food systems. Yet their work goes beyond art and economic critique to develop ingeniously practical, locally grounded alternatives.

To learn more about Cooking Sections' singular vision, I recently interviewed Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual for my Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #50).

In recent years, Schwabe and Fernández have mounted a series of art installations, performances, and videos under the thematic title, CLIMAVORE – “How To Eat As Humans Change Climates.” While I'm no art critic, I daresay the full, rich character of their vision for food is so advanced that it has yet to be fully understood and, shall we say, digested by the culture. 

If international bodies produce scientific data on climate change, Cooking Sections' art jolts our consciousness and perceptions. Then the artists go farther, beyond art, to enlist people to work together to develop better food systems and eco-restorative local economies.