David Bollier

About a year ago, some folks in Bangkok reached out to me. Hans van Willenswaard and his wife Wallapa wanted to translate my book Think Like a Commoner into Thai and publish it. Hans is the founder of the Innovation Network International in Thailand, and his wife Wallapa is a social entrepreneur and founder of the Mindful Markets movement. Both have been quite involved in the commons for some time.

I was thrilled by their request, but upon re-reading the original version of my book, published in 2014, I was dismayed to realize that parts of it felt outdated. So much had happened in the Commonsverse over the past decade that was not in the book! Also, my own perspectives on the commons had evolved dramatically. So it felt important to update and revise the book so that it could speak more powerfully to the current moment.

With the van Willenswaards' keen interest and encouragement from New Society Publishers, my publisher, I set out to rewrite the book last March. In the end, about half of the new edition became entirely new text. The book's length grew by 50 pages, and all sorts of subtle issues of tone and point of view were adjusted to reflect contemporary politics, life, and culture.

I'm pleased to report that the second edition of Think Like a Commoner will be published on March 11, and in Europe and UK in mid-May. I see the book as an opportunity to open up some new conversations and expand many existing ones. 

Providing care to people in need is usually seen as supremely humane and ethical. But look more closely and you'll find that "care" is often a vehicle for self-serving social and political control. It's often considered acceptable to withhold care from people who don't have the "right" citizenship, skin color, cultural background, or gender identity, or who don't have money to buy the care they need. 

For an illuminating deep dive on the politics of care, check out a new book, Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (Pluto Press). I interviewed two of the co-authors -- Italian activist Valeria Graziano, now living in London, and Croatian activist Tomislav Medak -- in my latest Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #58). The third co-author is Croatian activist Marcell Mars, now living in Coventry, England.

Pirate Care is an omnibus term coined by the authors to describe acts of care that defiantly challenge the "organized abandonment" of people in need. In the tradition of civil disobedience, pirate care activists intervene in situations to show organized compassion and social solidarity for ordinary people. 

In the process, they also aim to show how the state, markets and patriarchal families are the ones decided who is deserving of care, and on what terms. Certain types of care are seen as unpatriotic, a threat to business revenues, or unacceptably kind to marginalized people. 

Look behind the glitz and glamour of global fashion, and you will find an ecologically harmful, anti-social industry largely unable to shed its capitalist dynamics. Its factories generate huge amounts of pollution and rely on underpaid, abused sweatshop labor. Fast fashion fills up landfills with mountains of cheap clothing discarded after a few uses. To keep consumption and sales going, fashion's relentless marketing machine peddles fantasies of luxury, rail-thin bodies, and sex appeal. 

While this juggernaut may seem unstoppable, a brave and hardy band of creative insurgents is pioneering entirely new models of textile production, garment design, production and distribution. Their goals are to rehumanize and relocalize garment production, and to escape the hamster wheel of endless consumerism and economic growth. 

To get a better sense of what this grassroots global movement looks like, I recently spoke with British designer/ecologist/activist Zoe Gilbertson on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #56). 

Gilbertson has worked in the fashion industry for more than 20 years -- for an athletic shoemaker in Germany, a major outdoor clothing brand in Canada, and eventually at her own startup company. But it slowly dawned on her that the ecological performance of major fashion houses was painfully modest if not an outright marketing deception. 

Inspired by climate activists, coursework at Schumacher College in Devon, England, and by her father -- who helped start the fair trade movement -- Gilbertson decided to take a deeper plunge. With support from a Churchill Fellowship, she began an in-depth research project to explore the feasibility of bioregional fiber production. She wanted to figure out ambitious, practical ways of  transforming fashion from the ground up (literally!). 

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.