David Bollier

Surging real estate markets, among other factors, have made US housing unaffordable to large segments of the population, especially young people. So much of it is designed for conventional nuclear families and upscale buyers seeking luxury amenities. For lower- and middle-income people, simply finding affordable housing is hard enough; it almost seems utopian to want housing with attractive public amenities, shared spaces, and a spirit of neighborliness and belonging.

Fortunately, a number of renegade architects, builders, and city planners see great potential in shared living arrangements. There are many varieties, from housing cooperatives and intentional communities to co-housing and communes. The common goal is to use innovative architectural and social design to make residential living more enjoyable and affordable.

In my latest podcast episode (Frontiers of Commoning, Ep. #78), I spoke with two notable architects – Neeraj Bhatia and Antje Steinmüller – who have intensively studied the social and economic dynamics of co-living. This is a relatively neglected field of inquiry in architecture, housing development, and urban policy. But as my two interviewees explained, commoning can play a powerful role in expanding this overlooked sector of housing. 

Neeraj Bhatia spent years as a San Francisco architect and urban designer at the California College of the Arts. His research – much of it conducted via The Open Workshop research-design project – has focused on commoning, infrastructure, housing, and urbanism. He recently joined the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and won the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture for 2026-2027.

Bhatia first discovered the potential of collective living when he visited “The Embassy,” an urban commune in an old Edwardian house in San Francisco. When attending a public lecture there, some residents took him on a tour. 

“It was so incredible to see the type of work they were doing,” he recalled, “—the radicality of the ways that they were living, the experimentation in labor practices, the emotional support they were able to provide each other, this really high quality of life they were able to achieve in a very expensive city like San Francisco.” As a point of reference, he pointed out that San Francisco has a 200,000-unit shortfall of affordable housing relative to need.

To outsiders, the Alps may conjure images of majestic mountain landscapes and carefree ski vacations. But to tens of thousands of people living in small Alpine towns, the challenges they face aren’t so different from those of many rural towns: How to meet basic needs and make the economy more resilient? How to deal with the worsening disruptions of climate change? How to assert greater regional control when distant, city-based politicians and investors push very different priorities? 

Paradoxically enough, remote rural locations are precisely where a lot of exciting ecosocial and economic innovations are arising. Constraint tends to focus the mind and expand the imagination. It forces people to think creatively, leading to unexpectedly robust innovations.

These were my conclusions after interviewing designer Bianca Elzenbaumer, the cofounder of an Italian community organization called Brave New Alps. The group began as a collaboration between Elzenbaumer and her partner Fabio Franz in 2005 when they decided to return to the region in which they grew up, the Vallagarina valley in the Italian Alps, near the Austrian border. 

Elzenbaumer explained in an essay: “After having studied and worked as an eco-social designer across Europe and Palestine, my partner and I decided to dedicate our next 40 years studying how design can support commons and community economies” in a post-capitalist world.

By 2012, Brave New Alps had evolved into a formal “cultural association” dedicated to building community design practices that could “reconfigure the politics of social and environmental issues.” But their vision of development had a significant twist. They wanted to build systems that could operate beyond markets, such as commons, and to step outside the conventional client-designer framework in favor of participatory processes. 

One point of using a Creative Commons license is to make a book (and other creative works) as widely available as possible. To that end, I’m thrilled to announce a new stage in the life of Think Like a Commoner, Second Edition, published last year by New Society Publishers. 

The printed text of the book is now posted online, for free. Here’s the weblink: https://thinklikeacommoner.com/second-edition/read-it. Like the printed book, it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.  

The license essentially means that the work can be copied and shared so long as credit is given to me as the author (BY). Noncommercial uses are allowed without permission, but any commercial reuses require my permission (NC). Any derivative uses of this book, including translations, new printings, and excerpts, are permissible so long as they also use the same license requiring sharing (SA). 

I’m also happy to announce that an audiobook version of the book is now available, at https://thinklikeacommoner.com/audiobook. 

Humanity cannot continue to expand production and consumption exponentially on a finite planet.  It’s biophysically impossible. The carbon emissions are already producing more volatile weather patterns, more frequent floods, droughts, and wildfires, and disruptions of agriculture, commerce and global supply chains.

And yet the US Government and respectable opinion remain in zones of denial or deflection. The Trump administration is savaging climate science, environmental regulation, and international treaties, while saner responsible adults are at least focused on energy efficiency and renewables. But few people dare to name, let alone tackle, the real driver of climate collapse – the capitalist economy’s demand for relentless economic growth.

To take stock of this quandary, I decided to have a long talk with a leading degrowth scholar and activist, Federico Savini. An associate professor in environmental planning at the University of Amsterdam, Savini has spent a lot of time thinking about how to bring market activity into ecologically sustainable limits, an agenda often known as degrowth. As a co-editor of the book Post-Growth Planning: Cities Beyond the Market Economy, Savini has suggested how cities, agriculture, energy, and transit need to change, and how affordable housing, better land stewardship, and infrastructures for social care and eco-resilience could help reduce climate impacts.

I recently interviewed Savini for my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #72) to get a keener sense of the state of the degrowth movement today. What are the strategies it’s calling for, the hotspots of degrowth advocacy, and the challenges the movement is facing?

In the US, of course, degrowth is a rarely heard term. In hyper-individualist, consumerist American culture – the world citadel of modern capitalism – few people want to hear brutally honest accounts of what needs to be done. Curb the drivers of growth? Respect ecological limits at the expense of profits? Foster social equality by curbing the power of oligarchs and corporations? Change who makes key investment decisions? In most cases, the answer is no.