The City as Commons: The Conference

The Brooklyn-based project, 596 Acres, has mapped a large inventory of vacant public land and is actively helping neighborhoods convert parcels of land into functioning commons for community gardens, recreation and learning. 

The Ubiquitous Commons project is a prototype legal/technological toolkit designed to help people control how the personal data they generate from countless devices may be used, especially in urban contexts. 

Because the conference was the first thematic conference of the IASC on the urban commons, there were quite a few academics at the conference, especially younger ones.  So there were quite a few academic paper presented that applied the conventional principles about commons as resources

Two notable keynote talks included commons activist Silke Helfrich and Italian design strategist Ezio Manzini. Helfrich's talk, “Imagining the (R)Urban Commons in 2040,” set forth her vision of what a city as a commons would look like in the year 2040. 

In another thoughtful talk, Manzini, founder of the DESIS (Design for Social Innovation for Sustainability), a network of university-based design labs, stressed that cities must be seen as a world of relationships.  Urban commons must be “conceived as fluid forms,” he said. “To enact them we should focus on enabling conditions, not on fixed designs.” 

For those inclined to some serious reading about law, theory and urban governance, check out Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione’s forthcoming essay in the Yale Law and Policy Review, which lays out a systemic and detailed overview of the idea of the city as commons.  The essay proposes a range of collaborative and polycentric governance strategies for cities. 

Michel Bauwens and I shared an onstage conversation about "open cooperativism," and especially the new efforts to devise "platform cooperativist" models to challenge Uber, Airbnb and other "death star" platforms that exploit social communities without reinvesting in them or sharing the benefits.

There was so much energy unleashed by this conference that I expect many more initiatives on urban commons in the future -- and a new, more focused dialogue on what it means to manage a city as a commons. Fortunately, a second IASC thematic conference on urban commons is already being planned, for 2017.