Changing Societies through Urban Commons Transitions - Michel Bauwens

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Changing Societies through Urban Commons Transitions

Contents

case study choices

Executive Summary

This report examines the re-emergence of the urban commons as both a bottom-up emergence by citizens/commoners and a radical municipal administrative configuration

specific attention towards the municipal coalitions of Barcelona, Bologna, Naples, Frome and Ghent

Chapter 1

The Centrality of Urban Commons in the Social-Ecological Transition

Chapter 2

Recent Developments in Urban Commons Transitions

Most projects are now moving to poly-centric governance models

Chapter 3

Towards a Coherent Institutional Design for Public-Commons Partnerships

This new system follows a new logic:

It puts the commons, and not the market, at its center, and civic society becomes the locus of the institutions of the commons

The market is transformed towards a generative market, which serves the accumulation of the common, not the accumulation of capital

The state or common good institutions, such as the city and its institutions, are seen as facilitating mechanisms to create the right public frameworks for individual and social autonomy.

But how do we get from the current market state and market city configurations

strategy in three phases:

first phase is the emergence and formation of alternative commons-based seed forms

second phase is a regulatory and institutional phase

creation of the proper regulatory support and new institutional design, creates the basis for the third phase

This first institutional arrangement described here allows for permanent ad hoc adaptations and the organization of supportive frameworks to enable more support for the common-based initiatives

But just as importantly, this support needs to be strategized in the context of the necessary socio-ecological transitions, which is the purpose of the second set of proposals, as outlined in the following figure: (Table)

The challenge of meaningful work in the age of Trumpism

2.1. Grassroots initiatives in urban commons transitions

In the book ‘Towards a co-city: From the urban commons to the city as a commons’, edited by LabGov in cooperation with the P2P Foundation, the authors use a large variety of case studies to map where urban commons innovations are occurring

Initiatives from cities that transform themselves into ‘sharing cities’ are included, such as Seoul, San Francisco and Milan, as well as examples from the Global South like Medellin, Nairobi and Dakar. All of these case studies will soon be published on the Co-Cities platform

an important distinction is that many projects in the Global North are connected to city and other state institutions, while this is hardly the case in the Global South.

in the South it is most often the government’s identification with developmentalist policies that creates indifference towards the commons-based modalities of their citizens

2.2. Commons-oriented municipal coalitions

The rationale for our case study choices

3.1 The basic concepts underlying public- commons partnerships