Urban commons are resources in the city that are managed by the users in a nonprofit-oriented and prosocial way. They go by many names, from grassroots activism to community-led initiatives, but are united by two main characteristics. First, they are managed by the users through a collective, participatory process of accessing, managing, and developing the resource called commoning. Second, commons projects measure value based on how their use for community members, rather than measuring them by their ability to generate profit. The process of commoning creates added social benefit for the commoners, the city, and society as a whole, and increases social resilience.

The eight case studies in The Urban Commons Cookbook provide a wealth of information about the nuts and bolts of day-to-day life in a commons project. Each one tells its own local story but they are also united by eight shared challenges and strategies for succeeding in the world of the urban commons:

1. Cooperation with industry, private foundations, and larger or more established groups can help aid transition, scaling up, and risk mediation. Big partners can be especially important when there is a big initial investment. However, it is important to define the conditions of cooperations in a concrete way, for example through a written agreement, to avoid misunderstandings and the risk of enclosure — that is, takeover by the larger partner.
2. A written mission statement or manifesto can be a good tool for getting all the participants on the same page but it’s important to be flexible in day-to-day work, especially in small and medium-sized groups. The written statement may become outdated fairly quickly because the commoning process is so agile. Don’t get bogged down trying to update it unless there is a concrete need to do so. Small and medium-sized groups can usually get away with verbal agreements during other processes and at regular meetings. However, written agreements play a more central role in very large groups, where informal control mechanisms are weak because not everyone knows everyone else.
3. A clear adversary or problem can be a good motivator for immediate action and continued support but it’s important to consider how to survive beyond the initial “fight.” Concentrate on what your project is for, not just what it is against. Align your theory of change with the values and goals of the wider community in order to get others engaged and create support for your project beyond the member group.
4. Join forces with like-minded groups. Create or join umbrella organizations to increase the effect of collective action and take advantage of economies of scale and the internal differentiation of roles. Share resources and skills to empower each other and build synergies. Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to — maybe someone else already has a solution to the problem you’re facing.
5. Scaling up, moving, and transformation are the biggest challenges commons projects face. Growing pains can help test how good existing structures are and identify where improvement or adjustment are needed. For example, these challenges provide new opportunities to test how robust your discussion culture and cooperation network are. Resources like The Urban Commons Cookbook can offer assistance.
6. Use media to increase awareness and visibility as the first step towards advocacy and political lobbying. Use multiple channels (i.e. local newspapers and Facebook) and adjust your language based on your audience to reach a large variety of potential supporters. Several projects also used local political campaigns as springboards for their projects and causes. Always be on the lookout for opportunities.
7. Base the structures of commoning on the real situation and be willing to adapt as it changes. Make the organization about the people instead of forcing people to accept your organization. This includes how the group communicates, decides, how deliberations are moderated, and a range of other aspects. Make sure everyone is involved in making changes and that decisions are transparent and accountable.
8. Finally, make the process enjoyable and tap into people’s enthusiasm. Passion will help keep the project afloat even when it is faced with challenges. Even though this seems like a long list, try not to get bogged down by too many rules, and don’t forget to have fun!

This list is adapted from The Urban Commons Cookbook, a handbook for those interested in starting and growing community-led projects which highlights eight projects from Europe, South America, and the United Kingdom. It outlines the growth of their projects, the challenges they faced, and the methods they employed to surmount them. Want to know more? Get your own copy of The Urban Commons Cookbook here.

Additional stories in this series

• Bike Kitchen Bratislava: A bike hire co-op powered by the sharing economy

• The Kalkbreite: Participative housing planning in Zurich

• Holzmarkt Berlin: Balancing creative freedom, economic survival, and bottom-up urban development

• Düsselgrün: An urban commons in the heart of Düsseldorf

• Commons and crises: Community resilience from feudal Europe to today

The post Shared lessons and challenges from urban commons around the world appeared first on Shareable.

Tomas describes it this way: “Our project started with three or four people. In the beginning, we were basically just doing flea markets with bicycles. We repaired old bikes and did one-day events with film screenings or concerts. During that period, we had a very small space. Then, through the participatory budget in Bratislava, we had the possibility to use some space in a building owned by the municipality. After we moved into this space, things became more formalized: we started to meet every Wednesday, to invite friends and to cook together, and to repair bicycles, of course.” As the co-op formalized, word began to spread and the initiative began to grow. It was spurred on in part by the large number of exchange students in the city.

“What really empowered us was the connection with the students in Bratislava. They wanted to move around by bike and didn’t want to spend money on public transportation. They were used to cycling, especially the Germans and people from other developed cycling countries. They came to us and we said, OK, we have some bikes, and we can repair your bikes, but you have to cook dinner for us. And so, in return for repairing or lending them bikes, they cooked really great specialties from all around the world for us.” The Bike Kitchen provided a way to connect community and mobility in a new way which felt very natural to the initiators. “For us, the connection between food and bicycles is very obvious, because the first thing you really need in this world is food and the second one is a bike, right? Food really connects communities – it’s inclusive – and so are bikes,” Tomas said.

For us, the connection between food and bicycles is very obvious, because the first thing you really need in this world is food and the second one is a bike, right? Food really connects communities – it’s inclusive – and so are bikes.

As interest began to grow, so did the Bike Kitchen. In 2014, the initiators started the White Bikes program, a cooperative bike sharing platform based around an open source software and a credit system. What started as a group of friends sharing 50 bikes around the city has now grown to more than 800 users. Over time, they have developed a nearly self-sustaining system. “When somebody wants to join the White Bikes, we have a face-to-face meeting and decide if it fits,” said Tomas. “We do 20 minutes of training with new users and we ask them what kind of support they can offer for improving the system, or for helping the cycling community or environmental community in Bratislava.” These users’ potential contributions are fed into a database of volunteers: “The database is categorized by the possible types of support. So, if we are organizing an event and need a graphic designer, we look at the list of graphic designers and illustrators and ask them who can help. If someone doesn’t know what kind of support he or she can offer us, it’s also fine. We always need people who can carry stuff or who have a driver’s license or who can bring food for breakfast on cycling days.”

Unlike many for-pay bike-sharing systems, the White Bikes are nearly self-sustaining, a result of design choices baked into the sharing system. “We have virtual credit: When you start to use the White Bikes, you get a credit of, let’s say, 20 points, and if you use the bike for more than one hour then you lose one point, so you have 19 credit points left. If the user doesn’t bring back the bike or locks it badly or whatever, we subtract extra credit points. When that person has zero credit points, he or she is not able to rent anymore. Of course, they get a notification before. It’s possible to earn new credit points by cleaning bikes or riding them back to where they are needed, for example. This makes the system almost self-sustainable, which is very rare,” Tomas said.

Cooperation has always played an important role in their project and is a central theme in everything they do. The members and volunteers cooperate to engage in advocacy for bike mobility and cyclist safety and to support events and keep the project going. Bike Kitchen Bratislava as a project is active in a range of initiatives and NGOs in Slovakia that focus on environmental or urban topics, in particular the largest national NGO on cycling, Cycling Coalition Bratislava. Cooperation also allowed them to start the White Bikes program because the bikes were a donation from the Dutch National Park through a local arm of the Rotary Club.

The project faces a range of challenges from limited-term leases on their space to a lack of strong support from the municipality. However, as Tomas points out, these challenges also serve to help bolster motivation among the project’s members. Despite these challenges, the Bike Kitchen has a significant impact both locally and nationally. Locally, they organize protests and events around cycling and discussions about transport and mobility during mayoral election years to help keep the topic current and visible. But they see their main impact on a national scale: “I would call our project the center of the cycling movement for all of Slovakia. This is the place where you find all the information and all the inspiration and all the motivation for pushing the cycling culture forward. So I think the impact is really, really big. Our initiative connects everything,” said Tomas.

In the end, Tomas attributes the Bike Kitchen’s success to its concentration on its core values, such as anti-racism and anti-homophobia. “Values hold a community together. We are always presenting ours to the outside so that everybody knows what kind of people we are. That connects us and at the same time keeps away those people who are not so into the community stuff. We never hide our values; they are always our top priority,” he concluded.

Values hold a community together. We never hide our values; they are always our top priority.

This article is part of our series on the Urban Commons Cookbook.

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In 2007, the Kalkbreite cooperative won the competition to build housing over and around a streetcar depot in the center of Zurich. The project’s initiators had to be creative to plan quiet, high-quality living space above parked streetcars while experimenting with new spatial arrangements, living situations, and concepts of collectivity.

The Kalkbreite has moderate rents, innovative and flexible housing forms, and a resource-friendly, sufficiency-oriented vision. In practice, this means:

• There is less living space per person: 31.2 square meters (335.8 square feet) compared with the Zurich average of 39 square meters.
• Each household contributes the costs to support 0.8 square meters of common space like the cafeteria and sauna.
• As there was no space to build the parking spots mandated for new residential construction, new residents are required to sign an agreement to forgo car ownership (there are 500 bike parking spots).
• There are four commonly used rooms whose function is agreed by resident assent (for example a youth hangout or a gym).
• There are so-called “Wohnjoker” (residential joker) rooms with en-suite bathrooms scattered through the building. If current residents need to expand their living space temporarily, for example if an elderly parent comes to stay, they can rent this additional space for up to three years.
• There is a super-household, an association of 65 people, that runs a dining room and a kitchen, and cooks and eats together on weeknights.

To realize this project, participative planning was key — potential future users were involved in planning and decision-making from the beginning. Planning began very informally. From day one, the initiators stressed a transparent, inclusive approach. We spoke with Fred Frohofer, a Kalkbreite resident, to better understand the project’s vision.

Frohofer said the motto was “don’t plan behind closed doors, instead build trust through transparency.” During the construction phase, small teams were created to reach common decisions about topics from courtyard design to how to run meetings. To decouple this work from the right to an apartment, the initiators decided to pay group members 20 Swiss Francs (about 21 USD) per hour after their first 20 hours volunteered.

Today, working groups tend the community garden, maintain the workshop, and manage the cafeteria, while topical groups tackle issues like reducing resource use in the building. In addition, approximately 40 percent of the usable area is commercial space. This mix truly makes the Kalkbreite a city within the city, with shops, restaurants, a movie theater, a kindergarten, and much more. More than 250 people live in the apartments and around 200 people work in the commercial spaces.

To be eligible for an apartment, you must become a member of the cooperative, buy shares and pay the join fee. The money from the shares is used to pay the lease to the city (a legal restriction in Switzerland) and the join fee goes to a discretionary fund that is used for activities within and around the house. When an apartment becomes vacant, criteria including age, migration background, education level, and gender are applied to allocate it so that the mix of residents reflects the composition of Switzerland and Zurich. These rules are designed to prevent its resident mix from becoming homogenous — for example, all young, native Swiss families with university degrees. Frohofer said finding a match wasn’t a problem when the apartment next to his became free. “As there is a serious affordable housing shortage in Zurich, if a cooperative offers an apartment, there are usually plenty of applicants to choose from. We have always been able to find someone that fulfills all the criteria. For example, the apartment next to mine was recently rented. We were looking for a man over 50 who was not an academic and we found him! His name is Hans.”

Within the community, decisions are made by systemic consensus, not majority vote. Frohofer said: “A proposal is made and then the moderator asks if anyone has an objection. If there is one, we discuss it until we find a solution that’s acceptable for everybody. The most important thing is that you’re not just allowed to be against the measure, you have to say why you’re against it. It’s a very constructive way of making decisions.” Another important part of commoning is a solidarity fund: “A portion of everyone’s rent goes directly into that fund and if someone is broke and can’t pay his or her rent, he or she can use the fund. The fund is now even open to other cooperatives that also open theirs. So if one cooperative has too little money, one of the others helps out.”

But there are also sanctions in case people break the commonly agreed-upon rules. Frohofer refers to Elinor Ostrom’s eight rules for managing a commons and stresses that sanctions “have to be determined on a grassroots basis, of course, but before you start something, you should always talk about what happens if someone doesn’t stick to the rules.” For example, when the dishes went unwashed too often in the super-household, a meeting was called and it was agreed that anyone who doesn’t wash the dishes when it’s their turn has to pay 50 Swiss Francs (about 53 USD) into the discretionary fund; “And since then the dishes get done much more regularly, and when they don’t, we have a little extra disposable income,” Frohofer said.

Despite the challenges they’ve faced and things they might have done differently, Frohofer sees the Kalkbreite as an experiment others can learn from: “If something doesn’t work so well, we don’t hide it but provide advice for others how to do it better. The cooperative has been a big experiment from the beginning and we want others to benefit from that – both the things we get right and the things we don’t!”

Don’t plan behind closed doors, instead build trust through transparency.

Which ingredients of a cooperative community project most help it succeed? What are urban commons and how do they fit into current activist and practitioner debates? And what tools and methods do commoners need to strengthen their work? These are the three questions at the heart of The Urban Commons Cookbook, a handbook for those interested in starting and growing community-led projects which includes interviews about eight projects from Europe, South America, and the United Kingdom outlining the growth of their projects, the challenges they faced, and the methods they employed to surmount them. This series presents profiles of four of the projects.

This article is part of our series on the Urban Commons Cookbook.

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The year was 2007. The long-vacant spaces along the Spree River in the southern part of the Berlin district of Friedrichshain were populated by a range of intermediate cultural uses. Nightclubs such as Bar 25, YAAM, and Maria am Ostbahnhof flourished in former industrial buildings along the river banks predominantly owned by the city’s public works company.

But all that was about to change. These spaces were slated for a new investment project named MediaSpree, in which the entire neighborhood would be transformed into a glamorous new quarter for media and technology, lofts, and retail. It had been planned since the early years of Berlin’s reunification but various issues had delayed the project previously. As the plans were released and preparations made, coalitions were founded to protest the top-down nature of the planning and advocate for communities to give input on the design. They called for “Spreeufer für alle!” (Spree banks for everyone!). One result of these protests was a successful but non-binding popular referendum to the district which demanded that a 50m-wide (164ft) greenway along the banks remain unbuilt and publicly-accessible, that the overall building volume be reduced and reallocated, and that no high rises be part of the project. The second result was the founding of Holzmarkt Berlin, an experiment in low-density, citizen-led urban development.

The project, which is located at the former location of Bar 25 and was started by its former owners, initially faced a major challenge: the land that they wanted to continue using was sold by the city through a highest-bidder process. Benjamin Scheerbarth, a former project manager at Holzmarkt, who we spoke to for The Urban Commons Cookbook, said that process would usually be the end of the road for a creative and citizen-led project. Luckily, Holzmarkt was able to develop a concept and partner with the Swiss Abendrot Foundation, which bought the land and granted the organizers a long-term lease. It was through this coalition that they have been able to realize their vision for wooden architecture, low-density construction, and 100 percent unrestricted public access to the river bank.

Making this vision a reality has not been without stress, struggle, and the need for structure. One of the biggest challenges that the project faced after buying the land was mutual distrust between financial actors and the creative scene. To overcome this, Holzmarkt developed a framework of two cooperatives and one citizens’ association to be the legal entities in charge of management and development. These structures are co-dependent. The executive committee of one cooperative is part of the supervisory board of the other and vice versa. The cooperative structure was chosen to create a level playing field: each person has only one vote. In this way, a legal structure was chosen which the banks and the Abendrot Foundation would accept, but which also embodied the grassroots, democratic approach at the core of the project.

From its origin as a public movement, it has enjoyed continuing strong public support. Nowhere was this more obvious than at the groundbreaking. “Over the years, Holzmarkt has built up a big network of friends and supporters. On day one, there was no official groundbreaking; instead, everybody was invited to bring a plant and plant it here. More than a thousand people came!” said Scheerbarth.

To maintain authenticity and the experimental spirit of the project, the initiators chose unconventional approaches to development. Instead of trying to complete construction as soon as possible to offset the fixed costs such as rent, the initiators experimented with temporary uses as a way to pay the bills and create seed funding for incremental development. As Scheerbarth put it, “vacant land is an opportunity to create attractive spaces with little means,” which is a long tradition in Berlin’s subcultural scene.

During this phase, the project had to undergo an important transformation from their protest origins: organizers had to ask themselves not only what they were against but what they were in favor of, and make a proactive plan together with their network. But the intermediate and temporary aspects of their project have remained. “You need space, space to experiment, or even to move back one step and then move forward again. Never being finished is part of our identity, and this iterative process is fundamental to our work here,” Scheerbarth said.

A decade later, the space has been converted piece by piece into a lively urban village that is home to new ways of living and working, a large variety of alternative leisure and culture facilities, and free public access to the Spree. Holzmarkt has grown into a symbol for user-driven, bottom-up urban development in Berlin and internationally, drawing students, planners, and visitors from around the world. Much like the techno club Bar 25 before it, Holzmarkt has become a prime example of the creative, citizen-led projects which make the city so vibrant and are a draw for visitors and tourists alike.

Want to know more? Get your own copy of The Urban Commons Cookbook here.

This article is part of our series on the Urban Commons Cookbook.

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The initiative faced a range of challenges and questions as it developed and grew. None was more difficult than its relocation from an unused building lot to its current location in a public park near the main train station. The gardeners capitalized on their digital reach, strong network, and a well-timed election year to find a new place for their raised beds. Viktoria explained it this way: “The most important point for a community-based garden is to find an appropriate location – which means a safe, long-lasting, and accessible space where the project can develop. Finding such a place and negotiating with the City of Düsseldorf about how we want to use it commonly was a big challenge. But above and beyond that, it was a logistical challenge. How do you move a garden of raised beds, which weigh tons, when almost all of the members only have bicycles? What about the soil? The area we were moving to had been an industrial area. How are we going to get the quantity of soil that we need in the middle of the city? And that’s where our cooperations were really important – an organic farm from the local region helped us with tractors and donated soil. You don’t have to own everything yourself. Sometimes it’s enough to know someone who has the necessary tools or know-how.”

You don’t have to own everything yourself. Sometimes it’s enough to know someone who has the necessary tools or know-how.

When it became clear that their previous plot was to be developed, they got organized. They created a website and a Facebook page, designated one member to speak to the press when needed, started making press releases and engaged a range of media, including the local newspaper. “I think our digital visibility also played a big role in our success, in particular being able to gather support from outside,” Viktoria said. Simple things like having a website and a Facebook page meant that we suddenly had a large community behind us, and that helped us to reach the local media as well.” Through regular announcements in these channels, the gardeners were able to raise awareness on the political level for community-led cultural projects in the city and their risk of displacement through real-estate development. They even lobbied the mayoral candidates to include their cause in their platforms. In the end, with the help of the city, they were able to find a suitable new location in a public park near the central train station, a success that Viktoria attributes to their successful professionalization and activism during this phase.

Of course, such a central location also brings its own challenges. Like many urban gardening projects, they have had to face questions about the openness of both the garden and their initiative. How do you ensure that the spirit of openness, sharing, and commoning is truly reflected in your structures? One solution is by having your space be open 24-7. This was actually a stipulation of their new location but also a challenge. Thankfully, neighbors in the surrounding buildings keep an eye on the garden when the gardeners are not there. They also curbed unwanted behavior such as smoking by placing signs around the garden.

The question of openness extends to the initiative’s internal structures as well: How do you ensure monthly meeting attendance is as easy as possible and that newcomers feel truly welcome? At Düsselgrün, they rotate the weekday and time of the meeting each month so that those with conflicting regular appointments (such as sports classes) aren’t prevented from participating. They also made the decision to meet in a local association building rather than a member’s apartment. The initiative has to pay a small amount of rent to use this space but they say it makes new members and first-time attendees feel more comfortable and welcome. Finally, their decision-making structure gives more weight to those who have objections to a course of action, even if they are in the minority. Dissenters are given the floor and the group attempts to achieve consensus, rather than “voting over them” through majoritarian-style decision making.

Viktoria attributes the group’s success to the passion of those involved and having a fixed location with some security. “Through our activism and initiative we have managed to start a conversation about urban gardening in Düsseldorf that didn’t exist before – how important it is that citizens have the ability to shape the city themselves or the role that informal meeting spaces play in the social life of the city,” Viktoria said. “Cities can be pretty anonymous. A space like our garden offers the ability to meet other people, to learn, and to share knowledge, ideas, perspectives, and experiences. In my opinion, that is essential for becoming a more solidary society and a topic that is worth expanding on.”

Have the courage to start. Don’t let yourself get discouraged by the fact that there are lots of unknowns. The most important thing is to take the first step.

Which ingredients of a cooperative community project most help it succeed? What are urban commons and how do they fit into current activist and civil society debates? And what tools and methods do commoners need to strengthen their work? These are the three questions at the heart of The Urban Commons Cookbook, a handbook for those interested in starting and growing community-led projects which includes interviews with the leaders of eight projects in Europe, South America, and the United Kingdom outlining their growth, challenges, and how they surmounted them.

This article is part of our series on the Urban Commons Cookbook.

The post Düsselgrün: An urban commons in the heart of Düsseldorf appeared first on Shareable.

Commons have always been a buffer against shocks, improving the prospects of those most at risk. During the feudal era, free access to the commons meant survival for serfs and peasants because it gave them access to food and firewood not under the control of the region’s lord. Today, commons also represent a buffer against shocks and crises such as the global economic crisis and COVID-19 pandemic. When governments and markets break down or can’t respond fast enough, community projects step in to fill the need.

This is the first in a series examining the lessons found in the upcoming Urban Commons Cookbook, a handbook for people who are starting and growing community-led projects. The book includes interviews with activists from eight projects in Europe, South America, and the United Kingdom, outlining the growth of their projects, the challenges they faced, and how they overcame them. This article examines the historical development of the commons from its feudal origins to the coronavirus pandemic.

From feudal commons to austerity

In Medieval Europe, large tracts of undeveloped land were held in collective ownership. On these parcels, known as the commons, serfs and peasants had free access to firewood, peat, fruits, berries, and wild game. This system persisted for centuries and acted as an important survival mechanism against bad harvests, overly zealous taxes, and other threats to peasants’ survival. This system fundamentally changed with the enclosure acts of the 1800s, which literally put a fence around the commons, privatizing what was once communal and reserving these once freely accessible natural resources for the elites. The enclosure acts were a major factor in the industrialization and urbanization of Europe, especially the UK. The acts destabilized the agrarian economy, pushing peasants into cities and a growing number of factory jobs.

Fast forward through two centuries of labor activism and two world wars. In the postwar era, the so-called “welfare state” ensured the survival of those most at risk in the UK, the US, and Europe — at least in theory. State-run healthcare, unemployment, welfare, and other programs now served a commons-like function for the industrialized workforce: they ensured the survival and resilience of those most at risk. Rather than providing food and firewood, they provided the safety net essential for the new workforce.

In the 1980s, conservative politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan moved to privatize and cut government funding for welfare programs in what were called austerity measures. Many safety-net programs were privatized and dismantled, thereby losing their commons-like function. Over the course of the 1990s, services were pared back in parallel to the vast growth in wealth inequality.

Urban commons have become a way to secure affordable access to resources, a measure to build community resilience, and a rallying cry against the waves of privatization and financialization that continue apace, most prominently in growing cities.

Urban commons fill the gap left by government

Out of this bleak situation, a new type of project began to emerge which is nonprofit-oriented, prosocial, and run by the people who benefit from it: urban commons. Urban commons projects in cities go by many names, including grassroots activities, community action, or citizen-led projects. Despite these varying descriptions, urban commons projects are united by four key characteristics:

1. Resources are managed by the users through a prosocial and participatory process called “commoning.”
2. Projects also focus on a resource’s use-value — the practical, everyday value of the resource for its users — instead of treating it as a commodity from which profit can be derived.
3. Residents address their own perceived desires and co-produce solutions to urban issues that are important to them, from housing to wireless internet.
4. They rely on intangible resources such as social capital and also actively build these within their communities.

Urban commons emerged as an alternative to state and market offerings as a result of both the absence of the state and market (“citizen self-help”) and the overbearing presence of the state and market (resistance to enclosures resulting from commodification, financialization, or new legal circumstances), which had, in turn, both been exacerbated by the neoliberal policies of the 1970s and 80s. However, it took a major shock to the system — the global financial crisis — to bring the accrued effects of decades of austerity and privatization into sharp focus, along with the projects that had emerged to buffer against them.

Urban commons and the global financial crisis

At the end of the 2000s, the global financial crisis sent shockwaves through the global economy, resulting in widespread austerity measures and the rollback of public goods and services. Urban commons sprung up as both emancipatory and self-help measures. Commoners planted vegetables in abandoned lots and tended overgrown public parks. They offered community healthcare and developed new housing alternatives for victims of foreclosure. In short, they stepped in to help the most vulnerable who would in previous decades have had access to government-led safety-net programs.

These new austerity measures and the fallout of the financial crisis exacerbated two situations which had been developing in the background for some time: the housing affordability crisis and the privatization of municipal assets and services. On the one hand, market offerings, most notably in the housing market, increasingly failed to serve those with lower and middle incomes. At the same time, state-led offerings in cities had been pared down through years of entrepreneurial city tactics, which had gradually jettisoned municipal housing, municipal land ownership, public utilities, and public services, privatizing these through sales or outsourcing. Against this backdrop, urban commons became a way to secure affordable access to resources, a measure to build community resilience, and a rallying cry against the waves of privatization and financialization that continue apace, most prominently in growing cities.

Urban commons projects put the power back in the hands of those affected by decisions, a welcome alternative to dependence on the market and state. Furthermore, urban commons provide a new form of security against shocks by allowing the dynamic, nonprofit-oriented management of resources by users. Management is based on community needs and use-value, not profit margins or stock prices. In addition, having relatively small project sizes in large numbers means the overall system of commons is more resilient. When the projects are networked, they can also offer solidarity in times of need, further increasing the resilience of the overall system.

COVID-19: A new case for the commons

Urban commons are fertile ground for social resilience.  They build trust, connection, social capital, and community, intangible community resources which are critical for being able to effectively respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects. The qualities inherent to commons projects – solidarity, empathy, and collectivity — are precisely what is needed to prevent social isolation and maintain a vital sense of community despite social distancing. Furthermore, from porch food drops to homemade PPE, 3D-printed ventilator parts, and crowdsourced solidarity funds, the commons and the community they engender once again represent a buffer against shocks. Urban commons are at the front line of community needs, once again acting to lessen immediate damage and helping preserve the communities that we have come to rely on so that we are even more resilient next time.

About The Urban Commons Cookbook

Which ingredients of a cooperative community project most help it succeed? What are urban commons and how do they fit into current activist and civil society debates? And what tools and methods do commoners need to strengthen their work? These are the three questions at the heart of The Urban Commons Cookbook, a handbook for those interested in starting and growing community-led projects.

The post Commons and crises: Community resilience from feudal Europe to today appeared first on Shareable.