the commons

How might the commons paradigm be applied to cities in a more focused, effective way?  To find some answers, I recently interviewed two leading thinkers and advocates for urban commons, Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione.

A crash course in the work of political economist Elinor Ostrom, who championed the commons and communal governance as practical frameworks.

Much of the discussion on open source's relevance to cooperatives has focused on open, permissive licenses that represent a 'digital commons' (possibly at risk of appropriation). But debate over licensing misses an essential and unique quality of open source: its democratic toolset which is much more sophisticated than resolutions and Annual General Meetings.

It is now abundantly clear that the world we have inherited is no longer working, And yet there are many hopeful signs of people imagining and building a different type of future.

This interview digs into the oligopoly control of academic publishing, the high prices of academic journals and books, the lack of choices among many scientists and scholars, the limited leadership of university administrations, and some open-access innovations now being developed.

In the 1970s, the accepted environmental thinking was that overpopulation was destroying the earth. Prominent economists and environmentalists agreed that the only way to stem the tide was to impose restrictions on how we used resources, such as land, water, and fish, from either the free market or the government. This notion was upended by Elinor Ostrom, whose work to show that regular people could sustainably manage their community resources eventually won her the Nobel Prize. Ostrom’s revolutionary proposition fundamentally changed the way we think about environmental governance.

We discuss how software is a commons, what the cooperative movement can learn from Silicon Valley, and how cooperative tech projects can scale up.

Peter Linebaugh on the history of the commons.

Urban researcher Nikos Vrantsis interviews Yavor Tarinski, author of Common Futures: Social Transformation and Political Ecology, on the current bureaucratic state of cities and the democratic perspectives offered by autonomous urban movements. 

Agrarian Trust has started ten Agrarian Commons in the US, in an attempt to make community-supported, collectively stewarded farmland available to younger farmers