Urban Commoning in Europe
The newly created Office for Communal Action is interested in the possible (and impossible) overlaps between urban commons and municipalist political processes and the specific practices that sustain them.On the one hand, we are witnessing an emergence of commoning projects reclaiming the capacity to transform the governance of the territories they are rooted in. On the other, urban commons have been identified as a central component of the municipalist political hypothesis. This mapping aims to determine the elements and characteristics that make these processes replicable and scalable. That is, to identify principles and protocols needed to expand and strengthen commoning practices across different fields and territorial scales.
New experiences of the common government of urban spaces, public services and basic needs such as water and energy have an indispensable potential for democratising local municipal management and transforming our environments.
In recent years, the political hypothesis of the commons has been proposed as one of the ways to stop the enclosure of the resources necessary for collective life by financial capitalism and for the sake of economic development based on the exploitation of the planet’s resources – material and immaterial. New experiences of the common government of urban spaces, public services and basic needs such as water and energy have an indispensable potential for democratising local municipal management and transforming our environments. This context leads us to rethink the models of decision-making and participation in the municipal sphere, promoting new frameworks of collaboration, co-decision and confrontation between public administrations and citizen organisations.
Answering the question: "which commons?" allows us to rethink their institutional frameworks concerning the communal sphere.
Within this framework, this mapping aims to identify European experiences framed within a political, ecological and institutional perspective on the conditions of production and reproduction of the urban commons. Answering the question: “which commons?” allows us to rethink their institutional frameworks concerning the communal sphere. Among the diversity of projects, agents, fields of study and ontological definitions that deal with commons, we are interested in those emerging urban commons, contested spaces that have been recovered from the public-state or private-mercantile space and that for their development, continuity or mere existence require a relationship with some institutional framework, especially at the local level. Our hypothesis is that far from mere forms of economic asset management, urban commons can be powerful processes for transforming urban life and radically democratising the public sphere. The commons understood, therefore, as a way of broadening the political – not only the legal or technical – decision-making framework