Diversity and Challenges of the Urban Commons

Introduction

  • The urban commons has garnered increased attention in both practical and academic spheres over the last decade.
  • Urban commons are defined as shared tangible, intangible, or digital resources within a city.
  • They contribute to individual and collective well-being, with their degradation seen as a loss.
  • Built upon social dynamics like participation, collective action, and self-organization, reflected in the term "commoning": the collective creation, usage, and management of commons.
  • The city acts as a complex ecosystem with interconnected places, people, and infrastructure, all governed by institutions.
  • Urban commons emerge and evolve through the interaction of elements within the urban ecosystem.
  • These interactions lead to shared understandings through repeated encounters and practices, which in turn facilitate social learning, a vital component for adaptation.
  • Various studies emphasize the potential of urban commons to enhance urban resilience.
  • While socio-ecological and socio-technical networks influence urban adaptability, the current focus in resilience thinking is on social-ecological resilience, prioritizing adaptability over robustness.
  • Examining urban commons through the lens of its socio-ecological components proves valuable, especially for practitioners concerned with the longevity of their initiatives.
  • Despite diverse fields addressing urban commons, there is a lack of comprehensive investigation into its diversity and the internal/external factors influencing access, use, and management.
  • This review aims to provide a state-of-the-art overview of the diversity in urban commons, highlighting the benefits they offer to cities and the challenges that this emerging field presents, thereby setting the stage for future research agendas.

Theoretical Lens on the Urban Commons

Common, Commons, and Commoning

  • Three terms are distinguished:
    • Common: Describes shared tangible and symbolic resources on which humankind can coexist (natural resources to digital assets).
      • It represents a societal transformation outlook that involves mutual sharing and collaboration practices.
    • Commons: (Singular noun) Refers to mutual goods resulting from institutional dynamics and arrangements based on the common.
      • Under specific conditions, it resembles common-pool resources, characterized by non-excludability and rivalry, along with social value or utility.
      • It can manifest in various forms with different ownership regimes.
    • Commoning: The practice connecting a resource to its local community of users, thus producing the commons.
      • Multiple scholars link the commons to property relationships, while commoning is seen as a process transcending property and capital issues.
      • Commoning becomes a creative force, potentially generating new forms of urban spatiality.
  • The commons is defined as a system comprising a resource, its users, governing institutions, and associated processes.
  • The term urban commons presents a paradox.
    • Historically, commoners displaced from common lands became city dwellers.
    • Living in cities with wage labor, they contributed to capitalism, which contrasts with commoning.
    • The urban commons is produced by the collective practice of commoning, aimed at governing essential resources within a predominantly capitalist setting.
    • Increased urban cultural diversity leads to the urban commons incorporating multiple motivations and forms, many belonging to the new commons.

The Commons Map

  • Hess (2008) categorizes the commons across sectors:
    • Cultural
    • Knowledge
    • Markets
    • Global
    • Traditional
    • Infrastructure
    • Neighborhood
    • Medical and health commons.
  • These "new commons" encompass a full range of commons types, notably considering digital technologies.
  • Urban commons spans across these sectors, bridging tangible and intangible aspects.
  • Each sector is comprised of various types of commons, with most sectors relevant in the urban setting.
  • Two concepts were added to Hess’s classification, as they were missing but highlighted in the initial literature:
    • "Parks and Greenery" in the neighborhood commons sector (mentioned by 30 articles).
      • Too specific to belong to the traditional commons sector, they play a significant role in neighborhood life.
    • "Experts Knowledge" within the knowledge sector (addressed in 20 articles).
      • Characterizes the formation and spread of commoning initiatives in the urban context
  • Several new commons types were not encountered in the corpus (indicated in light font in Figure 1).
  • The neighborhood commons type relating to the homeless was renamed homeless habitat.
  • The adaptation illustrates the diversity of the urban commons.

Property

  • More attention is needed on the diversity and access rules of urban commons (restricted or shared access).
  • Urban commons exist on both public and private land due to specific property-regimes and access rules.
  • The leading theory mentioned about property-rights regarding the commons is about property rights bundles.
  • Property rights bundles (Schlager & Ostrom, 1992): It spreads the possible rights (access, withdrawal, management exclusion, alienation) across diverse key positions (owner, proprietor, claimant, authorized user, authorized entrant).
  • The enforcement of these property rights bundles is done through property rights regimes:
    • Open-access regime (res nullius): No-one can be excluded unless by prohibitive costs (e.g. urban biodiversity).
    • State property regime: the property is owned by the state in the name of all citizens (e.g. Central park in New York).
    • Common property regime: the property is owned by a group of individuals (e.g. R-Urban strategy in the Paris area).
    • Private-property regime: the property is owned by a private owner or a group of legal owners (e.g. collective use of private yards in Minneapolis, privately-leased land in Sydney harbour).
  • Rose (1996) distinguishes between public property:
    • Good owned/managed by government body.
    • Good collectively owned by society.
  • Defining public space is not binary (ownership/no ownership) but a blend of rights.
  • All property rights bundles and regimes may coexist in a given urban commons, as rights and responsibilities are spread across actors interacting with the commons.
  • The commoners’ criteria of exclusion/inclusion condition the openness of a given commons.
  • The distinctions guide the analysis of our corpus.

Methodology

Justification of the Review

  • The urban commons appears in many fields of research.
  • After social sciences, environmental sciences and urban studies fields, engineering and computer sciences account for around 11% of our corpus articles, reflecting the importance of digital communication technologies in the contemporary urban commons.
  • The diverse fields suggest a multiplicity of the urban commons.
  • An urban system is complex: its components exist in interaction with others and under many externalities.
  • Urban commons initiatives do not necessarily affect one another directly, but knowledge is built through additions and exchanges of information.
  • The knowledge about the urban commons is built on inputs from multiple science fields and practice, based on past experience, reason, and testimony.
  • Therefore, an assemblage thinking approach is taken.
  • Originally developed in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980), the approach has since allowed taking a wider perspective in social complexity studies (DeLanda, 2006).
  • Assemblage thinking is “a mode of relational thinking that approaches an object of interest, and theorizes about it, not as a pre-existing whole (an essence) but as a whole emerging from the coming together of heterogeneous, co-existing and co-functioning components that creates agency, an assemblage” (University of the Aegean, 2017).
  • The “known” of the urban commons is forged by the “knower”.
  • With the assemblage approach, we embrace the heterogeneity projected above in a transparent process towards the “known”.

Method of Analysis of the Urban Commons Literature

  • The urban commons is studied under the lens of Hess’s adapted map to build an assemblage of knowledge.
  • In a first search using Google Scholar, keyword synonyms are isolated with the notion of urban commons for further article selection: “urban green commons”, “urban ecological commons”, “cultural commons” and “digital commons”.
    • The last two expressions must be linked to the keywords city or urban.
  • A snow-ball search is then performed in Scopus, WebOfScience and Proquest’s ABI/INFORM database, to only select relevant peer-reviewed publications.
  • The initial corpus is selected by browsing all peer-reviewed articles with abstracts or titles containing the exact expression “urban commons”, or recurrent synonyms of urban commons as found through Google Scholar.
  • After including the additional keywords in the initial query, ensuring they are meant in an urban context and removing the possible duplicates, a total of 167 results from Scopus, WebOfScience and Proquest (ABI/INFORM) are obtained, spanning from 1979 to 2019.
  • The analysis is built on a theoretically recognizable 2-dimensional structure.
    • Given the potential of the urban commons to trigger adaptive capacities, the first dimension follows a framing that is often used to evaluate adaptive and collaborative resource management systems (Conley & Moote, 2003; Plummer & Armitage, 2007) with three components: ecosystem, socio-economic and institutional factors.
    • The second dimension categorizes results across three practical characteristics: benefits for cities or communities, challenges and what can support the urban commons.

The Urban Commons in Practice

  • Table 1 provides a roadmap of the literature review analysis.
  • The number of research articles which refer to each argument are mentioned in [brackets] in the coming subsections.
  • The detailed count is accessible in appendix 3.

Urban Commons Types

  • All new commons sectors in Hess’s typology are almost equally represented in the urban commons discourse (details in appendix 2), exceptions made for a minority of infrastructure commons, markets as commons and medical health commons.
    • Those are generally public services under the responsibility of the welfare state.
    • As for the Market Commons, there are only few cases of locally made goods being sold, exchanged or gifted: shopping centres, Smart City initiatives, free space or products.
  • Most of the urban commons are generated and used by the community itself, crediting our initial intention of observing the socio-ecological processes of the urban commons.
  • The four new commons types most recurring in the urban context, after literature analysis, are:
    • Land use and tenure,
    • Indigenous culture,
    • Parks and greenery,
    • Peer production of knowledge.
  • From the predominance of land use and tenure in literature (76 studies in our corpus), we can infer that space is a key resource for commoning in the city.
    • It is the primary tangible commons in cities, from which other commons directly derive: agriculture, parks, housing, education or infrastructure.
    • It is the resource most affected by property-rights regimes.
    • Given the growing urbanisation and the saturation of urban space, we can understand to what extent the subsistence of a tangible urban commons is dependent on the availability of urban spaces.
  • Indigenous culture belongs to the cultural commons and describes the lifestyle of urban citizens and their concerns for livelihood, which are the means to secure the necessities of life, and for alternatives to consumerist urban lifestyles.
  • Parks and greenery are associated with a quest for well-being, through recreational activities or connection to nature.
  • Peer production of knowledge is a global term which often applies to digital technologies (Wi-Fi, online platforms) through which knowledge can be generated and shared among community users (e.g., Cantone et al., 2014).
    • Art dissemination is another example of exchanged knowledge.

Benefits

Socio-economic factors

Livelihood support
  • This is a recurrent argument not only in developing countries, but also in developed countries when it comes to urban farming, gardening and some cultural practices.
  • The urban commons provides populations with means of subsistence [66]: agriculture, fishing, irrigation, sacred practices, household uses.
  • Additionally, 12 studies reported the health benefits of commoning: through the de-pollution role of green spaces or through the positive effect of recreation in urban spaces on physical and mental health.
Recreation
  • The urban commons provides opportunities for recreation [19], connection with nature [18] and a global positive feeling [12].
Identity
  • Commoning helps create both an individual and collective sense of identity: a social consciousness and system of values built progressively around experiences shared by different individuals [58].
  • It gives communities a way to deal with societal crises by triggering social resilience, which is the ability of social entities to cope with and adjust to environmental, political or social threats.
  • Commoning additionally provides a strong sense of community empowerment [62].
  • For example, Community Land Trust housing projects include citizens in the development and construction phases.
  • Commoning is seen as a way to express or claim one’s civic rights not only as an individual but also as a community.
  • The gained autonomy gives the chance to shape products and services which best fit the community’s interests.
  • A key component for this are the democratic values which commoning promotes [56].
  • The urban commons represents place-making opportunities [40] for citizens.
  • Places are claimed or re-used in a way which fits a community’s needs.
  • Examples of this include meeting places, gardening lots, housing through squats or street contestation movements such as Occupy, Squares Movement, Indignados or Nuit Debout.
  • These places also represent an opportunity for social integration [44], cultural diversity [45], education [35] and co-production [28].
  • They allow the expression of values such as mutual care, confidence, solidarity and a sense of security.
Economy
  • The urban commons can help increase or create economic value in the neighbourhoods [23], through the provision of goods and services.
  • The socio-economic context is usually a strong motivation for commoning [40], such as economic crises, housing crises or the welfare state drawback.
  • In the case of economic depression, urban disinvestment, decay and fiscal cuts can happen, eventually leading to insufficiently maintained public parks and a weak provision of social goods: this is the welfare state drawback.
  • This phenomenon fuels the urban commons, as a replacement either bottom-up, such as in Cape Town, or through local politicians’ initiatives, such as in Berlin after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
  • Subsidiarity enables the local government to delegate some of its responsibilities to the citizens in order to provide lacking goods and services.
  • Opportunities also emerge from innovation and economic development, such as with the booming of information technologies through which the digital commons spreads.

Institutional factors

  • No direct institutional benefits of the urban commons were identified in our corpus.
  • However, some factors described in Section 3.2.1 may contribute to shaping, improving or renewing institutions: e.g. empowerment, identity building and place-making.

Ecosystem factors

  • The urban commons provides major ecosystem services such as greenery-driven climate regulation [13], urban biodiversity preservation [18], soil fertility upkeep and air, water and noise pollution reduction [18].
  • In addition to nurturing community empowerment and social production, the urban commons seems to provide all the ecosystem services types identified by the Resilience Alliance report:
    • Provisioning: the urban commons provides products and goods.
    • Regulating and supporting: the urban commons involving greenery can regulate cities’ pollution and the risk of natural hazards, and support the preservation of biodiversity and soil fertility.
    • Cultural: the urban commons often favours identity, cultural diversity, spirituality and recreation.
  • Numerous studies have mentioned that the urban commons supports resilience within urban communities [24].

Challenges

Socio-economic factors

Political critique
  • A large part of our corpus contributes to the critique of neo-liberalism [55]: socio-economic mechanisms are viewed as driven by the interests of global finance capital, rather than by the interests of the society or, more generally, human rights.
  • Neo-liberalism affects in many ways the urban commons: resource enclosure [49], privatisation [49], commodification [27], gentrification, displacements [22] and alienation [21].
  • These serve as an argument for commoners to claim spaces in the city and reverse neo-liberalism.
  • In some cases, the enclosure or social exclusion may result from the commoning activities themselves to ensure their functioning.
Social tensions
  • A high potential for exclusion of specific users or groups of users exists [24], particularly in contexts or urban land congestion.
  • The exclusion rule may originate from the commoners themselves, the local government or planners.
  • Access to the commons needs to be restricted in order to ensure a certain quality or target usage of the commons.
  • Interests and uses of a commons may also evolve over time, eventually leading to urban redevelopments and exclusions of past users.
  • This occurs especially in developing countries, where traditional communities depending on natural resources for livelihood become excluded when the land is redeveloped into a recreation area, with potential pollution issues arising.
  • It is often wealthier populations who benefit from the redevelopments at the expense of the urban poor (e.g. Baviskar, 2011).
  • This phenomenon is one of the main arguments of the critical discourse on smart cities and, more generally, on market-driven developments: the conversion of commons spaces into private or public spaces, usually implying an ecological loss and the intervention of external funding and speculation, hinders marginalised populations and has unclear sustainability achievements.
  • However, it is also argued that no-one can be excluded from the commons, because it belongs not only to its immediate users, the commoners, but also to its potential future users; commoners become caretakers or guests of the commons.
  • The boundaries of the urban commons, somewhat porous, are not always as clearly defined as those from the commons described by Ostrom, and therefore can be contested.
  • Another source of social tensions, which can also lead to exclusions, is the diverse cultures existing [31] and divergent interests or views [28], potentially causing conflicts.
  • Post-socialist countries witness a double discourse about the urban commons: it is conceived either for a collective or for a more conservative use.
  • Social tensions may also result from an uneven distribution of resources or power [20], amplified by the issue of contested or unclear boundaries, mentioned above.
  • Regarding institutions, the local governments are still perceived as the “ultimate sovereign”.
  • In modern Western societies, commoning may hardly be considered as a total emancipation from authorities and market, since both state and market are strongly woven into cities.
  • However, control does not always come from local governments and can be exerted up to a certain extent by a minority of users, such as in club goods or private organisations.
Values
  • Values are often put forward as a challenge [33].
  • The social norms built by our modern society may contradict with the values required to care for the urban commons.
  • Primary and secondary education [3], for example, lack basic instruction about food production systems and sovereignty, which could drive citizens to join community gardens.
  • This type of education supports a socio-cultural change favorable to re-evaluate the urban commons (Grabkowska, 2018), and trigger resilience thinking (Petrescu et al. 2016).
  • The lack of rooting or common norms is another downforce.
  • This can originate from policies oriented towards only individual incentives (e.g. home-ownership, median income) without considering collective efficacy (O’Brien 2012).
  • In addition, needs and norms evolve, as visible in the differentiated effects of urbanisation on urban communities.
  • Lastly, the urban commons can lack incentives [26] to attract or maintain its community.
  • The reasons are multiple and relate to values or to the socio-ecological context.
  • Lack of experience with commonality, lack of interest, no individual material or ownership benefit, unattractive degraded resources, lack of recognition or the absence of life-threatening conditions.
  • We could summarise these issues with: “everyone’s responsibility is no-one’s responsibility”.
  • Several scholars in our corpus insist on the importance of not looking at individual incentives per se, rather at their interaction with local customs and regulations.
  • By doing so, they highlight a context specificity in collective-action problems.
Financial viability
  • The urban commons suffers from financial instability [22].
  • Institutional protection, source of direct or indirect financial help, seldom happens, either by disinterest [7] or distrust [17] of the state towards commoning.
  • In this case, the commons often goes underground, making it less visible to the authorities, but also to citizens.
  • This increases the financial burden on the existing commoners, especially when land needs to be rented or purchased.
  • While legal barriers to subsidies need more investigation, recent research proposes to focus more on socio-economic concerns and contradictions within the community, to prevent control aversion situations.
Knowledge
  • Knowledge, from science or practice, generally acts as a support of the urban commons.
  • However, 25 articles discuss certain issues relating to knowledge retention by private actors, by software proprietary systems or within governed/governing partnerships.
  • Beside the problem of missing data, there is a risk of knowledge bias which may threaten the understanding of the interactions between society and the governance of a given commons.
  • Urban communities may struggle with knowledge re-appropriation, for example about the personal narratives in the neighbourhood, about DIY network technology or about urban food production systems, the knowledge of which has been externalised for a long time.
  • A second challenge regarding knowledge is that data management may be unsatisfactory, eventually leading to non-reliable or incomplete user-generated knowledge, or to a non-inclusive use of spaces, as in the case of cultural heritage sites in Cyprus.
  • Better designs of information flows can facilitate collective action.
  • Communication challenges occur: e-participation can suffer from too many users or superficial interactions, a lack of exchanges between the various actors and the unequal access to IT resources.
  • Communication quality also alters the image given of the urban commons to the public or to the authorities, and therefore influences their support of the initiative.

Institutional factors

Governance
  • A lack of institutional support is often described, through the difficulties to reach and maintain collaboration and polycentricity [34].
  • Several institutional challenges potentially hinder the urban commons: a weak internal structure [20] can make it more vulnerable to changes of purpose imposed by the local political context.
  • This weak structure may be a choice to stay open and allow possibilities of coexistence, or “compossibilities”.
  • Oppositely, a commons can struggle with rigid institutions [16]: these persist over time not taking into account circumstances which could, otherwise, make the commons more adaptive.
  • This occurs through static urban design or bureaucratic stalling.
  • Institutions may also be flagged as non-effective [15]: young and weak democratic structures, improper implementation of governmental protection plans or of property rights and the incapacity to prevent speculative real estate in case of city bankruptcy.
  • In the case of Central Park in New York, a badly managed public space leads to the formation of safe “socio-spatial bubbles” intended for the elite and bourgeoisie.
  • The last two institutional issues are over-regulation [6], for example through monopolies, and fragmented institutions.
  • Ironically, giving people roles disempowers them: instead of taking direct action, they tend to only make decisions.
  • A hierarchical division of responsibilities may lead to ignore the potential of citizens.
  • An excessive enforcement of cultural and institutional conventions, including public order and safety, may result in the formation of “atmospheric walls” which segregate the population, thereby diminishing the commoning possibilities.
  • Finding the appropriate level of autonomy [19] regarding the local authorities represents another difficulty: while some initiatives struggle to secure formal recognition [26], others enjoy a fruitful partnership with local authorities, which could turn into exacerbated inequalities or co-optation by the state.
  • In the latter case, the project is integrated in the agenda of a political party or of an NGO at the cost of its autonomy.
  • A major form of control exerted over commoning practices is the granting of short-term land leases rather than ownership for the group of commoners.
  • Such partnerships could restrict the freedom of action only to what benefits the government, meaning a partial or total loss of autonomy.
  • Commoning practices often lack the authority to enforce their internal rules, such as sanctioning which may happen through municipal enforcement only.
  • This points to the issue of accountability [11]: commoners lack the institutional legal support which could help them make better decisions and ensure a good use of the resources.
  • The issue closely relates to legitimacy.
  • However, according to several commons critical thinkers, the creation of proper commons strongly relies on the involvement of the state.
  • A commons also undergoes external pressures, with governments acting distrustfully towards individuals.
  • A government may act distrustfully towards individuals, for example through controlling a part of a city’s population by inhibiting popular uses of space.
  • In a post 9/11 world, States tend to tolerate fewer groups that act collectively outside known institutional frameworks.
  • Sanitary reasons may also be evoked as a reason to hinder commoning, as we have witnessed during the 2020 pandemic.
  • The inhibition is performed through institutions such as “vigilante” monitoring in Paris, police patrolling, evictions of squatters, stalled procedures for stigmatised populations and internet surveillance.
Land availability and accessibility
  • In a dense urban habitat, there is usually limited land availability [21].
  • High development pressure [20] drives challenges such as the commodification of space, strict definition of property and competition with financial activities.
  • Urban commons may even threaten each other.
  • The commons is often considered as “res nullius”, which is the open-access property regime, as much unassigned as any other form of wasteland.
  • Local governments may use this argument to appropriate these lands.
  • 37 studies mention struggles with property rights, one of which is access: social reproduction, for example with urban agriculture, requires access to resources such as water, waste and sewage.
  • The management of these property rights affects the commons, for example through street use regulation, and may drive exclusionary regimes.
  • For these reasons, it is often proposed to restructure the property rights in place.
Scale
  • Scale is the last significant institutional challenge, expressed through the problems of size [8].
  • Larger groups may be chaotic and smaller groups, although more convivial, can have an insufficient number of actors for effective stewardship of the commons.
  • Scaling-up requires additional levels of bureaucracy, which can fence off most initiatives.

Ecosystem factors

  • The urban commons faces urbanisation [25], i.e. the expansion and densification of the urban territory.
  • Densification and resource over-consumption are the two major identified tragedies of the urban commons.
  • They can be linked to the weak management of spaces by the authorities, also called regulatory slippage.
  • Urbanisation also has consequences in terms of land use change, degradation or pollution and encroachment.
  • In India, unplanned urbanisation may irreversibly destroy peri-urban natural areas.
  • In other cases, speculation and short-term individual gains exert pressure on urban land: in smart cities, the commons tends to be converted into public or private goods under a technocratic use of the term resilience, in a more corporation-driven and capitalist perspective.
  • Newer land uses, turned towards recreation, Special Economic Zones or renewed transport infrastructure, also diminish the urban commons.
  • A general consequence of urbanisation is pollution, which for example in India directly affects the urban green commons.
  • Urbanisation is also a driver of space saturation which causes competition, harmful to the urban commons.
  • Regarding the biodiversity discourse, one study questioned the adequation of urban vegetation and legal zoning: plant mobility indeed crosses the existing parcels boundaries, which may require additional framing of the urban green commons.

Supporting the Urban Commons

Socio-economic factors

Socio-cultural background
  • Opportunities span across several aspects: civic and well-being concerns, shared norms, a pre-existing street culture, existing links and proximity and diversity.
  • A public democratic culture supports the urban commons.
  • The most relevant discourse is the call for urban justice, for the right to the city or an overall tradition of organised opposition through practices of activism.
  • Indignados and Occupy discourse have helped to produce a commoning consciousness, leading to shared norms, which result in collective efficacy: culture industries and artistic neighbourhoods are the drivers of urban regeneration.
  • Traditions of collective care or collective attachment to a place are an example.
  • Finally, a diversity in community members, expressed for example through an explicit anti racial-focused or immigrant-opposed discourse, provides a fertile ground to commoning.
Media technologies
  • Media coverage provides a strong communicative and organisational support, both offline and online.
  • Digital technologies may be used to engage a community around an issue, such as public transportation, education or activism.
Expert and peer-produced knowledge
  • Knowledge strongly supports commoning [22].
  • Two types exist in our corpus: expert knowledge [20] and knowledge generated through commoning [27].
  • High-quality data helps to formulate adequate and relevant policies (Shah & Garg, 2017), to ensure evaluation and monitoring (Ni’mah & Lenonb, 2017) or to help kick-start or manage an urban commons initiative (Gilmore, 2017; Lang, 2014; Łapniewska, 2017; Petrescu et al., 2016).
  • Knowledge can also be co-generated through and for community engagement.
  • Social learning, experimentation and knowledge transfers are expected to help achieve resilience, such as through mutual exchange with other initiatives, which helps building adaptive capacity.
  • Overall, more knowledge about the urban commons increases potential participation and social resilience.

Institutional factors

  • Institutional support comes directly (aimed at a specific commoning initiative) or indirectly (as part of a larger discourse or set of policies).
Direct support
  • It may originate from social organisations, local governments or from the public through petitions and donations.
  • The formal recognition of the commons directly leads to financial support or logistic help, such as providing spaces or initiating the design phase.
  • In Quebec, a street Wi-Fi network has been approved as a bottom-up urban commons precisely because the municipality failed in setting partnerships with private telecommunication companies.
  • In the case of housing, direct support is needed for the provision of decent housing for low-income people.
  • In São Paulo, Brazil, part of this housing is organised by the housing movements or co-op organisations.
  • However, property remains the keyword when it comes to housing access.
Laws and treaties
  • The environmental discourse is a good example of indirect support; the related legislation concerns issues of soil and water remediation, biodiversity, greening the city or renewable energy which also affect urban land.
  • Germany’s Renewable Energy Sources Act from 2014 promotes decentralised energy systems, of which citizen initiatives in Berlin and Hamburg have benefited.
  • In India, the Smart Cities Mission, launched in 2015, has among its objectives to ensure a clean and sustainable environment.
  • However, in some cases, these treaties lead to resource access restrictions, negatively impacting the lives of nearby communities: the Ramsar intergovernmental treaty for wetland protection is one of them.
Polycentricity
  • A multiplicity of actors, often shaped into a decentralised governance system, can drive adaptive capacity.
  • Typical actors are the local government, social organisations, NGOs, knowledge or design experts, cultural partners, companies and of course citizens.
  • A close interaction between a community and its local government is generally observed as beneficial: it generates urban rejuvenation programs, fosters tactical urbanism solutions or participatory budgeting, offers autonomy and legal protection to commoners and helps ensure continuity.

Ecosystem factors

  • The global environmental discourse, including ecosystem issues, drives certain policies supporting the urban commons at multiple levels: international to municipal.
  • We have described them together with the institutional factors in subsection 3.4.2.

Discussion

  • A high variety of urban commons types was found in our literature body of 167 papers.

  • The context of the urban commons greatly matters when referring to benefits, challenges or supports: a geographical focus, a local or national institutional focus, or a socio-economic focus can help understand why commoning happens and along which dynamics.

  • Examples of contestation movements and claims to social/environmental objectives, but also of urban poor relying on the commons for their livelihood.

  • Unlike in the traditional commons literature, boundaries are not always clear in cities.

    • Urban commons initiatives are not bound to physical or digital infrastructures.
    • What makes them new commons is not the physical infrastructure, the floor, the walls, the shops or any other visible amenity that may become a “collective good”, but the atmospheres created by users passing by or gathering: a transit space created by informal socializing.
    • This is in line with the idea of a city as assemblage, a collective composition.

  • We highlight the need to rethink what commons means in the urban context, because of urban complexity and many existing informal arrangements.

  • “[T]hicker, more ethnographic accounts of the commons” (Blomley, 2008, p.320) are needed.

  • By using Hess’ frame of non-traditional Common-Pool Resources, or new commons, we embraced a significant part of this diversity in our review.

  • Commoning practices embody the dynamics of the urban commons which currently lack in Hess’s classification.

  • Through such practices, more cases are perpetuated and therefore, more knowledge is generated.

  • Commoning covers other types of communalities such as streets and transit places which become urban commons through action.

  • In the philosophy of Lefebvre (1968, 1974), the city represents a social space, in the sense of a complex social construction (Smith, 1998; Huron 2015).

  • How space is used (or socially produced, in Lefebvre’s terms) through practices, matters more than space itself, thus “redefining identity and collective strategies” (Le Galès, 1998, 502).

  • Urban space thus becomes the output of shared visions of the world (Moss, 2014), and offers good opportunities for the commons.

  • In this perspective, the urban space should remain accessible, for example through the idea of “social function of property”.

  • When the urban space is no longer accessible (Sassen, 2015), it becomes the object of claims All publications from our literature review brought valuable input to this assumption, and property rights are seen as a major challenge.+

  • Under various neo-liberal threats, market-driven, urbanisation-driven or both, Lefebvre’s idea of “right to the city” resonates through the urban commons.

Critical Points in the Literature Corpus

  • Two points stood out in our corpus.
  • The first one is knowledge.
    • While expert-generated or peer-produced knowledge is generally considered a support to the commons, multiple studies warn about the quality, extensiveness and management of this knowledge.
    • In addition, learning driven by commoning may trigger adaptive capacity of the involved communities, but education is sometimes subject to cultural norms, which may retain the social resilience potential.
  • The second point is governance.
    • Commoning initiatives propose an alternative governance approach, independent from conventional urban planning, which brings issues of legitimacy and accountability.
    • Maintaining the initiative’s activity over time may require various forms of institutional support, which raises concerns on their autonomy, on their trust relationship with local authorities, on the effectiveness of such partnerships and on the unequal access to formal help.
    • Democracy in such institutional arrangements is still debated.
  • Another issue is the internal management structure of urban commons initiatives.
    • It may be unstructured to favor openness to change and to possibilities, but this also makes these initiatives more vulnerable (to forced changes).
    • Nonetheless, a solid structure with too rigid institutions hinders the capacity to adapt, as illustrated by formal roles given to participants, which eventually disempower them by locking them in non-productive decision-making processes.
  • We, therefore, introduce the following paradox: on the one side,