Commoning Practices Along Streetscapes

Societies across the world are facing severe social, environmental, and technological challenges that are significantly impacting the built environment and citizen’s daily lives. To foster the transition towards more sustainable, beautiful, and inclusive cities and communities, the EU has launched several initiatives among which the EU Pillar for Social Rights, the New European Bauhaus, the Green Deal, the Digital Compact, and many more. Among these, the New European Bauhaus asks all Europeans to imagine and build a sustainable and inclusive future together that is beautiful for our eyes, minds, and souls. More than ever before policymakers, civil society organizations and citizens are being asked to work together to re-think and re-shape our cities, communities, and public spaces as well as the way we live, move, work, and consume to promote a transformation towards more resilient, economically sustainable, and socially inclusive places and cities. Together with institutionalized players, many non-formal stakeholders have already started to develop bottom-up initiatives aiming to find concrete solutions to pressing problems facing human society (e.g., climate change; social exclusion; socio-spatial inequality), or to respond to unmet citizens’ needs that the market or the state is not able to fully satisfy (e.g., provision of services; reclaiming the right to the city). Among existing collaborative and bottom-up initiatives taking place in our cities, we could mention the following: activist movements where people reclaim streets as places of shared interest, collective decisions and collective work (Stavrides 2016); collaborative pacts where citizens and public administrations sit at the same table to negotiate the shared use of unused or confiscated mafia spaces to meet needs and turn them into common goods (Collaboration Pacts Archives—Labsus); urban commons, where resources are collectively produced, owned, managed or distributed by a community for their mutual benefit in a sustainable manner (Harvey 2012).

This work is part of the research field into urban commons and focuses precisely on commoning practices happening in public spaces, mainly along streets. A commoning practice is a process according to which a community collectively creates, reproduces, and co-manages resources. Streets have often been considered as commons in the past to host many forms of social practices (Harvey 2012). In the course of history due to car-oriented planning, streets have lost their human and social dimensions; due to the consumer society streets have also been gradually privatized losing their public character (Mitchell 1995). Nevertheless, people are still seeing streets as places of shared interest, collective decisions, and collective work (Stavrides 2016). Many commoning practices occur along city streets (urban gardening, protests, climate movements); and people gather in streets to find shared ways to satisfy similar unmet needs through collective action; they use streets to protest and for social activities.

The literature on urban commoning is extensive; however, there is still a gap in the investigation of the relationships between “streets” and “commoning”, a topic not widely addressed so far. Even though there is literature on how streets may be considered as commons, few studies have analysed bottom-up initiatives as commoning practices occurring in streets. An example is provided by the work conducted by Rosol (2018) who studied urban gardening as an urban commoning practice in the context of neoliberal urbanism.

Indeed, many bottom-up initiatives may be reconsidered as commoning practices, primarily due to their potential to produce new forms of common space (Stavrides 2015: 11). So conceived, commoning practices occurring in streets have a transformative power on both spatial and social dimensions: on the one hand, they can increase the aesthetic and physical quality of streets; restore existing local resources that are important for the local population to satisfy their needs and livelihoods (existing parks; vacant lots); on the other hand, they can empower citizens, no-profit associations, local figures and people in general to protect, care for and take responsibility for the use of existing resources in a collective way, following principles of solidarity, sharing and caring.

Given this framework, this paper has a threefold objective: (1) map commoning practices occurring in streets to discover the different types of challenges addressed; (2) propose an analytical framework to investigate the social and spatial dimensions of street commoning; (3) contribute to a better understanding of the transformative power of commoning practices. The underlying hypothesis is that commoning practices can contribute to making streets more sustainable, beautiful, and inclusive (New European Bauhaus values) and can contribute to making communities socially just and ecologically sustainable (Agyeman et al. 2003), i.e., communities able to provide equitable access to green space, clean air and water, healthy food, affordable good-quality housing, and safe neighbourhoods. This paper is structured as follows: Sect. 2 presents a review of the literature on commoning practices along streets; Sect. 3 is about presenting a framework of analysis; Sect. 4 presents an example of commoning practices; the final section presents some discussion, conclusions, and open questions.

The term “commoning” was originally coined by Peter Linebaugh (2008) in his attempt to highlight aspects of the commons that are linked with activities and not with material resources. In literature, there are many definitions of commoning. The concept has been widely investigated in the field of urban planning (Stavrides 2014, 2016; Bingham-Hall 2016; Sohn 2019). Growing scholar attention on commoning practices rather than commons (Euler 2018) is related to both the academic and practical needs of unfolding the collective processes of alternative forms of ownership, production, and governance (Bresnihan and Byrne 2015) that happen daily in urban spaces to meet collective needs and desires. Commoning suggests a new vocabulary to explain “the social practices that enable people to discover, innovate and negotiate new ways of doing things for themselves” (Bollier and Helfrich 2012). Commoning has also been explained as a way of “creating a common culture” in partnership with other stakeholders (Pór 2012). Commoning highlights the notion that commons can only be managed through social relationships and shared knowledge (Bollier 2014). Overall, commoning refers to a network of relationships and social practices that are based on a shared understanding that some things belong to all of us, and that collective decisions and actions can shape the future without being locked into profit-driven mechanics.

Among the most used conceptualizations of commoning, particularly relevant to the scope of our work are those of: David Harvey, Stavros Stavrides, Massimo De Angelis, Chatterton and Bollier & Helfrich. They link social practices, the community of commoners and the social, political, and spatial environment in which they occur.

Harvey (2012: 73) defines commons not as resources or assets but as social relations and suggests understanding it as a verb—commoning—as a social practice. According to Harvey’s definition, we can talk about social practices of commoning when there is an unstable social, collective, and non-commodified relation between a self-defined social group and those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood (Harvey 2012: 73).

Stavrides refers to commoning as an inventive process that produces new forms of social life, shared experiences and knowledge that can challenge capitalism (Stavrides 2016: 99, 107): new ways of appropriating and using the city (ibidem 99) are developed through collective decisions and actions (ibidem 107), according to the collective needs and aspirations of a community of common space users. Commoning practices also have a strong spatial dimension. There are a set of spatial practices through which space is created. Space is not only a product and therefore a stake for commoning but a means of establishing and expanding commoning practices (Stavrides 2016).

In the De Angelis’ commons system, commoning, or doing in common, is a specific multi-faceted social activity, characterised by modes of production, distribution and governance of the commons that are participatory and non-hierarchical (De Angelis 2017: 121), whose effects on the commons environment may be that of spreading culture or values. Euler (2018) defines commoning as a process that creates, reproduces, and co-manages the community goods of a community; in explaining the “community” that manages communal goods, De Angelis (2017) indicates that it is a collection of people who share resources according to rules they themselves set out and are united around a common agenda, which they share and pursue together. As stated in Centemeri’s work (2018), based on the De Angelis’ definition of commoning, these alternative practices must be directed towards global goals of emancipation, social justice, and ecological sustainability (293), to be truly subversive.

According to Bollier and Helfrich (2019), commoning practices are embryonic forms of alternative modes of production and livelihood characterized by social interaction and a bottom-up mode of participative decision-making (Bollier and Helfrich 2019). They are an exploratory process through which people identify their needs and develop specific systems for provisioning and management. They are characterized by three elements referring to the social, economic, and institutional spheres: (a) social practices and the relationship between human and non-human (social life); (b) the act and modality of producing together (provisioning), (c) governance across the members (Peer governance).

Finally, Chatterton (2010) defines urban commoning as processes of collective (not necessarily open access), cooperative, non-commodified creation, maintenance, protection, and transformation of urban spaces.

These excursus of definitions and stream of thinking helped to identify the key elements of commoning practices that will be used to propose a framework of analysis (Sect. 3).

The analytical framework integrates dimensions coming from different theoretical backgrounds. The social dimension of analysis is built by merging the concept of social innovation as theorized by Secco et al. (2019) with the concept of commoning practices as theorized by Bollier and Helfrich (2019: 98) and the concept of commons as theorized in the work of Ostrom (1990). The spatial dimension of analysis refers mainly to the work of Oliveira (2016). These dimensions of analysis (Tables 1 and 2) allow us to examine: how and where practices are produced by whom, for which purpose, how resources are managed and how practices modify the physical space in which they occur. The table incorporates dimensions of analysis that are relevant to the authors based on a literature review, but it does not intend to be exhaustive. Moreover, the framework proposed has only been partially tested. Information on the selected practices was collected only for the analytical dimensions that were already tested in other projects/case studies (e.g., description, agency, context, needs, physical elements of the streets, land use). Full application of the framework is part of a future project in which the authors will select five different case study practices and study them in detail.

Information on the social dimension can be retrieved by using a mixed method approach (e.g., open interviews; semi-structured interviews; field observations; surveys) and via desk research (secondary data collection). The information helps to contextualize the practices and to understand the socio-economic and cultural structural dimensions that generate them; as well as to investigate how practices are socially produced, by whom and for what reasons; finally, the information enables us to investigate also how practices are managed, how the relationship between commoners occurs, the types of organization structure, and how space is collectively experienced and perceived by the people.

Information on the spatial dimension can be collected via maps, architectural diagrams, pictures, and texts generated directly by the people involved in the practices and retrieved via interviews or published online. The information is useful to perform a spatial analysis, which consists in investigating the space before, during and after the practices, and in understanding how the space has been spatially produced, modified, and experienced by the people involved in the practices; considerations will be made on the implications on the level of city forms/urban planning/urban design. This exploration is interesting as it allows us to focus on the possible links between how the city has been planned to use spatial elements and how these physical and social elements are used and can foster sustainability.

To map out different types of commoning practices taking place along streets and their specific socio-spatial features (e.g., type of people, spatial contexts, types of changes enhanced, modifications of implied power, inclusiveness), we created a database of examples by means of desk research. The database was developed in Excel and compiled using a range of sources including academic literature, project reports and input from expert colleagues. The database is a useful tool to distinguish socio-spatial differences across practices as it lists the key dimensions in the columns (e.g., scale, topic and sector, agency, for scaling see the paragraph before for the full list) while the information describing the commoning practices is placed in rows. As of 31 July 2019, the day the data collection ended, 20 examples had been inserted into the database. Of these, 4 related to Green Care, 3 related to Political Activism, 5 related to Community Care, 3 related to Recreation, and 5 to Social Justice. The database is not exhaustive but only illustrative. The societal challenges these practices want to address refer mainly to environmental justice, social inclusion, and socio-spatial justice. The practices developed more easily in the USA and Europe with New York and Italy the main focus; since the research was done in Italian and English this could also explain the results. The examples refer to practices dealing with activities that happen in city public spaces: Play, occupy, acting/expressing, community care, selling staying, walking, etc. The examples selected highlight the effectiveness of spontaneous and informal actions in terms of: (a) collective control of the territory, protection and security; (b) community services (activities that respond to collective needs); (c) promotion of tolerance (c.f. rethinking the culture of tolerance) and multicultural engagement; (d) conflict management, fighting social exclusion; (e) social capital, knowledge and interpersonal skills. Most of all the practices have both a local and global dimension and have a trans-local character, which, in a globalized world, is a common and desired trait to have processes that produce close interrelations between places and people that are far away and different. However, like many social innovation initiatives, commoning practices have a global character but act at local level with the capacity to generate strong impacts mainly at a local community level. Below is an example describing guerrilla gardening, an initiative that was developed on the streets of New York, which then spread across the world, taking slightly different forms through time and space (Fig. 1).

A photograph of Guerrilla gardening as a commoning practice. The garden has multiple beds for various crops.

This paper discusses the relationship between streets and commoning practices; it proposes an approach to analyse how commoning practices are produced socially as well as how they modify the physicality of space, leaving concrete signs in the urban context; also, it maps some existing commoning practices on streets. This section discusses some considerations on the transformative power of commoning practices on streets, i.e., how commoning practices manage the resources available and change social relations among individuals.

Commoning practices, consisting in action taken by individuals, groups and networks of people, with various motivations, should be seen in different ways: (a) as an opportunity to innovate the provision of urban services; (b) as a possibility to develop alternative economies, sometimes both out of the market exchange and state provision and towards a collaborative economy that drives local development and to promote transformation towards a more socially just and ecologically sustainable societies; (c) as a way to reclaim the “right to the city” and use existing available spaces; (d) and finally as a way to promote an inclusive regeneration of spaces using place-making, i.e., the intentional effort to create good public spaces to promote people’s well-being. Overall, streets can be transformed via commoning practices into resources for community development and empowerment as well as tools for designing better public spaces.

By dismantling the idea of “public” or “private property” towards shared ownership and stewardship, commoning practices suggest alternative ways of living, producing, and consuming that are based on values of caring for or/and sharing with. In many cases (e.g., food production, social economy), commoning practices provide a service where citizens and communities have an active responsibility; thus, citizens are moving away from being purely consumers to becoming consumers and producers of our cities and society (Sofia 2017). In so doing, commoning practices are fostering an equitable, supportive, and sustainable use of existing resources and just and ecologically sustainable communities.

Reclaiming streets and using them in an inclusive and sustainable way can bring a significant paradigm shift in the governance of urban spaces towards co-governance of local resources that directly involves communities, urban planners, architects, and designers. Commoning practices can inform collaborative development at a local level (community level) as well as at a city level (policy making, urban planning). This can lead to the direct involvement of the community in the maintenance and design of spaces (urban ecology; co-design, etc.), by increasing ownership and responsibilities towards urban policies (e.g., homeless management, prostitution, drugs—the diseases of contemporary society). In cities characterized by centralized planning models and less state intervention due to increased economic and fiscal crisis, commoning practices can gradually gain more strength since they rely on sharing power, collective action and shared responsibility between the government and citizens. They can support community development and empowerment. The fact that more and more people initiate commoning practices in their efforts to tackle common problems in our societies is both a challenge and an opportunity for planners, designers, and city makers that are asked to both consider the emerging and increasing motivations raised by “commoning practices” and to develop processes that are more open, democratic, and based on the active involvement of local people.

Finally, commoning practices can also enrich the aesthetic value of the streets. During and after commoning practices, some physical elements of the streets may be modified directly or indirectly by participants’ actions (modification in road uses, facade modifications such as murals) thus affecting the urban environment nearby the street or social practices in the whole city. The way in which commoning practices occur in streets and the way in which public spaces are used can create a special image of the neighbourhood and a particular urban atmosphere (Löfgren 2015), which can benefit the entire city.

Overall, commoning practices have a transformative power (Ryan 2013) as they propose alternative sets of social relations and practices—mutual support, care, negotiation, and experimentation—that have the capacity to change dynamics towards a shared management of resources.