4. Scaling Out, Up and Deep Understanding the Sustainment and Resilience of Urban Commons

The inquiry of how to manage common resources has always been a central topic in the discussion of the commons. However, our understanding of what can be discerned as the sustainment and resilience of urban commons – urban spaces that are managed by citizen groups – is under-evaluated and simplified if we only ask whether they last long enough or are able to be expanded in size and duplicated in multiple locations. In this chapter, I introduce the urban commons and the importance of discussing their sustainment and resilience, wherein I refer to the notion of sustainability and resilience in design and ecology spheres. A review around existing literature on governing the commons and expanding urban commons then provides the basis for the further explication of the sustainment of urban commons from three scaling perspectives: scaling out, scaling up and scaling deep. Lastly, I discuss the co-existence and correlations of these three scaling dimensions and open up the question of what the role of design is in promoting the scaling processes.