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A new model of urban governance, mapping the route to a more equitable management of a city's infrastructure and services. The majority of the world's inhabitants live in cities, but even with the vast wealth and resources these cities generate, their most vulnerable populations live without adequate or affordable housing, safe water, healthy food, and other essentials. And yet, cities also often harbor the solutions to the inequalities they create, as this book makes clear. With examples drawn from cities worldwide, Co-Cities outlines practices, laws, and policies that are presently fostering innovation in the provision of urban services, spurring collaborative economies as a driver of local sustainable development, and promoting inclusive and equitable regeneration of blighted urban areas. Identifying core elements of these diverse efforts, Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione develop a framework for understanding how certain initiatives position local communities as key actors in the production, delivery, and management of urban assets or local resources. Within this framework, they explain the forms such initiatives increasingly take, like community land trusts, new kinds of co-housing, neighborhood cooperatives, community-shared broadband and energy networks, and new local offices focused on citizen science and civic imagination. The “Co-City” framework is uniquely rooted in the authors' own decades-long research and first-hand experience working in cities around the world. Foster and Iaione offer their observations as “design principles”—adaptable to local context—to help guide further experimentation in building just and self-sustaining urban communities.

Cities and their networks are now decisively established as influential global actors in the difficult task of governing the globe, and their views and opinions are incorporated into many multilateral (nation-state led) and unilateral (city-led) agendas and policies ranging from climate to migration. Yet, the question of how city activism specifically translates into tangible policy and, in some cases legal, outcomes, at the global level remains unanswered. Questions also remain about whether our current international system, whether de facto or de jure, can genuinely incorporate the views of actors other than nations and the most powerful economic actors. Nevertheless, instances of bottom-up city networking and international law-making continue to multiply and cities and their networks continue the hard work of piercing the historically states-only veil of international politics in ways that make the critical role of cities in global governance not just a topic of scholarly debate, but an indisputable reality.

With global urbanization rapidly increasing and with over half of the world’s population already living in cities, the framework of the “urban commons” has emerged as a way to address contemporary urban challenges ranging from urban housing to urban inequality. The concept of urban commons is based on the idea that public spaces, urban land, and infrastructure ought to be accessible to, and able to be utilized by, urban communities to produce and support a range of goods and services important for the sustainability of those populations, particularly the most vulnerable populations. The founding principles of this movement include sharing, collaboration, civic engagement, inclusion, equity, and social justice. Urban commons are created and managed by civic collaborations including participants from local communities, government, business, academic, and local nonprofit organizations. In this way, the city is a platform utilized and optimized by citizens from all backgrounds and social statuses.

Cities and many kinds of urban resources are different from natural resources and more traditional commons in ways that render necessary adjustments to some of Ostrom’s principles. If cities are the places where most of the world’s population will be living in the next century, as is predicted, it is not surprising that they have become sites of contestation over use and access to urban land, open space, infrastructure, and culture. The urban commons framework thus raises the question to which Elinor Ostrom’s groundbreaking work provides an intriguing answer. Ostrom demonstrated that there are options for managing shared, common goods which are neither exclusively public nor private. Ostrom found, however, that for more complex resources this governance responsibility or power was shared with other actors to form nested enterprises. The design principles can lead to the production of very different urban commons governance devices which need to be adapted to the local context and the needs of local communities.

This chapter explores efforts to address the unequal distribution of polluting facilities and other environmental hazard exposure through civil rights and environmental law. From the very beginning of the environmental justice movement, its advocates brought lawsuits in federal courts challenging the placement of polluting facilities and landfills as racially discriminatory. Almost uniformly these lawsuits failed, in large part due to the underlying shifts in anti discrimination jurisprudence over the last 30 years in which requirements of intent and causation became serious obstacles to proving discrimination. A parallel effort by advocates to incorporate anti discrimination norms into environmental regulation, using President Bill Clinton’s Executive Order on environmental justice, met with some success. However, the application of the Order by environmental decision makers revealed how much in tension are the distributive equity aims animating environmental justice challenges and the narrow risk assessment framework that guides environmental regulation. This chapter suggests that one way to align these two frameworks — to better integrate equality norms into environmental decision making — is through the lens of vulnerability. From an equality standpoint, legal theorists have advanced vulnerability as an alternative to the limitations of anti discrimination law and as a more robust conception of the role of the state in protecting vulnerable populations. In the environmental context, social vulnerability analysis and metrics have long been employed to assess and address the ways that some subpopulations are more susceptible to the harms from climate change and environmental hazard events like hurricanes and floods. The use of vulnerability, either as a policy framework or as social science, has not been utilized much in the pollution context to capture the array of factors that shape the susceptibility of certain places and populations to disproportionate environmental hazard exposure. This limitation suggests that a fertile area of research is how to utilize vulnerability metrics in regulatory and legal analysis to better protect these populations and communities.

As rapid urbanization intensifies around the world, so do contestations over how city space is utilized and for whose benefit urban revitalization is undertaken. The most prominent sites of this contestation are efforts by city residents to claim important urban goods — open squares, parks, abandoned or underutilized buildings, vacant lots, cultural institutions, streets and other urban infrastructure — as collective, or shared, resources of urban communities. The assertion of a common stake or interest in resources shared with others is a way of resisting the privatization and/or commodification of these resources. We situate these claims within an emerging “urban commons” framework embraced by progressive reformers and scholars across multiple disciplines. The urban commons framework has the potential to provide a discourse, and set of tools, for the development of revitalized and inclusive cities. Yet, scholars have failed to fully develop the concept of the “urban commons,” limiting its utility to policymakers. In this article, we offer a pluralistic account of the urban commons, including the idea of the city itself as a commons. We find that, as a descriptive matter, the characteristics of some shared urban resources mimic open-access, depletable resources that require a governance or management regime to protect them in a congested and rivalrous urban environment. For other kinds of resources in dispute, the language and framework of the commons operates as a normative claim to open up access of an otherwise closed or limited access good. This latter claim resonates with the social obligation norm in property law identified by progressive property scholars and reflected in some doctrines which recognize that private ownership rights must sometimes yield to the common good or community interest.Ultimately, however, the urban commons framework is more than a legal tool to make proprietary claims on particular urban goods and resources. Rather, we argue that the utility of the commons framework is to raise the question of how best to manage, or govern, shared or common resources. The literature on the commons suggests alternatives beyond privatization of common resources or monopolistic public regulatory control over them. We propose that the collaborative and polycentric governance strategies already being employed to manage some natural and urban common resources can be scaled up to the city level to guide decisions about how city space and common goods are used, who has access to them, and how they are shared among a diverse population. We explore what it might look like to manage the city as a commons by describing two evolving models of what we call “urban collaborative governance”: the sharing city and the collaborative city.