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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.

This Essay examines the move by environmental and natural resources agencies to devolve decision making influence to local, multi-stakeholder, collaborative groups. The emerging use of such decision making mechanisms - such as forestry and watershed partnerships and community advisory committees - reflects the need for more creative solutions to the current generation of environmental problems and for improved decision making processes for identifying and equitably distributing the costs and benefits of environmental decisions. In seeking more participatory, local and holistic decision making mechanisms, the move toward devolved collaboration intersects and converges with another prominent movement, environmental justice, in ways that are crucial for the future of environmental decision making. This Essay examines the points of convergence and divergence between these two important currents in modern environmental decision making. On the one hand, the interest-convergence of these two powerful currents in modern environmentalism has been a crucial element shaping the direction of environmentalism from the 1990s into the new century. There are now more voices than ever calling for the creation of democratic, sustainable communities and for a more comprehensive approach to environmental problems that address the connections between environmental, economic and civic health. Yet, despite the interest-convergence of these two powerful currents in modern environmentalism, there are dangers lurking at their intersection. This Essay argues that while devolved collaboration can theoretically ameliorate some regulatory inequities, it may also add renewed legitimacy to racial and class distributional inequities, further entrenching them in the landscape of environmental decision-making. Perhaps as importantly, devolved collaboration will introduce new equity problems in environmental decision-making by modifying current patterns of participation and representation in unforeseen ways. Like its predecessor decision making approaches, this evolving model, thus far, is indifferent to (or innocent about) the social structural and institutional conditions necessary to realize its own promises, including its aspiration of more equitable decisions. This Essay concludes that the movement toward devolved collaboration should best be regarded as the collective expression of a core set of normative principles that can guide the shaping of environmental decision making processes in a context-specific fashion. These normative principles can be used to tailor a mix of decision making mechanisms to specific environmental problems in particular ecological, social, economic, and political contexts. This contextualized approach brings with it the additional virtue of preserving the accountability of centralized authorities for ensuring fidelity to these principles in specific contexts instead of leaving this task to unaccountable, fragmented local groups.