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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 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 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.