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Datafication is driving organizations to invest in data commons, not only to share the costs of data generation, analysis, and curation but, more importantly, to realize synergies in precompetitive research collaborations where private and public motives interact (i.e., semicommons). The fanfare surrounding datafication often hails the sophisticated algorithms used to develop large quantities of data toward greater insight, naively assuming that more data equals better data. Yet for datafication in general and precompetitive research specifically, less attention is awarded to what actually constitutes data and evidence in the first place—that is, to its genesis, construction, and interpretation by heterogeneous scientific and commercial entities. We present the case of Open Targets, a precompetitive collaboration in the life sciences, where publicly funded research, nonprofit foundations, and for-profit pharma collaborate to generate and share data in genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics. We theorize about the process of data commoning, a political activity in the semicommons where data are created, evidential value is assembled, and scientific meaning converges as data travels, or journeys, across creators, validators, and users. Our findings highlight the effects of relational dynamics and the political nature of data journeys: why these dynamics form, how they are manifested in a precompetitive semicommons, and what implications this can have for the mobility of data as a shared, public good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traversing a space along the Simeto River, in southeastern Sicily, this article explores responses to and engagement in processes of commoning and heritagization through ecomuseums. Through an ethnographic analysis of interviews, collectively made maps, industrial features in the landscape, and Simeto Ecomuseum itineraries, we explore how participants in the Simeto Ecomuseum articulate and (re)organize boundaries and histories to give new meaning to territories that have oscillated between industrial development, abandonment, and environmental degradation. We argue that collective recognition and experiences of both places of affection and places under threat are key to heritage-making and commoning processes. Despite limitations of translating the ecomuseum ideal into broader socio-structural changes, such experiences offer a window into the everyday possibilities of life after progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of policy notwithstanding, climate emergency continues to unfold and the need for new ideas is urgent. In this short article, I contextualize the need for 'revolutions for life' and set out some of the key ideas from Hosseini and Gills' recent book Capital redefined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do doors do? Open Close Invite In Shut Out Jam Stick Wedge open Welcome: Entice and Invite Offer a glimpse into Bar SLAM SHUT Get kicked in Get kicked shut Splinter Warp Hang Sit ajar Gently linger in our minds Cause hurt and separation Affecting thoughts Moments of joy or pain Longing, Waiting Fearful longing, Fearful waiting, Anticipating Wondering Haunting "Come-on-in" This article is based on research-creation experimentations arising from the provocations "what do doors do?" and "how do doors matter?" We ponder how knowledge-making practices come to life when you take a little time to notice the mattering of doors. We use collaborative feminist praxis to generate arts-based post-qualitative entanglements as generative invitations for door storying that illuminate the potentialities of commoning practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper delves into the role of academic institutions in urban commoning, which involves the sharing and collaborative management of common resources. It specifically examines the impact of Practices of Urban Inclusion, an experimental learning programme, in fostering new forms of collaboration across places and institutions. This programme was co-designed and co-run by a network of four architecture and urban planning schools and three third-sector organisations across four European countries. The paper mobilises the concept of 'threshold spaces' by Stavros Stavrides to discuss if and how urban knowledge and learning can be co-produced and circulated 'on the threshold' between academia and civil society. Practices of Urban Inclusion is thus seen as a threshold space that aimed to bring different subjectivities and forms of knowledge into connection by foregrounding experiential knowledge, fostering collaborative learning, and connecting temporalities. The paper reflects on the key characteristics of the programme and highlights some of its commoning outcomes. We suggest that conceptualising knowledge co-production through ideas of commoning and threshold spatiality allows for more nuanced understandings of the dynamics of academia-civil society collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the article is to contribute to the ongoing debate on just transition through an overview of the historical development of mobility transitions in rural France and the changes introduced following the introduction of the Mobility Orientation Law in 2019. The authors examine the reception and management of change introduced in public policies by elected officials and mid-level bureaucrats responsible for mobility issues, and by members of associations. This allows for an understanding of the nature and consequences of the changes in terms of mobility justice. Interviews were conducted with key actors in the local and regional mobility subsystem. Three main findings emerged from the analysis of the narratives and dissonance surrounding the implementation of the mobility transition in rural areas: the belief in the development of cheap technology that would allow the pursuit of a car-centred society, the lack of space to allocate to other modes of transport, and a lack of consensus on how to implement the transition. The author conclude that there is a need for a just transition through the social dimension of mobility and through the materiality of the transition and the potential for the first steps towards commoning mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a growing number of village revitalisation schemes have been initiated in Hong Kong by nonprofit organisations (NPOs) with expertise in ecological and heritage conservation. Although many projects have been commended for their success, villagers feel excluded and remain largely disengaged from the revitalisation process. This article proposes redefining the current understanding of Hong Kong's rural heritage by introducing the concepts of commons and commoning as a relatively new theoretical framework for analysing village revitalisation. Although it has been mobilised in Hong Kong's urban context, the concept of commoning is rarely used as a theoretical framework for discussing rural heritage. What new knowledge can be derived from a commoning approach to Hong Kong's village heritage? How does this approach elucidate past assumptions regarding the value and significance of built heritage? How can the concept of commoning be used to reinterpret the relative success or failure of recent revitalisation initiatives? First, commoning can provide a better understanding of how village heritage was created and managed over time. Second, the literature on commoning provides better tools for understanding the historical processes that led to the disappearance of Hong Kong built heritage commons in the second half of the 20th century. Third, the concept of recommoning is helpful for better understanding the current situation of Hong Kong and the shortcomings experienced by some villagers. This paper also shows that many of the specificities of global contemporary recommoning are relevant to the case of Hong Kong and can partially explain the success or failure of some village revitalisation initiatives. Overall, this article reflects on how various categories of commons and the complex social process of commoning offer multiple advantages to improve our understanding of built heritage when analysing village revitalisation schemes in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to imagining and working toward alternate futures—futures more abundant, just, and caring than many in our more-than-human midst are experiencing now—is articulating the ways in which our present is already multiple, already pluriversal. Moreover, as academics interested in these ideals, we might consider it our political responsibility to share examples of the pluriverse where we find them. However, calls for illuminating and enacting the pluriverse are sometimes vague about what we can do beyond researching and publicizing important social movements. This paper argues that enrolling theories of care and commoning to examine everyday phenomena can be a powerful move toward identifying and amplifying the pluriverse. Care and commoning both foreground how more-than-human wellbeing is actively nurtured in collective, relational ways. Further, we argue that cities, outwardly prominent manifestations of "universal" capitalism, are in fact rich in pluriversality. The ways in which alternate realities (and possible futures) are performed is of course varied, uneven, and full of struggle. Here, we use a case study of urban fishing to document and amplify such performances as part of the project of moving toward abundant futures. We highlight especially the elements of urban fishing that resist a capitalist culture, namely, claiming time and space for rest, sharing, and connection with more-than-human others. In doing so, we show how the theoretical development of ideas of the pluriverse and abundant futures might be improved with focused empirical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal land and building occupations form a significant part of Southern urbanism, emerging as central features of city--making in places defined by colonial histories and dispossession. They transgress normalised property and legal regimes and thereby open the possibility for alternative relations connected to shared practices of use and being in common. Drawing on long-term engaged research in Bogotá, Colombia and Cape Town, South Africa, this paper traces the origins and dynamic trajectories of two occupations, paying particular attention to the ways occupiers engage state logics transversally to assemble material infrastructures and advance citizenship claims. In comparing these situated practices relationally, we identify three modalities of transversal engagement that shape their presents and futures: 1) direct co-design; 2) aspirational co-design, and 3) anticipatory counter-design. Whilst the potentiality and outcomes of these are uncertain, we argue they are important contributors to contesting racialised regimes of dispossession and reimagining more just and equitable urban futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In recent years, a growing number of village revitalisation schemes have been initiated in Hong Kong by nonprofit organisations (NPOs) with expertise in ecological and heritage conservation. Although many projects have been commended for their success, villagers feel excluded and remain largely disengaged from the revitalisation process. This article proposes redefining the current understanding of Hong Kong’s rural heritage by introducing the concepts of commons and commoning as a relatively new theoretical framework for analysing village revitalisation. Although it has been mobilised in Hong Kong’s urban context, the concept of commoning is rarely used as a theoretical framework for discussing rural heritage. What new knowledge can be derived from a commoning approach to Hong Kong’s village heritage? How does this approach elucidate past assumptions regarding the value and significance of built heritage? How can the concept of commoning be used to reinterpret the relative success or failure of recent revitalisation initiatives? First, commoning can provide a better understanding of how village heritage was created and managed over time. Second, the literature on commoning provides better tools for understanding the historical processes that led to the disappearance of Hong Kong built heritage commons in the second half of the 20th century. Third, the concept of recommoning is helpful for better understanding the current situation of Hong Kong and the shortcomings experienced by some villagers. This paper also shows that many of the specificities of global contemporary recommoning are relevant to the case of Hong Kong and can partially explain the success or failure of some village revitalisation initiatives. Overall, this article reflects on how various categories of commons and the complex social process of commoning offer multiple advantages to improve our understanding of built heritage when analysing village revitalisation schemes in Hong Kong.

This paper examines the role of co-design methods in catalysing neighbourhood sharing and commoning in European cities. Through the comparative analysis of two design-mediated Urban Living Labs (ULLs) in Bagneux/Paris and Poplar/London, the paper explores how neighbourhood sharing of goods, spaces, and experiences are sustained in two different contexts. The paper then presents a co-design framework which was implemented in both cities, catalysing new sharing projects and relations in support of urban commons. We conclude that nesting co-design practices within ‘civic-organic’ ULLs can help to foster productive long-term relations between communities and academic partners based on mutual trust and help to initiate new sharing practices in the neighbourhoods of study. We argue that co-design methods are generative in this space, flattening knowledge hierarchies, supporting action on the ground, and developing situated responses to local needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this third paper in a series of four, we explore some ways of doing education differently. An education that moves beyond the persistent failures and irredeemable injustices of modern mass schooling episteme. The episteme for education we adumbrate – an episteme of life continuance – begins with a recognition of interdependency and the value of diversity, diverse knowledges and relations of tolerance. We propose an escape from the extinction ethics which modern schools perpetuate and a new grammar of living in which education and politics are processes of re-learning, co-learning, decision taking, limit testing, and conflict resolution in relation to an uncertain future. To achieve this, we outline a set of open and 'unplanned' commoning activities that would take place within local social infrastructures focused on re-politising learning itself and practicing the care of oneself, others, community and the environment. The proposal for a different education as common(ing) activities undertaken within social infrastructures, is about reimagining political and environmental relations, and co-creating a sense of collective ownership of and responsibility for the environment. A form of community that it is practical, rather than utopian, and that would be both the means and ends for such an education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of pluriversal politics, which encompasses the vast array of alternatives to ecologically destructive and colonial capitalism, is crucial for envisioning emancipatory futures. However, the diversity of the initiatives composing the pluriverse poses obstacles to the unity necessary to dismantle interconnected systems of oppression, thus creating an intrinsic dilemma between diversity and unity. This paper explores the navigation of this challenge within emancipatory and pluriversal projects, drawing on material from ethnographic research on the Neapolitan Commons movement. The case study illuminates how social movement actors achieve simultaneous unity and diversity through the grassroots-developed concept of ‘hegemony of non-hegemony.’ In the Neapolitan context, this framework allows diversity to thrive while maintaining essential unity, crucial for confronting economic and political powers. The findings underscore how grassroots, autonomous, and pluriversal degrowth practices can challenge capitalist growth dynamics through unity in diversity, hence suggesting the unnecessary nature of state-led, top-down, or uniformizing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social forestry schemes aimed at both conservation and land redistribution for smallholders surrounding the Indonesian state forests. However, the results so far are mixed at best, with limited areas having been granted to the intended beneficiary groups. Several problems appear to be the causes. They range from the domination of administrative and managerial aspects of the scheme, lack of decision-making participation of the intended beneficiaries, to the program granting marginal land and/or located far from the smallholder villages. Consequently, smallholders are unenthusiastic about the schemes, conflict ensuing at the local level, and the marginalized groups are excluded from accessing the schemes. Focusing on a case from two smallholder groups granted with a Community Forestry scheme in a South Sulawesi village, we delve into the ways in which, and the extent to which, the smallholders are actually able to access the social forestry program. Exploring the case through the commoning perspective we examine the unique ways in which the local smallholder groups create specific social relations and governing institutions, through the practice of commoning, that enable them to effectively benefitting from the scheme. We found that through commoning the groups create their own collective local rules, as well as activating informal relations, they were able to develop effective collective management of their plots–that are treated as individual-holding in most other similar groups. These successes hinge on their ability to develop and maintain the commoning practice, utilizing deep local knowledge, and unique historical context around Indonesian social forestry. The case presents a unique way in which smallholders are muddling through the red tapes of formal rules in order to make a successful story that the state scheme intended to achieve.

Informal land and building occupations form a significant part of Southern urbanism, emerging as central features of city-making in places defined by colonial histories and dispossession. They transgress normalised property and legal regimes and thereby open the possibility for alternative relations connected to shared practices of use and being in common. Drawing on long-term engaged research in Bogotá, Colombia and Cape Town, South Africa, this paper traces the origins and dynamic trajectories of two occupations, paying particular attention to the ways occupiers engage state logics transversally to assemble material infrastructures and advance citizenship claims. In comparing these situated practices relationally, we identify three modalities of transversal engagement that shape their presents and futures: 1) direct co-design; 2) aspirational co-design, and 3) anticipatory counter-design. Whilst the potentiality and outcomes of these are uncertain, we argue they are important contributors to contesting racialised regimes of dispossession and reimagining more just and equitable urban futures.

The article provides an empirical insight into urban initiatives that advocate for better urban mobility infrastructures and outlines a theoretical perspective of commoning infrastructures as a terrain for political struggles. Rather than constructing commons as the interplay of methodologically presumed elements (resources, a community of commoners, and their institutions of commoning) it takes a relational perspective on commoning that asks how activists mobilize and relate heterogeneous elements to make urban mobility infrastructures a common political concern. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on mobility activism in Berlin, the second part of the article illustrates such a relational perspective and presents three modes of commoning. To achieve what is called “mobility transition” (i. e. more sustainable and equitable urban mobility infrastructures), activists rely on mobilizations of knowledge, space, and affect.

AbstractIncreasingly, women are the producers of many agricultural commodities around the world and feminist scholars astutely argue that women subsidize global agricultural production because the exchange value attributed to their products in commodity chains does not fairly compensate them. Although this is the case with women’s smallholder coffee in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, in this paper we seek to move beyond an analysis of value and exploitation based on the commodity (in this case, coffee) to explore more fully women’s production practices. Drawing on debates over the question of value production in socionatures, we suggest that as women cultivate coffee, they also create socionatural spaces in which they produce and valorise a host of things and relations. Literature on diverse economies, Latin American theorizations of lo común (the common), and feminist political ecology help us examine how women also generate a multiplicity of values that exceeds their fraught relationship with global commodity chains. This perspective enables us to expand the way we understand women producers, seeing them simultaneously as subjects exploited by value extraction through the commodity chain to political actors engaging with other forms of valuing and promoting life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptualizations of a "commons" have recently been gaining traction in theorizations of specific locations, gatherings, and activism in and beyond the arts. A theater-based commons that adopts a planetary and relational approach to selfhood, interaction, and future survival on Planet Earth tends to focus on breaking with social, political, economic, and aesthetic hierarchies. I will first introduce how notions of relationality have been integrated in theorizations of solidarity, humanitarian action, and a commons. Then, I will discuss these theorizations within the contexts of theater as communication and action that involves both theater-makers and audience members as actants. Finally, I intend to show how these conceptualizations can be meaningfully applied to unraveling the artistic strategies of a broad array of plays associated with the biannual theater festival Climate Change Theatre Action, which has been taking place before and after the United Nations Conference of the Parties climate conferences since 2015. The examples from the corpus of 250 five-minute plays are to illustrate the intervention of climate-change theater in potentially insurgent commons-based engagement and thinking which tries to avoid virtue signaling and other self-promoting forms of supposed solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current growth-oriented and fossil-based energy system is undergoing a transformation toward renewable energy. However, simply swapping out technologies without addressing the deeper socio-economic structures risks perpetuating the actual social inequalities and environmental degradation. To counter this threat, it's imperative to (re)politicize the energy transition through the promotion of various forms of energy commoning. Energy commoning necessitates a transformation of the energy system that prioritizes both citizens' control of energy, social equity and ecological sustainability. In this paper, we propose collective energy initiatives as a socio-technical movement capable of reshaping perceptions, collective behaviors, power relations and daily energy practices around energy. Despite the popularity of energy collective initiatives, theoretical analyses are still needed. Nevertheless, we analyze how this movement can be threatened by institutional lock-ins and power relations in the energy market and its related infrastructures. At this aim, a systemic perspective is applied to understand the key dynamics, barriers and principal resistance of the energy transition and how to counteract them. Specifically, we focus on identifying socio-institutional patterns that can facilitate the growth of energy collective initiatives and their transformative potential. Our ambition is to provide conceptual and empirical support for considering energy commoning strategies as a policy tool to prevent the co-option of these collective actions by the current expansion of green capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial raises crucial issues surrounding the sustainability of tourist cities in Spain, highlighting the tension between the desire for leisure and consumption-driven tourism and the growing need for more sustainable, degrowth-oriented practices. Through the lens of philosopher Marina Garcés's concept of liveability, it explores the challenges and potential solutions for creating tourist cities in Spain that are not only attractive and liveable but also environmentally responsible and socially equitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyze how vulnerable yet resistant urban residents set out to “common” a particular phenomenon: the future. The scene in analysis is Wilhelmsburg, the southern section of the German city of Hamburg. Plagued by industrial pollution, infrastructural decay, and systemic poverty, Wilhelmsburg’s residents united themselves around the 2000s in an organization called Future Wilhelmsburg. Their goal? To get out of the crisis by commoning Wilhelmsburg’s future. Future Wilhelmsburg has engaged ever since in a continuous struggle—writing, blogging, researching, advocating, and protesting—to subject the neighborhood’s future to the wishes of its residents rather than to the top‐down projections of the urban governmental elite. The future of Wilhelmsburg is thus approached as a “cultural commons”: a symbolic construct that is collectively produced yet intrinsically vulnerable to enclosure. Against this background, I set out to sociologically explain Future Wilhelmsburg’s commoning of the future. How is it, precisely, that the activists united in Future Wilhelmsburg manage to turn the “not yet” into a meaningful matter of common concern? Laurent Thévenot’s “pragmatic sociology,” and more precisely his model of the three “grammars of commonality”—referring to the structuring principles through which social actors turn individual concerns into collective ones—allows us to answer this question. The article highlights how the “justificatory grammar" (structuring activists’ public argumentations), the “liberal grammar” (structuring their pinpointing of collective paths forward), and the “affective grammar” (structuring their affinity to place) all permeate the work of Future Wilhelmsburg as it sets out to turn the future into a cultural commons.

Rural areas comprise complex social and ecological systems that are nested in sub-systems at higher spatial and governance levels. At times, influence from higher level (sub) systems may threaten the integrity of local communities. Commoning designed and implemented across levels can address such challenges. A rural village is utilised to extend understandings of how commoning can be structured to tackle these challenges in the revitalisation process. This paper analyses how agricultural commoning at the village level can become nested with the wider system to restore the sub-systems integrity. This aids the identification of favourable designs of commoning and provides alternative ways to address challenges rural areas face.

In this article, we describe a student protest at an Argentinian university in 2018. The student protesters took over the School of Humanities and Sciences of Education at a national university for 18 days, in defence of public education and against budget cuts. The teaching, research, and administrative life of the School was interrupted during that time. The take-over spread to several Schools in the same university, and to other national public universities in the country. Theoretically grounded on the notion of the commons within a politics of location, data comprised a questionnaire answered by 16 language undergraduates, a corpus of the take-over collected by them between 2nd and 25th September 2018 (written statements, posters, leaflets, advertisements, photos, murals, videos, etc.), and their reflections on their corpus. Content analysis disclosed the experiences of the commons and the practices of commoning in the setting – under-researched in the Global South. It also revealed that the commons became a way of enacting political activism in a locally specific way. While the space of the take-over was embraced as a defence of human rights, social justice and inclusion, it was simultaneously used to enact practices of exclusion and threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops an empirically grounded frame for analysing varieties of alternativeness, using the case of such collaborative housing groups in Vienna (so-called Baugruppen) which aim to overcome the commodification of housing as well as the standardisation in social housing provision. Through experimenting with alternative ways of organising and living together they strive for social and political change. Taking inspiration from literature on commoning and alternative spaces, the article draws on French pragmatist sociology as well as post-actor-network theory (ANT) and assemblage approaches to focus on relational practices and different kinds of commonality as a basis for collective action. It analyses varieties of alternativeness as relational constellations by tracing how different groups compose commonality amongst each other, and how they relate to various actors. In doing so, it contributes to a situated understanding of the relations and relational practices that sustain alternatives, as well as the possibilities of scaling and transformation that specific variations of alternative housing hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From communities rooted in place to transnational coalitions, this special feature applies concepts of collaborative care rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems to the field of environmental governance. We highlight restorative, liberatory practices rooted in caretaking ethics and reciprocal human-nature relations. Our approach also centers decision making by those most connected to a given resource and the sustenance it provides. Despite global extraction, dispossession, and other colonial legacies, these efforts build toward collective action and community self-determination, both through formal policy change and informal practices. Three facets of collaborative care in environmental governance are threaded through the special feature: (1) care in place, (2) care in power, and (3) care in commoning. These themes connect both Indigenous-led and allied scholarship from the United States to the Netherlands, Japan to Madagascar, and Aotearoa to Canada. Though diverse in their interests and challenges, the authors and communities featured in this research build toward collective action and community self-determination in caring for the places that are the source of collective abundance [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The revival of the 'civic university' agenda in the UK reopens questions concerning the framing, control and application of 'knowledge'. While universities in the UK increasingly have to justify their work through benchmarking systems, questions persist over how 'excellence' and 'exchange' are understood, measured and valued in the context of pervasive capitalism. Such questions lead us to a concern over how knowledges (and knowledge-related resources) are exchanged, between whom and to what ends. In this article we consider the interface between knowledge exchange and political agendas that position higher education as servicing the reinvention of the UK as a 'science superpower', and the implications for development of the concept and practice of the civic university. We do so by reflecting on our own, and universities', situatedness within civic contexts. We explore how ideas of commoning may help us frame civic 'impact' as a multi-directional process in which the university, as much as the city, is changed by encounters with new or differing constructions of knowledge, based on the 'slow work' of relationship building rather than top-down agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop the concept of "second displacement" to symbolise the renewed forms of uprooting that refugees undergo in arrival cities in the name of urban regeneration. Focusing on the eviction of 2,000 refugees from a self‐organised settlement in Belgrade's old train station in order to redevelop the site as a luxurious "Waterfront" project, we show how the refugees' commoning practices and claims for living space in city centres often come into direct conflict with public and private interests over urban regeneration and with imaginaries over who has the right to the city. Whilst most displacement literature focuses on state policies, we call attention to how the uprooting of refugees is often entangled with urban renewal plans and private investors' interests. In Belgrade, the depiction of the refugees' living spaces as "badlands" by the state, catalysed the formation of the rent gap that facilitated re‐allocation of rights to the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine community collectives – place-based, community-led initiatives for sustainable livelihood, as an alternative to the top-down, efficiency-driven economic model. Drawing on the theoretical framework of prefigurative organizing, we examined the strategies employed by community members in confronting entrenched inequalities and overcoming marginalization as they envision and engage in inclusive futures. We conducted a comparative case study of two exemplary community collectives in India that exhibited differences in the degrees of internal and external marginalization. We identified two key cross-cutting themes of prefigurative organizing: projective cultural adjustment – whether a community leverages their traditional culture or breaks away from it, and tempered autonomy – negotiating autonomy without overtly challenging dominant groups, and exercising self-imposed restraints to make independent decisions. We show how these two themes manifested across three key processes of prefigurative organizing: prefiguring self-governance; commoning; and cultivating discursive spaces. These findings help us theorize that in communities where the degree of internal marginalization is high due to persisting social hierarchies, breaking away from past discriminatory practices, incorporating suspension of consent in the decision-making process, and introducing multiple constructive works are essential components of prefigurative organizing. In communities where the degree of external marginalization is high, building on the past, incorporating refusal in decision-making, and introducing unified constructive work are important components of prefigurative organizing. We suggest that prefigurative organizing against the dominant power structure, whether within community social hierarchies or external exploitative political-economic structures, is based on selective and strategic engagement without seeking an exit, as exit might not be an option for place-based communities. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this research for alternative organizing and grand challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zentrale Frage der digitalen Publikations- und Veranstaltungsreihe gemeine stadt: berlin gemeinsam gestalten ist, wie Stadt und ihre öffentlichen Güter gemeinsam im Kontext von zunehmenden Verteilungskämpfen um Daseinsvorsorge – wie Wohnraum, Mobilität, Gesundheit und die Notwendigkeit einer klimagerechten Transformation von Gesellschaft – gestaltet werden können. Die gemeine stadt wurde von Sabrina Dittus, Stephan Lanz und Kathrin Wildner im Auftrag der Berliner Landeszentrale für politische Bildung entwickelt. In aktuell acht Kapiteln wird sich „umkämpften“ sowie „banalen“ Themen wie straße, versammlung, eigentum, umweltgerechtigkeit, kollektive, daseinsfürsorge, „home“ / zuhause und unruhe/n gewidmet. Die Kapitel offenbaren eine große Bandbreite an künstlerischen, aktivistischen, journalistischen und wissenschaftlichen Beiträgen.

This introductory article sets out the twin goals of this special issue: “Advancing the Commonsverse: The Political Economy of the Commons”. The first is to introduce the innovative work of David Bollier and Silke Helfrich in theorizing and researching the commons. The second is to explore the possibilities and constraints of the commons and the process of commoning as they unfold in real-world political-economic settings. Bollier and Helfrich have formulated a remarkable, ‘in-the-round’, moral-empirical theory of the commons. In their social ontology, peer governance and moral economy commons form a subversive alternative to the capitalist order. Bollier and Helfrich’s theory restores an older tradition of a moral critique of capitalism in the tradition of “moral economists” such as Karl Polanyi and H.P. Tawney. It raises important questions about the socio-ethical foundations of our society and economy, the relationship between civil associations and the state, and the nature of the state. In the final part of this introduction, we discuss the complex relationship between the commons and the state. We frame this relationship as one of mutual dependency and argue for the careful redesign of our institutions of public administration and democratic governance to make them more receptive and accessible to the creative powers of the commons. Finally, we introduce the contributions to this special issue, including a reflective concluding essay by David Bolllier.

The article examines the living and infrastructuring practices of homeless newcomer migrants who find shelter in abandoned train wagons in the west end of Thessaloniki, an area described as “one of the biggest train cemeteries in Europe.” Hundreds of train wagons have been abandoned there over the years, especially after the 2010 financial crisis, when the state-owned railway company was faced with significant financial difficulties. These abandoned wagons form an urban borderland and have provided temporary shelter to numerous homeless and unregistered migrants who stop in Thessaloniki on their route to Central and Northern Europe. Although there is a significant number of studies which discuss the formal infrastructures provided by the state and the NGOs, little attention has been given to the various ways by which homeless and unregistered migrants create and self-manage their own infrastructures to meet their needs. The article aims to shed light on this shortage while examining the (re)production of arrival infrastructures by the migrants themselves. In doing so, the article builds upon the concept of abandonment and attempts to enrich it by drawing on the theories of arrival infrastructures and urban commons. It combines spatial analysis and urban ethnography in order to explore how an urban borderland with abandoned infrastructures, like the train wagons, are re-used and transformed into commoning infrastructures, where newcomers and settled migrants join their forces in their attempt to support each other, meet their needs and of “becoming otherwise.”

There are perennial challenges facing the self-organisation (collective action) of low-cost (social) housing, particularly socioeconomic constraints, complexity in management, and insufficient stakeholder support. Despite numerous housing research focusing on the physical and institutional aspects to address the collective action dilemmas, detailed analyses of the roles of social capital are relatively few. Thus, this review attempts to elucidate and synthesize significant insights utilising Schwitter's social capital framework, focusing on factors conducive to the effective self-organisation of low-cost housing communities. To this end, the review process adhered to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines, where twenty-eight (28) studies were ultimately selected for in-depth analysis. The review suggested that social capital, primarily discussed at two levels (individual and community) encompassing social networks, trustworthiness, and obligations, the collective impact of system control, system trust, and system morality, plays a role in overcoming poverty, overcoming passivity due to individual apathy, assisting local management in rules enforcement, cultivating social relations to transcend market-oriented organisation, and fostering collaboration with external stakeholders in community development. Apart from conceptualising social capital theories in low-cost housing, the findings offer policy insights and practical strategies to policy-makers and local communities.

This article conceptualizes care-(as)-work in collaborative housing and addresses current debates on the potential of cohousing to embody a feminist commons. A focus on purpose-built cohousing projects in the UK enables us to focus on the values present in the initial phases of collective design and on the ongoing negotiations and mediation that take place through social interactions, resident-led self-management, and formal and informal mutual support. Our analysis is based on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with two communities in England. Our contribution focuses on two aspects of care-(as)-work: how difficult emotions related to cohousing maintenance work are minimized for the good of the common and how such work is differentially embodied. Returning to cohousing's transformational capacities as a feminist commons, we show that while boundaries of care in commoning are critical to residents, they are inherently blurry, performative and gendered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops previous work in which we deployed a form of Foucauldian critique to clear a space in which it might be possible to think education differently. Here, in that space, we are hoping to 'get lost' in some unexplored spaces of possibility. We sketch some starting points, some 'lines of flight' for such thinking. To do this, we identify a concatenation of three crises and discuss briefly their inter-relationship. But the paper focuses primarily on education. The first of these crises, COVID, offers a moment, a space, in which we might think of ourselves, others, and the world differently. The second, climate, brings to bear a pressing urgency for change in the way that we think of our relation to the world in practical, political and epistemological ways. The third, education in relation to crises, is an opening within which some thinking might be undertaken about what it means to be educated, and in which the relation between education, community and sustainability, in a variety of senses, might be pursued. In the final sections, using concepts from Foucault, Olssen, Lewis and others, we seek to find inspiration from and an accommodation between Foucault's self-formation and commoning – a practice of collaborating and sharing to meet every day needs and achieve the well-being of individuals, communities, and environments – as a new way to think education beyond modern episteme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can we remake local economies from scratch – not through political struggle but by design – to solve wicked problems and transform urban governance? Such questions are raised by an emergent trend within urban experimentation that emphasises participation and commoning in designing peer‐to‐peer provisioning systems through a platform logic. This article deconstructs the discourses animating what we term "participatory experimental urbanism" and reflects on what this might mean for local state restructuring in times of neoliberal austerity. By following its policies and prototypes as they move and mutate across the London Boroughs of Lambeth and Barking & Dagenham, we examine two exemplary initiatives, Open Works and Participatory City, tracing their beginnings in Lambeth's "cooperative council" model and their ongoing assembling into novel public‐common‐philanthropic partnerships. Foregrounding the contradictions within this latest turn towards urban governance‐beyond‐the‐state, we draw out the implications for the future of social innovation, design‐thinking, and the experimental city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commons—resources used or governed by groups of heterogeneous users through agreed-upon institutional arrangements—are the subject of one of the more successful research programs in the social-environmental sciences. This review assesses research on the commons to accomplish three tasks. First, it surveys the theoretical, substantive, and methods-focused achievements of the field, illustrating how commons research has also influenced natural resource policy making. Second, it examines the changing trajectories of commons research, emphasizing the growing interest of commons researchers in new methods and the application of insights to new social contexts. Third, the review suggests that research on the commons can find continuing relevance by addressing contemporary and future social-environmental challenges. It highlights three directions in particular: (a) strengthening the focus on issues of power and equity, (b) applying insights about effective commons governance to collaborative attempts to craft commons in new societal spaces, and (c) advancing an emerging emphasis on causal analysis and taking advantage of novel streams of large-scale public datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the commons have been an inspiration for initiatives on natural resource decentralization over the past three decades. Researchers are increasingly recognizing however, that these commons initiatives are mostly failing to support rights, improve livelihoods, and conserve natural resources. These "commons projects," defined as approaches that claim to devolve natural resource governance to local institutions, have their origins in various formulations of theories of the commons but are usually interpreted and applied by states and donor organizations. This paper identifies and analyzes deficiencies in theories of the commons through the slight but significant refocusing on perspectives of commoning. We found that commons scholarship lacks a grounding in power relations, and furthermore, tends to portray commons-governing groups as homogenous communities enacting long-established practices. Conversely, a commoning perspective provides a more dynamic and relational approach, and thus distinctly centers political dimensions of collective practices among diverse groups of citizens. We also extend this argument by showing that a fundamental shift in understanding commoning will help advocate for, and anticipate what commoners can actually do in regions of the Global South undergoing widespread enclosures in the face of powerful informal patronage networks controlled by state power actors and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]