Common Property

Premise - Crowdsourcing the Built Environment

The voice of “the crowd” holds meaning like never before. The advent of network technologies and digital platforms invite the public to participate in the process of collective creation. “Crowdsourcing” is more than an abstract idea. Already it has informed the creation of two signature public projects in New York, and it promises to change the way the public can interact with the design of the built environment. What effect will this new media have on the way cities evolve?


Foreword - Innovation in Practice
by Brian Vargo, Executive Editor

In real estate, ‘innovation’ can be precarious. The industry typically standardizes the spectrum of the built environment into defined asset classes and product types, often confined by conventional financing and public policy. To many, the prospect of ‘innovation’ invites undue peril. Why subject the already risk-prone process of building or operating real estate to additional uncertainty?
Others see ‘innovation’ as the impetus of creating economic value. Beyond real estate, ‘innovation’ is a cornerstone of the modern economy and holds both cultural and practical implications. Many herald changing trends in the demand for real estate as a new generation takes hold, often pairing the ‘innovation economy’ with the ‘disruptive economy.’ Innovation is by its own definition unsettling; it can invoke a fundamental questioning of norms, disruptive of established principle in the pursuit of unique value. Yet not all novel ideas last forever, and only time will distinguish whether an innovative concept is fleeting or substantive.

If real estate follows a basis of standardization, and innovation is naturally disruptive, what is innovation in real estate? What is the conflict between real estate and innovation, and how is it challenged, overcome, or resolved? What is the value of innovation in the design and development of the built environment, and how does one find it?

The 2015 Harvard Journal of Real Estate takes aim at those questions. This year’s Journal features 11 authors from programs across Harvard University, each with distinct approaches to the various facets of the real estate industry. The authors investigate a range of subjects under the umbrella of innovative practice, including opportunistic investment strategies, creative financing mechanisms, progressive public policy, and case studies in unique approaches to real estate development. Following each article is a review written by an invited academic or leading practitioner with a background in the same topic.

The real estate industry faces new frontiers, and its evolution will require many voices. Collectively, these authors investigate the value of innovation in practice, inviting both new ideas and opportunities for further discourse.

The Environment in Anthropology presents ecology and current environmental studies from an anthropological point of view. From the classics to the most current scholarship, this text connects the theory and practice in environment and anthropology, providing readers with a strong intellectual foundation as well as offering practical tools for solving environmental problems.

Haenn, Wilk, and Harnish pose the most urgent questions of environmental protection: How are environmental problems mediated by cultural values? What are the environmental effects of urbanization? When do environmentalists’ goals and actions conflict with those of indigenous peoples? How can we assess the impact of “environmentally correct” businesses? They also cover the fundamental topics of population growth, large scale development, biodiversity conservation, sustainable environmental management, indigenous groups, consumption, and globalization.

This revised edition addresses new topics such as water, toxic waste, neoliberalism, environmental history, environmental activism, and REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), and it situates anthropology in the multi-disciplinary field of environmental research. It also offers readers a guide for developing their own plan for environmental action. This volume offers an introduction to the breadth of ecological and environmental anthropology as well as to its historical trends and current developments. Balancing landmark essays with cutting-edge scholarship, bridging theory and practice, and offering suggestions for further reading and new directions for research, The Environment in Anthropology continues to provide the ideal introduction to a burgeoning field.

The economic and political transformations determined by the rise of
neoliberalism are usually studied at a state dimension, while the urban one is
quite ignored. Nevertheless, the government of the city has been influenced
by global and national recent changes and all the municipal sectors have been
touched by the austerity’s recipe. The decrease of urban public spaces, their
privatizations as well as gentrification transform city planning that is often
unable to elaborate alternative solutions against the overexploitation of the
urban territory and the increase of inequalities caused by economic crisis. In
a city, after all, it is impossible to hide inequalities and injustices.
In the last years, cities have often been the theater of political struggles
against the privatization of public spaces, evictions and the dissolution of the
urban welfare. In many cases, the demonstrators have occupied parks or
abandoned buildings (theatre, condominiums…), and used them to find a
temporary solution to their different needs (housing, social space, new forms
of work, urban gardens…).
They denounce the great number of public or private empty spaces (for
instance, the abandoned infrastructures left by the process of deindustrialization) and their neglect. According to the right to the city they
claim, the inhabitants have to produce urban spaces starting from their own
needs: empty spaces become an opportunity, the urban care is a collective
task. This approach shares the logic of the commons, which reclaims a new
paradigm based on inclusion, participation and social and ecological use of
resources: according to many scholars, also urban spaces are commons.
After a description of this wide context, the article explores the
connection between commons and the right to the city.

Corporations dominate our societies. They employ us, sell to us, and influence how we think and who we vote for, while their economic interests dictate local, national, and global agendas. Written in clear and accessible terms, this much-needed textbook provides critical perspectives on all aspects of the relationship between business and society: from an historical analysis of the spread of capitalism as the foundation of the 'corporate' revolution in the late nineteenth-century to the regulation, ethics, and exclusionary implications of business in contemporary society. Furthermore, it examines how corporate power and capitalism might be resisted, outlining a range of alternatives, from the social economy through to new forms of open access or commons ownership.

A variety of disciplines examine human-environment interactions, identifying factors that affect environmental outcomes important for human well-being. A central challenge for these disciplines is integrating an ever-increasing number of findings into a coherent body of theory. Without a repository for this theory, researchers cannot adequately leverage this knowledge to guide future empirical work. Comparability across field sites, study areas and scientific fields is hampered, as is the progress of sustainability science. To address this challenge we constructed the first repository of theoretical statements linking social and ecological variables to environmental outcomes. Stored in a relational database that is accessible via a website, this repository includes systematically formalized theories produced from researchers studying resilience, environmental conservation, common-pool resource governance, environmental and resource economics and political ecology. Theories are explicitly linked together in the database to form the first coherent expression of the types of human-environment interactions that affect outcomes for natural resources and, by extension, the people who use them. Analysis of this repository shows that a variety of types of theories exist, from the simple to the complex, and that theories tend to thematically cluster by scientific field, although the theories of every field were related in at least some way to theories from other fields. Thus there is much potential for increased interaction across these fields, hopefully with the help of resources such as this repository. The theories and variables employed to express their arguments are publicly viewable in a wiki-like format, as a resource for the scientific community.