New Urban Commons

A major new social, economic, political and cultural space (actually, a sector of many spaces) we can call the new commons has gradually emerged outside of markets, governments and households. It currently goes by many names and reaches far beyond the recognized and incorporated nonprofit sector to include many additional forms of voluntary assembly and organized action. This space is legally defined and is the domain of fundraising, volunteering, advocacy and other forms of collective behavior. It includes associations, groups and clubs but also constitutionally protected assembly - not only public gatherings but also parades, festivals, places like the Market in Philadelphia, and a diverse variety of forms of collective behavior including crowds, street corner societies, jazz and art 'scenes' and, of course, online and digital 'communities' and 'commons' of many types. The common thread characterizing all of these diverse activities is that they are 'new' commons - legally enabled and protected, (as opposed to the old commons of history that were traditional, customary and without legal protections, which made them highly vulnerable to 'enclosure'. These new commons include not only social but also cultural organizations including social movements, social problems and diverse other 'knowledge commons'.

These new commons have been studied under many different names in many different disciplines and research fields, but they share certain commonalities. They are legally protected and enabled. They function voluntarily on the basis of common resource pools for the achievement of common purposes. Among the effects of these new commons are the 'natural' emergence of social capital, common identity formation for participants and the formation, defense and projection of norms, values and practices.

New commons are an important component of civil society, basic to the idea of philanthropy as practicing the love of the human condition, and offer one possible pathway to future development of democratic society and culture.

This is a revised edition, now featuring Creative Commons licensing and a complete list of changes from the first edition.

O artigo documenta, de maneira exploratória, uma pesquisa sobre a relação entre os laboratórios cidadãos e o processo de fazer o comum (commoning) que os caracteriza e diferencia de outras experiências similares de oficinas experimentais. Em específico, busca demarcar o trânsito desse conceito da Europa, onde surgiu, para a América do Sul, e algumas das transformações que vem sofrendo a partir da comparação entre três diferentes projetos: o Medialab-Prado, de Madri, os Laboratórios de Inovação Cidadã (LABIC) liderados pela Secretaria Geral Iberoamericana (SEGIB), e o LAB Procomum, no Brasil, construído a partir da iniciativa de uma organização da sociedade civil. O estudo das diferenças e semelhanças teóricas e práticas que caracterizam esses
projetos pretende contribuir para a afirmação da possibilidade de produção de arte, ciência, tecnologia e inovação orientadas ao bem comum e à superação do modelo econômico vigente.

A major new social, economic, political and cultural space (actually, a sector of many spaces) we can call the new commons has gradually emerged outside of markets, governments and households. It currently goes by many names and reaches far beyond the recognized and incorporated nonprofit sector to include many additional forms of voluntary assembly and organized action. This space is legally defined and is the domain of fundraising, volunteering, advocacy and other forms of collective behavior. It includes associations, groups and clubs but also constitutionally protected assembly - not only public gatherings but also parades, festivals, places like the Market in Philadelphia, and a diverse variety of forms of collective behavior including crowds, street corner societies, jazz and art 'scenes' and, of course, online and digital 'communities' and 'commons' of many types. The common thread characterizing all of these diverse activities is that they are 'ne...

When Walter Lippmann famously called the public a phantom he meant less to question its very existence, but to stress its fragile and rather provisional nature ̶ that it could cease to exist, once no longer upheld, re-assembled, or performed. Clive Barnett suggests that publics do not simply exist a priori , but must be convened, or called into being in open-ended, contingent processes without any certainty of success. Nancy Fraser, in turn, highlights the presence of many “subaltern Counterpublics.” where marginalised groups can come together to discuss matters of common concern. The absurdity of the idea of a single, unitary public sphere, where only the quality of the best argument matters but not the identities of those who present it, is nicely expressed by Bruno Latour: “We were told (by the public sphere thinkers) that all of us ̶ on entering this dome, this public sphere ̶ had to leave aside in the cloakroom our own attachments, passions and weaknesses. Taking our seat under the transparent crystal of the common good, through the action of some mysterious machinery, we would then be collectively endowed with more acute vision and higher virtue.” By suggesting that the public and the political are constantly {re}assembled through devices, procedures, and mediums, crystallising around specific issues, or topoi, Latour shifts our attention to the processes of how publics are created, and emphasises the many small, mundane acts and things that support these processes. This exposition, then, is to point out the performative and ephemeral quality of ‘true’ public space, or the rare instance when a public sphere is temporally supported, or even convened into being by a physical setting. In such a moment a public space turns into more than just a state- owned venue of accidental, amorphous sociability and begins to take on a broader collective, often political, relevance.

A major new social, economic, political and cultural space (actually, a sector of many spaces) we can call the new commons has gradually emerged outside of markets, governments and households. It currently goes by many names and reaches far beyond the recognized and incorporated nonprofit sector to include many additional forms of voluntary assembly and organized action. This space is legally defined and is the domain of fundraising, volunteering, advocacy and other forms of collective behavior. It includes associations, groups and clubs but also constitutionally protected assembly - not only public gatherings but also parades, festivals, places like the Market in Philadelphia, and a diverse variety of forms of collective behavior including crowds, street corner societies, jazz and art 'scenes' and, of course, online and digital 'communities' and 'commons' of many types. The common thread characterizing all of these diverse activities is that they are 'ne...

Despite the existing literature regarding institutional influence on
traditional commons, there is still a comparative dearth of research that theorises
property-rights structure and its impact on contemporary commons. This is
particularly true for public open space (POS) governance: its management and
utilisation and hence its quality, of which underinvestment and overexploitation
leads to increasingly negative externalities and outcomes. An interdisciplinary
study is employed here to depict the relationships of diverse property-rights
structure attributes – POS title existence, community existence, POS title
transfer and POS site handing-over period to local government – with quality of
residential POS. A cross-sectional survey via direct structured observation with
a POS quality audit tool was conducted to collect a randomly stratified sample
of 155 Country Lease (CL) POS and entire 22 Native Title (NT) POS, from the
districts of Kota Kinabalu and Penampang, Sabah, respectively. Archival search
and document analysis on data of property-rights attributes were executed as
well. Next, 2-stage Pearson’s Chi-Square ( c2) and Lambda (λ) with Proportional
Reduction Error feature analyses were performed. Results showed that only these
three property-rights attributes – title deed existence, community existence and
POS site handing-over period to local government- are significantly associated
with POS quality at significance level (p≤0.05). It is found that, although POS
with title deed and community’s involvement might not contribute to good
quality, these attributes were likely to provide better quality. On the other hand,
it is found that the more recent the POS site handing over to government, the
higher the likelihood of good POS quality and vice versa. Such empirical findings
prima facie infer that: (i) current local property-rights structure does matter in
contributing to POS condition, particularly the effective management right which
likely leads to better POS quality; (ii) the present state-property regime in POS
governance is adversarial; and (iii) the importance of an interim privatisation and
communal regimes leads to a better POS. Thus, these may provide policy insights
by encouraging public officials to consider reengineering the POS market via an
adaptive property-rights re-alignment paradigm in the interest of addressing POS
quality and sustainability issues, which warrant further research
Keywords: Governance,  institutions,  neighbourhood residential commons,  property-rights structure,  public open space (POS),  quality,  two-stage associations