Ostrom in the City: Design Principles and Practices for the Urban Commons

Sheila R. Foster & Christian Iaione

forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of the Study of the Commons (Dan Cole, Blake Hudson, Jonathan Rosenbloom eds.)

Introduction

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 question posed by Saskia Sassen in a recent essay— who owns the city? —is arguably at the root of these contestations and of social movements that resist the enclosure of cities by economic elites (Sassen 2015). One answer to the question of who owns the city is that we all do. In our work we argue that the city is a common good or a “commons” — a shared resource that belongs to all of its inhabitants, and to the public more generally.

We have been writing about the urban commons for the last decade, very much inspired by the work of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom. The idea of the urban commons captures the ecological view of the city that characterizes Jane Jacobs classic work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (Foster 2006) It also builds on Elinor Ostrom’s finding that common resources are capable of being collectively managed by users in ways that support their needs yet sustains the resource over the long run (Ostrom 1990).

Jacobs analyzed cities as complex, organic systems and observed the activity within them at the neighborhood and street level, much like an ecologist would study natural habitats and the species interacting within them. She emphasized the diversity of land use, of people and neighborhoods, and the interaction among them as important to maintaining the ecological balance of urban life in great cities like New York. Jacob’s critique of the urban renewal slum clearance programs of the 1940s and 50s in the United States was focused not just on the destruction of physical neighborhoods, but also on the destruction of the “irreplaceable social capital”—the networks of residents who build and strengthen working relationships over time through trust and voluntary cooperation—necessary for “self- governance” of urban neighborhoods. (Jacobs 1961) As political scientist Douglas Rae has written, this social capital is the “civic fauna” of urbanism (Rae 2003).

This social capital—the norms and networks of trust and voluntary cooperation—is also at the core of urban “commoning.” The term commoning, popularized by historian Peter Linsbaugh, captures the relationship between physical resources and the communities that live near them, utilize and depend upon them for essential human needs (Linsbaugh 2008). In other words, much of what gives a particular urban resource its value, and normative valence, is the function of the human activity and social network in which the resource is situated. As such, disputes over the destruction or loss of community gardens, of open and green spaces, and of spaces for small scale commercial and artistic activity are really disputes about the right to access and use (or share) urban resources to provide goods necessary for human flourishing. (Foster and Iaione 2016)

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, 1

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 common goods which are neither exclusively public nor private. She found examples all over the world of resource users cooperatively managing a range of natural resources—land, fisheries, and forests— using “rich mixtures of public and private instrumentalities.” (Ostrom 1990) Ostrom identified the conditions and “design principles” which increase the likelihood of long-term, collective governance of shared resources (Ostrom 1990). In many of these examples, users work with government agencies and public officials to design, enforce and monitor the rules for using and managing the resource.

Building in part on the insights of Vincent Ostrom, and others, she referred to this kind of decision making as “polycentric” to capture the idea that while the government remains an essential player in facilitating, supporting, and even supplying the necessary tools to govern shared resources, the government is not the monopoly decision maker. (Ostrom, Tiebout, Warren 1961). Polycentric systems have multiple governing entities or authorities at different scales and each governing unit has a high degree of independence to make norms and rules within its own domain. (Ostrom 2010b). Polycentric systems also can unlock what she called “public entrepreneurship”—opening the public sector to innovation in providing, producing, and encouraging the co-production of essential goods and services at the local level. Public entrepreneurship often involves putting heterogenous processes together in complementary and effective ways. (Ostrom 2005).

As such, our work has explored whether the commons can be a framework for addressing a host of internal and external resource challenges facing cities, and specifically to rethinking how city space and shared goods are used, who has access to them, and how their resources are allocated and distributed. Recognizing that there are many tangible and intangible urban resources on which differently situated individuals and communities depend to meet a variety of human needs, what might it look like to bring more polycentric tools to govern the city, or parts of the city, as a “commons?” Is it possible to effectively manage shared urban resources without privatizing them or exercising monopolistic public regulatory control over them, especially given that regulators tend to be captured by economic elites? Can the Ostrom design principles be applied to cities to rethink the governance of cities and the management of their resources? We think they cannot be simply adapted to the city context without significant modification.

Cities and many kinds of urban commons are different from natural resources and more traditional commons in important ways. This is why, starting ten years ago, we both began to explore the governance of the urban commons as a separate body of study first investigating individually how different kinds of urban assets such as community gardens, parks, neighborhoods (Foster 2006, 2011) and urban infrastructure such as urban roads (Iaione 2010) could be reconceived as urban commons, and later jointly to conceive the whole city as a commons (Foster & Iaione 2016). We realized that we needed a different approach to bridge urban studies and commons studies and therefore to pose a slightly different set of questions for the governance of the urban commons (Iaione 2015). We also needed to define a different set of design principles for the management of urban commons in the city and the city itself as a commons.

For this reason, we have been surveying and mapping 100+ cities around the world and 200+ examples of urban commons within them. (www.commoning.city). The goal of this research project is to enhance our collective knowledge about the various ways to govern urban commons, and the city itself as a commons, in different geographic, social and economic contexts. From this study, we have extracted a set of design principles that are distinctively different from those offered by Elinor Ostrom and which can be applied to govern different kinds of urban commons, and cities as commons. Specifically, we investigate whether these design principles can help cities transition to fairer, inclusive, sustainable, 2

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 resilient futures given existing patterns of urbanization and the contested nature of urban resources such as public spaces, open or vacant land, abandoned and underutilized structures, and aging infrastructure. In our study, we see examples of how these resources can be governed as a commons in cities around the world.

The City as a Commons

To say that the city is a commons is to suggest that the city is a shared resource—open to, shared with, and belonging to many types of people. In this sense, the city shares some of the classic problems of a common pool resource—the difficulty of excluding people and the need to design effective rules, norms and institutions for resource stewardship and governance. Indeed, “the city analog to placing an additional cow on the commons is the decision to locate one’s firm or household, along with the privately- owned structure that contains it, in a particular position within an urban area.” (Fennell 2015, 1382). Congestion and overconsumption of city space can quickly result in rivalrous conditions in which one person’s use of space subtracts from the benefits of that space for others. For instance, different kinds of urban infrastructure (roads, telecommunications systems, water systems, parks) otherwise considered to be a nonrivalrous public good can become rivalrous either through increased demand (Frischmann 2012) or because of regulatory slippage (Foster 2011).

In addition to more traditional concerns about congestion and rivalry, the openness of cities also raises the question of distribution in the commons. Many contestations of city space and resources revolve around the question of how best to “share” the finite resources of the city among a variety of users and uses. (Foster and Iaione 2016). To be sure, distributive concerns fall outside of the considerations that motivated Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons—i.e., consuming resources beyond the point where they benefit anyone and in fact reduce the overall benefit of the resource for everyone (Fennell 2004). But Ostrom’s institutional approach to managing shared resources applies to a much broader range of human behavior and social dilemmas than avoiding suboptimal results from the cumulative actions of rational actors. (Ostrom 2010a). Ostrom’s work generated an approach that can be used in the analysis and design of effective institutions (or instruments) to manage not just common pool resources but many different types of shared resources.

The “commons,” as defined by scholars who build on Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development (IAD) approach, is as much a reference to community management or governance of shared resources as it is to the nature of the resource itself. “The basic characteristic that distinguishes commons from noncommons is institutionalized sharing of resources among members of a community.” (Madison, Frischmann, and Strandburg 2014, 2). As such, it is not surprising to see the emergence of “new” commons—or nontraditional common pool resources—such as knowledge commons, cultural commons, infrastructure commons, neighborhood commons, among others. (Hess 2008). These new commons seek to provide an alternative to the private-public (government) binary of governance solutions. These new kinds of commons focus on “communities working together in self-governing ways to protect resources from enclosure or to build newly open-shared resources” (Hess 2008, 40).

It is tempting, in asking whether shared urban resources (including the city itself) can be governed by local communities working together, to apply Ostrom’s design principles to the city and to apply them to the management of many kinds of public and shared resources in the city. For many reasons, however, Ostrom’s ideas cannot be wholly adapted to the city the way they have been used to understand the management and governance of natural resources. Ostrom’s framework needs to be adapted to the reality 3

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 of urban environments, which are already congested, heavily regulated and socially and economically complex. Without such adaptation, Ostrom’s design principles will be lost in translation.

Ostrom’s study focused mainly on close knit communities in which it was clear who was from the place and who was not (principle 1). For these communities, social control/monitoring and social sanctioning were two central pillars of Ostrom’s design principles for the governance structure that communities often put in place to manage a common pool resource (principles 5 and 6). For this reason, she observed that rules of cooperation among users were written or modified by those who would be entrusted with both the duty to obey them and the responsibility to enforce them (principle 3). The fact that these rules were written by the same community of users that apply them suggested the need to leave some room for adaptation of such rules to local needs and conditions (principle 2). Of course, these structures and rules were premised on the assumption that communities right to self-govern the resource would be recognized by outside authorities (principle 4).

Ostrom found, however, that for more complex resources this governance responsibility or power was shared with other actors to form nested enterprises (principle 8). Notwithstanding the above, she observed that conflicts might arise because even the most united communities have internal fractions and therefore require accessible, low cost tools to solve their own disputes (principle 7). These are the basic design principles which for years have been driving the study and observation of common, shared resources—namely scarce, congestible, renewable natural resources such as rivers, lakes, fisheries, and forests.

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. First, cities are typically not exhaustible nor nonrenewable, although they can become quite fragile over time due to internal and external threats. There are, of course, natural resources such as lakes, rivers, trees, and wetlands in urban environments that can be rendered quite vulnerable by rapid urbanization, migration, and landscape change. (Unnikrishnan, Manjunatha, and Nagendra 2016). Because they resemble in most ways traditional common pool resources, researchers have approached the possibility for collective governance and polycentric management of these “urban commons” in a similar fashion. (Nagendra and Ostrom 2014). However, much of the city consists of built urban infrastructure—open squares, parks, buildings, land, streets, roads and highways— which can be purposed and repurposed for different uses and users. In this way, these resources—the kind of “urban commons” to which we refer—are quite distinct in character and design from the forests, underwater basins and irrigation systems that were the subject of Elinor Ostrom’s study of common pool resource governance.

Second, cities and many of their resources are what we might call “constructed” commons, the result of emergent social processes and institutional design. (Madison, Frischmann and Strandburg 2010) As with knowledge commons, the urban commons often require the creation of governance or management structures that allow for not only the sharing of existing resources but also the production of new resources which will be shared by a group or community of actors. (Madison, Frischmann and Strandburg 2010) The process of constructing a commons—what some refer to as “commoning”—involves a collaborative process of bringing together a wide spectrum of actors that work together to co-design and co-produce shared, common goods and services at different scales. (Bollier and Helfrich 2015; Bresnihan & M. Byrne 2015) They can be created at the scale of the city, the district, the neighborhood, or the block level.

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 Third, cities do not exist in a pre-political space. Rather, cities are heavily regulated environments and thus any attempt to bring the commons to the city must confront the law and politics of the city. (Foster 2011) Managing and creating urban common resources most often requires changing or tweaking (or even hacking, in a sense) the regulation of public and private property and working through the administrative branches of local government to enable and/or protect collaborative forms of resource management. Legal and property experimentation is thus a core feature of constructing different kinds of urban commons. (Ela 2016)

Fourth, cities are incredibly complex and socially diverse systems which bring together not only many different types of resources but also many types of people (Portugali 2012). Because of this diversity and the presence of often thick local (and sublocal) politics, social and economic tensions and conflicts occur at a much higher rate and pace than many natural environments. The economic and political complexity of cities also means that governance of urban commons cannot be just about communities governing themselves. Rather, collective governance of urban commons almost always involves some forms of nested governance—perhaps involving other levels of government (Hudson and Rosenbloom 2013)—and in most cases cooperation with other urban actors and sectors.

Design Principles for the Urban Commons

Based on these differences, we began to think anew about design principles for the urban commons, taking into account what Ostrom learned about successful governance of natural resources commons. While many of her principles have clear applicability to constructed urban commons—such as recognition by higher authorities (principle 7), the importance of nestedness for complex resources (principles 8), the existence of collective governance arrangements (principle 3), and resource adaptation to local conditions (principle 2)—others are of limited utility or need to be adapted to the urban context.

For instance, communities should drive, manage, and own the process of governing shared urban resources, but we have seen time and time again that they can rarely avoid dealing with the state and the market. While this can be true of natural commons, and rural communities, we think both the state and the market are even more omnipresent in cities, making it difficult to side step them over the long run. As such, we observe that many types of urban commons tend to benefit from cooperation with other than internal community members and resource users. Rather, they need to collaborate and manage resources with other commons-minded actors, such as those constituting knowledge institutions and civil society organizations.

We have observed that in contexts where the State is the strongest, and markets are not as strong, local and provincial government actors can lend assistance to, and form a solid alliance with, communities to advance collective governance of urban resources. In this sense, the State generally acts as an enabler of cooperation and pooling of resources with other actors.

On the other hand, where the State is weak or weaker, either because of corruption or lack of resources, the market seems to be the only answer to enable the pooling of resources (i.e. human, economic, cognitive, etc.) needed for collective action and collaborative management of urban resources. The market could subsidize the commons if proper legal structures and participatory processes are put in place and there is sufficient social and political capital among resource users to negotiate with market actors. 5

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087

In both cases, the concept of “pooling” seems to capture the true essence of commons-based projects and policies in the urban environment. For these reasons, we have identified in our work two core principles underlying many kinds of urban commons as an enabling state (Foster 2011) and pooling economies (Iaione & De Nictolis 2017).

We also observed for instance that technology in cities plays a key role in enabling collaboration and sustainability, as well as pooling users of urban assets, shared infrastructure, and open data management. Further, urban commons-based governance solutions are cutting-edge prototypes and therefore often require careful research and implementation. In other words, they are experimental: new approaches and new methodologies are constantly being developed and require prototyping, monitoring and evaluation.

These basic empirical observations are now the cornerstone of a much larger and scientifically driven research project that we established and call the “Co-Cities Project”. The idea of the “Co-City” (Iaione 2016) is based on five basic design principles, or dimensions, extracted from our practice in the field and the cases that we identified as sharing similar approaches, values and methodologies. While some of these design principles resonate with Ostrom’s principles, they are each adapted to the context of the urban commons and the realities of constructing common resources in the city. We have distilled five key design principles for the urban commons:

• Principle 1: Collective governance (or co-governance) refers to the presence of a multi- stakeholder governance scheme whereby the community emerges as an actor and partners (through sharing, collaboration, cooperation, and coordination) with four other possible categories of urban actors in a loosely coupled system; • Principle 2: Enabling State expresses the role of the State (usually local public authorities) in facilitating the creation of urban commons and supporting collective governance arrangements for the management and sustainability of the urban commons; • Principle 3: Social and Economic Pooling refers to the presence of autonomous institutions (e.g., civic, financial, social, economic, etc.) that are open, participatory, and managed or owned by local communities operating within non-mainstream economic systems (e.g. cooperative, social and solidarity, circular, cultural, or collaborative economies, etc.) that pool resources and stakeholders often resulting in the creation of new opportunities (e.g. jobs, skills, education, etc.) and services (e.g. housing, care, utilities, etc.) in underserved areas of the city or for vulnerable inhabitants; • Principle 4: Experimentalism is the presence of an adaptive, place-based and iterative approach to design legal and policy innovations that enable the urban commons; • Principle 5: Tech Justice highlights access, participation, co-management and/or co-ownership of technological and digital urban infrastructure and data as an enabling driver of cooperation and co-creation of urban commons.

These design principles articulate the types of conditions and factors that we observe are present and that instantiate the city as a cooperative space in which various forms of urban commons not only emerge but are sustainable. These conditions shape and define what we call a “co-city.” The concept of the co- city imagines the city as an infrastructure on which participants can share resources, engage in collective decision-making and co-production of shared urban resources and services, supported by open data and technology, guided by principles of distributive justice. A co-city is based on polycentric governance of a variety of urban resources such as environmental, cultural, knowledge and digital goods that are co- 6

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 managed through contractual or institutionalized public-community or public-private-community partnerships.

Polycentric urban governance involves resource pooling and cooperation between five possible categories of actors—social innovators or the unorganized public, public authorities, businesses, civil society organizations, and knowledge institutions--the so-called “quintuple helix governance” approach. (Iaione and Cannavo 2015) These co-governance arrangements have three main aims: fostering social innovation in urban welfare provision, spurring collaborative economies as a driver of local economic development, and promoting inclusive urban regeneration of blighted areas. Public authorities play an important enabling role in creating and sustaining the co-city.

The ultimate goal of a co-city, we believe, is the creation of a more just and democratic city, consistent with the Lefebvrian approach of the right to the city (Foster and Iaione 2016, Iaione 2017). In the next section, we will turn to looking at an array of mechanisms, or tools, that constitute the commons- based approach to urban resources and that facilitate the transition to a co-city. Few cities have adopted a comprehensive and self-conscious approach to transition from a city in which there are urban commons present to the city itself as a commons. In Europe, three cities exemplify this transition in our view: the City of Barcelona (Ajuntament Barcelona 2017), the City of Turin through the UIA Co-City Turin Project (Iaione 2017c) and the City of Ghent through its commons transition plan (Bauwens & Onzia 2017)

The Design Principles in Action

Having identified design principles for urban commons, we now turn to some of the recurring institutional, financial, and legal mechanisms or tools that are employed to construct, govern, and sustain a variety of shared urban resources consistent with the principles above. The above 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. We have grouped these forms of urban commons governance mechanisms and tools into four main categories: institutional, legal, financial and digital. For each, we offer a brief description and an example or two from our case studies and field observations and explain how they manifest different design principles.

Institutional Mechanisms

In defining the various forms that the concept of commons has taken in history, Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess underscore that the commons requires an institutional approach to governing the production, use, management, and/or preservation of various kinds of type of resources. (Ostrom and Hess, 2007). These resources include both tangible and intangible shared resources, such as knowledge or cultural commons, as well as infrastructure resources. The term commons thus denotes more than a shared resource, or the community that benefits from that resource. The commons is the institutional arrangement that allows the coordination and sharing of those resources, and helps to ensure their accessibility and sustainability for a wide variety of users. (Madison, Strandburg and Frischmann 2016).

In this section, we introduce a set of institutional mechanisms for implementing co-governance of different kinds of shared urban resources. This is a tentative, and not exhaustive, list. From our empirical research as well as our own experience, we observe that the institutional ecosystem of a commons-infused city involves several closely related forms of collective governance at different scales. These include:

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 policy innovation labs, collaborative districts, collaborative working hubs, collaborative housing, among others. We give a few examples in this section and how they relate to the design principles above.

Policy Innovation Labs

Policy Innovation Labs are government sponsored facilities, entities or working groups devoted to the collective co-design, experimentation, governance and monitoring of urban policies. An emerging administrative innovation in many cities around the world, policy innovation labs exist outside of the often-ossified environment of city hall and employ a deliberative and co-working style of interaction to engage a variety of urban stakeholders. Policy Innovation Labs situate urban inhabitants and local communities at the center of the policy design process, including the experimentation and evaluation of proposals, enabled and implemented by the local government. These labs are experimental initiatives, often undertaken by public administration members with the support of social innovators and public innovation experts. They are also places where new instruments of collaborative governance, often supported by digital technologies and data analytical tools, can emerge and be supported before being embedded deeply in the local administrative state.

One such Lab grew out of the City of Bologna’s effort to become a “Collaborative City,” inspired by the concept of the urban commons. The role of the Policy Innovation Lab is carried out by Bologna’s newly formed Office for Civic Imagination and operationalized through “collective civic enterprises,” which are enabled by the public administration through co-design rather than ordinary participatory processes. (Iaione 2016). Civic imagination is the process through which civic actors, individually and collectively, “envision […] better political, social, and civic environments and work towards achieving those futures” (Baiocchi et al. 2014). Bologna’s Office for Civic Imagination is conceived as a permanent co-design laboratory that can manage and monitor all collective action processes, collect and disseminate public data, aggregate skills and tools, support collective practices of city inhabitants including experimenting with new forms of urban cooperativism.

Similar laboratories in cities serve the same function of pairing civic innovation and collaboration between government and residents throughout the city. The MindLab in Denmark is another example of a policy innovation unit whose aim is to enable public authorities to manage collaborative policies implementing co-working/service design processes that involve citizens. It involves a cross- governmental collaboration (Ministry of Industry, Business and Financial Affairs, the Ministry of Employment, the Ministry of Education and municipal: City of Odensa) to distribute among civil servants the methods and tools for facilitating the exchange of knowledge/experiences and mutual learning mechanisms through an experimental approach. (Cristensen & Bason, 2012).

New York City’s recently launched “NYCx Co-Lab” is focused at the neighborhood level and is designed to propose and test new solutions to modernize public infrastructure, support community driven development, and bridge the digital divide in low-income and ethnic minority areas of the city. The city touts it as a program “to transform urban spaces into hubs for tech collaboration, research, testing and development” toward helping the City “advance its goals to be the most fair, equitable and sustainable city in the world.” (NYC Office of Mayor 2017). Mexico City’s Lab for the City (Laboratorio Para La Ciudad) is another standout among the many emerging city labs, in that it has created a platform for experimental policies that can transform the urban environment through community-engaged processes and using digital technologies to enhance that engagement.

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 Collaborative Districts or Neighborhood Agencies

Collective action in cities and urban environments most often occurs at the neighborhood level. Although the form of these efforts varies, for shorthand we will refer to institutional arrangements that represent collective, co-management at the neighborhood level as “collaborative districts” or neighborhoods. The idea is that community residents work together in a deliberative and collaborative manner with other stakeholders, and at a defined geographic scale, to maintain or regenerate the assets and services within their neighborhood or district. These assets are then transformed into a collaboratively managed resource. These districts and neighborhoods represent a form of polycentricism in the way that Ostrom discussed in her work, meaning that they are nested in (or networked with) other government processes or governance structures. They also can be one way of applying the governance devices conceived and prototyped through public deliberation processes and co-design labs to the neighborhood/district level.

Neighborhood cooperative development agencies are one example of this kind of institutional tool. These agencies are inspired by regies des quartier, or neighborhood management, widely implemented in France (Regies des quartier 2017) and with ancient roots in Italy and currently manifesting through “community foundations” throughout the country (Laino 2012). The french regies des quartier are non- profit agencies coordinated at the national level, but governed at the local level through an association “de loi 1901”, the traditional model of volunteer non-profit civic association composed by a partnership of urban inhabitants, the city authorities, neighborhood level associations, social workers and other actors relevant for the inclusive economic development of the area. The agencies are distributed all over French cities, although the higher concentration is in the City of Paris, in the North-East Area (Regies des quartier 2017). They specifically address local development and community development issues and support residents finding jobs by investing in neighborhood infrastructure.

Two notable examples in Italy include the Pilastro Development Non-profit Agency in Bologna and the Neighborhood Houses in Turin. Both follow the “quintuple helix” approach by bringing together at least five possible urban actors or stakeholders in a collaborative institutional format to instigate peer-to- peer production of neighborhood goods and services. The Pilastro Development agency was created in a deprived neighborhood and constituted by the city government, neighborhood associations or collectives, the local housing agency, a civic organization formed by unemployed neighborhood residents to offer a range of community services, small neighborhood business and economic actors (e.g. agri-food center), the neighborhood’s mall, a prominent regional banking institution, and a philanthropic foundation. (Pilastro 2016)

Similarly, the Neighborhood Houses (NHs)—or Case del Quartiere –in Turin is a network of eight neighborhood community centers located in formerly distressed or abandoned spaces that were regenerated and made available to the local community for civic, cultural, and educational uses that meet the needs of residents. (Caponio & Donatiello 2017). The networking of these houses is promoted and supported by the municipality and other public and private stakeholders to foster cooperation and free exchanges between the houses and to innovate neighborhood level responses to the needs of vulnerable individuals, specific groups and the community.

In China, some urban villages are partly governed by village “collective economy organizations” which survive the transition from rural to urban land. (Tang, 2015) Village leaders convert the village’s collective landholdings, along with the land expropriation compensation funds given by the city 9

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 government, into a village shareholding company which then offers shares to the villagers and rents out portions of collective land and buildings to the local city government and investors for industrial projects. Although urban public services are typically provided through government established urban residents’ committees, successful village shareholding companies partially usurp those committee functions and play a leading role providing villagers with economic and social welfare, subsidizing community administration services, and mobilizing residents.

“Collaboratories” and Urban Living Labs

Collaborative working and living are often entry points into establishing polycentric governance of a variety of urban resources. The collaborative hub is a co-working space through which the relationship between district or neighborhood level institutions and community residents is mediated. These hubs can also interact with Policy Innovation Labs, described above, to coordinate and monitor the path of experimental civic collaboration policies. The main difference between policy innovation labs and collaborative hubs are from where they originate. Most often collaborative hubs emerge from and exist outside of the local government structure and administrative apparatus, although they work with public actors. In this way, they are part of an ecosystem of distributed, polycentric systems of decision making within a city or metropolitan area. They are also a form of knowledge and resource pooling, as well as collective governance.

One example of how these institutional forms manifest is the “living lab.” Living labs are user- centered, co-working open innovation spaces where different categories of actors, or stakeholders, can integrate their skills and energies and make them available to the city. At the heart of these living labs are a methodological protocol known as “collaboratory,” conceived in the late eighties in the field of computer science and later applied to fields such as environmental or energy research (Grimes, 2016). The key idea behind the development of collaboratories in scientific research is that knowledge is an activity that is inherently collaborative (Finholt, 2002). They operate as a catalyst to foster mutual learning and co- creation (Ostrom & Hess, 2007, 13, 327).

In the urban commons context, the collaboratory takes the form of a physical or virtual setting where innovative and cultural forces of the city converge, share resources and knowledge and join efforts for generating new forms of shared resources (including knowledge). In these spaces, collaboration teams can coordinate project planning steps in the city, trainings on innovative skills such as digital manufacturing, and more generally be a feeder into the process of generating and disseminating social innovation (Cossetta & Palumbo, 2014). They function as a living lab for innovation in the design of urban policy solutions by aggregating different actors (social innovations, enterprises, public institutions, knowledge institutions) in a co-design process where new public policies can be generated outside of the local government. These labs can be structured as a public-private-community institutional partnerships involving many actors and they can be established as a city, neighborhood, or institutional level. They can also be connected to each other, as in the European Network of Living Labs.

The city of Reggio Emilia in Italy has recently launched a process to co-design with many stakeholders a city-level collaboratory. The diverse and historic Hillman City neighborhood in Seattle, Washington established a community based collaboratory composed a co-working space, a community garden, a multipurpose space, and a learning kitchen. Universities can also become urban living labs, or collaboratories, as evidenced by our own LABoratory for the GOVernance of the Commons (LabGov), established at LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome. LabGov promotes co-governance experiments on 10

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 the urban commons and policies which situate cities as facilitators of the urban commons in different contexts. It played a co-leading role in the Bologna Regulation (see below) and is now working on the establishment of a Collaboratory in the neighborhoods of the City of Rome and through other projects throughout the country. Such university labs provide a platform for a rigorous and interdisciplinary approach to urban policy and democratic experimentalism (Sabel & Dorf, 1998). University labs can also be an instrument available to different urban stakeholders to guide field trials, city to city experiential exchanges, and empirical observation (Biber 2016).

Collaborative Housing

Co-housing and housing cooperatives have a long history in many American and European cities, and not all are examples of collaborative or commons-based housing governance. Some are what property scholar Carol Rose has described as “commons on the inside and private property on the outside” (Rose 1988). In other words, not all are accessible or are collaboratively managed toward the goal of providing affordable or collective goods. The goal of those living in collaborative housing spaces today is not just that of sharing common spaces or saving money, but also having a lower impact on the environment, building relationships and satisfying socialization needs, as well as gaining access to social services or creating collaborative economic activities. Additionally, some emerging forms of co-operative and co- managed housing reflect institutional, technological or design innovations that address social inequalities, greater ecological sensitivity, and the shortage of affordable housing.

Collaborative or co-housing already constitutes a successful policy agenda for inclusive urban development in Germany. After a period of strong state support to forms of self-organization for housing (1984-2000), which led to the blossoming of about 350 experiences, state support was interrupted. Over the past six years, however, Germany has seen a revival of self-organized co-housing, partly due to the exponential increase in housing costs. In 2008, the city of Berlin set up an agency to promote the networking of existing co-housing projects and to facilitate the birth of new co-housing projects (Droste 2015).

A similar transformation is happening in Italy, where the housing sector is moving beyond forms of social housing based on public management or public-private partnerships towards public-community and public-private-community partnerships for the supply of affordable housing (Federcasa-Nomisma 2016, Federcasa-LabGov 2018). For example, the Abit@giovani project, in Milan, is formed by a partnership comprising regional authorities, philanthropic foundations, and a real estate fund. It addresses the housing needs of young residents by offering them access to recently regenerated houses throughout the city and creates a collaborative network of apartments through which renters are connected in co- working labs and a digital platform (AbitaGiovani 2017).

In Barcelona, Spain, the nonprofit housing cooperative La Borda also enables a high degree of self- management and relies on the self-construction of buildings by its members. A novelty of the La Borda model is that it uses a “grant of use” tenancy for the allocation of housing units. (Cabrè & Andrés 2017). The land belongs to the City of Barcelona and the cooperative pays a lease for 75 years. The funding for the project is provided by a hybrid regime of social economy, ethical banking, and voluntary contributions by individuals and groups (La Borda 2017).

Beyond co-housing, much innovation in the area of collaborative housing arises from legal innovations such as community land trusts (CLTs), described in more detail below. A CLT is different 11

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 from the traditional housing cooperative in that it separates land ownership from land use and transforms that might otherwise be a collection of individuals owning property (in the typical housing cooperative ownership model) into a collaboratively governed institution which manages collectively shared goods in a way that ensures their long-term affordability. Residents in the CLT lease the land but own the building and their housing units. The affordability of the housing (or other uses) is secured through lease covenants (contractual promises) which restrict the resale price of the building (or housing units) and thus the amount of profit that can be extracted from the building or unit by any individual owner.

Legal Tools

There are a range of legal instruments available to implement an urban co-governance scheme and to support the kinds of institutional mechanisms offered above. Legal tools instantiate forms of urban collective governance and resource pooling. They often result in the formation of partnerships representing the quintuple helix of urban governance mentioned earlier. This set of legal devices is applied across a range of urban resources—ranging from urban heritage to public services—transforming them into shared assets and shared governance between at least three to as many as five different actors in the urban environment. They include specific legal instruments such as land trusts and collaboration pacts that can either be contractual or institutionalized. The tools are also designed to ensure that the resources meet the needs of local communities, and often are focused on making those resources more available, accessible and affordable to a broader range of urban residents.

Public-Community Pacts

Legal tools for the urban commons most prominently came into focus with the Bologna Regulation on Collaboration for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons. The Regulation established “pacts of collaboration”, a co-designed partnership between the public administration and local communities to share the regeneration and/or management of a variety of urban resources. These resources can range from public spaces and urban parks to abandoned buildings and urban services. Since that adoption, many cities in Italy have uncritically adopted the regulations, without attention to local context. This kind of cut and pasting of laws, without attention to local context, is not consistent with the design principles we have articulated above. The only city that has invested in the adaptation of this kind of regulation to its local context, and the creation of an experimentation process and an institutional ecosystem to implement it, is the City of Turin through its “Co-City” project.

Urban Civic Uses

Other examples of national or local regulations that can reflect enabling state and collective governance, as well as experimentalism, include the United Kingdom’s Localism Act which gives local communities the right to keep buildings or other assets that have use value for the community. In a similar vein, the City of Naples in a 2016 Resolution formally recognizes as “civic uses” abandoned or underutilized public properties that are being used and transformed by residents into collective uses or “common goods.” The city allows their use, without transferring ownership or even leases to the residents, and has appointed a multimember advisory body to study, analyze, oversee, and control the management and protection of these collectively utilized spaces and places.

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 Land Trusts

One legal mechanism that is often employed to support commons-based institutions in the urban environment, particularly where there is a speculative real estate market, is the community land trust (CLT). Land owned by a CLT is removed from the real estate market and put into a legal structure that is democratically governed by a diverse membership of public and private actors and inclusive of community residents where it is based. The governing board of a CLT is most often “tripartite”—an equal number of seats represented by users or people who lease the land from the CLT, residents from the surrounding community who do not lease land from the CLT, and the public and private sector (usually public officials, local funders, non-profit providers of housing or social services, and others). CLTs are also membership organizations, made of voting members from the surrounding community served by the CLT.

Although community land trusts are often used to protect and sustain the affordability of housing in a neighborhood, The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) example from the United States demonstrates that the land trust is much more malleable than its most common use in the housing context. DSNI, borne out of efforts by residents in a poor Boston neighborhood, formed an urban redevelopment corporation (DNI) that worked with state and local government and private financers to acquire acres of vacant lots and to construct an “urban village” consisting of hundreds of affordable housing units, six public green common spaces, two community centers, an urban farm, refurbished schoolyards, and numerous playgrounds. Medoff and Sklar 1994).

On a similar scale, the Granby Four Granby Four Streets CLT, a four-streets triangle located in a working class neighborhood in the Toxteth area of Liverpool, is endeavoring to create a vibrant mixed income community consisting of low-cost affordable housing, green public/social spaces, a retail and enterprise hub for both commercial and creative activities, as well as street markets and event spaces. After two decades of struggle against property degradation and redevelopment policies by the city council, Granby Four Streets CLT was able to create a partnership with the local city council and other housing associations, secure funding from private local investors, and maintain continuous citizens’ involvement to restore ten properties. (Thompson 2015).

The CLT model is also increasingly being adopted as official city policy as in New York City, which is promoting the use of community-driven CLT’s throughout the city to meet affordable housing development and neighborhood revitalization goals. The city recently pledged over one and half million dollars to create and expand CLTs, as well as to fund a CLT “Learning Exchange” for community-based organizations and affordable housing developers that want to form CLTs in their neighborhoods. The CLT model is also being used by cities to protect the affordability of informal settlements against the immense pressure of forced evictions and gentrification in those areas brought on by the real estate speculation affecting the entire city. Recently, a community in San Juan, Puerto Rico became the first informal settlement to be placed in a community land trust, managed through an independent government agency with a governing board made up of representatives from the public and private sectors and community residents (Shareable 2017).

Financial Mechanisms

One critical element for the development of the urban co-governance, or polycentric governance at the local or district level, is the development of social project financing for collaborative forms of urban 13

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 infrastructure and urban services. Commons institutions and co-governance in the urban environment must be financed somehow given the pressures on public financing and the lack of access to private capital by many poor populations. This kind of financing is one example of “pooling economies.” (Iaione and De Nictolis 2017). Pooling economies are instigated or created by the attraction of resources, in this case funding, from different actors or segments of society. These economies form around the collaborative economy, supporting efforts of residents and others to pool their efforts and cooperate around new forms of infrastructure and services.

Here we identify three financial tools that reflect pooling economies and which support production and co-creation of urban commons throughout a city. This is not to say that traditional forms of funding from philanthropic foundations, private investment entities, and institutional or individual investing are not important funding tools. Indeed, they can be part of a pooled strategy to co-create or co-produce common goods and services. The following financial tools reflect, in our view, the principles set out above: crowdfunding, solidarity funding, and social project finance.

Crowdfunding and Civic Financing

Crowdfunding (through online platform or person to person fundraising) can raise awareness and mobilize the local community as a first step leading toward the regeneration of blighted urban areas (Patti and Polyak 2017). In addition to pooling monetary resources, crowdfunding can also be the means to allow different actors to pool their efforts in a campaign to activate urban commons projects. For instance, the City of Bologna, in collaboration with a social enterprise and a local civil committee, launched a crowdfunding platform and campaign to mobilize local inhabitants to participate in the restoration of the “Portico di San Luca”, an historical site in the city Center (Un Passo per San Luca, 2014). Over 300,000 euros were raised from over seven thousand donors, and the platform has remained open for other collaborative projects in the city.

Another example is the “commons buy-out” (i.e. civic acquisition by a local collective) of the Macao building in a suburb of Milan by a group of users occupying the city-owned building in which they held social and cultural activities. The group launched a campaign that attracted over two thousand current users and external members to purchase the building and place it into some form of a cooperatively owned and managed space. (Macao 2017). Consider also the recently formed “real estate investment cooperative” (REIC) in New York City, composed of hundreds of city residents in New York who pool their money and to seek other contributions in order to acquire vacant or underutilized city-owned buildings and transform them into affordable spaces for civic, cultural and cooperative uses. (REIC 2018) Anyone can become a member of the REIC, paying a small membership fee of $10, and become active in fundraising and governance of the nonprofit organization. To date, the REIC has raised over one million dollars.

The Macao model is inspired by the Miethauser Syndicat model in German cities with around 123 properties were purchased through a traditional bank loan and in which ownership and use mimics the form of a community land trust mentioned above. Unlike the CLT, however, ownership and use are not divided between the building and the land. Rather, the building structure is owned by two entities. The title to the property belongs to a limited liability company (LLC), established specifically for this purpose and composed of the Association of Tenants living in the building (the Miethauser mainly deal with housing projects), and another LLC represents the overall tenement trust comprised of all Tenant Associations (Horlitz 2012). 14

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 Solidarity Funding

A similar funding mechanism that also relies on pooling economies is social solidarity funding, which is fueling the boom of cooperative housing in some regions of the world. As an example, two Swiss cooperative housing federations are maintaining solidarity funds, constituted by taking sums from individual housing cooperatives and creating a larger, common pool of revolving funding. (Scruggs 2017) Cooperatives can then access this funding to finance new housing and land acquisition or repairs to existing housing. This concept has fueled, for example, Switzerland’s housing co-op boom during the global financial crisis and has motivated the Geneva nonprofit housing developer Codha to raise millions from co-op residents to finance hundreds of new affordable housing units in one of the most expensive cities in the world. (Scruggs 2017)

Social Project Financing: Social Bonds and Impact Investing

The development of a social and community based economy is distinct from the traditional charity model based on grants. Instead, it tends to blend the profit and social motives, through social impact investing (Bugg et al., 2011). This model of investment is widely adopted and utilized in the U.S., U.K, and E.U. either through “social corporate responsibility” practices by private firms or through Community Interest Companies (CIC), a creature of U.K. law. The CIC is mainly focused on providing benefits for the local communities and is designed to be flexible (Cho 2016). What differentiates the CIC from a company is the statutory clauses of the asset lock which ensures the assets are used for the benefit of the community (CIC Regulator case study series 2017). The CIC, for instance, is set up as a social enterprise whose investments are directed toward its social purposes and whose profits are then reinvested exclusively for this purpose rather than to maximize profit for shareholders. They can also serve several social purposes fitting with the urban commons including: community development and inclusion, regenerating disadvantaged areas, and delivering new and innovative services at the neighborhood level (UK Government, 2017).

According to the UK government, CICs are diverse and can include local community enterprises, social firms, co-operatives, or national or international organizations. (UK Government, 2017). One example of a U.K. CIC is the Social Finance Group, which carries out social finance projects. A leading case is the social project finance that lead to the development of the very first experimentation of social impact bond in the UK in 2007, the Peterborough Project (Social Finance group, 2017a). The project was aimed at the production of services for vulnerable populations, with the support of volunteers and organized communities (NGOs, foundations). Another example is the Bright Futures Fund, launched in November 2014 by the Social Finance and Kin Capital. It is the first national fund to take advantage of the new Social Investment Tax Relief (SITR). The Fund aims to reach £3 million and will invest in charities and social enterprises working to improve the lives of children, young people and vulnerable groups across the UK (Social Finance Project 2017b).

A similar corporate model is embodied by the US model of Benefit Corporation. These corporations are business entities that pursue the general interest as a statutory requirement. It is the most popular corporate form of social enterprise (Murray 2012). A cooperative alternative to the corporate model would be the adoption of the Italian “community cooperatives” model (Mori 2014) or the French “collective interest cooperative” model (Mystica 2016).

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 Because urban commons can constitute some forms of social infrastructure—places for the care, shelter and education of local inhabitants— social bonds (SBs) and social impact bonds (SIBs) can also play an important role in financing schemes for these resources. SBs and SIBs are designed to attract private capital to finance innovative solutions in welfare services. (Fransen L., del Bufalo G., and Reviglio E. 2018). SBs or SIBs are used to implement social project finance schemes and through public- private-community partnerships regenerate urban spaces or run some community-based services, which are then able to generate the social value needed to be eligible for a SB (ICMA 2017) or support the repayment of the SIB. (Zheng Lu et al 2015)

Digital and Technological Tools

Technology can provide crucial tools for communication, and the process of commoning. Digital tools are often employed to connect actors and to facilitate their involvement, and collaboration. Communicating the possibility of collaboration is an essential step, as it facilitates the pooling of assets and actors. Communication and connectivity as it relates to commoning is more than the simple transmission of a message from a sender to a recipient, but rather is an act of social participation— something that is connected to the etymological root of the verb communicate (κοινω and κοινονεο: I make common sense, I join and participate).

As important, digital tools and technology can help to address urban inequality and the inaccessibility of a range of commons goods and services. This is what we refer to when we suggest that “tech justice” is a critical design principle. Without connectivity and the ability to communicate, it is impossible to realize one’s goals, to flourish, and to connect to others and build social capital across economic and cultural lines. In this last section we will focus on some of the more important digital and technological tools that we have observed can enable commoning and that also reflect the principle of tech justice.

Digital Platforms

A digital platform can activate a dissemination process, enabling all urban inhabitants to access transparent and comprehensive information on the projects launched in a territory and ongoing decision- making processes within the administration. Through the platform, citizens are made aware of the possibilities of participating in such processes and of contributing to the creation of public policies on issues that concern them closely. In addition, they come to know the tools provided to them by the administration to facilitate the activation of collaboration and participation processes. The dissemination of information is fundamental, but it is not in itself sufficient to ensure the development of new forms of urban co-governance and is often complemented by two other functions.

The first function is the platform's ability to enable processes whereby citizens can play an active role in shaping public policies, sometimes by voting or otherwise registering their preferences. These platforms can empower early and meaningful participation in the co-creation process by allowing participants to propose ideas and begin working collaboratively on the development of solutions. The second function, on the other hand, is to enable the introduction of learning pathways. These platforms are accessible to citizens who, even if they do not have the means to undertake specialized education, are able to increase their knowledge and acquire skills which can then be employed within collaborative decision-making processes.

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 The local governments of the recent EU-level legislatures have recognized the relevance of digital democracy and application of the principles of Open Government through the implementation of institutional platforms of transparency, participation and collaboration. For example, in Barcelona the government of Ada Colau has created a powerful digital infrastructure for public consultations, resulting in increased transparency and participation in the activities of the City. (Decidim 2018). Another example is the City of Paris, which has chosen to give great weight to online deliberation and voting as part of its participatory budgeting process (Paris Mayor, 2014).

The City of Athens has also developed a platform, SynAthina, to facilitate urban co-governance partnerships. The platform acts as a network coordinator: citizens, NGOs or informal groups can submit ideas for voluntary activities in public spaces or ways to utilize other urban assets in collaboration with relevant government representatives, NGOs, and private actors that might support their projects. Online applications and discussions continue with offline meetings organized in a physical space, the “SynAthina Kiosk”. The platform and the meetings currently host almost three thousand users, organized by over three hundred groups of urban inhabitants in cooperation with over one hundred sponsors (SynAthina 2013).

Increasing the digitization and accessibility of democratic, collaborative processes at the local (regional and municipal) level is also exemplified by the process in the City of Bologna to become a Collaborative City. The Bologna Iperbole digital platform has functioned as a dissemination platform, allowing the collaborative and participatory processes to be widely known. Through the "Collaborare è Bologna" campaign the city shed light on the implementation of its now more than three hundred pacts of collaboration. The Co-Bologna platform also allows users to observe and participate in the experimentation processes developed in urban co-governance field labs in three neighborhoods. The platform’s section on “experiment with us” enables interested parties to pursue new projects or experiments in the city and to share their experiences doing so. The City of Turin is implementing a similar, even more innovative, platform applying blockchain through the First Life platform.

Local Networks and Connectivity

The production and governance of infrastructure commons at the neighborhood/district level could be performed through several structures. Community created and user-managed “mesh” networks— decentralized wireless access points connected to each other—are one example. Mesh networking relies on existing urban infrastructure and the combined efforts of many local actors—including public and private property owners who grant access to buildings and other structures to mount the access points— to create a solution to the “last mile” connectivity gap. The goal of these networks is to bring internet service to communities and populations that lack high speed wireless or broadband access, increasingly seen as a necessary public good or “fourth utility.” In this model, no one owns the entire infrastructure (open and free access), but everyone who wants to access can contribute with their own resources to run the network which, in turn, is managed and governed by the community.

Mesh networks have been established in many European and American cities, including the famed community mesh network in Red Hook Brooklyn designed to overcome the digital divide, to the Detroit, Michigan network which provides connectivity to the 40 percent of its residents without internet access, to the mesh network in Berlin, Germany designed to provide vital internet service to newly arrived migrants living in refugee shelters. Among the well-known and celebrated examples of wireless or metropolitan area wireless networks in the EU include the Spanish Guifi, the Greek AWMN, the Italian 17

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 projects Neco, and Ninux and Freifunk in Germany. Many of those are considered as democratic re- appropriation of technology (De Filippi & Treguer 2016).

Many of the design principles applied by these community networks mirror the design principles for urban commons. As adopted in the Declaration of Community Connectivity, these include: a) collective ownership (the network infrastructure is owned by the community where it is deployed), b) social management (the network infrastructure is governed and operated by the community), c) open design (the network implementation details are public and accessible to everyone), d) open participation (anyone is allowed to extend the network, as long as they abide the network principles and design), e) free peering and transit (community networks offer free peering agreements to every network offering reciprocity and allow their free peering partners free transit to destination networks with which they also have free peering agreements), and f) the consideration of security and privacy concerns while designing and operating the network. The Declaration was facilitated by the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Dynamic Coalitioon on Community Connectivity (DC3) (Belli 2016).

Community mesh and broadband networks promote what legal scholar Olivier Sylvain calls “broadband localism,” an approach that seeks to overcome broadband infrastructure and service disparities by race, ethnicity and income (Sylvain 2012). It is also what he is getting at when he pushes regulators to go beyond “network neutrality” to “network equality” (Sylvain 2016). Network connectivity is thus an important element of “tech justice,” as it can generate economic opportunity and facilitate access to essential goods and services, such as job opportunities, as well as to provide resiliency in network access in the face of climate and weather events.

In a similar vein, we also see emerging locally networked energy production within a community through the establishment of “micro-grids” to become more energy self-sufficient and resilient. (Duda et al. 2016) Communities such as West Harlem in New York City, for example, are exploring cooperatively owned microgrids as a means to help vulnerable populations withstand climate change impacts and reduce energy costs in the transition from a fossil fuel to a renewable energy economy. Like wireless and broadband community networks, micro-grids involve pooling through different forms of financing, accessing excess energy from public buildings, and combining national and international incentives for energy efficiency. Through incentives, therefore, the community will be able to install photovoltaic systems that will be owned and managed by the community itself. The energy produced might also be able to support the creation of a Community network so that the local community can self-manage and share the wireless mesh network

Conclusion

The above design principles and practice are based on our observation and study of the ways that a variety of resources in cities, both existing and created, are being managed or governed by local communities in a cooperative fashion with other actors and often enabled by government bodies and officials. The five design principles, and some of the mechanisms through which they manifest, together with the co-city policy cycle/process (Iaione 2016), compose the beta version of what we call “the co- city protocol.” We interpret such protocol as a language that could guide collaboration among urban communities experimenting with the governance of the urban commons, as well as the exchange of ideas and practices on the commons at the urban level without impairing institutional diversity and adaptiveness. Much like in the digital and open source world, this protocol would allow local communities to build a shared language that could be iteratively updated and could increase shared 18

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3130087 knowledge around the city, ultimately contributing to the construction of an urban methodological approach to commons in the city and to governing the city itself as a commons.

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