The increasing privatisation of urban space is one of the more controversial developments that have accompanied the real estate boom of many inner cities over recent years. Many new ‘public’ spaces are owned and managed by private development companies, with restrictive by-laws limiting the range of activity they can play host to, rather than local authorities with public mandates to allow gathering, protest and so on. This was most starkly demonstrated during the Occupy movement, when it became clear that private owners such as the Corporation of London and Canary Wharf Group had rights to evict protesters from streets and squares that by their nature as open spaces in the city might have been assumed to be in public hands. If cities are to remain viable places for people to develop the strong associational and social life fundamental to healthy human existence they must incorporate a range of public spaces and “third” places i outside of work and home, in which urban citizens can come together. Certainly, privately-owned businesses such as cafés, pubs and nightclubs can provide this and all over the city they support public social life and street buzz. A purely consumption-based approach to public space, though, leaves little room for people to come together over productive activities – producing, growing, decision-making – around which can form much stronger bonds and communities, and thus urban societies. Not only does the commercial public realm lack in ways to support strong forms of public togetherness, but it excludes many whose financial circumstances do not allow them to partake in the activities it offers – shopping, dining and staged entertainment. Those without the means to pay for entertainment, meeting space and even fresh food for example, are also separated from the means to use urban space to create these things for themselves. Attempts to claim a space in the new public are often branded as anti-social behaviour and legislated out by the culture of by-laws that exists to preserve the best possible commercial environment.

This leads to a dangerous segregation in cities and a widening gap between those with and without a legitimate way of participating in public space. The investment that comes with private development is now essential to the maintenance of the urban streetscape, with changes to local authority funding, and the market logic that this investment obeys will of course favour a business-led model. However the tensions and disaffection emerging from the inequality of access this creates are a growing problem, evidenced by increasing unrest in cities across the worldii. This poses a huge challenge for urban governments, as well as developers whose interests are harmed by this conflict, to find more diverse models to apply to the operation and design of urban space, allowing room for forms of gathering and working together in public that lie outside of the market logic. Just as the urban economy will be revitalised by the return of making and craft to the inner city, urban society will be revitalised by the provision of space for people to produce their own food, energy, culture, democracy and learning in strong organisational and associational ways. There already exist plentiful examples of grassroots projects supporting this kind of collective participation in and ownership of urban space, often under the banner of ‘urban commons’.

Commons are traditionally uncultivated fields around a town or village allowing the ‘commoners’ of that community the right to sustain themselves by grazing animals and collecting wood and wild food. More recently Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics by showing that natural resources like forests and fisheries are highly effectively managed by commons-like organisations that allow a self-managed community of users equal access, without private ownership or state control. iii Common, then, is not the same as public: a difficult term but in this context one that can be thought of as denoting an asset owned by a local or national authority on behalf of all the citizens of that jurisdiction, whether or not they make use of it. ‘Common’ on the other hand suggests a community of commoners that actively utilise and upkeep whatever it is that is being commoned, in the new social definition the term has taken on through grassroots projects and scholarly rethinking. The UK Government currently defines common land as under specific ownership but with a ‘right to roam’ iv – including walking, picknicking, and running – granted to anyone who wishes to do so. In other words, it offers nothing more proactive than the right to recreational use that we expect of urban parks and rural attractions. The ownership of land with the right to roam is often private, such as in the case of rural landlords who grant common rights. Some village greens also have the ‘rights of common’ – such as grazing livestock – and associations of commoners have formed to encourage the enactment of these rights. v These are isolated and rural in nature though, and there are even fewer instances in which ordinary citizens can work collectively to make use of urban land or spaces for productive means that go beyond the recreational.

After Elinor Ostrom brought the notion of commoning back in to wider consciousness via the Nobel Prize, scholars started to look at how it could be practiced or applied conceptually to realms beyond the natural world. Benkler vi described the emergence of communication networks and the great possibilities for individual freedom that emerge from the possibility to exchange and share information separately to financial exchange: the more people participate in this exchange, the richer it becomes and yet it only exists because of its users. He also warns that the way the ownership of our communication infrastructures plays out – whether they are held in common or privately – will drastically shape the degree to which individuals will be able to partake in the “networked information economy”. This has been evidenced in the Creative Commons movement, which aims to make it easier for individuals to share writing, images, music and art for non-profit purposes, creating a common pool of creative resources that, again, is enriched the more it is used and produced by its participants.vii In cities, the presence of others confers value in ways that cannot be quantified. Safety, street buzz and neighbourliness are all things that have been conceptualised as commons: intangible assets that cannot be owned yet can be both produced and enjoyed collectively by the city’s users and inhabitants.viii The city also contains natural resources that are neither publicly nor privately owned, but common to all its inhabitants. Clean air, for example, which is a critically threatened resource that all those who use the city have a responsibility to upkeep and a right to enjoy. Although the state can intervene in its management, no organisational body can confer or deny access to it.

In fact, the city as a whole has been thought of as a common. Cities are hyper-complex systems consisting of a vast multitude of individuals, institutions, processes and physical entities, all of which give rise to the buildings, cultures, laws and services that we think of as the urban. Though each one of these may be owned or controlled in a specific way, the holistic entity we call a city (in many cases a towering achievement of human culture) grows in an uncontrollable way from the synthesis of these many parts, with no singular ownership, and is therefore something we have “in common” rather than co-own.

It is important also to note what are not commons. Urban sociologist David Harvey describes clearly how things we think of as public are not always common in the way that has been described here:

“There is an important distinction here between public spaces and public goods, on the one hand, and the commons on the other. Public spaces and public goods in the city have always been a matter of state power and public administration, and such spaces and goods do not necessarily a commons make. Throughout the history of urbanization, the provision of public spaces and public goods (such as sanitation, public health, education, and the like) by either public or private means has been crucial for capitalist development… While these public spaces and public goods contribute mightily to the qualities of the commons, it takes political action on the part of citizens and the people to appropriate them or to make them so” ①

There are many ways, then, in which urban can be thought of as common rather than either public or private. As debates about the extent of state responsibility and the degree to which private enterprise can build cities becomes increasingly acute, it may be extremely valuable to bring this terminology into play. It offers a third way between the sometimes simplistic and ideological counterpoint between “public” – which does not always mean accessible to all – and “private” – which does not always mean closed off to all – in the city. The question, then, is whether new urban commons can be designed-in to the city and what form these would take. The Theatrum Mundi x project Designing the Urban Commons xi called for proposals responding to this challenge, resulting in 10 featured projects offering new possibilities for commoning in the city, which we will return to after seeing an example of urban commoning in action.