The Wealth of the Commons

The Wealth of the Commons
Author: David Bollier
Publisher: Levellers Press
Total Pages: 752
Release: 2014-05-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1937146146

We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives. The Wealth of the Commons explains how millions of commoners have organized to defend their forests and fisheries, reinvent local food systems, organize productive online communities, reclaim public spaces, improve environmental stewardship and re-imagine the very meaning of "progress" and governance. In short, how they've built their commons. In 73 timely essays by a remarkable international roster of activists, academics and project leaders, this book chronicles ongoing struggles against the private com­moditization of shared resources - often known as market enclosures - while docu­menting the immense generative power of the commons. The Wealth of the Commons is about history, political change, public policy and cultural transformation on a global scale - but most of all, it's about individual commoners taking charge of their lives and their endangered resources. "This fine collection makes clear that the idea of the Commons is fully international, and increasingly fully worked-out. If you find yourself wondering what Occupy wants, or if some other world is possible, this pragmatic, down-to-earth, and unsentimental book will provide many of the answers." - Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and The Durable Future

Releasing the Commons

Releasing the Commons
Author: Ash Amin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2016-04-28
Genre: Science
ISBN: 131737536X

This book moves beyond seeing the commons in the past tense, an entity passed over from the public into the private, to reimagine the commons as a process, a contest of force, a reconstitution, and a site of convening practices. It highlights new spaces of gathering opening up, such as the digital commons, and new practices of being in common, such as community economies and solidarity networks. The commons is seen as a contested domain of the collective and as a changing way of being in common, with the balance poised in the tensile play between political economy and social innovation. The book focuses on the possibility of recovering a future in which more can be held by the many, focusing on three concepts: nation and nature as a commons, publics and rights, and bodies, concerning the management of lives and livelihoods. Across these three passage points, the book finds evidence of a commons under attack but also defended in fragile though promising ways. With contributions from leading scholars, this thought provoking book will be of great interest to students and scholars in geography, environmental studies, politics, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Art/Commons

Art/Commons
Author: Massimiliano Mollona
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1786997010

Art/Commons is the first book to theorise the commons from the perspectives of contemporary art history and anthropology, focusing on the ongoing tensions between art and capitalism. This study is grounded in an analysis of contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, which the author describes as practices of commoning, based on co-production, participation, mutualism and the valorization of reproductive labour. Mollona proposes a novel theoretical approach to current debates on the commons, and shows that art can provide both a language of anti-capitalist and post-colonial critique as well as a distinctive set of skills and practices of commoning.

Design Commons

Design Commons
Author: Gerhard Bruyns
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 3030950573

This book directly links the notion of the commons with different design praxes, and explores their social, cultural, and ecological ramifications. It draws out material conditions in four areas of design interest: social design, commons and culture, ecology and transdisciplinary design. As a collection of positions, the diversity of arguments advances the understanding of the commons as both concepts and modes of thinking, and their material translation when contextualised in the domain of design questions. In other words, it moves abstract social science concepts towards concrete design debates. This text appeals to students, researchers and practitioners working on design in architecture, architecture theory, urbanism, and ecology.

Architecture from Public to Commons

Architecture from Public to Commons
Author: Marcelo López-Dinardi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2023-12-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1003809227

This book provides an urgent framework and collective reflection on understanding ways to reconsider and recast architecture within ideas and politics of the commons and practices of commoning. Architecture from Public to Commons opens with Institutions the dialogue with the scales of the commons, the limits of language for fluid identities, the practices and challenges of architecture as an institution, the design of objects with apparent shared value in Chile, land protocols that explore alternatives to profit-seeking of property in New York, and spirited conversations about revolting against architectural labor from Latin America. Continuing chapters explore, under Territories, the boundaries of Blackness across the Atlantic between Ethiopia and Atlanta, the underground woven network with conflicting grounds of ipê wood between Brazil and the US, water cycles in depleted territories in Chile, indigenous women-led territorial and human rights struggles in Guatemala, climate change accidental commons in California, and the active search for racial justice between design and place in New Orleans. Contributions range from theoretical and historical essays to current case studies of on-the-ground practices in the US, the Middle East, Europe, and Central and South America. Bringing together architects, scholars, artists, historians, sociologists, curators, and activists, this book instils an urgent framework and renewed set of tools to pivot from architecture’s traditional public to a politicized commons. It will greatly interest students, academics, and researchers in architecture, urban design, architectural theory, landscape architecture, political economy, and sociology.

Routledge Handbook of the Study of the Commons

Routledge Handbook of the Study of the Commons
Author: Blake Hudson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2019-01-04
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1351669249

This comprehensive Handbook serves as a unique synthesis and resource for understanding how analytical frameworks developed within the literature assist in understanding the nature and management of commons resources. Such frameworks include those related to Institutional Analysis and Development, Social-Ecological Systems, and Polycentricity, among others. The book aggregates and analyses these frameworks to lay a foundation for exploring how they apply according to scholars across a wide range of disciplines. It includes an exploration of the unique problems arising in different disciplines of commons study, including natural resources (forests, oceans, water, energy, ecosystems, etc), economics, law, governance, the humanities, and intellectual property. It shows how the analytical frameworks discussed early in the book facilitate interdisciplinarity within commons scholarship. This interdisciplinary approach within the context of analytical frameworks helps facilitate a more complete understanding of the similarities and differences faced by commons resource users and managers, the usefulness of the commons lens as an analytical tool for studying resource management problems, and the best mechanisms by which to formulate policies aimed at addressing such problems. Chapter 26 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Proleptic Leadership on the Commons

Proleptic Leadership on the Commons
Author: Randal Joy Thompson
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2020-10-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1838678018

Will capitalism give way to a commons-centric society as many scholars and activists predict? Viewing the commons as a vehicle for a new world order, Randal Joy Thompson proposes ‘proleptic leadership’, which envisions how leaders will continue to be essential as the custodians of responsible agency and conscious choice.

Blue Ridge Commons

Blue Ridge Commons
Author: Kathryn Newfont
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2012
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 082034124X

"In the late twentieth century, residents of the Blue Ridge mountains in western North Carolina fiercely resisted certain environmental efforts, even while launching aggressive initiatives of their own. Kathryn Newfont provides context for those events by examining the environmental history of this region over the course of three hundred years, identifying what she calls commons environmentalism--a cultural strain of conservation in American history that has gone largely unexplored. Efforts in the 1970s to expand federal wilderness areas in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests generated strong opposition. For many mountain residents the idea of unspoiled wilderness seemed economically unsound, historically dishonest, and elitist. Newfont shows that local people's sense of commons environmentalism required access to the forests that they viewed as semipublic places for hunting, fishing, and working. Policies that removed large tracts from use were perceived as 'enclosure' and resisted. Incorporating deep archival work and years of interviews and conversations with Appalachian residents, Blue Ridge Commons reveals a tradition of people building robust forest protection movements on their own terms."--p. [4] of cover.