Commoning In The City
While Foster and Iaione start with the design principles identified by Elinor Ostrom, the great scholar of the commons, they acknowledge "the limits of her framework and its applicability to the urban environment." Unlike traditional commons of farmland, water, or fisheries, where uses have great latitude to devise their own governance rules, Foster and Iaione concluded that "Ostrom's framework needs to be adapted to the reality of urban environments that are often crowded, congested, socially diverse, economically complex, and heavily regulated."
So our discussion focused on the varieties of ways that urban commons are built in very different urban settings, and the cross-currents of politics, personalities, and histories that require a larger conceptual approach.