The Commons

The Potential For Community Energy And Commons In North Wales

June 16, 2025 Dave Darby, Resilience. Organize! Community, Energy, Local Economy, The Commons, Wales

I’d like to find out more about what you’re doing, your ambitions, the barriers you face. You contacted us, so you know that we’re working to build commons in Stroud – to bring assets into community ownership without debt or giving away equity, but with a reasonable return for investors, strong asset locks, and the ability to federate with other projects around the country, and eventually the world. So after this initial interview, I’d like to bring you together with specialists to see where we might collaborate. So first, before we ask about what you’re doing – why are you doing it? What’s your motivation?

Sharing Seeds In A World Of Proprietary Agriculture

June 1, 2025 David Bollier. Create! Food and Agriculture, Open Source, Seeds, The Commons

Seed sharing has been a venerable tradition since the dawn of agriculture. Sharing has been a way of honoring the renewal of life, developing new seedlines, and maintaining a farmer’s independence while helping other farmers. Modern capitalism, armed with new technologies and legal powers, has savaged this tradition of seed-sharing, with disastrous results. For the past several decades, large biotech corporations have aggressively engineered seeds and the design of seed markets to make them proprietary monopolies. This has had profound consequences for farmers and global agriculture: legal bans on seed-sharing, a loss of biodiversity, less innovation in seed breeding, and higher prices that threaten sustainable agriculture and the economic sovereignty of farm communities, especially in the Global South.

Money Commons: Review Of ‘Remaking Money For A Sustainable Future’

May 17, 2025 Katja Durrani, Resilience. Create! Alternative Currency, Capitalism, Money, The Commons

“For those interested in how money works, and in how it is made to work, these are lucky times”, writes Barinaga. While it’s up for debate whether these times are lucky in other respects, her statement is certainly true as far as our understanding of money is concerned. The financial crises of the last two decades have led to many good books and articles explaining how money is created and managed, not least a 2014 communication by the Bank of England. For anybody taking a closer look, it’s quickly obvious that our current money system isn’t working for most people, nor is it compatible with a sustainable future. This book does a very good job of explaining why that is so.

Commoning Within Arts Collectives: Three International Stories

April 3, 2025 David Bollier. Create! Art, Collectives, Local Economy, The Commons

What are some of the distinctive ways that precarious arts collectives share resources, support each other, and make art? I recently learned a lot about this topic from a workshop of international artists convened in Amsterdam. Most of the artists are associated with the so-called Lumbung Practice collective, an interdisciplinary group experimenting with how to cultivate a commons-based art economy. The artists come from Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, transqueer-migrant disaporas, and other geographies and circumstances, so they have some very different experiences and talents.

Welcome To ‘Think Like A Commoner’

March 1, 2025 David Bollier. Create! Book Review, Local Economy, The Commons, Transformation

About a year ago, some folks in Bangkok reached out to me. Hans van Willenswaard and his wife Wallapa wanted to translate my book Think Like a Commoner into Thai and publish it. Hans is the founder of the Innovation Network International in Thailand, and his wife Wallapa is a social entrepreneur and founder of the Mindful Markets movement. Both have been quite involved in the commons for some time. I was thrilled by their request, but upon re-reading the original version of my book, published in 2014, I was dismayed to realize that parts of it felt outdated.

Future Natures: On Seeing Commons Through Popular Genres

February 1, 2025 David Bollier. Strategize! Arts, Nature, The Commons, United Kingdom (UK)

In academic research about the commons, few scholars are as venturesome in their creative approaches than the scholars and researchers associated with the Centre for Future Natures, at the University of Sussex in England. Led by anthropologist and research fellow Amber Huff, Future Natures explores “ecologies of crisis, commons, and enclosures," but its chief output isn’t monographs and books. It’s an exuberant array of creative works in popular genres like comic books, zines, social media, videos, and podcasts.

The Commons Economy Reloaded

December 7, 2024 Malikia Johnson, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Food Security, Neighborhoods, The Commons, Zero waste

The world seems to have one devastating event after another, and the urgency to strengthen relationships, support one another, and fulfill each other’s needs outside of institutions feels more and more relevant. Many of the solutions offered by elected officials are mired with bureaucracy and lack innovation. In addition, those solutions remove agency from citizens and place it into the hands of institutions that don’t value community needs. It feels poignant to remind us of important work that a few GEO members did during Trump’s last presidency.

Applying Indigenous Wisdom Traditions To Modern Challenges

December 1, 2024 David Bollier. Strategize! Capitalism, Indigenous Knowledge, Indigenous Peoples, The Commons

I've always been fascinated by the striking affinities between commoners and Indigenous peoples, as well as their significant differences. Both are keenly aware of life as a deeply relational phenomenon -- one that Western capitalism, science, and market culture don't really understand. Both see commoning as a baseline for mindful living and presence, a process that can help transform the world in positive directions. And yet, while Western and Indigenous commoners share many values and practices, native cultures have subtle traditions and understandings that go back centuries, often millennia.

An Atlas For Urban Commons Of The World

October 6, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Architecture, The Commons, Urban Design, Urbanization

Stefan Gruber, a Carnegie Mellon professor of architecture and urbanism, sees cities as a prime site of struggle between capitalism and commons, and at the same time more accessible than most national or international policy venues. "The history of urbanization is intricately entangled with the history of industrialization and capitalism," said Gruber, citing thinkers like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells. "Cities provide access to a high concentration of labor and production, infrastructure, trade, finance, and consumption markets." Yet even though cities have contributed to capitalist growth, Gruber noted, "they have also been the arenas where the contradictions of capitalism, such as inequities, the environment, and class struggle, have played out most visibly."

The Role Of The Credit Commons In The Commons Economy

September 22, 2024 Dave Darby, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Credit, Localism, New Economy, The Commons

I’m talking to you from Stroud, where a group of us are trying to build the commons economy, and I know you’re doing something very interesting, and related, in Liverpool, which we can touch on today, but maybe we can talk about that in more detail another time. In Stroud we have the beginnings of a housing commons and climbing commons, and there have been conversations about a water commons, land commons, food commons, energy commons. We’ve got some top specialists, ready to go. Now we can’t really have a thriving commons economy using bank-issued, debt-based money. We need a credit commons to be at the core of it, don’t we?

Football As A Commons

September 15, 2024 Yavor Tarinski, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Privatization, Soccer, Sports, The Commons

In his book Football in Sun and in Shadow, Eduardo Galeano pointed at the commercialization of the world’s most famous sport and its detachment from the grassroots. In it he says that “when the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play, got torn out by its very roots. Professional football condemns all that is useless and useless means not profitable.”2 Once again we saw this in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil where modern football appeared for what it really is: a mechanism serving the logic of constant capital accumulation, aggressive towards those at the bottom who cannot afford to participate in this celebration of modern consumerist culture.

Cascadia And The Global Resurgence Of Bioregional Activism

September 1, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Bioregions, Cascadia, Ecological Systems, The Commons

One of the most encouraging recent developments has been the resurgence of bioregional thinking. About four decades ago, in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge public appetite for re-imagining the economy, eco-stewardship, and lifestyles around natural bioregions, but it gradually waned with the advance of neoliberal ideology. Now bioregionalism is emerging again, with much more force and sophistication. A great deal of vanguard leadership, then and now, has come from activists, academics, and social innovators in the Pacific Northwest. They are often associated with the term Cascadia, which is the name they've adopted for the bioregion stretching from British Columbia and southeast Alaska to Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, and Northern California.

Solving The Housing Crisis Via The Commons

August 23, 2024 Dil Green, Resilience. Create! Housing, The Commons, United Kingdom (UK)

In Stroud Commons, we’re looking to find ways to speed up the building of the commons – especially the housing commons, which we were talking about in terms of ‘the rock on which the commons can be built’ before we’d even formed the core group in Stroud. Dil Green of Mutual Credit Services (MCS – who design models for the commons in all sectors), posted a message in our chat group, giving his take on the housing crisis, and how we might speed up the housing commons by allowing / helping / encouraging people to put their house into the commons, and carry on living in it for the rest of their life – and pass it on to their family, too.

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