The Commons

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but upon re-reading the original version of my book, published in 2014, I was dismayed to realize that parts of it felt outdated.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.

Bridging The Human / Nature Divide Through Convivial Conservation

August 1, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Capitalism, Conservation, Environment, The Commons

The conservation movement has always lived within the contractions of the capitalist political economy. Much of it celebrates the global system of market growth, private property, and profit-making while trying, in irregular, PR-driven ways, to compensate for the appalling ecological destruction of this system by creating nature preserves. More recently, the conservation establishment has explicitly come to embrace market-based forms of conservation, such as eco-tourism, hunting, and the patenting of exotic plant genes. Land is recast as "natural capital" and made to pay tribute to markets to assure its own protection. The problem with both of these approaches to conservation is that they regard humans as entirely separate from nature, a premise that is biologically absurd.

The Library Is A Commons

July 15, 2024 Emily Drabinski, In These Times. Strategize! Libraries, Socialism, The Commons, Worker Rights

The Montana State Library Commission voted 5-1 (with one abstention) in July 2023 to rescind its membership in the American Library Association because of the ALA’s then-president: a self-proclaimed Marxist lesbian, which is to say, me. Despite their claims, that does not mean the entire field is socialist, nor is the professional association, which is nonpartisan and dedicated to advocating for libraries and the professional development of library staff. Who knows how many of us are card-carrying socialists (probably not too many, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a total 140,000 library workers while membership in the Democratic Socialists of America stands at about 80,000, most of whom likely don’t work in libraries — yet), but there’s a reason the Right is suspicious of libraries as an institution.

Lessons Of Desert Oases For Eco-Resilient Transformation

July 3, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Deserts, Environment, Food and Agriculture, Global South, History, The Commons

To the Western mind, the presence of lush oases in the middle of deserts is a strange aberration, almost a dream. What moderns fail to appreciate is that oases are actually deliberate human creations, socio-ecological examples of commoning. Colonial powers may see oases as a miraculous fantasy, but locals realize that their cultures of interdependence over the course of millennia have made oases possible, enabling them to collect and sustain natural flows of water in arid climates. Safouan Azouzi, a scholar of the commons, grew up in Gabès, Tunisia, where as a boy he lived within ancient traditions that sustain oases in the desert.

Urbánika’s SolarPunk Bus Tour And Video Course On The Commons

June 26, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Governance, Latin America, Solar power, The Commons

Urbánika is an international collective of tech commoners that calls itself an "immersive activism school." Led by Humberto Besso-Oberto Huerta of Mexico, the group wants to help build peer-governed, climate-resilient smart cities and communities, especially in Latin America. For this ambitious goal, Urbánika has nearly finished kitting out a climate-positive "SolarPunk Bus." The amazing vehicle will serve as a mobile learning center as it tours Latin American cities in coming months. More about that in a moment. But first, some news about another innovative Urbánika initiative: an educational video series, "PostCapitalism and the Commons."

How To Unite Local Initiatives For A More Sustainable Global Future

May 5, 2024 Vasilis Kostakis and Nikiforos Tsiouris, Resilience. Create! Local Economies, Sustainability, The Commons, wealth inequality

This article challenges the belief in high-tech solutions to solve socio-environmental crises, proposing a political vision beyond “green growth” and “ecomodernism.”. It advocates for a commons-based technology framework, promoting collective resource management for sustainability. We thus introduce “cosmolocal” production, a configuration that strives to connect communities around shared resources and serve their needs while minimizing ecological impact. Despite acknowledged tensions, we contend that the cosmolocal framework could foster institutional and social change, aiming to address environmental degradation and wealth inequality.

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