{"id":6415,"date":"2018-01-22T16:37:48","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T16:37:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/?page_id=6415"},"modified":"2018-03-08T20:46:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-08T20:46:00","slug":"commoning-the-city-from-digital-data-to-physical-space","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/issues\/issue-11-city\/peer-reviewed-papers\/commoning-the-city-from-digital-data-to-physical-space\/","title":{"rendered":"Commoning the City, from Digital Data to Physical Space: Evidence from Two Case Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Adrien Labaeye and Harald Mieg In times of widespread austerity measures, the self-\u00adgovernance of shared resources is entering the spotlight as an alternative to privatization. In the city, urban commons emerge when local public management has receded and citizens take over (Foster, 2011), or when new resources are produced by commoners (Borch and Kornberger, 2016). The breadth of urban resources analyzed as commons has rapidly expanded from parks, green spaces, and public squares to various neighborhood amenities or urban infrastructures (Dellenbaugh et al., 2015; Foster, 2011). However, for Harvey (2012), the urban commons is to be defined more broadly, such as in the intangible value of neighborhood life: the permanent production and appropriation of the urban commons by private interests being a defining feature of urbanization itself and the stake of the commoners\u2019 struggle for their \u201cright to the city\u201d(Harvey, 2012).<\/p>\n Considering urban data as a commons is unorthodox, for \u201cdata is the new oil\u201d [1]<\/a>, regarded as a resource to be extracted as a commodity for markets. Seeing urban areas as great deposits of data, and keen to benefit from a new extractive industry, IBM and its competitors re-\u00adbranded some of their information systems business under the concept of \u201csmarter\u201d or \u201csmart cities\u201d, promising prosperity and sustainability through the optimization of information management (Dirks, Gurdgiev and Keeling, 2009; IBM Global Services, 2009). Commentators increasingly critique this top-\u00addown and technology-\u00adcentric epistemology of the smart city vision, and call instead for alternative approaches, shifting the focus to smart citizens and their rights to the digital city (Foth, Brynskov and Ojala, 2015, vi). As we look into the tall shadow of the smart city discourse to uncover the work of (smart) citizens reclaiming their right to the digital city, the urban commons, it may be of interest to see how a commoning process may involve physical space as well as data, side by side.<\/p>\n By describing existing processes of commoning the city, we may better understand how the city itself may be thought of as a commons, as proposed by Foster and Iaione (2015).<\/p>\n The remainder of this article consists of a theory section, describing developments in the literature from urban commons to commoning, followed by a review of the literature on a particular category of intangible commons: knowledge commons. We present our adaptation of a seasoned framework to address case studies. The methods employed and considerations of collecting empirical material follow. In the results section, we present the main findings of two case studies from Berlin (Mundraub) and New York City (596 Acres). These are discussed in the context of the existing literature. Finally, we suggest further research directions and avenues for activists and local governments for the commoning of urban assets.<\/p>\n The first substantial theoretical discussion of commons in an urban context has to be credited to Sheila Foster (2011), who highlighted the ways in which shared urban resources such as parks, vacant land, streets, or business districts are managed by groups of users in the absence of government management and without privatization of the resource. Foster emphasizes that commons dilemmas, such as overuse or rivalry between users around an urban resource, emerge as a response to a withdrawal of public regulation in a previously highly regulated space; she calls this phenomenon \u201cregulatory slippage\u201d: “In simple terms, regulatory slippage refers to a marked decline in the enforcement of these standards that define the use of the resource\/space in question and\/or the increasing tolerance of noncompliance with these standards by users of a given public space” (Foster, 2011, p. 67). In her landmark study, Foster observes in some cities a shift from a centralized form of government to what she calls an \u201cenabling\u201d role of state and local governments in supporting private actors to overcome free riding and coordination problems in the collective management of urban resources (Foster, 2011). This argument is further developed in \u201cThe City as a Commons\u201d, where the emergence of co-\u00admanagement of municipal services and the co-\u00adproduction of urban commons are the two pillars structuring an ongoing transformation of urban governance from a controlling state (the Leviathan) towards a collaborative state (the Ubuntu) (Iaione, 2016). Epitomizing this approach, the city of Bologna adopted in 2014 a \u201cRegulation on Collaboration between Citizens and the City for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons\u201d. In this enabling role, the government may ensure that formal agreements for cooperative management of public resources are time-\u00adlimited, in order to reduce the risk of ossification, a process whereby commons institutions become static and rigid in the face of a changing environment (Foster, 2011, pp. 130\u2013132).<\/p>\n A handful of other authors have thematized commons in the urban context: as an alternative to privatization in a context of budgetary austerity (Stelle Garnett, 2011), as a key resource in building resilience in cities (Colding and Barthel, 2013), or as the result of the civic activation of public space (Radywyl and Biggs, 2013). De facto, the academic discussion about urban commons has focused almost exclusively on tangible resources. A notable exception is Foster and Iaione (2015), who take into account the existence of intangible (e.g., sense of safety or social networks) or digital (e.g., data or infrastructure) goods as urban commons. This is reflected in their significant contribution to shaping the City of Bologna regulation (2014). This intangibility of the commons is evident in David Harvey\u2019s analysis (2012), where he describes the urban commons as the co-\u00adcreated value of a neighborhood, and the commoners\u2019 struggle to protect it from private appropriation as the cornerstone of citizens\u2019 rights to the city. Harvey recognizes a \u201csocial practice of commoning\u201d established between a social group and an aspect of its environment considered as a commons (Harvey, 2012, p. 73). Similarly, commoning is also used to describe the resistance to enclosure, the opening of new commons (Dwinell and Olivera, 2014), or the process whereby a community reclaims an urban resource as a commons (Sundaresan, 2011).<\/p>\n A more anthropological and historical strand of the literature also switches to the verb form \u201ccommoning\u201d, giving more room to the changing nature of urban commons (Linebaugh, 2008). Thus, for Bresnihan (2016), commoning emphasizes the fluid, continuous nature of the production of urban commons understood beyond the \u201cobjective limits\u201d of a static, physical resource, but also integrating people, physical space, materials, technologies, and knowledge. Here, the commoning process inherently extends beyond the tangible resource.<\/p>\n Commons have often been analyzed through the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, which has mostly been applied to the governance of rural tangible resources such as forests, fisheries, or irrigation systems (Ostrom, 1990). More recently, it has also been successfully extended to intangible resources such as open-\u00adsource software (Schweik and English, 2013), online creation communities (Fuster Morell, 2014), and genomic data (van Overwalle, 2014). Indeed, as Christine Hess and Elinor Ostrom argue:<\/p>\n “[The IAD] framework seems well-\u00adsuited for analysis of resources where new technologies are developing at an extremely rapid pace. New information technologies have redefined knowledge communities; have juggled the traditional world of information users and information providers; have made obsolete many of the existing norms, rules, and laws; and have led to unpredicted outcomes. Institutional change is occurring at every level of the knowledge commons.” (Hess and Ostrom, 2007, p. 43)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The most prominent adaptation of the IAD to knowledge\/information commons is to be credited to Madison, Frischmann et al. (Madison, Frischmann and Strandburg, 2010). They define constructed commons in the cultural environment (in contrast to the natural environment) as \u201cenvironments for developing and distributing cultural and scientific knowledge through institutions that support pooling and sharing that knowledge in a managed way\u201d (Madison, Frischmann and Strandburg, 2010, p. 659). In a more recent definition, Frischmann, Madison et al. (2014, p. 3) adopt the terminology \u201cknowledge commons\u201d, defined as \u201cshorthand for the institutionalized community governance of the sharing and, in some cases, creation, of information, science, knowledge, data, and other types of intellectual and cultural resources.” In this article, to avoid ambiguity, we prefer to speak of a commoning process to describe this community governance, and reserve the use of \u201ccommons\u201d to describe the shared resource as is often the case in the literature (Hess and Ostrom, 2007, p. 3).<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Figure 1: The IAD framework for knowledge commons. After Frischmann, Madison et al. (2014)<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the present study, we use our own adaptation of the IAD framework for knowledge commons (Figure 1) in its most recent version by Frischmann, Madison et al. (2014). In this framework, a Background Environment is seen as a given in the study of a knowledge commons. It influences a set of Attributes that are interconnected: Goals and Objectives, Resource Characteristics, Community attributes. These define the governance (and possibly production) of the commons \u2014 the Action Arena in which actors interact through various Action Situations. This results in the emergence of Patterns of interaction that may solidify over time and generate Outcomes such as the creation, expansion, or degradation of a new or existing knowledge commons. In a feedback loop, these Outcomes will in turn redefine the initial set of attributes or, more directly, influence the structure of the Action Arena, with for example the emergence of new Patterns of Interaction creating new Action Situations. An apparent difficulty, in applying the IAD for knowledge commons to our hybrid cases characterized by the presence of both tangible and intangible resources, lies in the fact that the framework has previously been adapted by Frischmann et al. (2014) through two main modifications intended to fit intangible resources (knowledge).<\/p>\n In the urban environment, tangible resources may predate the emergence of a community of users, but may not be in use and thus not perceived as a resource (e.g., vacant land). Thus, analyzing the commoning rather than the commons, i.e., the process by which existing resources are reclaimed and used as commons, may actually benefit from these adaptations, as they emphasize the dynamic character of the process.<\/p>\n Moreover, Frischmann, Madison et al. (Schweik and English, 2013, p. 238). Emphasizing this aspect, Fuster (2014) argues that infrastructure provision (in our case studies, the provision of an online mapping platform) is not neutral for online creation communities and should therefore be integrated into the Governance process (Action Arena) rather than forming part of the Resource Characteristics as in Schweik and English (2013). This provides a theoretical avenue for extending our understanding of the provision of a participation infrastructure beyond the digital realm, taking into account the changing role of the local state that would traditionally manage a highly regulated urban space (Foster, 2011).<\/p>\n In this article we use the IAD as refined by Frischmann, Madison et al. (2014) to elucidate the main interrogation: How does the hybrid commoning process of (1) data and the related (2) public space take place? In particular, we seek to understand the role of the participation infrastructure providers (mainly grassroots initiatives) in the creation of a community of users that is both a pattern of interaction in and an outcome of the commoning process.<\/p>\n We chose a case study approach, as this has been widely used to analyze commons (Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom, 2010). Case study research is seen as particularly appropriate for explorative and evaluative research, and supports conceptual refinement and theory-\u00addevelopment (Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom, 2010, pp. 34\u201335) as in the present study. The description of such (rather hidden) phenomena may also make them more real and credible to policy and activism, making the research itself a performative ontological intervention (Gibson-\u00adGraham, 2008).<\/p>\n The two case studies were chosen for their similarities. In both cases, data about the urban space (vacant lots and growing edibles) is being collaboratively produced or reclaimed, and refined into an open and shared resource by a citizens\u2019 initiative \u2014 a knowledge commons (Frischmann, Madison and Strandburg, 2014; Fuster, 2014; Hess and Ostrom, 2007). Yet, for both initiatives, that intangible commons is only a means towards an end; by being made actionable through the use of a mapping platform and further actions including community building, it results in a new, collective form of public land use: urban foraging on the one hand (Berlin); community spaces such as gardens on the other hand (NYC). What used to be neglected public assets \u2014 fruit trees and wasteland \u2014 are turned into shared resources that provide opportunities for community activities, reconnection to nature, food production, and DIY practices.<\/p>\n To structure our study we rely on an IAD framework for knowledge commons adapted for hybrid urban commoning processes that combine an intangible and a tangible resource. Table 1 presents a condensed version of the framework, including representative and operational research questions proposed by Frischmann, Madison et al. (2014) and completed with Fuster\u2019s (2014) focus on infrastructure provision (in Governance).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nIntroduction <\/span><\/h2>\n
Theory <\/span><\/h2>\n
From urban commons to commoning the city <\/h3>\n
Knowledge commons: The IAD framework <\/h3>\n
\n
Research questions <\/span><\/h2>\n
Materials and methods <\/span><\/h2>\n