commons

For nearly a century, Western Sydney has grown as a suburban frontier, now accommodating one in ten Australians. However, the region faces imminent threats from anthropogenic climate change, with heat, drought, fire, and flood poised to render parts uninhabitable within decades. Despite city-wide discussions on climate preparedness, the input of everyday residents, particularly migrant and low-income communities, is often overlooked. Our research highlights the valuable insights these residents offer on coping with environmental extremes both inside and outside their homes.

Property concerns exclusive rights to the access and use of a resource, the possession of an object or territory with a right to exclude others, or the ability to dispose of or exchange an owned object. The particular property regime that has, for at least the minority world, become a ‘common sense’ is a private and individualized notion of property that is manifest in legal title and state enforcement.

This article analyzes the digital field and the historical processes in which it was
privatized (enclosures), while alternatives of co-operative and solidary uses were
developed. The paper delves into the aspects related to the digital-virtual terri-
tory, proposing a literature survey that accounts for both privatization actions
and the so-called platform co-operativism (different from the privative). The no-
tions of common and communalization are introduced as distinct from those of

This article analyzes the progression from traditional to current pastoralist practices and the contemporary diversification of livelihoods of the Jie group of the Karimojong in the Kotido district in Karamoja (Uganda). the focus is on changes of land use, framed by the commons debate. We identify factors that have forced the Karimojong to abandon their traditional mobile pastoral lifestyle and to adopt new income-generating activities, including charcoal production and brick-making, which may have detrimental effects on local forest and soil cover.

In the paper I argue that in a world where our lives are intricately interconnected and our environments are rapidly changing, commoning produces ecological imaginaries and understandings of places that could build a sense of global commons based on mutuality, reciprocity, and relationality. In exploring commoning in the international class room, my paper contributes to on-going dialogues community economies and feminist political ecology in the Community Economies Research Network (CERN), and the newly formed EU project Well-being, Ecology, Gender and cOmmunity (WEGO).

Editorial for the special feature.

Public fridges are open-access community-stewarded spaces where food can be freely and anonymously shared. As such, they are fertile ground for understanding the obstacles and opportunities for governing food as a commons. This paper examines the governance strategies that have developed within and around Foodsharing.de, a grassroots food-rescue network in Berlin, to manage food as a commons. Analyzing the commoning of food in Foodsharing.de provides a novel entry point into the multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder governance processes that shape our broader food system.

What can it mean to shift from a critical to a caring design practice? I raise this issue as urgent and significant within the interdependent planetary dynamics of climate breakdown, rapid species extinction and the vertiginous exacerbation of social inequalities spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic. To explore this question, I take my own participatory and research-led design practice as a reference point that helps me to ref lect on how care can be central to design practices today.

This article is an interview with four researchers about the role of community and community-based initiatives in climate adaptation in urban contexts

This document is an appendix to the Commons Transition Plan for the City of Sydney by the Sydney Commons Lab.