commoning

This paper examines the circular economy’s application in addressing sustainability challenges, focusing on organic waste and peri-urban futures. Critically reflecting on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s definition of circularity, we explore how waste minimization and ecosystem regeneration align with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) like climate action and responsible production. Realising this more ambitious and transformational version of circularity involves us in a process of redrawing the “circle” and in the process reimagining economies.

This chapter proposes to recast the “supply chain” as a commons via an extended description of the shared social, intellectual, and regulatory resources currently producing an experiment in a circular economy for organic waste in Sydney, Australia. Organic waste, once composted, finds its way into high value-added crops like heirloom garlic which are then sold back to consumers in Sydney.

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 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.

Urban commons are characterised in the literature as collectively shared property in the city shaped by a context of scarce resources, population density, and the interaction of strangers. In the broader commons literature, commons appears as a verb, a noun, and a process made by practices of commoning—albeit still with a focus on property. In this paper, I argue that an understanding of urban commons as more-than-property is needed to recognise how present but elusive urban commons are.

As the planet moves further into the human-induced Anthropocene there is an urgent need to reconsider the values, practices, and politics leading to widespread ecological degradation. The prioritisation of economic growth by the most dominant political institutions encourages limitless expansion while minimizing awareness of the ecological vulnerability of the planet. Commoning presents an alternative political structure based on transformative practices of collective care or caring with.

Editorial for the special feature.

If communities are constituted by commoning, what are some of the tensions in this idea for thinking about communities of care, where care labour is gendered, classed and colonised? This article reflects on these tensions through the idea of the 'nitty-gritty' of care in communities, using two examples from Aotearoa New Zealand: Te Hiko Centre for Community Innovation in Porirua, and Life in Vacant Spaces in Ōtautahi Christchurch. 

This article came out of many years of thinking and talking together about our earlier work in an urban youth garden in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. We were really interested in the way youth talked about the changes in themselves as people who could learn to care for each other and shared spaces (commons). We had the opportunity to publish in a special issue of Cities on storying the 'counter-city', so we used our thinking about changes in subjectivity to write and think about what this might mean for postcapitalist countercities already present in place. 

The term “solidarity economy” is most commonly deployed to describe altruistic and socially beneficial ways of doingbusiness, often in opposition to ones that are less so. Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork among Danish minority gangs, this article seeks to open the discussion on solidarity economies beyond these traditional understandings by addingthe perspective of gangs. It explores the more exclusive and violent aspects of solidarity economies, drawing on the analytical lenses of reciprocity and pooling.