Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier

In response to a 2018 city tender, Amsterdam designer and postdoc researcher Selçuk Balamir had a crazy/brilliant idea – to develop an affordable housing cooperative based on commoning and the principles of “private sufficiency and communal luxury.” The building would require cutting-edge eco-friendly materials; prioritize non-traditional families, queer-feminists, eco-socialists, immigrants, and seniors as future residents; and pioneer innovations in finance, building design, construction, and residential governance. Hailed by 'The Architectural Review' as “a beacon of hope in the gloomy Dutch housing landscape,”De Nieuwe Meent [the New Commons] is inspiring other cities and town to re-imagine affordable housing. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.

Can commoners work constructively with the state, and if so, how? Torange Khonsari, a British scholar of architecture and design activism for 20 years and now a principal at Public Works Group, shares insights on this topic from her new book, 'Commons and Public Partnership: Legitimising a Commons Sphere.' The commons offers a "culture of collaboration, co-governance, relational power, relational ethics, and care-based resource production and management," but the state is often indifferent or hostile to these capacities. Khonsari argues that the state needs to recognize the limits of its centralized, top-down notions of power, and support the commons as an arena of distributed, collective risk-taking with care. If properly designed, commons/public partnerships could provide "a kind of institutional fulcrum” for revamping relations among the economy, ecosystems, and society. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.

In the face of real estate markets that cater to upscale buyers and the resulting scarcity of affordable housing, a variety of co-living arrangements are flourishing....though they remain largely invisible to mainstream culture. In this episode, two notable architects -- Neeraj Bhatia of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture and Antje Steinmüller of the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning -- describe their research into the social dynamics of co-living. They also explain how architectural design, commoning, and municipal policies can support co-housing, co-ops, intentional communities, and communes. To make co-iiving options a robust sector of housing, these strategies need far more attention. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.

With collaborators Stephen Ellcock and Annabel Edwards, British photographer and filmmaker Leah Gordon has produced a gloriously eccentric and sumptuous folk history of land rights, enclosure and resistance among English commoners. Their book, 'Common People' (Watkins, 2025) features stunning historical paintings, etchings, and folk relics from local cultures of commoning, as well as contemporary photographs of commoners who continue these traditions as Ramblers, Gypsies, travelers, squatters, festival-goers, ravers, antinuclear protesters, and nature lovers. The visual imagery is augmented by a series of insightful essays about "vanquished peasants," vagabonds, rural rebels, and folk traditions, revealing how historical memory about the commons is still very much alive in England. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.

By applying commoning practices in rural towns in the Italian Alps, Bianca Elzenbaumer, a community economies designer and cofounder of Brave New Alps, is catalyzing many new forms of rural development and ecosocial transformation. Working from a repurposed railway station in Vallagarina, the group relies on radical pedagogy, "feral approaches" to community economies, and lots of DIY making and organizing. Projects don't aim for market development and conventional investment, but for participatory vehicles that honor social imagination, improvisation, and collective impact. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.

In his new book 'Ecocivilization', Jeremy Lent offers a bracing vision for how humanity can escape the destructive imperatives of capitalism and create ecologically centered societies that work for everyone. The book draws on dozens of real-world projects and social movements to describe what a stable, humane world would look like and what strategies can get us there. Chapters focus on significant socio-economic changes that must occur in business organization, agriculture, technology, finance, infrastructure, law, global governance, among other areas. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.

Benjamin Mako Hill has spent years studying the distinctive social dynamics and governance structures of collaborative websites, from open source software (GNU/Linux), wikis (Wikipedia), collaborative filtering (Reddit) and a range of social media. A noted hacker, activist, and computer science professor at the University of Washington, Hill has come to see that digital commons go through developmental stages, each with its own special needs. Fledging projects need to attract contributors by remaining open and welcoming, for example, while more established collaborative websites need to protect their shared code, curated information, and reputations from outside political and corporate players that attempt to capture their "epistemic legitimacy." More on the commons at www.Bollier.org. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.

Federico Savini, a professor in environmental planning at the University of Amsterdam, talks about the state of the degrowth movement today -- its priorities, challenges, and hotspots of possibility. As the author of the book 'Post-Growth Planning' and many essays on degrowth, Savini advocates many policy changes that could make agriculture, energy, transit, and social services more ecologically sustainable. Of course, degrowth as a political agenda faces formidable challenges, especially in the US and Europe. But coming to terms with climate change will ultimately require reducing economic growth, which is tightly linked to carbon emissions usage. Projects based on commons, the Solidarity Economy, cooperatives, cosmo-local production, bioregionalism, mutual aid, and more, offer promising pathways forward. More on the commons at https://www.bollier.org. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.

For the past five years, Stéphanie Leyronas has been part of an internal team at the French Development Agency (AFD) exploring how it might pioneer new forms of development by supporting commoning in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Instead of promoting the linear "progress narrative" of capitalist markets and growth, AFD's efforts seek to strengthen social collaboration and shared benefits, drawing upon the distinctive strengths of each local context. The experiments are forging a Global North-assisted development approach rooted in traditional "relational logics" of cooperation, co-learning, and long-term eco-stewardship. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.

Lewis Hyde, a celebrated scholar, essayist, literary critic and poet, wrote two classic books on aspects of the commons -- 'The Gift,' in 1979, about the power of gift-exchange in forging and maintaining social reciprocity, and 'Common as Air,' in 2010, about creativity as a force nourished by cultural commons. In this episode, Hyde discusses the origins of his striking perspectives on creativity as a gift that must be shared ("the gift must always move"), and the ways in which the US Founding Fathers sought to protect the free circulation and sharing of knowledge rather thane excessive private control through copyrights and patents. More more on the commons, visit www.Bollier.org. Credit for photo of Hyde: Anna Schuleit Haber For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.