The Common City
The physical places we live give us a sense of place, sustain us and provide wellbeing and shelter. However, something is deeply amiss. Place making has been subject to abstract and alienated planning systems, scarred by bureaucracy, corporate greed and concentrated land ownership. Urban economies have increasingly become locked-in to fast money, volatile inward investment, domination by big brands, zero hours contracts and low pay and poor skills. And to confound this, urban democracy and governance are intensely unequal and hierarchical. In the west, city governments are rarely governed beyond an established party political elite while city or metro mayors have done little to radically decentralise power to neighbourhoods. We live in deeply uncommon times.
The common city points to a fundamental shift in the way that place making, urban economies and democracy are undertaken. These come in many guises: novel forms of citizen led housing, community ownership, localised and solidarity economies, collaborative production, local currencies and civic finance. Moreover, radically new ways of doing democracy are being activated through experiments in popular assemblies, participatory budgets, citizens forums, distributed networks, coproduction, co-operatives, as well as civil disobedience and direct action that call attention to injustices.