The Commons and the City:
Density as Private Profit and Collective Care of Resources
In the field of urban design there are many ways of addressing the question of density, relating it alternatively to the number of inhabitants or dwelling units in a given urbanised area, or the relation between the total floor surface of a building and the land area upon which it is built. In this text, I suggest that the question of density is first and foremost a matter of the balance between the collective care for, and the private profit from the shared resources in our cities. I argue that in order to reach this balance, we need fresh ways of thinking about the governance of our cities. As a central hypothesis, I hold that theories of ‘the commons’ offer a powerful basis for thinking of an alternative way of governance at the scale of the architecture of the city.
The Commons
Over the past few years, a panoply of innovative activism, scholarship and projects focusing on ‘the commons’ have gained momentum. Inspired by the seminal publication Governing the Commons (1990) by economist and Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom, but also driven by significant societal developments, the concept of ‘the commons’ has become an important point of reference in many fields of thinking and practice. Under the header ‘the commons’, fields like geography, ecology and economy have started to explore different ways of managing resources.
However, theories of the commons continue to be misunderstood as advocating a naive sharing of resources that opposes the state and the market. For instance, in the field of urban design, some authors have proposed the commons as a way of governing the city against the logics of the state and the market. The opposite is true. As Elinor Ostrom stated in her groundbreaking book, the commons are a way to think beyond the state and market, especially beyond their antagonistic roles. In other words, the commons are about finding a new balance between values that are traditionally assigned to the state and the market. They are about discovering an equilibrium between the collective care of resources, traditionally attached to the state, and private profits from resources, usually associated with the market.
As thinker of the commons Garret Hardin has shown, the relation between collective care and private profit from resources is directly related to questions of density. If the individual gain from a resource expands and there is no collaborative care, the resource becomes depleted, and the result is what he called ‘the tragedy of the commons’. In other words, from the perspective of the commons, the question of density is a matter of the careful balance between private profit and the collective care of resources.
As a theoretical framework, the commons seems to be most interesting as an alternative way of thinking about the governance of cities. After all, we have learned to think about urban governance as thoroughly embedded in the matrix of the state, as various studies on the relationship between urban development and the welfare state, or investigations linking urban form to neo-liberal market logic attest.
This conception of the governance of the city as exclusively driven by either state or market has not only become intrinsic to our contemporary thinking about the city, it has also shaped our historiographies, which are determinedly presented along these lines. Time and time again, we have conceived the city's history as a matter that is entirely driven by powerful political or economic governance. As a result, we have lost the ability to think of the architecture of the city as a common matter.
In this text, I propose to explore a different perspective on the governance of the city, which explicitly takes the notion of the commons as its point of departure. I am particularly interested in how the architecture of the city, as a spatial and material artefact, relates to the question of governing the city as commons. I propose approaching the commons from three angles, which I term, respectively, res communis, lex communis and praxis communis. These are strongly intertwined and refer to what I consider some primary aspects of the commons.
Res Communis: Common-Pool Resources in Architecture and Urban Design
My exploration of the commons starts by necessity with its most basic definition: the idea of shared resources or common-pool resources. Political theorist Michel Bauwens helps us differentiate between three categories of common-pool resources, all of which can play an important role in relation to the governance of the city. He distinguishes ‘inherited commons’, which he links to resources such as earth, water and forests; ‘immaterial commons’, which encompass the cultural and intellectual knowledge, as well as the craft skills that exist in a certain place; and ‘material commons’, which he relates to the large man-made and man-managed reserves of materials we find in our environments.
Looking at the history of the architecture of the city from this perspective, we find a long and rich tradition of governing and designing urban territories as a matter of engaging with the spectrum of common resources. A prime example of engaging with an inherited common-pool resource in the city is the Boston Common. The continuing existence of this green, open space in the city of Boston,is the result of a mediation between individual and collective interests, not by the state or the market, but through local processes of negotiation.
Architecture played an essential role in governing, unlocking and maintaining, the common-pool resource. As the urbanisation of Boston proceeded, the particular location and form of the common in the urban landscape were maintained by the very character of the buildings along its perimeter, combined with a simple system of paths and fences. The interrelation between the open space of the common and the monumental fronts of the public buildings facing it acted as a protecting belt for the intra-urban common-pool resource. Simultaneously, the programmatic variety of the facilities around the common, ranging from government buildings to a courthouse and a masonic lodge, set the basis for the common-pool resource to play multiple collective roles.
Hence, the Boston Common was a place where the activities of various groups of citizens coexisted, serving private purposes, such as grazing and military training, or public functions, such as leisurely strolling, festivals, demonstrations, and at some points even executions. The Boston common unlocked the land as a productive resource – with cows grazing and providing milk and meat to the city until 1830 – as well as a political resource, where meetings and executions could take place and as a leisurely resource where citizens could come for a picnic, a stroll, or to play sports.
While in the case of the Boston Common an extensive territorial resource was turned into commons, the towns of the Val di Fiemme in Italy illustrate how inherited common-pool resources can also be governed through smaller architectural interventions. The Comunità territoriale della Val di Fiemme (Territorial Community of Val di Fiemme), a union of eleven municipalities in the Trentino-Alto Adige region, has always had a unique status based on an autonomous system of governance established in the twelfth century. Historically, the most important economic and social decisions were taken through ‘commoning’ processes via very specific organisational structures, called vicinie or regole – assemblies composed of the members of a neighbourhood who decided upon the use of shared resources, such as land or water.
This particular mode of governance was supported, or even enhanced, by the specific morphologies of the villages and towns, where the common relation to inherited resources – such as green open spaces – was embodied in characteristic urban figures such as large collective courtyards, shared landscape terraces or clusters of houses with communal barns. These urban figures regulate the relation between the individual and the common resources. Their very architecture articulates the intricate relationship between the private space of the house and the collective space of the town. The form, materiality and composition of these urban figures suggest alternative ways of accessing and using common resources, such as the town’s open spaces. The hybrid conglomerates of houses and the multidimensional structures attached to them illustrate a thick web of relationships ranging from collaborative care of common open spaces, to families extracting private profits from them.
The examples of Boston Common and Val di Fiemmedemonstratethat when we approach the city through the lens of the commons we discover that, time and time again, architecture has played an important role in governing common-pool resources. Although the strategies applied range from the introduction of a monumental composition in the Boston Common to dense urban figures in Val di Fiemme, in both instances the unlocking of resources as commons has been as important a task for architecture as articulating them as fully public goods for the state, or as commodities for the market.
Praxis Communis: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation
A second aspect of the commons I have labelled praxis communis. It explores how common practices can play a central role in an alternative governance of the city. As many thinkers about the commons have argued, the commons also depend upon social practices of ‘commoning’ – acts of mutual support, negotiation, collaboration, communication and experimentation that are needed to manage shared resources and engage with common codes.
Philosopher Ivan Illich has pointed out that these commoning practices can be understood as ‘convivial processes between people and their environment’. He maintains that they have the capacity to enhance ‘the contribution of autonomous individuals and primary groups to the total effectiveness of a new system of production’. Thinkers like David Bollier help us to conceive of the very character of the processes of commoning. He argues that ‘in a commons, “care work” … is primary. By contrast, capitalist markets and economics routinely ignore the “care economy” – the world of household life and social conviviality that is essential for a stable, sane, rewarding life.’ From such a perspective, Bollier maintains, people’s sense of self and subjectivity becomes intertwined with the resources they are dealing with: ‘They take pride and pleasure in becoming stewards of resources that matter to them and their community.’
Civic Survey and Civic Action
That the processes of commoning can play a vital role in the management of the city is not a new phenomenon in the history of urban design. This becomes clear when we look at the urban practice of biologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes, who worked in the late nineteenth century in the city of Edinburgh. Edinburgh's historical centre was generally considered an overly dense and unhealthy area, following industrialisation and the rapid immigration of a significant number of workersinto the city. Instead of relying on standard procedures, where the state would take the initiative, and a town planner would map the city’s ills, demolish ‘unhealthy buildings’ and replace them with new ones, Geddes employed an entirely different method. He relied strongly on the immaterial common-pool resource of the citizens’ knowledge of Edinburgh and actively collaborated with them in what he called a ‘civic survey’. This common practice involved groups of citizens in exploring together with Geddes the potential qualities of the existing city. By walking around the city and talking to its inhabitants, citizens’ committees collectively charted the spaces and practices that mattered to people living in Edinburgh.
The result was stunning. Spaces such as backyards, left-over terrains and small alleys that urban planners and architects had thought worthless, were mapped by the so-called Open Space Committee of citizens as potentially valuable urban resources. Relying on their own knowledge of the city and tapping into the acquaintance of their fellow inhabitants, the Open Space Committee redrew the map of historical Edinburgh as a juxtaposition of valuable spatial resources indicated in green on their map.
The civic survey was, however, only one aspect of Geddes’ reliance on common practices. The urban common resources it discovered had to be unlocked to become a commons, which required ‘civic action’. Indeed, Geddes invited groups of citizens to elaborate small interventions, such as stairs and gates, that would give access to the newly discovered areas to more of the city’s residents. These small, often self-constructed urban elements unlocked previously undiscovered resources for common use, turning forgotten spaces into valuable resources for the community. In addition, Geddes helped citizens to ‘take care’ of the newly discovered resource by proposing plant growing areas designed for their leisurely enjoyment or productive use.
Relying on common practices to analyse and intervene on the city was not the exclusive preserve of late century planners like Geddes. In the twenty-first century, architects and urban designers have articulated approaches and projects that harness the power of common practices to explore and construct the city. A good example is the Folly for a Flyover in Hackney Wick, East London, realised by British collective Assemble in 2011. In the project, intelligence from the citizens of Hackney Wick was activated to offer a new interpretation of an unused spatial resource. Together with local residents, Assemble transformed a disused motorway undercroft into a temporary public arts venue.The Folly was designed as a giant construction kit, which allowed volunteers of any skill or commitment level to get involved in building. The walls of the Folly were made from timber bricks sawn from reclaimed planks, drilled with holes and strung together by wires. Though the project only lasted nine weeks, it uncovered how the space beneath the flyover could play a new role in the city and be taken care of by the citizens.As a result of the initial project, the London Legacy Development Corporation invested in permanent infrastructure designed by muf architecture/art, which has allowed the site to continue being used as a public space.
These examples illustrate how the perspective of praxis communis problematises the question of agency in the development of the architecture of the city. While historical studies have often maintained that strong state administrations or initiatives from private developers have propelled the development of the city, the perspective of praxis communispoints to the different agency of ‘commoning’. Patrick Geddes’ civic survey and civic action as well as Assemble’s Folly for a Flyover demonstrate that the intellectual, political and practical agency of citizens can play a crucial role in the development of cities not only in terms of urban analysis, but also in the initiation, development and maintenance of new urban projects, and has the potential to redefine the relationship between them and the common-pool resources of the city.
Lex Communis: The Commonality of the Discipline and the Discipline of the Common Place
A third key aspect of the commons relates to the common codes and conventions of the city. An understanding of the architecture of the city as a matter of common codes can influence the relation between collective and private interests, between large-scale and small-scale concerns, as can be observed in the case of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées(Civil Engineering Services). This French public body was initiated in 1716 to instruct hundreds of local engineers and architects who were going to build public spaces, infrastructure and buildings all over France. Typically, their design approach often did not entail a fully fledged project, but rather the definition of a set of common principles.
Hence, in planning important public spaces such as parks, squares or streets, Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, director of public works for Paris, did not rely on a complete design. In his publication, Les promenades de Paris, Alphand explains how he defined common principles of urban design that could be used by various engineers and architects to address local conditions and situations.
Alphand outlined a set of codes that included urban elements such as different trees, benches, city lights and how they could be combined into exemplary road sections to define the well-known streets and boulevards of Paris. In his Etudes Relatives a l’Art de Construction, his colleague Louis Bruyère explains that the design of indoor public spaces – such as storage houses and market buildings – also adopted the Ponts et Chaussées approach based on the definition of specific architectural elements and the principles for combining them. Rather than an entire building, Bruyère proposed building elements for various public structures. The idea was that several local engineers and architects could combine them in new indoor public spaces for the city.
The principles of the Corps des Ponts et Chausséeswere published in the Annales des ponts et chaussées. This low-cost publication was distributed across the French territory to all the engineers and designers of the Ponts et Chaussées. In turn, these local engineers and designers were reporting in the Annales how they had been applying the norms and principles in their local context, not only ensuring that the norms and forms of the discipline continued to develop, but also that they were available to all – that they were what I call a lex communis.
The definition of the architecture of the city through a set of norms did not remain limited to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century explorations by the architects of the Ponts et chaussées. Closer to our time, the reconstruction of the Moroccan city of Agadir offers another example of an approach to urban design where common codes play a major role. After a devastating earthquake in 1960, the Agence de la Réconstruction, an organisation that coordinated and curated the new urban development, defined the reconstruction of the city not as a well-conceived plan but as a specific set of codes and conventions that several architects and urban designers could employ simultaneously.
In 1960, the Agence combined a schematic plan for the future outline of the city with a set of codes, the so-called Normes Agadir 1960. The 34-page documentset out specific codes concerning the materiality and construction techniques of several buildings:
– buildings have simple structural forms in plan and elevation.
– masonry may be of burnt clay brick, concrete block or of stone, unreinforced, but must be contained in panels supported around the perimeters by reinforced concrete work.
In addition, the Normes d'Agadir established that every building has an obligation to contribute to the public realm of the city within its very building envelope:
– buildings contribute to the public spaces of the city.
– constructions connect to existing streets and squares.
Together with the city’s general zoning, these codes formed the framework within which a new city could be designed by a wide variety of Moroccan and international architects. In Agadir, urban design was no longer about drawing a precise plan, but rather about defining an accurate set of codes that would allow various actors to develop the city. Apart from specific typological or formal articulations, the material idiom of the architecture of the city fulfils the role of an infrastructure that can be discovered, adopted and even amended by the citizens of Agadir time and time again, while at the same time functioning as a continuous material decorum that guarantees coherence within the city.
The perspective of lex communis illustrates a long history of governing the architecture of the city not as a juxtaposition of private approaches, nor as a response to public plans and programmes, but rather as a matter of common codes and conventions. These may concern the materiality, the architectural elements, the typologies, as well as the composition of the city. Throughout the history of urban design, we see that architects have engaged with these common codes in various ways and have, in that sense, understood their role and projects as contributing to the commonality of the city and the discipline.
Another Approach to Density, Another Way of Governing the City?
As my short exploration of res communis, praxis communis and lex communis illustrates, when we look at the city through the concept of the commons, the contours of a new way of governing the architecture of the city emerge – where density is redefined as a matter of balancing private and collective interests in common urban resources. Out of a res communis perspective, theories of the commons invite us to think about the character and role of common-pool resources when designing our cities. In our present-day society, we talk amply about resources, discussing, for instance, their scarcity and renewal. The same questions should be asked about the inherited, the material and immaterial resources of our cities. In other words, we should start to define what can be identified as common resources around which citizens can gather and construct the city in the twenty-first century.
The viewpoint of lex communis challenges us to think about the common codes and conventions we should follow in constructing our cities. What are, in other words, the general principles that organise the architecture of the city, and how do these relate to the common resources? Beyond stylistic questions, I believe that the discipline of architecture, especially in an urban context, can formulate common principles which allow each intervention in the built environment to reach beyond its own confines. Redefining the common codes in our contemporary cities seems to be an important challenge.
The praxis communis perspective offers us the opportunity to rethink what agency means in the governance of the city, but also how this agency relates to the question of caring for shared resources. It invites us to think about collaborative practices among so-called ‘professionals’ such as designers, craftsmen and engineers, but also among so-called ‘laymen’ who hold essential knowledge on the city. Understanding the complex character of the interactions between these different actors as matters of care and negotiation might lead us to new design approaches in the making of cities.
These reflections on res communis, praxis communis and lex communis give rise to a set of questions concerning the role of the architect and urban designer, their approaches and tools. Indeed, thinking about an architecture of the commons requires that we no longer conceive of the architect as a ‘solo player’ but rather as a ‘commoner’; an urban agent who explicitly situates their agency in relation to other urban actors. This also requires. us to rethink our tools. Drawings and models might become less the media of seduction they often are nowadays, and more a matter of negotiation. It may also imply that our discipline needs to think about new tools that fit to the role of the commoner better.
In this way, ‘the commons’ could become a new leitmotiv for the governance of the dense city. If the city is the ultimate common – a collective social, cultural and material construct that is composed by and for its inhabitants – would it then not make sense to understand the governance of the dense city, and by extension, urban design, as the thoughtful caretaking and unlocking of these common resources?
Tom Avermaete is Professor at ETH Zurich, where he is Chair for the History and Theory of Urban Design. He has a special research interest in the postwar public realm and the architecture of the city in western and non-western contexts. He is the author of Another Modern: The Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (2005) and Casablanca, Chandigarh: A Report on Modernisation (2014, with Maristella Casciato). He has also edited numerous books, including Shopping Towns Europe 1945–75: Commercial Collectivity and the Architecture of the Shopping Centre (2017, with Janina Gosseye), and is a member of the editorial team of OASE Architectural Journal and the advisory board of the Architectural Theory Review, among others.
