Sharing and cooperatives for urban commons

Cooperatives are jointly-owned and horizontally/democratically governed enterprises, and can include businesses that are owned and managed by those who use their services (consumer cooperatives) or by those who work there (worker cooperatives), or shared/hybrid cooperatives where ownership is shared between consumers, workers, and other stakeholders like non-profits. The concept of the commons generally represents a form of collective but decentralised control over resources, or forms of wealth, which (should) belong to all and must be actively protected and managed in a collective manner, for the collective good.

General introduction to approach

With urban sustainability in mind, the idea of cooperativism and commoning has been very much applied to the production/distribution of “clean” energy at city/local level, or for services such as bicycle-repairing and producing/distributing organic food in urban areas. In the urban realm, urban commons are represented by community gardens, social centers run by community groups, public parks or other public or private (often abandoned) spaces which are reclaimed by citizen groups, reconfiguring their use, transforming and maintaining them. Cooperatives are often integrated or themselves constitute forms of urban commons. Whereas in cooperatives the purpose and different roles within the “enterprise” are usually well-defined (although often reconsidered), in other forms of urban commons these are not always as clear.

Shapes, sizes and applications

A strong component of what we observed as urban sustainability-oriented cooperatives are those dedicated to, or include, the local production and consumption of clean(er) energy (see Rescoop for a collection of identified such projects, geographically referenced). One example stemming from the results of the INCONTEXT project is the Emission-Zero initiative in Les Vents d'Houyet, Belgium. After its initial phase of experimenting with raising awareness and spreading information on renewable energy, now it is focused on raising capital for and volumes of renewable energy. The cooperative connects about 1000 cooperators and 10 000 affiliated members (2011). It built seven wind turbines that are now jointly owned (and democratically managed) by the cooperative. Whereas the idea is not complex and many such coop/commons projects pop up, it seems that their greater challenge is the ability to continue without burdening the community which sustains them. Many times, especially when projects do not constitute an important part of the participants’ livelihood, members that assume a lot of voluntary responsibilities get tired and abandon. Long-term institutional support from municipalities and other public actors proves crucial for these projects sustainability. This support means both shifting material/asset into common ownership but also implementing more pro-citizen, socially just approach to urban development and the decisions around it.

Relation to UrbanA themes: Cities, sustainability, and justice

The idea of cooperativism and common management of resources is not new. However, it has been intensely rediscovered in modern cities of today, due to increasing pressures that urban citizens experience on the physical environment (pollution, lack of green space, lack of healthy food), their livelihoods (non-affordable housing, precarious employment) and their political recognition and participation (lack of public space, mistrust in governmental institutions). As a response, urban commons and cooperatives are seen to operate mostly at the level of cities, in urban neighborhoods but also the digital sphere, at times expanding to metropolitan and regional level. Recently also, the rise of such initiatives in cities such as Barcelona or Ghent, has called for a more translocal vision (see Commons Transition Plan for Ghent, and the Electoral Program of Barcelona En Comu). However, many such initiatives (like consumer coops, urban agriculture initiatives), combine use of urban and rural territories and interaction, in a way also helping in reconceptualising the relations and dependencies between these areas in metabolic, social and environmental terms.

(Re)claiming urban commons from solely profit-seeking actors and/or central public institutions that are governed by distant and rigid expert bureaucracies that operate in increasingly neoliberal fashion, is part of reclaiming justice in the city as urban resources and participation in governance become more widely accessible and possible. However, each initiative also faces contradictions and challenges as these are embedded in historical patterns of exclusion and discrimination, and current neoliberal rationalities. Some, for example, assume the withdrawal of the state from certain domains and take on individual responsibilities for aspects that should be of common and public concern. In the case of Gela (‘GEmeinsam LAndwirtschaften’), the arrangement between consumer groups and organic farm producers ensures security of income for the farmers and healthy food for urban citizens. However, if both those aspects are not supported by more universal public policy, these benefits might only accrue to those who can afford to invest and be part of such initiatives.

Socio-enviornmental sustainability is not necessarily central to the goals of commoning/cooperative projects, but sustainability issues have increasingly become a central peoccupation of citizens and movements, thus reflected in such projects. The community-supported agriculture initiative studied under INCONTEXT project, for example, has a strong sustainability perspective as it promotes organic food of proximity, reducing the use of agrochemicals and avoiding embedded energy consumption (transportation). At the same time, environmentalists find that working directly with citizens brings more promising results than with upper-level governments. Many dedicated organizations and NGOs that work towards increasing the share of renewables in energy, for example, are now looking at cooperative or public ownership for renewable energy facilities as a way of reducing the increasing resistance to big wind turbine facilities. However, aspects of sustainability are envisioned and implemented at different scales and in different ways in cooperative/commons projects. SomEnergia is an energy cooperative in Barcelona, which not only aims to produce local renewable energy but also promotes a degrowth perspective to energy use so that overall energy consumption be reduced.

Narrative of change

Cooperatives and other common-based projects are adressing interweaved problems of unequal and insufficient access to resources and services that urban citizens deem valuable if not necessary for their well being. They also address environmental concerns at various scales (from global warming to environmental health issues) which have deep justice implications as they differentially impact urban populations. Whereas a lot of projects are struggling to “fill the gap” that formal institutions leave unaddressed (e.g. making use of unused/degrading land, making viable/accesible the production/consumption of organic food), and thus achieving change by “taking things in their hands”. However, an underlying premise in some cases under this approach is also that by fomenting and practicing equal participation, common management of resources, and direct democratic control over processes, wider socio-cultural and systemic change will also be enabled and dominant institutions will be challenged.

Transformative potential

As described above, there is a growing expectation that bottom-up and citizen-led common-based projects will challenge dominant institutions that reproduce power structures and prioritise profit-based values while not accounting for envirnmental and social externalities. It is seen that at city level, as urban governments work more closely together in domains like renewable energy and urban economy, and as the most progressive governments build synergies between public and common domains, socio-ecological transformation through citizen-led and -owned initiatives become more possible. Research has shown that configurations of community-based initiatives such as cooperatives and commons-based projects do provide a fertile ground for productive transformations, as long as they constructively deal with the contradictions and challenges that they face, and thus allowing for more resilient strategies and structures to emerge (ref: Sekulova, F. et al. (2017) ‘A ‘fertile soil’ for sustainability-related community initiatives: A new analytical framework’, Environment and Planning A. SAGE Publications Sage UK: London, England, 49(10), pp. 2362–2382.).

Summary of relevant approaches

The Emission-Zero-Cooperative ('Emission-Zero') is an energy cooperative launched in 2007. It started when, in 2006, a non-profit organization named ‘Vents d’Houyet’ created its first citizens wind turbine -a "children's wind turbine"- owned by 800 children that were granted 2000 shares (to the value of 100€ each) through a public subscription. The success resulted in the creation of the cooperative Emission-Zero which now connects cooperators and members that share the goals of shifting the energy system towards renewable energy and local ownership. By 2011the coop had built seven wind turbines that are now jointly owned and democratically managed. The energy is produced and consumed locally while the dividents generated flow back to the share owner.

In Colombes, Paris (France), a pilot implementation of ideas that stemmed from the R-URBAN project aims at initiating locally closed ecological cycles that will support the emergence of alternative models of living, producing and consuming between the urban and the rural. Since 2012, a “bottom up strategy of resilient regeneration” started including a micro-farm for collective use, a mini recycling plant and cooperative eco-housing and, currently, 400 citizens are co-managing the project follwoing also sustainability principles of reduced water use and reducing waste.

At transnational level, the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) is a a non-governmental co-operative federation or, more precisely, a co-operative union representing 313 co-operative federations and organisations in 109 countries (TRANSIT project- report).

References

[[Category: Community-supported agriculture] [[Category: Emission-Zero cooperative] [[Category: Energy cooperatives] [[Category: Community gardens] [[Category: Housing co-ops]