School of Commoning

📢Event Announcement
A Creative Commons? The future of Estuary Commons - TODAY at 6:30PM - 17th Nov Focal Point Gallery

The Thames Estuary serves many purposes. As the country’s major waterway and shipping channel, it was once the centre of the British Empire controlling a quarter of the world’s land via sea. It includes some of the UK’s most beautiful landscapes and its coastal habitats and marshlands sustain various agricultural and foraging practices, some of which have coproduced its internationally important wetlands and grazing marshes. The Thames barrier keeps out the tides and the sea level rise from flooding in. The environment continues to be a source of inspiration to artists, who for centuries have captured the dynamic, often conflicting transformations of landscape and places that are now home to communities that live, work and play on its banks.

With a looming environmental and social justice crisis dramatically reshaping our world, the future of the Estuary is too often framed by dominant narratives that portray a landscape of dereliction, dominated by decay, which is ripe for economic investment, remediation and regeneration. Can these different narratives be reconciled? Is it possible for the Estuary to emerge as a true ‘common’, offering public right to it as a resource? Can we deduce models for sustainable development that ensure access to goods and services, that are deemed neither private or public, but instead are valued, protected and made accessible to people and wildlife through renewed mechanisms of commoning?

In the final of three discussions, Victoria Barrow-Williams, Sarah Dance, Emma Edmondson and Dr Mark Hampton will look ahead to consider how we might harness the Estuary to ensure our communities can take ownership of this common resource for the betterment of cultural practice, through creative practitioners making interventions and addressing the challenges between public and private spaces. The conversation will be chaired by Dr Khalil Betz-Heinemann.


https://www.fpg.org.uk/event/a-creative-commons-the-future-of-estuary-commons/

Focal Point Gallery — A Creative Commons? The future of Estuary Commons Contemporary visual arts organisation based in South Essex

📢Event Announcement
A Creative Commons? Commons, Ecosystems and Public Interventions - TODAY - 10th Nov Focal Point Gallery

The Thames Estuary serves many purposes. As the country’s major waterway and shipping channel, it was once the centre of the British Empire controlling a quarter of the world’s land via sea. It includes some of the UK’s most beautiful landscapes and its coastal habitats and marshlands sustain various agricultural and foraging practices, some of which have coproduced its internationally important wetlands and grazing marshes. The Thames barrier keeps out the tides and the sea level rise from flooding in. The environment continues to be a source of inspiration to artists, who for centuries have captured the dynamic, often conflicting transformations of landscape and places that are now home to communities that live, work and play on its banks.

With a looming environmental and social justice crisis dramatically reshaping our world, the future of the Estuary is too often framed by dominant narratives that portray a landscape of dereliction, dominated by decay, which is ripe for economic investment, remediation and regeneration. Can these different narratives be reconciled? Is it possible for the Estuary to emerge as a true ‘common’, offering public right to it as a resource? Can we deduce models for sustainable development that ensure access to goods and services, that are deemed neither private or public, but instead are valued, protected and made accessible to people and wildlife through renewed mechanisms of commoning?

In the second of three discussions, Graham Burnett, Christina Peake, Cherry Truluck and Rosanna Vitiello will explore of the current creative uses of Estuary land through individual and collective action, such as artistic intervention in the work of contemporary novelists, poets, musicians and artists, or in how we use our land and what we produce, the food systems and structures that and its value to people and wildlife. The conversation will be chaired by Dr Khalil Betz-Heinemann.


Book here:
https://www.fpg.org.uk/event/a-creative-commons-commons-ecosystems-and-public-interventions/

Focal Point Gallery — A Creative Commons? Commons, Ecosystems and Public Interventions Contemporary visual arts organisation based in South Essex

📢Event Announcement

Thames Estuary: Creative Commons?
3-17 Nov 21 Focal Point Gallery

Exploring public right to culture across Britain’s largest waterway.
Landscape painters (artists) of the past created ignorant ideals of other lands. Reality was different, justifying defining them as degraded, in need of colonial care - in practice exploitation. Today the waterway from which colonialism was shipped to 1/4 of the world's land, the , has been defined as derelict, with the consequent exploitation of it called "economic investment". What role will artists play?



Book here:
https://www.fpg.org.uk/project/the-thames-estuary-a-creative-commons/

GOOD NEWS -
By popular demand, there will be a second Open House, a gathering of people who already feel called to the Protopia learning journey and those who are simply curious.
To reserve your seat and receive the Zoom link, click on this link to the Open House Registration Form: http://bit.ly/385NTva .
So why “Protopia”? Well, between the utopia of impossible pipe dreams and the dystopia of a nightmarish future, there is a future worth striving for.
Protopia is the practice of prototyping the path to this future as we walk it.
https://www.facebook.com/events/3338653389569439

Envision -> Energize -> Embody a future worth living for — Open House for the learning journey Register for our free Open House, Saturday, 13-March-2021, 3-4:30 PM, London time

If you are wondering what part you can play in the transition Russell Razzaque is talking about in this video https://lnkd.in/eUFGn4Z,
check out the 'Protopia' course by Pavel Lukash.
https://bit.ly/38XsrZ1

The course helping people discover their unique role and contribution in this transitional process. It is shaped as a collectively created learning journey to explore the world we want to see – and the possible ways to bring it into being. It will take you on the pathway to the roots of the evolutionary crisis – economic, political, and epistemological – and then to discover what lies beyond the crisis, behind the barrier, the ‘evolutionary attractor’ of the flourishing planetary futures.
We will learn to sense into, (re)connect with, and act from, this ‘evolutionary attractor’ that manifests itself through our ways of being and acting. Our final aim on this course will be to design our new personal ‘operating systems’ – habits of thought and action, supported by tools and practices – that will help each of us become the future we aspire to be

Protopia: a journey to the edge of collective evolution – Campus Co-Evolve This course is for practitioners – entrepreneurs, researchers, facilitators, change leaders, policy makers, and more – who sense that our civilization is going through a great evolutionary transition, and who want to find their unique role and contribution in this process. The course is shaped a...

This learning community starts on Monday, April 20. To secure your place, register today.

From Me to We to All of Us From Me to We to All of Us An action-research seminar led by George Pór “The pandemic is a portal” “We aren’t just stopping coronavirus. We’re building a new world” “COVID-19, Mutual Aid, & Planetary Consciousness” “Coronavirus Spells the End of the Neoliberal Era. What’s Next?"...

School of Commoning updated their business hours.

I feel excited and honoured to have Michel Bauwens on our faculty to teach a course on the role of the Commons in the coming Transition. We need to be able to help facilitate this very important transition. Come and join us and become a facilitator of this major transition.
The Open House call where you can meet some of us will be on Monday 9th March at 6:30pm UK time.
Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSddq4b1R4dbC7hOotbbrhI18sxt3L3pkGh513HTR3Vyeu1XrA/viewform


https://campus-coevolve.org/commons-transition/

OPEN HOUSE INVITATION Reserve your place in the live online information session about the new Spring semester courses of Campus Co-Evolve, which will take place on March 9, 19.30 Central European Time. To check your local time click : https://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/ If you want to learn about more than one option b...

The Commons in The Economist! "The alternatives to privatisation and nationalisation
"More public resources could be managed as commons without much loss of efficiency
.Many economists see the spread of property rights as essential to kindling modern economic growth. Between the 16th century and the 19th most common land in England and Wales was enclosed and deeded to private owners. Economic historians long reckoned that enclosure, though unjust and brutal, spurred progress and laid the groundwork for industrialisation. Large tracts could be farmed more productively, freeing labourers to work in urban factories while also providing food to support them. “The break-up of the peasantry was the price England paid…to feed her growing population,” wrote Peter Mathias, an economic historian, in 1983. The Industrial Revolution seemed to bury the concept of the commons for good.

But such orthodoxies are being revisited. Privatising shared resources, it turns out, does not always lead to a productivity boom. More recent research suggests that enclosure may not have been such a boon for British agriculture or industry. Research by Robert Allen, an economic historian at New York University Abu Dhabi, concludes that the big, capitalist estates which resulted from enclosure were not much more productive than common land farmed by the yeomanry. Nor did the great lords who gained control of large tracts funnel their profits into industry. Most indulged in fine living; many were debtors rather than savers. As Guy Standing of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London writes in his book, “The Plunder of the Commons”, property rights can create an incentive for owners to use resources well, but they also grant the liberty to squander the fruits of their holdings.

If privatising land raises productivity less than might have been expected, that could be because commons are not as doomed as used to be thought. In fact, many were well cared for. Elinor Ostrom, a Nobel prizewinner in economics, studied how rural villages around the world manage shared resources such as land or irrigation systems. The Swiss commune of Törbel, for instance, has successfully shared irrigation resources for more than half a millennium. An exclusive focus on states and markets as ways to control the use of commons neglects a varied menagerie of institutions throughout history.
. empowering commoners could mend rents in the civic fabric and alleviate frustration with out-of-touch elites."

The full article can be found in the Finance and economics section of the print edition under the headline "The alternatives to privatisation and nationalisation"

School of Commoning updated their phone number.

A WAKE UP CALL
AFTER WATCHING THIS DOCUMENTARY OF WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW ON THIS PLANET YOU WONT BE THE SAME PERSON

We have to put pressure on our governments and the multinational corporations while building resilient and conscious communities. There is no time to waste when no living creature on this planet will be spared.
We have to fight on behalf of the lives of future generations by fighting the unrelenting rise in the world’s temperatures before it is too late for anyone and anything to survive.

There are solutions. But we must act now!!

Climate Change The Facts David Attenborough looks at the science of climate change and potential solutions to this global threat. Climate Change is real. We have to put pressure on o...

Written in 2011 and now more important but also more possible than ever before

https://www.schoolofcommoning.com/content/commons-health-and-well-being

Partner State - P2P Foundation = the Partner State is the concept whereby public authorities play a sustaining role in the 'direct creation of value by civil society', i.e. sustains and promotes commons-based Peer Production

Commons as culture, Culture as commons Krystel Khoury (Arab Theatre Training Centre in Amman, Jordan) and Mario Corbi (L'Asilo in Naples, Italy) have been working on com(.)com, a pilot research project exploring micro-scaled civil and artistic communities re-questioning hierarchical political systems. Krystel's essay below is part of a p...

Help Anna fix *Fakebook* Find out how we can fix the Fakebook of lies with 'Correct the Record' ...

The New Commons of Work – Esko Kilpi – Medium All work systems differ in the degree to which their components are loosely or tightly coupled. Coupling is a measure of the degree to…

Book Launch: Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto | P2P Foundation Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis & Alex Pazaitis (P2P Foundation) will launch their new book ‘Peer to Peer. The Commons Manifesto’

We’re facing a crisis of the commons — of the public spaces we once held as fundamental to the functioning of our democratic society. And we have data-driven capitalism to blame for it.

Whose Data, Which Commons, What Tragedy? – NewCo Shift – Medium Facebook may dominate the news, but it’s only a symptom of a far larger trend.

A Commons Society offers a new paradigm that mixes the best of commercial business and public service. It is a network of organisations connected in such a way that enables them to collectively function as a community wealth management system. It is best thought of less as an innovative individual organisation than as a network and infrastructure within the free market that by nature of its design functions to enable enterprise to naturally perform in a socially beneficial way.

The Commons Society (CSoc) The Commons Society is a mutual aid membership Society that manages the relationships within and between an ecosystem of organisations. It has an ethos of purposeful, accountable activity that opens up a community space between public and private ownership that releases cash, creativity and contentm...

Three main contemporary theories of the Commons: the liberal, the reformist and the anti-capitalist.

In this paper Vangelis Papadimitropoulos has presented a critical overview of the contemporary political theories of the Commons, classified in three main categories: the liberal, the reformist and the anti-capitalist. The work of Ostrom, Benkler and Bollier is termed ‘liberal’ insofar as they place the development of the Commons in parallel with the state and market operation.

The work of Bauwens and Kostakis, Arvidsson and Peitersen and Rushkoff is termed ‘reformist’, as they advocate the gradual adjustment of capitalism to the Commons.

The work of Hardt and Negri, De Angelis,Caffentzis, Federici, Rigi and Meretz is termed ‘anti-capitalist’, given that they favour the autonomous development of the Commons against and beyond capitalism.

Vangelis Papadimitropoulos argues that both the liberal and the anti-capitalist theorists (with the exception of Rigi) miss the likelihood of the Internet, 3D printers and artificial technology rendering large-scale material production redundant, thus forcing capitalism to adjust to the Commons in the long run. He therefore makes the case that the reformist theory has
significant potential for the future development of the Commons. He stresses, however, the fact that the Commons are still in its infancy facing numerous ‘internal’ contradictions such as elitism, aristocracy, monarchy, autocracy, lack of transparency and solidarity, exclusion, discrimination, racism, precarious volunteering and activism, the domination of self-interest and competition over solidarity and cooperation, the rational mastery of techno-economism, and the fear of the tyranny of the Commons over the heterogeneity of individuality. For the Commons to overcome these contradictions, a global institutional reform, followed by a number of inter-local and international principles, is sine qua non. In this framework, transparency of information, distribution of value, solidarity and bottom-up self-management are the core variables of individual and collective autonomy, as they permit a community or group to formulate its values in relation to the needs and skills of its members.

The Politics of the Commons: Reform or Revolt? In this paper I present a critical overview of the contemporary political theories of the Commons, classified in three main categories: 1) the liberal 2) the reformist and 3) the anti-capitalist. A…

It is argued that the Commons favour decentralisation over central control, self-governance over hierarchical management, access over property, transparency over privacy, distribution of value over profit maximisation, sustainability over growth at all costs (Ostrom 1990; Benkler 2006;
Bollier and Weston 2012; Bauwens and Kostakis 2014).

https://gfbertini.wordpress.com/2017/11/21/the-politics-of-the-commons-reform-or-revolt/

The Politics of the Commons: Reform or Revolt? In this paper I present a critical overview of the contemporary political theories of the Commons, classified in three main categories: 1) the liberal 2) the reformist and 3) the anti-capitalist. A…

To Find Alternatives to Capitalism, Think Small Why co-ops, regional currencies, and hackerspaces are pointing the way toward a new economic vision.

A PEOPLE'S FOOD POLICY LAUNCHED TODAY
Download a copy at www.peoplesfoodpolicy.org

As Brexit negotiations begin, England urged to develop progressive food policy in advance of leaving the EU.

· Coalition of grassroots food and farming organisations launch ‘A People’s Food Policy’ - a comprehensive proposal for a more just and sustainable food system in England.
· Scotland is already in process of adopting national food policies and is currently developing a ‘Good Food Nation Bill’, while England has yet to make any progress.

Today sees the launch of A People’s Food Policy – a ground-breaking manifesto outlining a people’s vision of food and farming in England that is supported by over 80 food and farming organisations. The report draws on 18 months of extensive, nation-wide consultations with grassroots organisations, NGOs, trade unions, community projects, small businesses and individuals. It has resulted in a set of policy proposals and a vision for change that is rooted in the lived experiences and needs of people most affected by the failures in the current food system.

It’s widely acknowledged that agriculture is one of the sectors that will be faced with the most uncertainty as a result of the UK leaving the EU. Rising food prices is an issue that has already been repeatedly reported on in the context of Brexit, while migration restrictions are set to have an enormous impact on the availability of workers in the agricultural sector.

In the face of this uncertainty, the report argues that policy, legislative framework and a food act is needed that, “integrates the compartmentalised policy realms of food production, health, labour rights, land use and planning, trade, the environment, democratic participation and community wellbeing.”

Heidi Chow, food campaigner for Global Justice Now which is part of the coalition that developed A People’s Food Policy said:

“From the increasing corporate control of agriculture in the UK, to the price of basic food stuffs outstripping the rises in real wages, through to small farmers being aggressively squeezed out of the market, with over 33 000 small to medium farms closing down in the past decade – the UK is witnessing a series of crises in how we produce, distribute and sell food. The government’s approach to addressing these problems is at best piece-meal and at worst non-existent.

The new Environment Secretary. Michael Gove commented last week that the UK can have both cheaper and higher quality food after Brexit. But the experience of many UK farmers and growers suggests that cheaper food prices must be paid for through lowering environmental and social standards across the farming sector. Instead we need to see greater regulation of the food retail sector to ensure farmers everywhere are paid a fair price for their produce.’’

Dee Butterly, the coordinator of A People’s Food Policy, young tenant farmer and member of the Landworkers’ Alliance said:

“The lack of a coherent, joined-up food policy framework in England is becoming increasingly problematic. In this country we have shameful levels of food insecurity, with food bank usage rising year on year, and an estimated over eight million people now in a state of such financial precarity they can’t afford to eat. Just last week, Unicef released a report ‘Building the Future’, with evidence that the UK has some of the highest levels of child hunger and deprivation among the world’s richest nations, with one in five children under 15 years old currently food insecure.

The way our food system functions and is governed needs to radically change. We need to develop a national food policy in the coming years that transforms our food systems and that puts equality, resilience and justice at the forefront. As Brexit negotiations begin, we urge politicians to seriously consider this blueprint for a progressive national food policy which supports a food system where everybody, regardless of income, status or background, has secure access to enough good food at all times, without compromising on the wellbeing of people, the health of the environment, and the ability of future generations to provide for themselves.”

Many countries in Europe and around the world have begun to adopt progressive frameworks like food sovereignty, agroecology and the right to food into regional and national legislation in an effort to create a more stable and just food system.

A People’s Food Policy is an extensive report, extending to 100 pages across 9 thematic chapters covering governance, food production, health, land, labour, environment, knowledge and skills, trade and finance - each with an in depth analysis and policy proposals for transforming the food system in England.

Download a copy at www.peoplesfoodpolicy.org

Contact:
A People’s Food Policy: [email protected]
Website: www.peoplesfoodpolicy.org

Dee Butterly: 07415054248 (A People’s Food Policy coordinator)
Heidi Chow: 07595048875 (Global Justice Now)
Oli Rodker: 07913547820 (Landworkers’ Alliance)

Health Creation & Food Commons From land to fork – a complex web of relationships This event’s focus is on healthier food systems and the power of communities in addressing the current imbalance in this area of health creation. Do you know anybody who suffers from a chronic disease such as diabetes, dementia, mental health proble...

School of Commoning Events We are a commons education group based in London, established as a Community Interest Company under UK law. What is the Commons? “The social and political space where things get done and where people

De Meent | The Dutch Commons Assembly | P2P Foundation photo by John Carnemolla This article was originally posted on our Dutch P2P Foundation blog On Thursday April 13, 2017, the second meeting was held on “De Meent” in Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam.…