Growing the Commonsverse: Rethinking Property
Property law as it is today systemically privileges the individual versus the collective, self-serving control over relationships, and exchange value over intrinsic or use value.
Economy featured
The Dignity And Grit Of The Appalachian Hill Women
Cassie Chambers’s Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains, like Smarsh’s Heartland, considers the dignity and resiliency of poor working-class families in this region of America.
Guidance from The Urban Commons Cookbook
The Urban Commons Cookbook seeks to answer such questions as: “Which ingredients of a cooperative community project most help it succeed? What are urban commons and how do they fit into current activist and civil society debates? And what tools and methods do commoners need to strengthen their work?“
An Open Letter to Research and Degrowth
Research & Degrowth should shift trajectories, dramatically, as soon as possible. In what direction? Political science research, and direct organizing.
Why?
We are running out of time.
How the Twin Disasters of Climate Change and Covid-19 could Transform our Cities
It’s often been said that we’re living through an unprecedented moment. But in city centres, the coronavirus crisis has merely accelerated trends that have been unfolding for some time.
Resources for a better future: Offsetting
Learning to live without the myth that we can keep sailing forever may be daunting, but it’s the only way to keep from drowning. In the end, it may not be so bad to live in a world that is more than the sum of its parts.
What if every city used Doughnut Economics?
Doughnut Economics is rapidly moving from the fringe to the mainstream. Amsterdam in Holland was recently confirmed as the first ‘Doughnut City’, using the model to underpin its economic development strategy.
‘Affective Labor’ in Community Forests in India
In other words, the inner lives of commoners, as commoners, have direct consequences for the external, material world. They are engaged in a symbiotic dance with living natural systems, a call-and-response conversation with the more-than-human plants and creatures of the forest.
Bridging Social Justice & Community Resilience
On June 23rd, 25 Transition leaders from across the country met virtually to share and explore strategies for bridging community resilience and social justice. Our conversation focused on strategies that align with Transition’s approach of systemic–yet localized–solutions, and fall into two main categories: healing the damage of systemic racism and building equitable new systems.
Repaying the Debt owed Black People Requires a Democratic and Reparative Economy
The more important conversation is not how much must be paid, but rather how much must change. To be frank, all of it ultimately has to change. In other words, the entire system that continues to exert violence against and extract labor and blood from Black lives and communities must go.
We are Doomed if, in the Post-Covid-19 World, We Cannot Abandon Non-Essentials
If there is one lesson all of us should have learnt during the Covid-19 crisis, it is about how to separate the ‘essential’ from the ‘non-essential’.
Thinking Outside the Ring
I grant that at this moment in our converging health, societal, and economic crises—including the equivalent of a 32.9 percent annual decline in GDP—words discouraging economic activity probably come as unwelcome (especially from the jewelry store owners and the malls that lease them space).
