The Commons And Farming The City:

Prior to the industrial revolution every village town and city had a commons for food production and marketing. In the 21st century the commons is regaining popularity and applications. My personal experience of the spatial commons is the Boston Common and Garden, a both glorious and cordial public space. My second is the Calcutta Maidan, from Hooghly River to the New Market. It incorporates fishing, goat grazing, horse racing, religious festivals and much more.

As a teenager my good commons experience was three or four girl-boy dates. We rented a station wagon taxi to and from the movies in a town eight miles away. The couple that got the back seat typically did the most necking on the drive home.

Last week Washington DC saw the launch of bicycle-share, [SmartBike].  We have had car-share for four years [ZipCar]. Also last week the Vancouver Sun newspaper reported on the City's fruit tree-share project. BikeShare has a long history in Europe and Latin America. I have visited street fruit tree share projects in Argentina and Chile supporting the aged and orphans.

In the USA over the past few decades home owner associations [commons] have been taking over several of the civic functions previously administered by local government. Here in Washington house-share is common amongst grad-students and government interns.

Ride share is becoming more popular as both congestion and the cost of commuting increase. And that’s where I started with my teenage movie date.

A principal author of the American Constitution Thomas Jefferson is frequently quoted: "Although the farmer owns the land the soil belongs to all of us, because civilization itself depends on the soil."

Urban agriculture exploits the commons more than rural agriculture, and is increasingly doing so, in some places. The best known application is Community and Allotment Gardens. Community or Cooperative aquaculture is significant in ponds, and bays.  Less well known is aquaculture in urban waste water lagoons. Community Forest Gardens in Nepal and Kenya are deservedly receiving attention as women's cooperative ventures. Community irrigation, neighbors deciding who gets how much water when, is well documented in Spain and Taiwan. Urban farmers' collaboration in production within utility rights-of-way is worldwide and particularly noted in Brazil and the Ivory Coast. In African towns cow share is widespread.

Heifer International operates from the principle, "Not a cup but a cow". Heifer is operating in over 50 countries.  Its core program is cow-share. It gives one female livestock, cow, goat, sheep, pig, to a family with the agreement that the first heifer or kid will be given freely to another member of the community.  The program is titled "Pass on the Gift".  It has been a remarkably successful program for over 50 years.

There is a long history of the fence as common property, farming the fence along the road and around the library is a common practice is some countries. Laws going back to the middle ages in Europe permit us to farm our neighbor's fence and our church's and prison's.

It is becoming more and more common that idle/vacant land in the city is accepted as available for cultivation. In many countries, from Canada to Kenya, the green space along streets and highways are the space for you and I to raise vegetables and graze livestock.

In the 21st Century the biennial meetings of the "International Association for the Study of the Commons is drawing more attendance and attention.  It has extended the concept from classical, as expressed by Jefferson, natural resources to medicine, the Internet, idle land and Antarctica.

Many of us read or heard about in the 1970s Garrett Hardin's article in the Journal "Science" titled; "Tragedy of the Commons". In which he concluded that we all suffer if one of us over consumes his or her share of the commons.  Significantly Dr. Hardin, in the 1990s, famously issued a formal regret and offered an improved title "Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons". A decade later we are learning better commons management.

Historically it was the case that the commons in the village was well managed. The introduction of agribusiness and global Agrifood corporations, temporarily it now seems to be the case, reduced the significance and the recognition of the commons in our food and ecological practice.

The worm has turned and today the urban poor, the scientific and economic scholars and the locally-based food system entrepreneurs are reinventing the commons from bicycles to forests. The opportunity is clear for city planners and urban designers to map, qualify and inform the public of the space available for building community by farming the urban commons.

References:

1.   'Commons' = 1. shared by all alike, 2. community as a whole, 3. land belonging to or used by a community as a whole, 4. the right of a person to use the lands or water of another:  Webster, 1975
2. International Association for the Study of the Commons http://dlc.dlib.indianna.edu
3. www.info@vancouverfruittree.com" target="_blank">www.info@vancouverfruittree.com
4. www.freecycle.org
[makes available a wide range of free goods to nonprofits & anyone]
5. www.smartbikedc.com
6. www.Heifer.org, contact Ray White @ 1 800 422 1311
7. www.homegrownassociation.org

Jac Smit ©