Download or read book Reclaiming the Urban Commons written by Nick Rose and published by University of Western Australia Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are in the midst of a great shift, a fundamental transformation in our relations with the earth and with each other. This shift poses humanity with a challenge: how to transition from a period of environmental devastation of the planet by humans to one of mutual benefit? How do we transform our relationship to the land, non-human lifeforms, and each other? Reclaiming the Urban Commons argues this change begins with a deeper understanding of and connection with the food we produce and consume.This book is a critical reflection on the past and the present of urban food growing in Australia, as well as a map and a passionate rallying call to a better future as an urbanised species. It addresses the critical question of how to design, share, and live well in our cities and towns. It describes how to translate concepts of sustainable production into daily practices and ways of sharing spaces and working together for mutual benefit, and also reflects on how we can learn from our productive urban past.Covering Aboriginal food systems, RAW gardens, backyard gardens and rooftop beekeeping to the latest in commoning and resilient urban food systems research, Reclaiming the Urban Commons gathers together leading innovators, researchers and practitioners of urban agriculture in Australia to share stories of what they are doing, how they are doing it, and why.
Download or read book The Urban Commons written by Daniel T. O'Brien and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-10 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The future of smart cities has arrived, courtesy of citizens and their phones. To prove it, Daniel T. O’Brien explains the transformative insights gleaned from years researching Boston’s 311 reporting system, a sophisticated city management tool that has revolutionized how ordinary Bostonians use and maintain public spaces. Through its phone service, mobile app, website, and Twitter account, 311 catalogues complaints about potholes, broken street lights, graffiti, litter, vandalism, and other issues that are no one citizen’s responsibility but affect everyone’s quality of life. The Urban Commons offers a pioneering model of what modern digital data and technology can do for cities like Boston that seek both prosperous growth and sustainability. Analyzing a rich trove of data, O’Brien discovers why certain neighborhoods embrace the idea of custodianship and willingly invest their time to monitor the city’s common environments and infrastructure. On the government’s side of the equation, he identifies best practices for implementing civic technologies that engage citizens, for deploying public services in collaborative ways, and for utilizing the data generated by these efforts. Boston’s 311 system has narrowed the gap between residents and their communities, and between constituents and local leaders. The result, O’Brien shows, has been the creation of more effective policy and practices that reinvigorate the way citizens and city governments approach their mutual interests. By unpacking when, why, and how the 311 system has worked for Boston, The Urban Commons reveals the power and potential of this innovative system, and the lessons learned that other cities can adapt.
Download or read book Urban Commons written by Christian Borch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book rethinks the city by examining its various forms of collectivity – their atmospheres, modes of exclusion and self-organization, as well as how they are governed – on the basis of a critical discussion of the notion of urban commons. The idea of the commons has received surprisingly little attention in urban theory, although the city may well be conceived as a shared resource. Urban Commons: Rethinking the City offers an attempt to reconsider what a city might be by studying how the notion of the commons opens up new understandings of urban collectivities, addressing a range of questions about urban diversity, urban governance, urban belonging, urban sexuality, urban subcultures, and urban poverty; but also by discussing in more methodological terms how one might study the urban commons. In these respects, the rethinking of the city undertaken in this book has a critical dimension, as the notion of the commons delivers new insights about how collective urban life is formed and governed.
Download or read book Reclaiming the Commons written by Brian Donahue and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively account of a community working to combat suburban sprawl, and how it discovers how to live responsibly on the land.
Download or read book Urban Commons written by Mary Dellenbaugh and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban space is a commons: simultaneously a sphere of human cooperation and negotiation and its product. Understanding urban space as a commons means that the much sought-after productivity of the city precedes rather than results from strategies of the state and capital. This approach challenges assumptions of urbanization as capital-driven, an idea which resonates with a range of recent urban social movements, from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement to the “Right to the City” alliance. However commons exist in a tense relationship with state and market, both of which continually seek to exploit and control them. Initiatives to create “commons” are welcomed and even facilitated by governments in order to (re-)valorize urban space and lessen the impacts of economic restructuring, while, at the same time, the creative and reproductive potential of the urban commons is undermined by continuing attempts to commodify them. This volume examines these topics theoretically and empirically through a wide spectrum of international case studies providing perspectives from a variety of cities as diverse as Berlin, Hyderabad and Seoul. A wider discussion of commons in current scientific and activist literature from housing, public space, to urban infrastructure, is explored through the lens of the urban condition.
Download or read book Carving Out the Commons written by Amanda Huron and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the practice of “commoning” in urban housing and its necessity for challenging economic injustice in our rapidly gentrifying cities Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource—housing—that had been used to extract profit from them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them. In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban “commoning” through a close investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism’s totalizing claims over life.
Download or read book Reclaiming Public Housing written by Lawrence J. Vale and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawrence Vale explores the rise, fall, and redevelopment of three public housing projects in Boston. Vale looks at these projects from the perspectives of their low-income residents and assesses the contributions of the design professionals who helped to transform these once devastated places during the 1980s and 1990s.
Download or read book Reclaiming the Urban Commons written by and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rebel Cities From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution written by David Harvey and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-04-04 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manifesto on the urban commons from the acclaimed theorist.
Download or read book Reclaiming San Francisco written by James Brook and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reclaiming San Francisco is an anthology of fresh appraisals of the contrarian spirit of the city-a spirit "resistant to authority or control." The official story of San Francisco is one of progress, development, and growth. But there are other, unofficial, San Francisco stories, often shrouded in myth and in danger of being forgotten, and they are told here: stories of immigrants and minorities, sailors and waterfront workers, and poets, artists, and neighborhood activists-along with the stories of speculators, land-grabbers, and the land itself that need to be told differently. Contributors include historians, geographers, poets, novelists, artists, art historians, photographers, journalists, citizen activists, an architect, and an anthropologist. Passionate about the city, they want San Francisco to be more itself and less like the city of office towers, chain stores, theme parks, and privatized public services and property that appears to be its immediate fate. San Francisco is not alone in being transformed according to the dictates of the global economy. But San Franciscans are unusual in their readiness to confront the corporate agenda for their city.
Download or read book Resistance written by Martin Butler and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All around the world and throughout history, resistance has played an important role - and it still does. Some strive to raise it to cause change. Some dare not to speak of it. Some try to smother it to keep a status quo. The contributions to this volume explore phenomena of resistance in a range of historical and contemporary environments. In so doing, they not only contribute to shaping a comparative view on subjects, representations, and contexts of resistance, but also open up a theoretical dialogue on terms and concepts of resistance both in and across different disciplines. With contributions by Micha Brumlik, Peter McLaren, and others.
Download or read book The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty written by Franklin Obeng-Odoom and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last two hundred years, the earth has increasingly become the private property of a few classes, races, transnational corporations, and nations. Repeated claims about the "tragedy of the commons" and the "crisis of capitalism" have done little to explain this concentration of land, encourage solution-building to solve resource depletion, or address our current socio-ecological crisis. The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty presents a new explanation, vision, and action plan based on the idea of commoning the land. The book argues that by commoning the land, rather than privatising it, we can develop the foundation for prosperity without destructive growth and address both local and global challenges. Making the land the most fundamental priority of all commons does not only give hope, it also opens the doors to a new world in which economy, environment, and society are decolonised and liberated.
Download or read book Whose Common Future written by and published by Philadelphia ; Gabriola Island, B.C. : New Society Publishers. This book was released on 1993 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation written by Stavros Stavrides and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and politics of urban commons, and Stavrides uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity emerges today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality.
Download or read book The Smart Enough City written by Ben Green and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why technology is not an end in itself, and how cities can be “smart enough,” using technology to promote democracy and equity. Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself. In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.
Download or read book Reclaiming the Commons written by Vandana Shiva and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authored by world renowned activist and environmental leader Vandana Shiva, Reclaiming the Commons presents the history of the struggle to defend biodiversity and traditional practices against corporate biopiracy and details efforts to realize legal rights for Mother Earth and achieve the vision of the universal commons and Earth as Family.
Download or read book Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns written by David Engwicht and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns provides groundbreaking answers to the problems that cars and traffic inflict upon our neighborhoods, streets, and pedestrian rights. It points the way toward "eco-cities" where people can move (via foot, bicycles, and mass transit) and interact freely-without fear and pollution. Advocating community control, this is an excellent how-to book on organizing and planning for sustainable urban development. Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns has been made available through New Catalyst Books. New Catalyst Books is an imprint of New Society Publishers, aimed at providing readers with access to a wider range of books dealing with sustainability issues by bringing books back into print that have enduring value in the field. For more information on New Catalyst Books click here.
