Panel 3.4. Mapping Commons-State Partnerships Practices: Neighbourhoods as Nexus of Sovereignty

This paper uses the project ‘Creative Archway Commons’ which is a community-led initiative in partnership with local government in London (London Borough of Islington). The project is embedded in a neighbourhood in North London and aimed at delivery of a community-led creative enterprise zone (CEZ) in its town centre. CEZs are designated by the Mayor of London and aspire to be grassroots led. However, they are seldom that due to its lack of financing and knowledge in practice models. The paper will demonstrate how it tackled these two obstacles through a partnership between London Borough of Islington, London Metropolitan University and the Architectural Association. The new knowledge that emerged relates to both pedagogy of teaching and the mobilisation of the classroom as a common resource and the methodology of such grassroots delivery. The major project findings included: 1) high land rental value making grassroots creative organisations homeless, 2) culture of competition over resources between grassroots organisations, 3) lack of knowledge about governmental procedures and 4) power relationships that were constructive and destructive. The paper will present how each one of these obstacles were addressed using innovative and creative solutions beyond local government’s imagination. The talk will be structured, where each applied solution is mapped against an overall diagrams that aligns with principles of State Reinforced Self-Governance (SRSG), and has been presented to the local government as Commons-Public Partnership model within neighbourhoods. All this work has its theoretical backbone from various relational theories that range from; relational leadership, relational power, relational ethics, relational epistemology, and interpersonal conflict and sanctions. The work also includes the use of new technologies such as blockchain, metaverse and innovative use of NFTs, framing the neighbourhood as a nexus of political decision-making.

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At IASC Lima, in 2019, the paper "Bicultural practices? - self determination and hyperlocal planning in Vogelmorn, New Zealand" was presented. As an embedded, affective ethnographic researcher I laid out a philosophical perspective, weaving Maori and Pākeha histories of New Zealand, and aspirations for a commons-designed community asset. In 2019 Vogelmorn's community had already begun to form around a former bowling club in the southern part of Wellington city with some support from Local Government. In 2025, Vogelmorn will celebrate ten years of community management and ownership and this moment offers chance for reflection.

Vogelmorn's ethos was influenced by European movements including the European Assembly of the Commons in Brussels and the Fearless City movement in Barcelona (both 2016); IASC papers plus subsequent author visits to Grenoble, Brussels, Naples and Turin to understand similar spaces and practices 2017-2019. This paper aims to ask and answer how the aspirations of Vogelmorn have developed from a practice analysis: how well bicultural goals have been met; how Vogelmorn's distributed decision making has influenced city-thinking in Wellington; how market and private forces work within the community centre and how cultural independence has fared. This paper is based on interviews and reflections with city and community makers in and around the centre.

This paper examines how deliberative democratic theory provides a normative foundation for designing inclusive and participatory governance models, with particular attention to water resource management. Deliberative democracy, as articulated by theorists like Jürgen Habermas (1996) and John Dryzek (2000), emphasizes public participation, reason-giving, and inclusivity as the core principles of legitimate governance. These principles not only ensure that decision-making is more equitable but also that it reflects the collective will of those affected by environmental policies, differently from other models that prioritize mere aggregation of preferences based on private interests.
The Italian Contratti di fiume (river contracts) are a practical embodiment of deliberative democracy. These contracts, designed to manage river basins through multi-stakeholder engagement, align with deliberative theory by fostering open dialogue and collaboration among local communities, governments, environmental organizations, and industries. Indeed, by encouraging inclusive participation and collective decision-making, river contracts promote sustainable water management that address issues like water pollution, flood risks, and biodiversity loss (Pistocchi & Iannetta, 2015), balancing environmental, social, and economic needs.
In this study, we aim at discussing how and to what extent different models of river contracts facilitate public participation, reason-giving and inclusivity in drafting and realizing water management policies. More specifically, case studies such as the Contratto di Fiume Lambro-Seveso-Olona in Lombardy and the Contratto di Fiume Mincio will be analyzed, to investigate how participatory forms of governance can lead to more equitable and sustainable water management outcomes.
Overall, this analysis will contribute to a deeper understanding of how deliberative democratic principles can be operationalized in environmental governance, offering valuable insights into their broader potential for managing shared natural resources.

Urban commons, including greenspaces and neighborhood infrastructure, often depend on collective development and stewardship by state actors and community groups. While inclusive planning and citizen collaboration are widely advocated in neighborhood revitalization programs, these efforts tend to falter due to imbalanced dynamics between state and community stakeholders, undermining governance and long-term sustainability.

This study explores how commons-state partnerships in U.S. neighborhood revitalization can be structured to ensure effective, collaborative governance systems, using the State-Reinforced Self-Governance (SRSG) Framework. The SRSG Framework posits that state actions—legislative, administrative, and financial—can either foster or hinder supportive environments for co-production (synergistic collaboration among stakeholders as equal partners) and adaptive governance (the ability to dynamically respond to change).

The research applies the SRSG Framework to critique landmark policies from the Great Depression to the present, including the HOPE VI Program and the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative. These programs are analyzed through the lenses of collective action, co-production, and state-reinforced self-governance, focusing on the extent to which constitutional decision-making authority, resources, and decision-making capacities were equitably distributed among stakeholders. The critique draws on Ostrom’s (1994) theories of self-governance and co-production, alongside contemporary adaptations by DeCaro et al. (2017), and Sarker (2013), to assess how these initiatives empower or constrain neighborhood-level governance.

Preliminary findings suggest that policies insufficiently transferring decision-making authority and operational resources to local groups often prove ineffective in the long run. From an SRSG lens, this means ensuring citizen groups are equipped with appropriate decision-making and operational authority, sufficient fiscal and human resource capital, assigned specific responsibilities, capability to change and resist change as needed as well as conducive environment that facilitates co-productive partnership with public administrators to develop revitalization solutions that are socioecologically fit (DeCaro et al., in press; Epstein et al., 2015).

By demonstrating the diagnostic potential of the SRSG Framework, this study offers insights into overcoming systemic barriers to collaboration, informing more equitable, adaptive, and responsive urban planning practices that prioritize long-term community empowerment.

As a way of engaging with the local neighbourhood and providing platforms and means through which those on the periphery of society can take part in the commons, I am proposing the notion of the surplus material in the context of a participatory performance project entitled Chodzenie-Siberia.
Surplus material has precedence in economics in the context of surplus value and wealth, and in architecture as discarded material that can be re-used in the creation of new buildings. In this proposal I describe surplus material as social surplus that is excluded from established social structures and disciplinary practice, and by extension, from representational politics. Any involvement with this surplus requires an interdisciplinary approach that encourages alternatives modes of dialogue and engagement within the neighbourhood, bringing to life what has been ignored or hidden.
The project Chodzenie-Siberia deals with this surplus as an artistic/architectural intervention that disrupts the normalised and functional content of the High Street, inverting its use from a place for consumption and shopping, into an arena for dialogue and participation. The need to buy and fulfil consumerist demand is replaced by a continuous process of engagements that highlight desires in relation to matters of concern. Through its intervention, it unleashes and reveals the social surplus by becoming a platform for undisciplined encounters between unlikely groups of people and individuals, who normally would never meet, thus altering their everyday reality.
Chodzenie-Siberia (Walking-Siberia) was a participatory event on and around a transformed military truck in the middle of Watford High Street (UK), produced as part of the Imagine Watford Festival in 2011. the project culminated in an extensive collaboration between architects, visual artists, dance choreographers, composers and local resident volunteers from Watford Palace Theatre and Polish survivors then resident in the UK.

Riding on the so-called “Deliberative Wave”(OECD, 2020), wealthy Western democracies, like the country of Luxembourg, are increasingly experimenting with the use of deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) such as Citizen’ Assemblies (CA) in state-led policy-making processes at various levels of public government. These spaces can be considered “invited spaces” (Miraftab, 2004) of participation controlled by the state and are often promoted as an exclusive prerogative, not to say duty, of citizenship. As a counter-practice, “invented spaces” of participation operate outside the official governance structures of the state, often within spaces that we might identify as the commons and are more directly connected with the everyday lives of people and their communities. While scholarship on “insurgency” (Holston, 1998, 2008; Miraftab, 2004, 2009; Sandercock & Lyssiotis, 2003) has emphasized the movement between “invited” and “invented” spaces, they have been inadequate in considering the ways in which these spaces are more fluidly shaping each other. So, the question is: How do invited and invented spaces co-constitute each other across commons-public thresholds? And what does that suggest for imagining public-commons partnerships? In this paper I argue that public-commons partnerships can be considered within a “commons-public-entanglement” as formalisations of everyday encounters with the law with(-in) the commons. Thinking with Lefebvre’s everydayness (Lefebvre et al., 2014/1947) and de Certeau’s tactics of the everyday (de Certeau, 1984/1974), I propose that the notion of “everyday law”, as it has been explored more extensively within the more transdisciplinary branches of legal geography (See Kymäläinen, 2024), might offer a helpful lens to understand public-commons relationships, and I discuss the potential need of a methodological shift informed by post humanist and new materialist philosophies for the study of the commons-public-entanglement. I present the arguments through a set of examples from the context of Southern Luxembourg, focusing on civil society organisations and unregistered community initiatives that actively engage with the regeneration of the socio-ecological fabric of the region in the context of its historical industrial extractive mining and steel production landscapes and current neoliberal state-led transition agenda.

This paper compares three sites of major urban regeneration in London and the role in this process of the associated community organisations (Paddington Development Trust, People's Empowerment Association for Custom House and Royal Docks Communities Voice). Local statecraft and grassroots organising tactics developed to address issues of power, politics and development at a neighbourhood scale arising in the context of an increasingly dominant speculative city logic are examined. The impact of government policy change over the last three decades on such community based initiatives is then explored: From the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) direct funding to improve the quality of life for people in deprived areas via direct funding provide financial resources to local authorities, community organisations, and other stakeholders, to the current Opportunity Area Planning Frameworks (OAPFs) that seek to provide certainty to the development process and for investment and build consensus between public and private stakeholders. How successfully formal and informal neighbourhood and community groups responded to such policy contexts in terms of gaining power and funding as recognised, situated and legitimate civic political bodies is questioned. In conclusion the underlying trajectory of regeneration into one of a public land value extraction process through disposal and development consent in a quasi public private partnership arrangement is problematised to strip away conventional understandings of this ‘speculative city’ model with resultant insights used to inform a reframing into one that recognises the potential role of localised commons practices, asset stewardship and governance structures in mediating and directing both market and state power in collaborating on creating just and sustainable place making outcomes.

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The shift from monocratic systems of government to those of representative democracy has led to the emergence of theories based on the application of systems theory (Von Bertalanffy, 1969; McLoughlin, 1969, Luhmann, 1984) in the construction of public policy and planning approaches. In this framework, different social components perform a specific function and relate to other components. Among these functional differentiations, that between the state and citizenship takes on particular relevance. If one follows the logic of complex systems (Maturana and Varela, 1985 ; Von Foerster 1984; Atlan 1979), applied to the sciences of politics and territory (Cavallaro, 1995), the separation between the functions of systems can be overcome and one can move toward models of participatory and deliberative democracy, in which state-apparatus and citizenship are parts of the same element.
The commons approach (Ostrom, 2006), and especially the urban commons approach, definitely moves in this direction, which allows the apparatus state and the citizen-state to co-govern: co-decide and co-manage.
The paper analyzes in depth the Italian situation - with particular reference to Turin (Segapeli 2022; 2024) -, where cities are moving toward forms of participatory democracy in the governance of commons (City regulations) that design new roles for formal and informal neighborhood groups and associations, according to experimental collaborative patterns and new forms of governance. Admittedly, the state legislative framework, with its proliferation of codes and regulations on administrative procedures and accountability and safety, still remains structured according to an authoritative model (the state authorizing, granting, sanctioning), which holds back momentum for change. Whereas the urban commons approach needs appropriate forms of governance in which the translation from the ineluctability to the universe of the possibles is achievable, that is, from the single all-embracing vision (the state) to the variety of scenarios produced by the multitude.