Session 11. 5.

This paper explores the resurgence of earthen architecture as a sustainable and equitable approach to building. By examining case studies from around the world, we demonstrate how communities are harnessing the abundant and readily available resource of earth to create affordable, durable, and culturally appropriate housing. We argue that earth architecture represents a tangible example of commons-based practices, promoting social equity, environmental sustainability, and community resilience.
Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, we highlight the role of community-led initiatives in driving the adoption of earth-based construction. From traditional mud-brick houses to innovative superadobe structures, these projects demonstrate the potential of raw earth architecture to address housing shortages, not only in marginalized communities. Furthermore, we discuss how earth architecture can contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as promote local economies and cultural preservation.
By exploring the intersection of traditional knowledge and contemporary challenges, this paper emphasizes the importance of preserving and revitalizing earthen architecture as a means to create more sustainable and just societies.

From grandeur and monumentalism, through liveability and zoning to private- public conflict over space. Urban planning has evolved influenced by the prevailing narrative of the time. This presentation will reflect on two considerations: the influence of neoliberalism on urban planning and its impacts, and the potential to reimagine urban planning through the lens of commons theory. Instead of a system of managing private rights, can we better manage conflict in urban design through a focus on commons? The presentation will approach these questions from the perspective of Melbourne; Australia’s fastest growing city with a population of five million and in the midst of a housing affordability crisis. Despite Australia being an affluent country, governments with scarce financial resources post-COVID chose to erode and privatise commons in the search for density and housing availability. This reduces or degrades common spaces both on the ground and in the air creating conflict. With no respite on urban growth anticipated, the paper asks whether a clearer understanding of urban commons is required to influence both public discourse and approaches to planning. Opening dialogue about commons spaces, how they are managed and what is important requires collaborative forms of governance that engage a wider range of community actors. Many of these are currently disempowered by planning systems and laws. The presentation will be from the perspective of both a practitioner in a local community and researcher.

In my work, I argue that smart city technologies and governance approaches can allow for the emergence of large-scale collaborative agents to stop anthropogenic environmental degradation and regenerate Earth. I view climate change as a group of problems taking on the form of coordination problems (following Guala 2016 and Chwe 2001), common-pool resource problems (following Ostrom 1990), and (super) wicked problems (following Rittel and Webber 1973 and Levin et al. 2012). While these are heterogenous perspectives, I argue that the common knowledge condition is a key feature shared by all of them. The satisfaction of the common knowledge condition (e.g., Gilbert 1989) is integral to creating group agents that can handle these types of problems, and I argue smart cities are one way to satisfy this condition. If this is in fact the case, smart cities can become group agents. Then, the question is if their agency is robust enough, and their constituent parts integrated enough, for these group agents to respond to the challenge of climate change. Thus, I create a taxonomy of smart cities as group agents: 1) the smart city, 2) the sentient city (following Crang and Graham 2007 and Shepard 2011), 3) the agentive city, and 4) the superorganismic city (following Kesebir 2012 and Wilson et al. 2013). At each level I assess the possible group agent in terms of agential capacity, based on an approach to a generalizable agential architecture (cf. Tomasello 2022). While the creation of this taxonomy is conceptually interesting in its own right, I intend to use it to clarify the potential and limitations of smart cities projects with regard to climate change. I apply each level to different use-cases, types of problems, and scales, showing that each level may be helpful for the challenges of today and tomorrow.

In an article published in Relations magazine, Louis Gaudreau, professor at the work school at the Montreal University of Québec (Canada), identified collective ownership as a means of reappropriating the City (Gaudreau L. [2019], Se réapproprier la ville par la propriété collective, Relations n°804, 19-20).
While collective ownership endured for several centuries in rural areas in many European territories until the 18th century (notably in the form of common lands), the revolutions of the 18th century, particularly the French Revolution, had the effect of calling into question, even dismantling these collective properties in favor of individual ownership. Even today, individual ownership remains the major reference point for modern society, although vestiges of collective land ownership also remain and resist.
In cities such as Marseille (France), faced with the rise of speculative private investment in real estate and the privatization of public spaces, civil society is organizing itself to defend the common use of the city, even if this means taking on forms of collective ownership, inspired, for example, by the Mietshäuser Syndikat. (Germany. Examples include Dar Lamifa (a self-managed social center), La Déviation (an artistic and cultural venue) and Manifesten (a self-managed bookshop).
What are these practices and what are their effects on the appropriation of the city by its inhabitants? Are there other ways, apart from collective ownership, of encouraging common uses of the city by its inhabitants? As Louis Gaudreau suggests, could this be encouraged by local urban planning? Finally, are there any lessons to be learned from the history of rural land commons to anticipate the preservation of urban commons?
These are the points I wish to address in this paper.