Session 3. 4. B.

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.

Beckenkamp, M., 2012. Institutions and Trust in Commons: Dealing with Social Dilemas.
Bergum, V. and Dossetor, J., 2005. Relational ethics. Hagerstown, Md.: University Pub. Group.
Brenner, N., 2014. Neoliberalism. In: J. Self and S. Bose, ed., Real Estates: Life without Debt, 1st ed. London: Bedford Press.
Galster, G., 2001. On the Nature of Neighbourhood. Urban Studies, 38(12), pp.2111-2124.
Latour, B., 2008. Reassembling the social. Oxford University Press.
Thayer-Bacon, B., 1993. Caring and its relationship to Critical Thinking. Educational Theory, 43(3), pp.323-340.

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.