Excerpted from Anna Seravalli’s review of the Economics and the Conference conference:
“The idea of commons seems to be quite close to the idea of Things, which is often used at Malmö Living Labs (editor’s note: for an introduction to Things, see Ehn’s Participation in Design Things). When discussing how to design Things, the concern is how to bring together human and non-human actors involved in a specific issue and how to support a collective design process where diverse agendas can find a space. When it comes to involving non-humans actors, the commons field has a long tradition in discussing how to ensure a voice to nature, as law professor and expert in commons, Stefano Rodotá, pointed out in his opening speech. A fascinating example in this direction is Ecuador where nature’s rights are recognized by constitutional law. Commons can be looked upon as a way to govern Things to make them last on a long-term perspective.
Beyond open access
An argument that was brought up several times at the conference was the necessity to move beyond open access: since it does not guarantee in a long-term perspective that things will stay open (as recent happenings in the 3D-printing field has showed). Commons, in that sense, becomes a way to ensure that things will stay open, that access will remain open.
This could be further expanded with questions that are quite close to the Malmö Living Labs way of working: access for who, and under which conditions? These are questions strongly related to the experiences and learnings from Malmö Living Labs where we could see how participation and collective ownership is not a matter of openness but rather needs to be constructed and supported through design.
Commons as new medievalism, the tension between local and global
Even if commons are concerned with how to provide involved actors the right to decide, it is not always clear about who should be involved. While the idea of Thing stresses the importance of creating an agonistic space where diverse agendas can meet, promoting the encounter between top-down structures and grass-root initiatives, commons are not necessarily carrying this inclusive/universal perspective. Some of the participants were actually looking at commons as a way to move beyond the state as a form of grass-root self organization that eliminates the need for a centralised and public structure. This however, opens for some issues.
As pointed out in the keynote by Rodotá, the risk with the commons paradigm is to have a nostalgic approach and moving from a distributed society to a fragmented society, where local entities based on commons are in conflict with each other, leading to a new institutional medievalism. The double nature of commons, being a possibility for self-organization but also risking becoming a way to create close and oppressive communities, was also brought up by several participants, who pointed out how the public sector (or state) could play a role in avoiding this. This leads to a very interesting challenge between the local and the global, i.e. how to balance the necessity to focus on local interests and autonomy on a local scale and at the same time do not end up in closed communities.”