Uncovering urban commons-public relationship through the lens of land use

The excessive use and unequal distribution of resources in urban areas pose urgent socio-ecological challenges to sustainability. Urban commons have been proposed a potential to promote sustainability. As an alternative mode of resource governance besides the state and the market they open the case for thinking beyond public-private partnerships – Tianzhu Liu on exploring the urban commons-public partnership in Switzerland.

Urban commons-public relationship from a land-use lens

I participated in the 2024 annual congress of AESOP (Association of European Schools of Planning), presenting my ongoing work on the urban commons – public relationship, through the lens of land use. This research, part of the COMMONPATHS project, is based on a series of investigations into urban commons initiatives in Switzerland. Our study stems from observing the challenges posed by excessive use and unequal distribution of resources, especially in urban settings where land is scarce. Urban commons, as self-organized initiatives, have the potential to promote sustainability and offer an alternative governance model to state and market systems. However, we also notice that contemporary commons rarely detach from the state or market. While “public-private” partnerships have been widely discussed, our focus is on exploring the “urban commons-public” relationship through the lens of land use, as land is an essential resource for commons and a scarce resource in urban contexts.

Investigation of multiple cases

Commons and commoning have very different meanings. In this research, we define urban commons as urban-related resources self-governed by a community of users. Using this definition, we identified a range of cases in Switzerland that provide essential goods and services: housing, green spaces, and food. We employed questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to collect data from urban commons managers. We asked questions to interviewees: Who owns the land? Under what contract? How did the initiative get access to land? Do you confront any constraints or supports regarding land use?

Our ongoing work includes 25 cases, with interviews conducted for 22 of them. We envision to collect over 100 results through the distribution of an online questionnaire.

Public’s role in providing land for urban commons

Our findings indicate that public authorities, especially local ones, play a significant role in providing land for urban commons. However, this role is still emerging, and there are no established land policy support systems.

From the graph of land ownership situations of urban commons, two pieces of information are outstanding: most land of urban commons is owned by municipalities; only in a few cases that urban commons as a collective owns land.

We found three patterns regarding urban commons-public relations, based on the process of access to land by urban commons:

1. Municipalities actively provide public land for urban commons. Municipalities own land and explicitly require commoning activities (for example, not-for-profit housing provision, community organic gardens) to develop the area to achieve their social goal. This pattern however only concerns very few cases.
2. Municipalities respond to urban commons’ requests without explicit land policies. This is the most frequent pattern. Urban commoners have to take the initiative to mobilized public authorities.
3. Urban commons face constraints from federal legislation and cantonal politics, necessitating strategic solutions. Under these circumstances the strategies we observed are that urban food commoners look for solutions.

More “mutual beneficial” than “antagonistic” relations

Contrary to literature portraying commons and the public as antagonistic, our findings highlight rather a logic of mutual benefits in these well-established urban commons. Commoners gain access to land, while municipalities benefit from services like green spaces, biodiversity maintenance, affordable housing, and innovative solutions. Our interviewees usually told us that they had good relationships with the municipalities. Some of them also told us that urban commons help mitigate risks and responsibilities for public authorities: citizens tend to be more tolerant regarding commoners’ actions, and it avoids protest to municipalities’ actions.

Reflection: “self”-governance of urban commons?

This research drives us to reflect on the sense of “self-governance” of urban commons, particularly when linked with planning and land policies. Our findings suggest the potential for planning and other policies as public levers to support urban commons, but this dependence on public authorities challenges their true self-governance capacity. We may argue that contemporary commons are never “perfect,” but this should not prevent us from questioning their self-governance capacity and their contribution to sustainability.