Indigo Landed Commons in the Flanders Study
= "a research project on territorial development, land ownership and governance of land use rights in Flanders (Belgium). It aims to understand how landed commons are co-created, and to contribute to the proliferation of innovative forms of shared land use (rights), cooperation and land valuation".
URL = http://theindigoproject.be/
Description
"The research project named INDIGO started at the beginning of 2015. It is coordinated by prof. Frank Moulaert, prof. Pavlos Delladetsimas, prof. Bernard Hubeau, prof. Constanza Parra, Guy Vloeberg, and dr. Pieter Van den Broeck. Involved partners are the research group Planning and Development of the Department of Architecture - KU Leuven (Be), the research group Government and Law of the University of Antwerp (Be), the Department of Geography of Harokopio University (Gr) and the private consultancy OMGEVING cvba (Be).
The INDIGO project is an inter- and transdisciplinary project, which puts the discussion about shared land uses, land property and use rights within the interdisciplinary context of ownership regimes and the ‘governance of the commons’.
Briefly, and ambitiously, the project aims to explore how spatial development (planning) can be improved to address contemporary and future challenges for socially and ecologically sustainable spatial organisation and development, by
1. broadening, differentiating and enriching (concepts of) land use rights, ownership regimes and their governance, thus overcoming the dichotomy of private versus public property;
2. renewing relationships between planning and ownership, imagining new ways of planning and governing land and resources and exploring the potential of the commons as a resource and a governance practice;
3. offering solutions to the complexity of divergent land use claims, mismatches between property regimes and changing and often conflictive individual and collective uses;
4. learning from and facilitating innovative forms of sharing land use (rights);
5. improving (methods of) participation and co-production by stakeholders of new (inclusive) ownership regimes and governance modes."
Discussion
The theoretical foundations of the (Landed) Commons
Indigo:
"Building Commons as shared land use rights as well as modes of governance to coordinate them is a deep aspiration of most actors active in the spatial ‘land use arenas’. We address these types of Commons related to land issues as ‘Landed Commons’.
It can be argued that Landed Commons are “simpler” to address compared to other types of commons. Landed Commons are in general “sufficiently tangible and finite to indicate that they may be more than common pool resources to which everyone has access, and instead may exist as real and discrete properties”. In addition landed commons are also (in most cases) territorially confined and hence assume a distinct spatial designation.
Yet this ‘simplicity’ is easily challenged by questions on the protection of resources, the implementation of collective spatial projects, issues of redistribution of land value, shared land uses, activation of private land owners, difficulties in mobilising land for collective uses, while conflicts over spatial development strategies feed an impellent need for thorough exploration of innovative approaches and methods."
More Information
See also, our entry on the Indigo Project