Co-Cities

= " “a ‘CoCity’ is based on urban co-governance which implies shared, collaborative, polycentric governance of the urban commons and in which environmental, cultural, knowledge and digital urban resources are co-managed through contractual or institutionalized public-private-community partnerships." [1]

The Book

• Book: Co-Cities. Innovative Transitions toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities. By Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione. MIT Press, 2022.

URL = https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/co-cities

A new model of urban governance, mapping the route to a more equitable management of a city's infrastructure and services:

"The majority of the world's inhabitants live in cities, but even with the vast wealth and resources these cities generate, their most vulnerable populations live without adequate or affordable housing, safe water, healthy food, and other essentials. And yet, cities also often harbor the solutions to the inequalities they create, as this book makes clear. With examples drawn from cities worldwide, Co-Cities outlines practices, laws, and policies that are presently fostering innovation in the provision of urban services, spurring collaborative economies as a driver of local sustainable development, and promoting inclusive and equitable regeneration of blighted urban areas.

Identifying core elements of these diverse efforts, Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione develop a framework for understanding how certain initiatives position local communities as key actors in the production, delivery, and management of urban assets or local resources. Within this framework, they explain the forms such initiatives increasingly take, like community land trusts, new kinds of co-housing, neighborhood cooperatives, community-shared broadband and energy networks, and new local offices focused on citizen science and civic imagination.

The “Co-City” framework is uniquely rooted in the authors' own decades-long research and first-hand experience working in cities around the world. Foster and Iaione offer their observations as “design principles”—adaptable to local context—to help guide further experimentation in building just and self-sustaining urban communities."

Project and Report

URL = http://labgov.city/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/Co-cities-Open-Book-Report.pdf

Dirk Holemans & Kati Van de Velde:

"We find a similar inspiring approach in the international CoCity Project from LabGov (collaborative cities-design for commons).

LabGov has investigated new forms of collaborative city-making that ‘are leading urban areas towards new forms of participatory urban governance, inclusive economic growth and social innovation. The project takes urban commons as a starting point. As the researchers state, “a ‘CoCity’ is based on urban co-governance which implies shared, collaborative, polycentric governance of the urban commons and in which environmental, cultural, knowledge and digital urban resources are co-managed through contractual or institutionalized public-private-community partnerships.

Urban commons in a Co-City are governed in a shared, collaborative, polycentric way involving different forms of resource pooling and cooperation between

1) social innovators (i.e. active citizens, city makers, digital collaboratives, urban regenerators, community gardeners, etc.),

2) public authorities,

3) businesses,

4) civil society organisations, and

5) knowledge institutions (i.e. schools, universities, cultural institutions, museums, academies, etc.). Public authorities play an important enabling role in creating and sustaining the cocity in order to make it more just and democratic.“5

On the basis of the principles that the Nobel prize Winner Elinor Ostrom identified as characteristic for commons, combined with their own research findings, the people of Co-Cities defined 5 key design principles for Urban Commons:

• Principle 1: Collective governance refers to the presence of a

multi-stakeholder governance scheme whereby the community emerges as an actor and partners up with at least three different urban actors

• Principle 2: Enabling State expresses the role of the State in

facilitating the creation of urban commons and supporting collective action arrangements for the management and sustainability of the urban commons.

• Principle 3: Social and Economic Pooling refers to the presence of different forms of resource pooling and cooperation

between five possible actors in the urban environment

• Principle 4: Experimentalism is the presence of an adaptive

and iterative approach to designing the legal processes and institutions that govern urban commons.

The end of 2018, LabGov published several very relevant publications, including a “Co-Cities report”. This report measured the existence of Co-City design principles in a database of 400+ case studies in 130+ cities around the world. It convincingly shows how cities are implementing the right to the city through co-governance."

(https://gef.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GEF_Article_Urban-Commons_Dirk.pdf?)