Abstract
Inaccurate histories beget faulty explanatory theories which, in turn, engender faulty guiding theories for practice. This research addresses such faults with a focus on Garret Hardin’s 1968 Science essay titled ‘Tragedy of the Commons.’ Hardin’s work invoked the commons as a symbol while inspiring a broad shift in theory and practice across multiple disciplines, including land-use planning. To understand how “Tragedy” became a lightning rod, this research brings together current debates with a deep history of land-use governance. To start, the etymological root of the word ‘commons’ stems from an intentionally planned, central space for use by commoners. Archeologists and anthropologists demonstrate the prevalence and perseverance of the commons as a structural feature across an 8,000-year history of city building. The commons offered opportunities for self-sufficiency to the most vulnerable community members. With the enclosure and privatization of the commons in the last millennium, disenfranchised commoners fought for greater representation in governance, a fight that has extended to modern notions of participatory planning and environmental justice. Together, with the contributions to this special issue, we emphasize that the commons are still a rallying symbol and proof of concept in realizing a sustainable, just society.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But lets the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.
-Unattributed 17th century folk rhyme
Introduction
Where the contributors in this issue trace the current contours and future trajectory of theories related to urban commons, I introduce the issue with a historical approach to ground theories. The overview expands research that has drawn attention to the commons as a distinct urban feature, a central location for subsistence farming for the city’s poorest (Brinkley, 2020). Removal of the commons spurred the growth of the state and added duties to feed and house the most disadvantaged, a theme that has preoccupied planning since its inception (Brinkley and Vitiello, 2014). At times, and in many places, the state seems reluctant to both assume responsibility for the poor and/or allow a return to self-sufficiency. It was this reluctancy that Hardin played on in arguing against an ethics of care and downplaying the worthiness of the urban poor in his 1968 Science essay titled ‘Tragedy of the Commons.’
With a deeper history covering the cojoined ten-thousand year experiment of cultivating land for agriculture and city building, I extend the prominence of the commons as central to the broader struggles for survival, equality and representation. I also demonstrate how the commons gained saliency, capturing the imagination of scholars and policymakers alike. Last, I show how Hardin co-opted and subverted the symbol of the commons in order to argue against its very purpose. In so doing, I connect the contributions in this special issue to debates about fundamental values embedded in the guiding theories of urban governance.
The Commoners and the Commons
What is the commons if not for the commoners? The Middle English word “common” is derived from the Anglo-Norman word “commune,” meaning “of general, public, or non-private nature” as an adjective and, as a substantive, “the common body of the people of any place; the community or commonalty” in the singular; “the common people, the commonalty; the lower order, as distinguished from those of noble or knight or gentle rank”. 1 The commons as a place encompassed small-scale agriculture near an urban area- meant to provide the daily bread for the commoners who labored at the pleasure of nobility and/or the church. It is this narrow definition of “the commons” as a place with a specific use that I will refer to going forward to describe a plot of land near or within an urban area that is collectively used and managed by the poor.
Though the word “commons” stems from Middle English (1150CE- 1450CE), the commons are a central feature throughout the prehistory of early settlements. The first known settlements occurred some 10,000 years ago concurrently, before and after the first crops were domesticated (Childe, 1936). To describe these processes, the Australian archeologist V. Gordon Childe introduced the terms “Urban Revolution” for the founding of the first settlements and “Neolithic Revolution” for the process by which hunter-gatherer societies domesticated crops and animals and began a farming lifestyle (Childe, 1936). Importantly, farming and settled life did not progress in lockstep. Many societies intentionally moved in and out of various lifestyles of hunter-gather, village-dweller and farmer (Schmidt, 2000). Throughout this prehistory, the commons represented experimentation with both gardening and settled life. Perhaps the commons as a central feature enabled the fluid interplay between hunting, gardening and a touch-and-go city life still enjoyed by urban residents today who summer outside the city and garden within it.
The practice of creating commons continued with building the first cities. Inhabited from 4000 BCE to 638 CE, Uruk was one of the oldest and largest cities in the Bronze Age world with 40,000-90,000 residents by 3100 BCE (Algaze, 2013). Historical, mythological and religious inquiries into ancient Uruk are all compelled to mention the city’s impressive ring wall which encompassed a large commons. The inner urban space was one third built up, one third dedicated to palm gardens, and one third to water pastures (Pournelle, 2019; Sluyter, 1994). That the city wall should encircle so many food producing lands attests to the important role of the commons in early city functions and everyday imaginations. More broadly, the Babylonians and Assyrians planted gardens in cities, giving rise to the famous hanging gardens of Babylon on palace grounds as well as orchards for public use (Dalley, 1993). Incidentally, the Greeks continued to use a Persian word, “paradeisos”, for an enclosure, a garden, an orchard and for paradises, such as the Garden of Eden (Dalley, 1993). This synonym for the commons with paradise perhaps hints at the passion that Hardin could stir in decrying the spoiling of the inner-city paradise, the commons.
Repeatedly Dismantling the Upper Classes
Human history’s meandering path to city building also forms the basis for explanatory theories about the origins and functions of social hierarchies and inequality, a theme Hardin played on to describe how the poor, the commoners, no longer deserved access to the commons. Somewhat ironically, living communally is what many social theorists and archeologists believe led to the formation of social hierarchies (eg. Diamond, 2013, p.9). After all, you cannot have much of a social hierarchy without a good number of people. Yet, the myth of a conjoined march of city building and inequality is a dangerous, and often politically motivated storyline.
No doubt social inequalities arose and exist today in many places, but they were also frequently dismantled and are not inevitable. For example, the city of Harappa in the Indus Valley (circa 3300–1700 B.C.E.) had written language and plumbing, but archeologists have found no evidence of temples or palaces that would represent centralized power (Green, 2021). In such early cities, the commons were designated spaces that allowed foraging, gardening, and small-scale household or communal gardening, termed ‘play farming’ by Graeber and Wengrow (2021, p. 266) because the effort could not fully sustain a family but was symbolic of the freedom to grow food outside of the social power structure. Such spaces and practices likely helped early societies both resist and feel out centralized authority by intentionally crafting a fallback plan for self-sufficiency within the city walls.
As such, the commons were a visible, everyday symbol of the possibility of freedom. Graeber and Wengrow (2021, p 518) also argue that even within extreme social hierarchies, the elite were often administrators of the commons and the explicit caregivers for the city’s poor, widows and orphans. In other words, centralized hierarchies may be permitted only to the point that they provided care to the poorest and guarded the commons. Without such care, commoners would rebel. In contrast, today’s American society broadly lacks such freedoms to forage in any forest or to garden in city parks- or even in one’s own front yard (Vitello and Brinkley, 2014). The commons are tightly controlled by central authorities along with the right to self-sufficiency.
Next, I argue that the commons are still a central physical feature of the broader social struggle for an egalitarian community by examining the history of dismantling the commons. Further, I demonstrate how land-use law is imbricated with spiritual and religious understandings, bringing the politics of space together with core value systems.
The local gods of land-use
While forming social hierarchies is not inevitable, anthropologists have noted commonalities when inequality does arise. For example, social hierarchies are often legitimized by cultural practices that ritualize belief systems of worthiness and divine power through religion, the construction of temples and the creation of ceremonies that literally idolize the elite classes while giving them rights over land-use. French prehistory expert Jacques Cauvin was one of the first to champion this theory that collective living and early city-building was sparked by changes in human psychology (1994). In The Birth of Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, Cauvin proposed that the primacy of such vast land-use and lifestyle changes should be attributed to a restructuring of human mentality with the rise of new religious ideas and symbols as uncovered in artifacts. In other words, theory led the practice of early city building. Finding numerous female clay figurines in sites of the first villages in Syria and across Europe, Cauvin concluded that the Neolithic Revolution had been preceded by a “revolution of symbols,” which led to new beliefs that were culturally encoded through rituals and the birth of religion. Archeologist Marija Gimbutus furthered such theories with her trilogy that concluded with The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), connecting religious practices across the northeastern Mediterranean region with architecture and urban practices.
In support, land-use law often appears first in sacred rituals and texts. For example, the earliest authored writings known are by a woman, Eheduanna, a high priestess for the goddess Inanna/Ishtar in the previously mentioned Mesopotamian City of Uruk. Her proclamations emphasize land-use governance and how to care for the urban poor (Benjamin, 2019). Enheduanna was appointed by King Sargon, a historical figure very similar to the biblical Moses. Both Moses and Sargon claimed divine ownership rights to land, reserving administrative rights for the king to protect land from misuse; and land-use rights to women to use or delegate (Russell, 2013; 153-170). The divine right to possess the Earth is similarly found in Judaic law with Yahweh’s commandment in Leviticus that “the land is mine”- and codified in Islam’s Sharia law. Some of the earliest written law code known, the Code of Hammarabi (1755–1750 BCE) begins by noting the gods’ (Anu and Baal) blessing to Hammarabi to create land-use laws, including, divine decrees about letting sheep out of “the common fold at the city gate” (King, nd; law: 58). Thus, land-use planning and regulations were conceived of as holy proclamations from divine beings with provisions for the commons and commoners as central features. Today’s planning has moved a fair bit away from this model.
Losing the religion- but not the planning theory
Before far-reaching nation-states had formed, the gods were local, and the rights bestowed to leaders limited to the territory and people under cultural and religious control. When early city-states began the project of building empires, they extended their cultural and religious influence, shaping notions of land ownership and management globally. Where alliances broke and new forms of land law were instituted, often so were new religions.
England offers a compelling case from the spread of Roman Catholicism to the rise of Protestantism. By Roman and Catholic law, lords with villages could require commoners to work without pay—and the commoners could not leave the land. As compensation for serfdom, commoners were allotted a commons to grow food for themselves. In a bid for greater political power, a rising merchant class in the 1500s increasingly sought land ownership because with it came voting rights and representation in the House of Commons, founded in 1341 CE. Like the common class merchants, England’s King Henry VIII also sought greater political power through territorial expansion.
Importantly, the dismantling of the commons was only possible through concurrently dismantling England’s inherited Roman land laws as well as and the ethical value system encoded by the Roman Catholic Church. The political path was illuminated by earlier Enclosure Acts that had allowed enterprising nobles to fence off the feudal commons (Sanchez, 2001). Where the commoners could be removed, such land could be effectively privatized, subdivided and sold to a growing merchant class, dubbed “landlords” to denote how they came by their nobility. Sir Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia details the escalation of such Enclosure Acts, alleging that, “the prince and the council…. intend by some subtlety to decrease the commons, and to take some profit of it themselves” (p.77) so that “every day [they] pluck and snatch away from the poor some part of their daily living” (p.16). To do just that, King Henry VIII founded a new religion: the Church of England, of which he proclaimed himself the head in 1534. A year later, he took possession of the feudal commons. The new laws were buttressed by religious symbology as evidenced by the creation and dissemination of special prayer directed to the rising class of merchant landlords: “The earth O Lord is thine and all that is contained therein; we heartily pray thee to send thy Holy Spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling places of the earth that they, remembering themselves to be Thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes after the manner of covetous worldlings, but so let them out to others that the inhabitants thereof may both be able to pay the rents, and also honestly to live to nourish their families and to relieve the poor” (cited in Linklater, 2013; p. 17).
As a new middleclass of commoners was blessed by the new Church of England, the King ushered in new property laws. Representation of the merchant middleclass in the House of Commons reintroduced notions of broader collective control into land governance, complicating notions of ownership, occupancy, use and power as well as what the “commons” meant and for whom. Debates in land theory blossomed. For example, in countering Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), John Locke proposed the labor theory for property as a "natural right" in his Second Treatise of Government (1690). While the Hobbesian state may make and enforce the rules, according to Locke, God had not bestowed land-use exclusively on the monarchy, but on those who use and work the land. Such use-cases continue to form the basis for legal cases arguing ‘squatters rights’ and re-commoning of privately held property (Mattei and Quarta, 2015). The result is that what constitutes a commons and who controls it is still very much debated in theory and practice.
One of the most important features of this sweeping history of city building is that the commoners did not cede the commons ground easily- and only relatively recently. In total, the effort to dismantle the English commons took roughly a millennium of court cases and local battles over the erection of fences and hedgerows (Dyer, 2006; Wordie, 1983). Peasants who were driven off the land were deemed “rogues and vagabonds” by newly minted legislation in the 1580s that banned homelessness and poverty (Linklater, 2013, p. 21). As commons were removed, commoners increasingly demanded concessions in expansion of state-sponsored social services and representation in land-use governance. By 1832, the British Reform Act allowed men with a certain amount of property to vote, while introducing the first explicit statutory bar on women voting by defining a voter as a male person. With only limited admittance to the House of Commons, most commoners were explicitly excluded from both their commons land and representation. Unpropertied men would not get the vote in England until 1918, three years after Garrett Hardin was born. Women over the age of 21 gained electoral equality regardless of property ownership only in 1928; Hardin was 13 years old at the time. Even with the vote, commoners were well aware of how unequally the laws applied. A popular ditty often attributed to the early 1600s and repeated still, neatly summarizes the commoner’s long-lived resentment. The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from off the goose. The law demands that we atone When we take things we do not own But leaves the lords and ladies fine Who take things that are yours and mine. The poor and wretched don't escape If they conspire the law to break; This must be so but they endure Those who conspire to make the law. - No source, no date
Dismantling the commons globally
Where Sir Thomas More argued that enclosure of the commons was unjust and would spur inequality at home, others had their eyes on global consequences. Enclosing and selling the British commons raised enough funds to finance the British navy, priming it for global colonial expansion and foreign wars. In 1450, 60% of farmland in England had been held by the crown, church or nobility; by 1700, those entities owned less than 30% of England’s farmland, having converted it to financing as detailed by popular historian Andro Linklater in his sweeping history of British land reform (2013, p. 36). Queen Elizabeth I used the funds on expeditions. She granted Sir Walter Raleigh (1584) a royal charter to take possession of “all the soil of all such lands, territories, and Countries, so to be discovered” and “full power to dispose thereof, and of every part thereof in fee simple or otherwise, according to the order of laws of England” (Royal Charter, 1584). The British land law system was exported the world over as the British Royal family claimed the commons of others, carving colonies out Asia, Africa and the Americas. At its height, the British Empire governed a quarter of the world's land surface, and most of the area already inhabited. Even after losing much of its holdings in North America and Asia, by 1913, the British Empire had 412 million subjects, a quarter of the world’s population. As a testimony to how valuable the commons were, their enclosure and sale ultimately financed global colonialization.
Getting the History Wrong, Getting the Theory Wrong
By the time Hardin played off this history, the urban commons in the United States had largely been dismantled, converted to parks in the early twentieth century, their historical uses hidden (Brinkley and Vitiello, 2014). Urban renewal and modern city building often failed to provide for commoners or supply land to allow them self-sufficiency. Hardin grasped at the powerful image the commons evoked, but his conceptualizations were as vague as the conflicting imagery he presented. Had he, like many others, simply forgotten the undergirding etymology? Or was he seizing on a powerful image and intentionally inverting its meaning to serve his purposes?
Where the history of the urban commons was hidden, social stratification and inequality were on full display, and Hardin never questioned the rise of inequality nor the role it might play in sustainable resource management. Instead, he laid blame entirely on overpopulation, curiously sidestepping major social movements of the time and dismissing their role in larger discussions about sustainability. Meanwhile, commoners continued to fight for and obtain representation with the gradual separation of religion from land rights and the birth of the modern state. In the 1960s, protests created intersectional coalitions across social movements (Crenshaw, 2017), connecting civil rights, worker’s rights, women’s rights, disability rights, gay rights and environmental rights (Evans, 1980; Scotch, 1989; Cutter, 1995; Doak, 2008; Bullard, 2005; Pelka, 2012). City planning introduced participatory planning in the 1960s (Umemoto, 2001), opening opportunities for youth (Botchwey et al., 2019) and non-citizens to engage in land-use governance. By ignoring the history and the modern movements focused on the commons and commoners, Hardin charted a political path to trickledown economics and the criminalization of poverty that was more closely aligned with imperial desires for centralized power and economic control than that of commoners for the commons.
Maybe if Hardin had Been a Different Person …
Scholarly positionality no doubt influences the production of knowledge (Said, 1978; Henley, 1995; Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006). Had Hardin been raised in Scandinavia, perhaps the commons would have been a living concept. The ancient norm of allowing the general public to walk, camp and forage for berries and mushrooms on public or privately owned land is codified in Sweden’s ancient law of Allemansrätt “Everyone’s Right” (Colby, 1988). Similar public use laws allow “freedom to roam” in Scotland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Austria, Czech Republic and Switzerland.
Had Hardin been brought up in an indigenous value system, the very notion of privatization may have been a cultural affront. As described by Native American Studies experts, rather than seeing humans as having ‘dominion’ over the Earth, many indigenous epistemologies describe humans as the ‘younger brother’, needing to learn how to behave from landscapes, plants, and animals (in Deloria et al., 1999: 51–2; see also Cajete, 1994; Sams, 1999). Such relationships are no less spiritually symbolic than the Eurocentric transmission of rights from Lords in Heaven to designated Kingly Lords to Landlords. As Indigenous Law scholar, C.F. Black (2011: 15) explains: a Creation story becomes a particular group’s theory of how things came to be and, more specifically, how people should lawfully conduct themselves in a particular place. The difference here is that in the Creation story, the emphasis is not on answering abstract questions of existence; rather, it is on understanding how humans were patterned into a certain tract of land.
Where Henry VIII’s imperial England worldview treats land as ‘capital’ that may be ‘accumulated’ for wealth building, Black (2011: 41) explains, ‘Land was never perceived as a resource but always addressed as a “thou” where covenants ran both ways between humans and the land.’
For contrast, here is Hardin’s take (p. 1245) “Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public; the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable. A hundred and fifty years ago a plainsman could kill an American bison, cut out only the tongue for his dinner, and discard the rest of the animal. He was not in any important sense being wasteful.”
Today’s reader balks (hopefully). First, that waste is only judged based on how many people witness it; second, that the freedom being argued for is wanton destruction; third, that Hardin appears willfully blind to the intentional slaughter of American bison and its impact on first nations people (Hubbard, 2014). When Hardin wrote “The Tragedy” in 1968, scientists had rung the alarm bells about an impending ecological crisis. Such waste, even in a frontier setting, would have global consequences. While body-politics positionality can explain how Hardin may not have foreseen such consequences, there is a collective responsibility for allowing Hardin’s ideas to produce the guiding theories in broad play today.
Special Issue Introduction
For half a century, Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ has wrought its influence in planning and many other fields. The full title of the essay originally published in Science has a colon, and continues, “The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.” Hardin’s recommendations to curtail the population were less an “extension in morality” and more a contraction in considering who is deserving of both resources and representation. He struck at ethics that undergirded personal choices as well as collective action and in summation, the fate of the planet. His premise: there are too many people and too few resources, a rallying cry that has persisted. Hardin’s later call for “Lifeboat Ethics” 2 (1974) is succinctly summarized by him in a 1987 interview: “Since Ethiopia has far too many people for its resources, if you give food and save lives and thus increase the number of people, you increase the number of people, you increase suffering and ultimately increase the loss of life’ (Baeten, 2000; Bookchin, 1995, p. 79)”. He foreshadowed such sentiments in the 1968 “Tragedy” essay by titling a section “Freedom to Breed is Intolerable.”
Hardin’s essay was sloppy. The commons were poorly defined. As were different models of governance. He asked readers to “picture a pasture open to all” (Hardin, 1968, p. 1244) and then a few paragraphs later refers to free street parking as a commons, and a few sentences after that the oceans of the world. Was he referring to land held in common? Common pool resources, like underground freshwater aquifer? Is the city the commons? Is private property beyond the collective reach of democracy? As a biologist, perhaps he was simply out of his depths in musing on land law, politics and the ethics of care?
Yet, Hardin got the academic conversation going. Even Elinor Ostrom conceded, "Prior to the publication of Hardin's article on the tragedy of the commons (1968), titles containing the words ‘the commons', ‘common pool resources', or ‘common property' were very rare in the academic literature" (Laerhove, 2007). Where Hardin offered anecdotes, Elinor Ostrom built a theory and tested it by compiling and inspiring hundreds of case studies on managing common-pool resources (CPRs). Her results counter the prevailing Hardinesque recommendations to impose government or private ownership on spaces or goods (Ostrom, 1990; Cox et al., 2010). Ostrom was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009, further canonizing her design principles for collective ‘polycentric governance’ (1990). Notably, her work focused more on small-scale governance, not global systems, and more on natural CPRs, not urban commons, leaving more debate and translation work for climate policymakers and urban scholars. Shelby’s (2022) contribution to this special issue aims to fill some of these gaps by delving into the many definitions that have since arisen around modes of land and resource management in cities while asking if a place can be “commoned” in a top-down approach.
While one might be tempted to simply close the door on Hardin and continue down the path Ostrom charted, scholars keep hauling Hardin’s text out of its grave and parading it around town in commemoration. The ‘Tragedy’ is required reading on numerous introductory syllabi across multiple disciplines, further inoculating the next generation. Citation analysis shows that Hardin’s ‘Tragedy’ is continuing to be cited in ecology, economics, biology, and other physical science disciplines (Costanza, 2004; Fidelis, 2018). Hardin remains pervasive. According to google scholar, the six-page essay accrued nearly 50,000 citations by 2020. In comparison, Jane Jacobs’s book Death and Life of Great American Cities, published a few years earlier in 1961, has 40% fewer citations. In part, this special issue aims to assess Hardin’s impact by asking how deeply entrenched Hardin’s work is in planning scholarship using bibliometric analysis. In this issue, Seitanidis and Gritzas (2022) find that one percent of all of the articles citing Hardin’s original essay are from planning and planning-related journals. They review 100 of such high impact planning articles and find a “shallow impact” on planning. Both authors are based in Greece and wryly note that the term “tragedy” is a form of drama in ancient Greek theater. Has Hardin’s tragedy been clapped off the stage?
Even if planners could exorcize Hardin from teaching and research, his legacy is alive, well and must be contended with in public policy discourse. Hardin’s endorsement of eugenics (Mildenberger, 2019) is echoed in former president Trump’s reference to ‘the Race Horse Theory’ (2020) during a political rally - and the applause from the crowd which resounded support and acknowledgement. Hardin’s prescription that “the tragedy of the commons … is averted by private property, or something formally like it” (Hardin, 1968, p. 1245) has been enshrined in neoliberal advocacy for the privatization of public services.
Similarly, many proponents of zero or slow growth planning policies call on Hardin’s work in the name of sustainability, for example, Meadows et al.’s “Limits to Growth” (1972) cites Hardin’s essay. Climate activists are proposing Hardin’s “mutual coercion” methods to reduce the human population by considering the full suite of actions and their impact on the global climate, “tallying not just your air conditioning use and the gas mileage of your car, but also how you vote, how many children you choose to have…” (Patee, 2021). In this issue, Caggiano and Landau (2022) explore how current climate policy, like the Green New Deal, is grappling with such sentiments of population control, worthiness and equity.
It’s not just talk either. Hardin’s proposed solutions for averting tragedy are widely in play. Hardin slyly states, “we need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long as he wants to; we need merely make it increasingly expensive.” As always, the gnarliest planning debates draw on parking analogies. Since he published ‘Tragedy’, income inequality rates have steadily grown in many countries, including the United States, pricing low-income families out of housing, childcare, food and neighborhood amenities. If Hardin’s proposals for a subtle eugenics through price signaling is truly morally repugnant and broadly cast aside in planning research, why are such policies seemingly in broad political play?
Conclusion: a prayer for theory
Theory building uses the patterns observed in histories to derive explanatory models. With this review, I show that the theory Hardin derived was based on a very narrow and often inaccurate history. It is no wonder that where his solutions have been broadly tested, they have failed. Privatization of land and resources has not yielded less pollution. Population control efforts and raising the rents on childrearing have not brought about a sustainable future. Further, by considering social inequality inevitable, many theorists, like Hardin, rarely looked for evidence of how inequality has been countered and scarcely considered the role of social inequality in environmental degradation. Somewhat ironically, despite this gross negligence and with wildly mixed results, we are nonetheless indebted to Hardin for sounding a rallying cry for the commons.
With this brief historical review of the commons and ethics of care they offered to the urban poor, I join others in restoring the commons as a central feature for consideration in urban theory. I hope to have impressed upon readers that the commons were a key component in humanity’s ten-thousand-year experiments with agriculture and urban life. Because Popper’s (1972) broadly accepted approach to theory building relies on evidence to build theories, the widespread occurrence and longevity of the commons should compel its future consideration. Further, just as Cauvin proposed a “revolution of symbols” as the root of major societal shifts to agriculture and city-building; I propose planning theory embark in a revolution of symbols to redirect the future of society and city-building. The task is daunting because the worldview Hardin espoused is widely held and actively perpetuated. In the words of the late long-time Planning Theory editor Dr. Vanessa Watson, delivered at the closing plenary of a University College London conference in November 2019: “We are being called on to permanently shift ‘a goliath’ which is buttressed by decades of entrenched research, publication and teaching; by concentrations of resources and personnel in certain dominant universities and global agencies; by research funding channeled through northern universities often to co-opt data gathering in the south for northern theorizing; by biases of the giant publishing companies and journal editorial boards; and by the dominance of the English language. This is a global structural problem of unequal knowledge production now being reinforced by the universalising discourses of big data, smart technologies and the seductive graphics of the real estate sector.”
Today’s planners do not have to contend with local gods in changing land-use laws; the apparatus of western ‘civilization’ is fearsome enough.
To achieve such a ‘revolution of symbology’ within planning theory, I suggest that planning scholars ground new guiding theories for collective governance and resource management by exploring histories of communities with vibrant commons and more egalitarian societies (eg. Manning, 2011; Middleton, 2015). Indeed, such a revolution of symbols is already in full swing. Worldwide, cities are tearing down statues (Gregory, 2021) and renaming streets (Rose-Redwood et al., 2010), exerting a collective choice to venerate different histories and ground different theories. Social movements are noting that power is in the hands of only a wealthy few mortals, the “one percent”, not gods. Broadly, academic journals and institutions are attempting collective exorcisms of colonialism, devoting public statements to supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement and special issues to exploring the consequences of structural inequality, making space to build emancipatory practices (Albrects, 2003; Irazábal, 2009). In so shifting a frame a reference, opportunities to derive new explanatory and guiding theories emerge along with possibilities to live them.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Drs. Marlon Boarnet and Ben Davy for comments on early drafts and Drs. Vanessa Watson and Angelique Chettiparamb for editorial guidance in assembling the special issue. Last, thank you to the many scholars who submitted entries and especially to those who persisted with the collaboration through trying start of the covid pandemic.