The commons of property
Written 6th March 2020
Last week I attended an event in London with the artist Anthony Luvera, who has collaborated with many individuals who have experienced homelessness in cities and towns across the UK for over fifteen years.
I was particularly struck by the work called, Frequently Asked Questions — a research work that focuses on the impact of homelessness at the national level, demonstrating the true scale of the crisis through an individual’s navigation of bureaucratic and depersonalising centres of authority. Stemming from a parallel enquiry conducted over the past five years with Gerald Mclaverty, a participant of Assembly, it presents responses from 110 local authorities across the UK, based on questions arising from Gerald’s own experience of homelessness.
In an email to several borough councils across the country, Gerald introduces himself as a ‘homeless person without any money’ and then asks a series of simple questions, such as “Where can I go for something to eat and drink?” and “Where can I go to the toilet during the day?”, they then chart the responses from the various councils, which is, unsurprisingly, lacking for the most part — mostly referrals to other places, auto-responses if there is any response at all.
The event, a day-long series of conversations amongst ‘stakeholders’ and people working in the homelessness support and housing sector about issues our society currently faces when dealing with homelessness, housing precarity, and housing justice, left me feeling that, other than food and water, if there were ever a ‘resource’ for communities to manage equally and equitably for themselves, property might be it.
I know that ‘property’, goes beyond buildings, and even homes, but the right to housing is a Universal Human Right, and a good place to start, and the current hoarding of it by some at the expense of the rest of us, when there are many people who are unable to find or afford secure, stable, appropriate housing, is a travesty.
There’s so much to delve into on this topic, and Silke Helfrich and David Bollier’s Free, Fair and Alive, explores property in chapters 7 and 8 (the next chapters to be released and available to read for free here).
Commoning around the world
Generative Commons
gE.CO Living Lab is an exchange platform for formal groups or informal communities of citizens who manage fab-lab, hubs, incubators, co-creation spaces, social centres created in regenerated urban voids.
Learn more about generative commons here.
London Renters Union
The London Renters Union has been set up by a coalition of housing groups and social justice groups including Radical Housing Network, Take Back The City, Generation Rent, Digs (Hackney Renters), Rent Strike and People’s Empowerment Alliance for Custom House (PEACH). Our advisory network includes the New Economics Foundation, Advice4Renters, and the Migrants Rights Network.
We’re currently building our first branches in Newham & Leytonstone, Hackney and Lewisham, and we’re working with housing activists and renters across London to set up branches all over our city.
Find out more here.
This week, we are mostly reading…
Here are some of our favourite books, articles and long read articles on the commons. Let us know what you think or send us your own recommendations.
The Rent Trap
by Samir Jeraj and Rosie Walker
Deregulation, revenge evictions, parliamentary corruption and day-to-day instability: these are the realities for the eleven million people currently renting privately in the UK. At the same time, house prices are skyrocketing and the generational promise of home ownership is now an impossible dream for many. This is the rent-trap, an inescapable consequence of market-induced inequality.
Samir Jeraj and Rosie Walker offer the first critical account of what is really going on in the private rented sector and expose the powers which are conspiring to oppose regulation. A quarter of British MPs are landlords, rent strike is almost impossible and snap evictions are growing, but in the light of these hurdles The Rent Trap will show how people are starting to fight back.
Find the book here.
A DAO of One’s Own? Feminist strategies for P2P Organisations
by Denise Thwaites
Over the past year, experiments in building and deploying Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) have proliferated, marking a transition (in many cases) from software design and development towards alpha and beta testing stages. From a technical perspective this is a key moment in the evolution of such systems, as communities of users test and provide feedback on the functionality of these products.
Read more here.
Lewis Hyde, author of Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership
Poet and scholar Lewis Hyde has been writing about the commons for over thirty years. His first book, The Gift (1983), is regarded as the modern classic on Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World–the 25th anniversary edition’s subtitle. His new book, Common as Air, directly addresses the cultural commons, and could hardly be more relevant to understanding at a deep level the work of Creative Commons.
