ABSTRACT
‘Commons’ are everywhere. The term, in both the singular and the plural, is in widespread usage across a range of disciplines, non-academic discourses and social justice movements. It seems to be liberating, full of potential – but also unthreatening, because of its historical precedence and the way it seems to side-step potentially violent models of socio-political change. However, what the term means or refers to precisely is an issue of much confusion. For Elinor Ostrom, the political scientist most associated with establishing the term in contemporary debate, ‘commons’ initially meant a natural resource; but by the end of her career, ‘commons’ could be almost anything – including knowledge and computer code (Ostrom, 1990; Hess and Ostrom, 2006). For planning scholar Jeremy Németh the commons can be thought of as a whole range of things, from libraries, through the internet, sidewalk, light from a streetlamp, to the atmosphere or some food (Németh, 2012: 815). And Hardt and Negri, two giants of the world of contemporary socio-cultural criticism, and advocates of ‘common’ solutions, define the commons (though they call it ‘the common’) in yet another way, unconnected to the others: the common is that valuable part of something, the value of which is not determined by its use value, or labor inputs, but created and given freely by potential users, like the trendiness of a bar (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 153–4, 280; Hardt and Negri, 2004: 196–7).
