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When on September 15, 2008 the financial conglomerate Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy – and with that 'officially' sparks the international financial crisis – still few would anticipate the invasive effect this crisis would come to have on the professional and personal life of many across the world. Today, it's implosion remains a mere 'blip' in the universe of events that followed. On closer observation, this financial turmoil started out as a 'mortgage crisis', largely fuelled by unsustainable or speculative investments in real-estate in cities across the world. In the run-up to the boom-and-bust of 2008, some – among them architects, urban designers, spatial practitioners, artists, activists, but also economists and others – started preparing for what they understood as (the necessity) of a different world to come, beyond the broken neo-liberal dogma. Today, fragments of such a different reality are unfolding in front of us. Modest, but for real. STEALTH.unlimited (practice of Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen) is one of the protagonists in this field, pointing to the responsibilities and capacities of architecture in contemporary societies, and acts between the fields of architecture, art and activism. With "Upscaling, Training, Commoning", in 2011 they set on an expedition of sorts, to transform their practice. Following a decade of research addressing urgent cultural and urban issues ahead (resulting in publications, exhibitions, spatial interventions), now they use questions, doubts or limitations of such a practice as a lead towards direct long-term engagements with specific spatial process and/or communities. The resulting practice based exploration has been far away from a distant or objective research condition. It is subject to volatile political and economic situations, to conflicting interests or the engagements with(in) local communities encountered in the work. In this, three lines of exploration have been followed; that of the practice assuming new responsibilities, of the economies of engagement and disengagement, and that of the urban commons. The title "Upscaling, Training, Commoning" relates to the awareness that the relevant activities and approaches need to be nurtured, and that the imperfect contexts in which this take place can be seen as 'training grounds' to arrive to practices of commoning. Hence, upscaling, training, commoning describes a trajectory (to be) taken. The artistic research (PhD) "Upscaling, Training, Commoning" concludes with a set of six books, and includes comments on the trajectory taken since 2008 by: the writer Dougald Hine, the economist Martijn Jeroen van der Linden, architects Ana Méndez de Andés and Iva Marčetić. The concluding book, set to words by the writer Paul Currion, features a fictional narrative, looking what the future could possibly hold, in which collective action might enable citizens to navigate through difficult times to create a new political economy.

This article outlines how a radical practice of commoning-based collective design is developing new concepts of social practices, through a direct democratic common assembly method. A commoning-based approach implies that collective design is being developed with the underlining principles of broader commoning practices and living. This includes an anti-capitalist standpoint and a focus on fairness, equality, inclusion, sharing, self-limitation and self-organisation (Bollier and Helfrich, 2019). The underlining organizational principles are drawn from political theorist Cornelius Castoriadis's argument for an ethical and political project of social organisation, which is based upon self-governance through an ongoing process of common assemblies, and Murray Bookchin's conception of communalism, where "every productive enterprise falls under the purview of the local assembly … to meet the interests of the community as a whole" (Bookchin, 2015, pp. 17–18). Two art exhibitions, thematically centered on precarious living conditions, as well as two ongoing social projects, serve as case studies that provide a reflective critique in which I argue how this methodological approach opens a new field of discourse relating to social participation in communal projects. Within this argument, a new critical interplay between art and architectural practices emerges in terms of fulfilling a role within long-term social change.

Digitale Technologien sind eine Zumutung! Um dies zu ändern, sollten wir uns nicht von ihnen abwenden, sondern uns eingehender mit ihrer transformatorischen Macht befassen. Shintaro Miyazaki ruft dazu auf, die alternativen Rhythmen des kooperativen, solidarischen Zusammenlebens (Commoning) operabel zu machen und die Digitalität so zum Tanzen zu bringen. Er macht ein Leben vorstellbar, in dem Profit und Eigentum keine Rolle mehr spielen, sondern das nachhaltige Zusammenspiel der Bedürfnisse unserer lebendigen Ökosysteme mit jenen aller Menschen oberste Priorität hat. Hier trifft Kapitalismuskritik auf eine kritische, marxistisch-informierte Medientheorie der algorithmischen Modellierung anderer Zukünfte.

Commoning represents a dynamic and emergent means of risk-reduction and livelihood provision which can address the shortcomings of both market and state-oriented economic systems -- increasingly relevant as climate change threatens human subsistence worldwide. This paper brings together international examples of responses to climate-related threats that are collective (not privatizing), to provide preliminary empirical evidence about how and in what circumstances people may develop equitable communal institutions rather than ones that worsen community fragmentation. The examples include traditional and new forms of commons which help to meet local subsistence needs and develop communities' social, political and economic resilience in the face of climate change, exploring how climate justice -- improving the local and global equity of climate change impacts and processes – can advance in parallel with commons development. ; This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FRN IDRC and SSHRC File Agreement No. 2017-0082

Digitale Technologien sind eine Zumutung! Um dies zu ändern, sollten wir uns nicht von ihnen abwenden, sondern uns eingehender mit ihrer transformatorischen Macht befassen. Der Autor ruft dazu auf, die alternativen Rhythmen des kooperativen, solidarischen Zusammenlebens (Commoning) operabel zu machen und die Digitalität so zum Tanzen zu bringen. Er macht ein Leben vorstellbar, in dem Profit und Eigentum keine Rolle mehr spielen, sondern das nachhaltige Zusammenspiel der Bedürfnisse unserer lebendigen Ökosysteme mit jenen aller Menschen oberste Priorität hat. Hier trifft Kapitalismuskritik auf eine kritische, marxistisch-informierte Medientheorie der algorithmischen Modellierung anderer Zukünfte.

This article is a reply to 'The illusion of the digital commons', an idea introduced by Ossewaarde and Reijers. Their criticism challenges those of us arguing that digital commons are emancipatory, exhibiting post-capitalist dynamics. From the perspective of the digital commoner as well as that of the scholar who studies commoning practices, my thesis is that digital commoning is not grounded in a-political principles as the authors claim. But rather it introduces a political platform upon which various progressive movements are converging.

Conventional political thought and practice continue to be stifled by a dilemma of choosing between the ideal imaginaries of State and/or Market solutions. Widely presupposed as the only valid possibilities in both theory and practice, this stale dilemma covers up a real multitude of actually existing alternative approaches to governance practiced in civil society. State/Market approaches are identical in the way that they construct a 'spectator' role for communities, who are left to choose between their preferred set of rules and norms developed elsewhere. The concept of commoning governance offers an opportunity to break free of this stalemate. It creates a new role for citizens and their communities as 'sparring partners'; who although they operate within the limits of current State/Market institutions, create new norms and rules against and beyond them. In the paper, we first expand on our understanding of commoning governance: re-designing governance arrangements to serve the common good. That is here understood in terms of (radical) democracy, solidarity and sustainable ecological relationships. Second, we illustrate how commoning efforts on the ground contribute to the reclaiming of the democratic imaginary as a political arena by zooming in to a case study of the three cities involved in civic-led network of German Food Policy Councils. Finally, we reflect on the empirical barriers that communities of commoning endure, and call on policymakers, planners and scholars to interrogate their own normative understandings of citizenship and democracy, and begin to recognize theoretical and latent possibilities by enabling commoning with new or re-designed institutions of governance.