A Synthesis of Rational Choice and Critical Urban Commons Debates

Abstract

The notion of urban commons has been used to describe community self-organized efforts to govern shared urban resources that are deemed essential to their well-being. Commoning often involves communities claim, use and manage resources over which they have very limited property rights. While critical commons scholars see urban commons as a response to the enclosure of capitalist urbanization, traditional commons scholars have attempted to replicate their commons research in urban settings in view of the success of commons as a governance mode for common-pool resources. In this article, we use the debates in these two schools of thought to synthesize the problematics related to commoning in urban setting. To advance urban commons research, we develop two research agendas and the propositions that explicate our major arguments and assumptions. The two research agendas explore institutional designs and property rights arrangements that enable commoning, collective action and self-organization among actors with different preferences and capacities, and the collaborative governance mechanisms that strengthen the role of urban commons in city governance. We believe that the two research agendas lay out new pathways for urban commons research whereby the two schools of thought could benefit from each other and generate new insights that would be useful for practitioners in the field.