32

Constructing the Commons:

Towards Another Architectural Theory of the
City?
Tom Avermaete

This text starts from a certain unease. Over the past few years, a panoply of innovative
activism, scholarship and projects that focus on ‘the commons’ have gained
momentum. In many fields of thinking and practice –ranging from ecology, to geography
and media studies— the theme of the commons has become an important
point of reference. This rapidly growing movement is based on new thinking in the
domains of economy, political and social sciences, suggesting radically different
ways to organize our societies. Inspired by the seminal publication Governing the
Commons (1990) of Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom these theories focus on ‘common
pool resources’ as a way to think our everyday assets beyond the dominant
discourses of market economy and state intervention1. Thinkers like Silke Helfrich
and David Bollier have in Die Welt der Commons (2015) argued that this requires
new ‘practices of commoning’ that challenge our conventional understanding of
politics, economy and culture2.
In these general theories of the commons, however, there seems to be little attention
for the value of the city as a shared resource and as one of the main tangible
forms in which the commons exist in society. Architectural and urban theorists have
started to explore the question of the ‘urban commons’, but have mainly conceived
it as a matter of collective practices in the built environment, referring alternatively
to processes of participation, joint construction initiatives and collective management.
Obviously, these are important perspectives but they refer mainly to the commons
as a matter of what Richard Sennett has called “the rituals, pleasures and politics
of cooperation” and are silent about all other aspects of the urban commons3.
As a result, the aptitude of the concept of the commons for conceiving a new
perspective on the architecture of the city has not been fully explored; it has remained
a theoretical terrain vague.
This blind spot is in my opinion the result of a generalization in how we understand
the growth and transformation of cities. We have learned to think about
urban development as firmly embedded in the matrix of the state (explicated for
instance in various studies on the relation between urban development and the
welfare state) and the market (as represented amongst others in the numerous
investigations that link urban form to neo-liberal market logics). This conception
of the city as driven by state and market has not only become intrinsic to our
contemporary thinking about the city, it has also entered our critical studies and
historiographies which have been firmly narrated along these lines.
In this text, I want to open a different theoretical and historiographic perspective
that does not neglect the state and the market, but rather focusses a comple-

1 Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.
2 Helfrich, Silke. Die Welt Der Commons: Muster Gemeinsamen Handelns. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015.
3 Sennett, Richard. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-Operation. London: Penguin, 2013.

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mentary set of actors and values that have profoundly influenced the architecture
of the city. The concept of ‘the commons’ will be the crowbar that opens this new
historiography on the architecture of the city. In other words, I want to explore
how conceptions of ‘the commons’ have relentlessly been part and parcel of the
development of the architecture of the city. This will require that we go beyond the
well-established understanding of the commons as collective ephemeral practices
and that we move into a more profound investigation of its other dimensions. In
this text, I want to investigate what the fundamental definitions and principles
of the commons have to offer to our understanding of the development of the
architecture of the city. In order to do so, I propose to explore the commons from
three angles, which I coin respectively ‘res communis’, ‘lex communis’ and ‘praxis
communis’. These three angles are strongly intertwined and refer to some primary
aspects of the commons.

Res Communis:
Common-Pool Resources in Architecture and Urban Design

My exploration of the commons starts by necessity with its most basic definition:
the idea of collective resources. As Elinor Ostrom claims, thinking about the
commons always start from the idea of shared assets; of so-called ‘common-pool
resources’. Ostrom maintains that these common-pool resources can be found in
all instances of our environment and always consist of a ‘resource system’ which
can be “fishing grounds, groundwater basins, grazing areas, irrigation canals,
bridges, parking garages” and the ‘resource units’ which entail the “fish harvested
from a fishing ground, water withdrawn from a groundwater basin or an
irrigation canal, the tons of fodder consumed by animals from a grazing area.”4
The common-pool resource system and unit maintain a reciprocal relation that
needs to be governed and regulated, Ostrom claims.
Silke Helfrich has pointed out that it is paramount to understand
that “a common-pool resource is not yet a commons. Instead, it has to
be turned into a commons by its users. One cannot talk about the commons
without talking about the communities that use and sustain it.”5
Helfrich points out that we are constantly surrounded by natural and man-made
common-pool resources and that the very question we have to answer is: “What
do we want to do with them? Do we want to produce commodities and convert
everything – our collective knowledge, our genes, solar energy, public arenas and
spaces, water, beaches, social care etc. – into commodities? Or do we want to
sustain and reproduce them as commons? It’s our choice.”6
This idea of a resource being managed beyond private interest is also central
in the definition by Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich: “People called commons that
part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their
own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to
produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households.”7
Illich also argues that in the most robust commons the resource system plays

4 Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.
5 Helfrich, Silke. ‘The Commons: Marginalized but Rediscovered, Year One of the Global Commons Movement’,
2011. https://commons.blog/2011/01/29/the-commons-year-one-of-the-global-commons-movement/
(accessed 1 April 2018)
6 Ibid.
7 Illich, Ivan. ‘Silence is a commons’, The CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1983, 1-6.

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multiple roles and engages with different groups of citizens: “An oak tree might be
in the commons. Its shade, in summer, is reserved for the shepherd and his flock;
its acorns are reserved for the pigs of the neighbouring peasants; its dry branches
serve as fuel for the widows of the village; some of its fresh twigs in springtime
are cut as ornaments for the church - and at sunset it might be the place for the
village assembly.”8
The Belgian political theorist Michel Bauwens offers a more nuanced way of
understanding the nature of common-pool resources that we encounter in urban
territories. Bauwens differentiates between three categories of common-pool
resources. The first category is ‘inherited commons’ which he links to resources
such as earth, water and forests. These common-pool resources are inherited
by different generations of citizens just by the sheer fact that they live on earth.
Besides these natural common resources, Bauwens recognizes ‘immaterial commons’
which encompass the cultural and intellectual knowledge, as well as the
craft skills that exist in a certain place. Indeed, an important resource of cities
resides in the knowledgeable and skillful practices that are held by the citizens.
As a last category Bauwens identifies ‘material commons’ which he relates to
the large man-made and man-handled reserves of materials that we find in our
environments. Indeed, cities can be looked upon as a stock of materials which is
constantly been used and re-used as the urban condition evolves, which is nowadays
prevalent with professionals engaging with reuse and sustainability. With his
tripartite division of inherited, immaterial and material commons Bauwens points
to the varied character of common-pool resources in urban territories.

Unlocking common-pool resources: the ‘meent’, the common, the lavoir

When looking upon the history of the city from this perspective, we find that there
is a long and rich tradition of looking upon our urban territories as a matter of common-
pool resources. A good example can be found in the territorial figure of the socalled
‘meent’, which emerged as a way to deal with the inherited common-pool resource
of fertile ground as towns and cities were expanding in the Low Countries9.
The concept of the ‘meent’, which translates to English as the ‘commons’, was
since the late middle ages in the Netherlands and Belgium a prevalent way of
managing the agricultural land in the vicinity of towns and villages. It mediated
between a medieval system of castle lords leasing lands and a more modern system
based on private landownership. Season after season the common use of the
agricultural land was renegotiated by the farmers, called ‘erfgooiers’ (‘erf’ literally
means ‘inherit’). During a yearly meeting they renegotiated collectively the use
of the common agricultural resource. Minimal architectural elements played a
central role in unlocking the common pool resources for common use. Through
a system of permanent dirt roads and flexible simple fencing the land was continuously
redefined and the negotiated division of the land was articulated. These
simple architectural elements provided the possibility for the land to be disposed,
managed and unlocked as a common resource.
Another example an inherited common-pool resource in relation to the city is

8 Ibid.
9 For an introduction to the figure of the meent, see: Kos, Anton. Van Meenten tot markten. Hilversum: Verloren,
2010.

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the ‘Boston common’10. Still existing until today, the common in the city of Boston
was, like the meent, a green and open space on which individual and collective
interests were mediated. Also in this case, architecture played an important role
in unlocking and maintaining the common-pool resource. As the urbanization of
Boston proceeded, the particular location and form of the common in the urban
landscape was maintained by the buildings along its perimeter, combined with
a very simple system of paths and fences. The very interrelation between the
open space of the commons and the monumental fronts of the public buildings
along it, acted as a protecting belt for the intra-urban common-pool resource. At
the same time, the programmatic variety of the buildings around the commons,
ranging from governmental buildings to a court house and a masonic lodge, set
the basis for the common-pool resource to play multiple collective roles. Hence,
the Boston commons was a place where activities for various groups of citizens
coexisted; from more private purposes, such as farming and military training, to
public purposes, such as leisurely strolling, festivals, manifestations and at some
points even executions. The Boston common unlocked the land as a productive
resource- with cows grazing and providing milk and meat to the city until 1830,
as well as a political resource where meetings and executions could take place
and a leisurely resource where citizens could come for a pick-nick, a stroll or to
play sports.
While in the case of the meent and the Boston common large territorial
resources were turned into commons, it is also possible to think the unlocking
of inherited common-pool resources through smaller architectural
interventions. In the history of the city we find condense architectural projects
that provide access to common-pool resources. The washing house
or lavoir which can be found in Southern European cities illustrates this logic 11.
Commonly found in France, lavoirs are generally very small architectural structures
that unlock the resource of water by providing a set of minimal architectural
definitions; they consist of a solid material base to perform the washing activities
and a roof for protection from the elements, and either situated along or on rivers.
Initially, lavoirs emerged in small towns and villages and were simple utilitarian, often
jointly created, structures that offered the much-needed access to the resource
of the water. Gradually lavoirs became more sophisticated and fully integrated in
the urban setting where they started to play a role as places of social gathering and
interaction. The 18th-century lavoir of Brienon-sur-Armançon in Yonne, situated
at the source of a small river, the so-called ‘fosse de Dionne’, is a prime example.
Its intricate architectural typology of several concentric spaces articulates the
productive, functional and social understanding of how the resource of the water
enters the city.
When we approach the city through the lens of common-pool resources we
discover that in many instances of the city, architecture has played time and time
again an important role in unlocking and maintaining the commons. The strategies
applied to obtain this unlocking can differ from the introduction of very minimal
and basic territorial definitions in the meent to monumental composition in the
Boston common and sophisticated typology in the lavoir. Nevertheless, this short
exploration illustrates that unlocking common-pool resources as commons has

10 For an introduction see: Shand-Tucci, Douglass. Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800-1950. Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
11 This figure is well introduced in Roddier, Mireille. Lavoirs. Washhouses of Rural France. New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2003.

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throughout the history of the city been at least as an important task for architecture
as articulating them as fully public goods for the state or as commodities for
the market.

Lex Communis:
The Commonality of the Discipline and the Discipline of the Common Place

A second primary aspect of the commons refers to the common codes and conventions
of the city. In his inaugural lecture at the College de France the French
philosopher Michel Foucault, indirectly referred to this important dimensions of
the commons, by positioning the common organization of a discipline as opposed
to the notion of individual authorship. Foucault claims that “a discipline is defined
by a domain of objects, a set of methods, a corpus of propositions considered to
be true, a play of rules and definitions, of techniques and instruments: all of this
constitutes a sort of anonymous system at the disposal of anyone who wants to
or is able to use it, without their meaning being linked to the one who happened
to be their inventor.”12
Unlike an individual artist, architects can –following Foucault— rely on the
already shared rules of the city and architecture. They do not have to invent a unique
and new piece of art. Architecture, as discipline, can pose of a set of common
codes and norms which together form an anonymous system that does not belong
to the single architect but rather to the broader collective of professionals. Out of
such a perspective the architecture becomes a common. Though in times in which
individual signature in architecture remains to be celebrated, such a common
and anonymous approach to architecture might seem to be strange, we can find
in the history of architecture multiple instances that illustrate the force of such a
commons attitude to architectural design.

The common codes of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées

A good examples is the approach of the so-called Corps des Ponts et Chaussées
[Corps of Bridges and Roads], a French public body that was initiated in 1716 and
designed virtually all of the public spaces and buildings in the French territory13.
Typical for the Ponts et Chaussées is that their design approach did often not
entail a full-fledged project but rather the definitions of a set of principles for the
public spaces and buildings that they we planning. Hence, when Jean-Charles
Adolphe Alphand as a director of public works of Paris was planning important
public spaces such as the Parc Monceau or main streets such as the Boulevard
Richard-Lenoir, he did not rely on a full design. In his publication Les Promenades
de Paris Alphand explains how he rather defined common principles of urban design.
He defined as set of codes that comprised of urban elements such as different
trees, benches, city lights and possibilities to combine them to define the streets
of Paris. His colleague Louis Bruyère, explains in his Etudes a l‘Art de Construction

12 Foucault, Michel, Daniel Defert, François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Graham Burchell. Lectures on
the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1970-1971 ; and Oedipal Knowledge. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013.
13 Picon, Antoine, and Martin Thom. French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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that also the conception of indoor public spaces such as storage-houses and market-
buildings was based on the definition of certain architectural elements and the
principles to combine them. The principles of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées
were published in books, but more importantly also in the Annales des Ponts et
Chaussées, a low-cost publication that was distributed across the French territory
to all the engineers and designers of the Ponts et Chaussées. In their turn these
local engineers and designers were reporting in the Annales how they had been
applying the norms and principles in their local situation, assuring not only that
the norms and forms of the discipline developed but also that they belonged
to all; that they were what I call a lex communis.
Next to the understanding of ‘the commonality of the discipline’ by the engineers
of the Ponts et Chaussées, we find almost simultaneously different attempts
to describe what we could call ‘the discipline of the commonplace’. A notable example
is the study that the French architect Pierre le Muet made in the 17th century14.
Muet was looking at the houses in cities like Paris and illustrated how the disposition
of the spaces and circulation of row houses depended on the plot size
(width, depth, orientation) on which they were erected. In his book Maniere de bien
bâtir he illustrates how the way that the rooms are articulated in terms of size and
relation to one another, as well as the positions of the stairs depends strongly on
the form and largeness of the parcel and its relation to the street. Muet illustrates
convincingly that independent of the approach of architects or of architectural
style, the city of Paris can be read as a series of common codes of how to link the
typology of the house to the size and position of the parcel.
The perspective of lex communis illustrates that there is long pedigree of
conceiving the architecture of the city not as juxtaposition of private approaches
nor as a response to public laws, norms or programmes, but rather as a matter
of common codes and conventions. These can concern as well the materiality,
the architectural elements, the typologies and the composition of the city. Sometimes
these codes and conventions are made explicit and become an overt part
of a design approach such as with the Ponts et Chaussées, in other cases they
remain tacit and are silently but not less powerfully embedded in the urban fabric
of the city as Pierre le Muet illustrated. However, throughout the history of the city
we see that architects have engaged with these common codes in various ways
and have in that sense understood their role and projects as contributing to the
commonality of the city and the discipline.

Praxis Communis:
The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation

A third aspect of the commons that I want to touch upon is praxis communis. As
many thinkers about the commons have argued, the commons also depend upon
social practices of commoning –acts of mutual support, negotiation, collaboration
and communication and experimentation that are needed to create systems to
manage common-pool resources and to engage with common codes and conventions.
Ivan Illich has qualified these acts as processes of ‘conviviality’ and has
defined them as the “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and
the intercourse of persons with their environment.”15

14 Le, Muet P. Maniere de Bâtir: Pour Toutes Sortes de Personnes. Paris: Claude Jombert, Jean et Joseph
Barbou frères, 1730.
15 Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 2009.

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Illich has pointed out that these convivial processes have the capacity
to enhance “the contribution of autonomous individuals and primary
groups to the total effectiveness of a new system of production,
designed to satisfy the human needs which it also determines.”16
He continues to state that “people (…) need above all the freedom to make
things among which they can live, or give shape to them according to
their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others.”17
More recent thinkers about the commons like David Bollier have seconded this
perspective and maintained that “rather than look to state authorities as guarantors
or administrators of their interests, commoners generally prefer to seek
direct sovereignty and control over spheres of life that matter to them: their cities,
neighborhoods, food, water, land, information, infrastructure…”18
Jane Bennett is one of the thinkers that helps us to conceive of the very
character of the processes of commoning. In her seminal book Vibrant Matter
she argues that “in a commons, ‘care work’ (…) is primary. By contrast, capitalist
markets and economics routinely ignore the ‘care economy’—the world of household
life and social conviviality that is essential for a stable, sane, rewarding life.”19
Indeed, while in market systems labor is motivated by monetary rewards, it seems
that processes of commoning are instead characterized by ‘affective labor’20.
Out of such a perspective, people’s sense of self and subjectivity becomes intertwined
with the resources that they are dealing with: “They take pride and pleasure
in becoming stewards of resources that matter to them and their community.”21

Civic survey and civic action

The power of care work and of processes of commoning is not a

new phenomenon in the history of the city. This becomes clear when
we look at the urban practice of biologist and planner Patrick Geddes,
who worked in the late 1860s in the city of Edinburgh in Scotland 22.
The historical centre of Edinburgh was at the time generally considered a decayed
area, following the industrialization and the rapid emergence of a very large
working class. The standard procedure was that town planners, following the
1867 Chambers Improvement Act, demolished ‘unhealthy buildings’ and replaced
them with new ones. Consequently, the citizens of Edinburgh were pushed away,
as every demolished house was replaced with a modern and expensive one, an
early example of gentrification.
Geddes employed a totally different method than his contemporaries, by
relying strongly on the immaterial common-pool resource of the citizens’ knowledge
of Edinburgh and by actively collaborating with them in what he called the
‘civic survey’. This would involve that groups of citizens would explore together
with Geddes the possible qualities of the existing city. By walking in the city and

16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Bollier, David. ‘Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm’, 2015. https://thenextsystem.org/commoning-
as-a-transformative-social-paradigm (Accesed 1 April 2018)
19 Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
20 This concept is coined by by Indian geographer Neera Singh. Singh, Neera M. “The Affective Labor of Growing
Forests and the Becoming of Environmental Subjects: Rethinking Environmentality in Odisha, India.” Geoforum.
47 (2013): 189-198.
21 Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
22 Geddes’ work as city planner is well discussed by Meller, Helen E. Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and
City Planner. London: Routledge, 1993.

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by talking to its inhabitants, citizen committees collectively charted the spatial

qualities and social practices of Edinburgh. The result was stunning: spaces such
as backyards, left-over terrains and small alleys that had been previously qualified
by urban planners and architects as worthless, were now mapped by the so-called
‘Open Space Committee’ of citizens as potentially valuable urban resources. Relying
on their own knowledge of the city, but also by tapping into the acquaintance
of their fellow inhabitants, the citizens’ committees redraw the map of historical
Edinburgh as a juxtaposition of valuable spatial resources.
The civic survey was only one aspect of Geddes’ approach. The discovered
urban common-pool resources had to be unlocked, so that they could become
a commons and this required ‘civic action’. Indeed, Geddes invited groups of
citizens to elaborate small interventions such as stairs and gates that could offer
access for larger groups of citizens to the newly discovered areas. These small,
often self-constructed urban elements unlocked the previously undiscovered resources
for common use. In addition, Geddes assisted the citizens to ‘take care’
of the newly discovered resource by offering proposals to cultivate plants in the
new areas that would enhance their leisurely or productive use.
The perspective of praxis communis problematizes the question of agency
in the development of the architecture of the city. While our historical studies have
often maintained that strong state administrations or initiative-rich private developers
have been propelling the development of the city, the perspective of praxis
communis points us to the different agency of ‘commoning’. It requires that we
recognize that the intellectual, political, practical and financial actions of citizens
have proven to have the capacity to change cities, and that we reconsider our
understanding of the agency of so-called ‘professionals’, including architects and
urban designers. The example of the civic survey and civic action by Patrick Geddes
illustrates that as well on the level of the analysis, as concerning the initiation, the
development and the maintenance of new projects, the agency of citizens can play
a crucial role in the development of cities –and has the capacity to establish a new
relation between citizens and the common-pool resources of the city.

A New Path for Contemporary Logos and Praxis?

As the above short introductions on res communis, lex communis and praxis
communis illustrate, the concept of the commons has the potential to offer us a
new perspective on the architecture of the city. When we look at our cities from
the viewpoint of the commons, we realize that we have been conditioned to understand
the built environment as the outcome of processes and values that are
related to the state and the market. Market and state are nowadays understood
as the main propellers of urban development. My concise exploration of the commons
illustrate that another perspective can be opened and another story can be
told. Within the long history of architecture we find abundant examples of projects
and neighbourhoods that were constructed on the basis of common resources,
codes and practices.
Such an assertion is not without implication for our understanding of the
history of architecture. We are in urgent need of new histories of architecture that
can account for logics and processes that go beyond the state and the market. I
believe that contemporary historians have a moral obligation to start constructing
narratives in which the care for the common pool resources by common codes and

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common practices is at the core of the argument. Such an approach would not
only introduce new processes and values in the history of architecture, but also
shed light on new categories of actors that have been central in the development
of our urban environments. I am myself committed to contribute to such a new
historiography of the modern architecture of the city in which the common-pool
resources, common codes and common practices are at centre stage.
The perspective of the commons also offers a great basis to construct a new
theory of the architecture of the city. Out of a perspective of res communis such
a theory might invite us to think about the character and role of common-pool
resources in our contemporary city. In our present day society we talk amply about
resources –discussing for instance their scarcity, their renewal, etc… The same
questions should be asked concerning the inherited, the material and immaterial
resources of our cities. In other words, we should start to define what in the 21st
century can be identified as common resources around which citizens can gather
and construct the city? I am convinced that such a focus on common resources
will lead to different urban projects.
The viewpoint of lex communis challenges us to think about the common
codes and conventions through which we want to construct our cities. What are,
in other words, the general principles that organize the architecture of the city
and how do these relate to the common resources? Beyond stylistic questions, I
believe that the discipline of architecture especially when performing in the city
can formulate common principles which allow each intervention in the built environment
to reach beyond its own confines. Re-identifying the role of codes and
conventions in our contemporary architectural practice for the city seems to be
an important challenge.
The praxis communis perspective offers us the opportunity to rethink what
agency means in the built environment, but also how this agency relates to the
question of the care for common resources. It implies that are invited to think the
architecture of the city much more as a matter of collaborative practices among
so-called ‘professionals’ such as designers, craftsmen and engineers but also
among so-called ‘laymen’ that hold important knowledge on the city too. Understanding
the complex character of the interactions between these different actors
as matters of care, affective labor and negotiation, might bring us to different
design approaches of the city.
From these reflections on res communis, lex communis and praxis communis
emerge a set of questions concerning the role of the architect as well as concerning
the approaches and tools of architecture. Indeed, thinking about an architecture
of the commons will require that we start to conceive of the architect no longer as
a ‘solo-player’ but rather as a ‘commoner’; an urban agent that explicitly situates
her/his agency in relation to other urban actors. This will also require that we
need the rethink our tools. Drawings and models might become less the media
of seduction that they often are nowadays and more a matter of negotiation, but
it also could imply that our discipline needs to think about new tools that are more
fit to the role of the commoner.
‘Constructing the commons’ could in such a way become not only a new lens
for architectural historiography but also a new leitmotiv for architectural thinking
and practice. If the city is the ultimate common –a collective social, cultural and
material construct that is composed by and for its inhabitants— would it then not
be propitious to understand the interventions of architects and urban designers
as the caretaking and unlocking of these common resources?

An Atlas of Commoning: Places of Collective Production