Reorienting Urban Design Methods for Commoning

Abstract

In the face of climate crisis, rising inequity, and the ever- expanding commodification of urban space, the urban design discipline is confronted with challenges that often exceed its traditional design methods. State and market action shaped by capitalism continues to produce rising inequity, ecological destruction and imbalances of power in communities around the world.1 Normative urban design methods have focused on shaping urban form through scripting and projecting typo-morphological patterns of built form, choreographing experiences of the public realm, organizing systems of mobility, infrastructure and ecosystems, and regulating the city through policy regimes.2 However, the emergence and maturation of the discipline as response to the expansion and fragmentation of urban form during the late twentieth century has operated in parallel to ever intensified commodification of the city. While recent work has brought a renewed focus on ecosystems and sustainability oriented regimes of regulation, the challenges of access, equity and ecological crisis persist. An emergent discourse around urban commoning has identified the capacity of citizen-led resource sharing practices to respond to these challenges in ways that neither the state nor the market alone is able to.3 Processes of commoning create bottom-up transformations of political discourse, patterns of spatial use, management of resources, structures of ownership and value-capture, and the repositioning of productive and reproductive labor.4 This paper explores how normative urban design methods might be reoriented to advance urban commoning projects, learning from goals, practices and patterns of real-world case-studies of urban commoning. It builds on recent literature on urban commoning and summarizes a range of commoning-oriented design approaches selected from five years of student thesis projects.