Shrinking Commons

The Shrinking Commons

What do we mean by common property?

What resources do we continue to hold in common?

What is their fate?

The commons have been described as a drama, even - famously - a 'tragedy'. Their fate, their future, has never seemed more parlous, with climate change, population growth, and competition for scarce resources seemingly threatening our greatest common property, the planet itself. Enclosure - once seen as the end of the commons - is touted by some as the only way to protect precious environments subject to encroachment. At the same time, undergirded by a general anxiety that the natural, social and political commons are at risk from the encroachments of capitalist expansion, hyper-consumption, and corporatist politics, critics of enclosure grasping for a new counter-narrative, propose a new global commons as the only solution to pressing global problems. The commons, far from disappearing, and irreducible to merely 'public goods', remain central to material struggles and utopian imaginaries of collective ownership and wellbeing.

Yet what exactly is meant by the commons today? How do we define them? How are they formed, and for whom? What are the prospects for new commons and new forms of 'commoning'? What political languages and narratives about what is held 'in common' should we seek to endorse?

This symposium addresses these questions, following developments across three historically vital 'passage points': the ownership, availability and condition of land and nature; the technologies and infrastructures of collective provisioning; and the structuring of publics and their rights. Participants - drawn from the natural and social sciences, and from diverse disciplines ranging from architecture, anthropology, geography, environmental science, urbanism, sociology, and philosophy - will explore the processes behind the shrinking commons, but also demonstrate their survival and expansion, as well as the development of new and emergent commons. The Symposium also features four public lectures with keynote speakers reflecting on the loss and the promise of global commons.

Throughout, we consider the material, discursive and ideological implications of things being held, managed, and imagined 'in common'. Our ultimate aim is to encapsulate the breadth of contemporary change and to find within it the terms and sites of a new language of collective presence and shared returns.

The symposium is organized by the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.