 Alright, yeah, Jerry. Why don't you why don't you do some intro because it's your it's your show man Cool Well Neil and I've known each other for I don't know. We were not crib mates. I know that but it feels like a really long time And then everywhere I look Neil has already been there before me. So shareable is on everything My journey was I was a tech industry analyst for a dozen years not a Wall Street analyst Rather, how does technology influence people and business and society? In the middle of that time, I realized I couldn't stand the word consumer and that kind of took me down a completely different path which took me where I am now where I'm studying trust and I'm studying how we lost trust I'm studying how we're regaining trust in many different ways from open-source software to Co-housing to unschooling to all kinds of stuff and I'm sort of a super interested in how cities Can become kind of city-like again because we we basically paved them over for the car We started passing laws and rules to forbid things instead of enable things There's a whole bunch of bad things that have happened And so that's kind of the journey and then I was talking to Neil Hey, maybe we could have a little short series of conversations that we can post online Just for whoever is curious about these things about some of these topics and figure out Who's doing interesting work? What are the issues? how does this all work out and you're the first person who came to mind and I was like score and I read a couple of your papers, which were wonderful about the co-city and Lynn Ostrom and a bunch of other things like that As a side note, I put my notes into my brain Which means not what you think it is not this one This is the onboard wet brain, but I use a piece of software called the brain Yeah, and it was it's a little startup in in Los Angeles. That's now 20 years old I was on their first press tour in my days as an analyst and the moment I said the moment the inventor opened his laptop and showed me this thing I was like, oh That's kind of how my brain works. So I started using it Publish it online. If you go to Jerry's brain calm in your browser, you can look through my brain for free Wow People could say that Well, exactly and Jerry's pretty famous for his brain by the way I am a legend in my own mind And and what's funny is that the brain you look at if you go to Jerry's brain calm is the same file that I opened 20 years ago Meaning everything that matters to me is in one mind map all linked in you know the way The way it makes sense to me. So under the coast city under your paper the coast city I've got it under Bologna under co-cities under community land trusts under governing the commons Under the article la chita come a mini Comuni Louisiana's wetlands a lesson in nature appreciation basically the things you mentioned I found and then linked and woven And when we're done, I'll send you a link to this particular spot in my brain So you can see how it looks when it's kind of woven together perfect So I thought an interesting place to start maybe if you want to do a tiny bit of introducing yourself and then I just Wanted to figure out How did we how did we forget what the commons was any ideas? Not sure we forgot what the commons is but I'll get back to that. Yeah, so I'm Sheila Foster I teach at Georgetown University as a professor of law and public policy and for many years I taught in New York at Fordham University and I got into the commons the work on the commons Actually through doing work on environmental justice so the commons framework I've long associated actually with the natural world or with the issue of Environmental goods environmental amenities environmental quality or the lack of them or the destruction of environmental goods and Many years ago, maybe 10 or 12 years ago. I went on a research trip with some colleagues throughout Latin America and visited the Informal settlements. We were in Bogota in particular, but also Havana, Panama City and other cities and When I was there and we were there looking at urban development as it intersects with environmental issues and When I was there we visited one of the informal settlements in Bogota and I remember thinking When I was there like why don't we think about these issues of Land and overpopulation and migration and kind of sharing the city through the lens of the commons And you know the mayor of Bogota both the ex mayor now the current mayor Penalosa is a great urban planner and a lot of what you know He tried to do there was to think about and design the city in a particular way and the question is what? really drives Urban planners and people who think about cities when we build parks in a you know a certain place or transportation routes or new amenities and So the commons I began to bring the commons framework to this work and to say you know, why don't we think about the city? and Things resources in the city as a shared space and a shared good and from there it you know kind of took off I started looking at first Not just the idea of the commons and common good, but the institutions in cities that mimic what Len Ostrom Found in her studies like are there instances in which People it well Urban users and city users, you know govern themselves or govern spaces and so I looked at community gardens That's one really good example and you know part conservancies and part groups and even the guardian angels really are kind of Self-governing the commons and and you know use informal social norms Also partner sometimes with cities and other institutions And then I met my colleague in Italy Christian Ioni who runs the laboratory for the governance of the commons as he was working in Bologna And actually he contacted me and said hey, why don't you come work with us because I've been reading your work and And I'm drafting this ordinance partly based on this idea of the urban commons And so that brought me into lab gov, which I now co-direct with him and so and I guess as a kind of Way to bring this home. We held this conference in 2015 in Bologna with the International Association for the Study of the Commons, which is you know Was you know Lynn Ostrom's group and we held their first ever conference on the city as a commons and Neil was there That's where I met Neil So this is all come together and and there we were really celebrating Bologna as this grand experiment in the urban commons and Trying to actually think about this on a city-wide level and what that means for urban governance So for me the commons is both about Common spaces and the commons the literal commons Institutions in the city, but also about governance Fundamentally how we govern this space we call the city and who governs it Totally agreed love love this background. It's it's really fabulous Um While we're at it Neil do you want to introduce yourself briefly so that you're not the mystery person He's kind of lurking here on this great It's just sitting there. Who is he? What is he doing there? Yeah, Neil more flow. I'm executive director of shareable and Yeah, we got interested in the comments. I mean from the very early days of shareable 2009. It was always part of our worldview And we saw a kind of transition happening a big one across many sectors in society You know with the common thread being sharing collaboration, you know new ways to create value new ways for people to work together You know part of the mix was along with open-source software and co-working and bike sharing and all this There was the sharing economy companies, right? Um who at the time when we started we're you know, these coming the Italian sort of oriented or Yeah, like really sharing and all that money flowed in and we're talking billions of dollars and it completely changed their character and And ran, you know really in a way ran off with the sharing story and it kind of gave it a bad name. You might say, you know and But also gave us an opportunity in that reaction against the sort of corporatized sharing economy We started other ideas like platform cooperatives and sharing cities and one of the reasons why we Started investigating sharing cities as an idea and actually a practice because you know Seoul South Korea is You know started their sharing cities program in 2012 and many other cities have followed One of the reasons we were really interested in catalyzing that and covering that and amplifying it and bringing more resources and people and attention into the space is Because I think it if you put commons as the political economy for sharing cities It is a counter to that this sort of abstract corporatized version of the economy, you know that that we see that Uber and Airbnb represent, you know, you really bring it back back home to like the neighborhood and And the things that people know in a concrete way and and how they can get their needs met by working together and Seeing their space and their assets as commons and that they can govern them as peers In their community and take control of their economic destiny. So, you know, we Really were energized by that and recently came out with a book called sharing cities activating the urban commons, you know, in which we Acknowledge the influence and groundbreaking research of Sheila and her partner Christian and and And it's you know, it's 275 pages of commons based solutions for cities, right and 11 different categories and it really shows That the sharing the sharing city is kind of From the conference, I'll quote Someone from the conference. They it was silka. She said I think she was quoting someone else, but she said that And her closing keynote that that of the conference in Bologna 2015 that the the urban commons that is a kind of Comfort utopia Meaning it's one within reach. That's practical like all the pieces are there. We need we just need to put them together and then our book Sharing cities is like a beginning out of kind of handbook like here's how you can do it, right? Here's the examples and pulse, you know case studies and policies and you know flip through it See what you like make it happen in your community but more than that also suggest me the need to kind of coordinate efforts right to bring those projects together and Like the the regulation for the urban commons in Bologna, you know, it's it's a it's not just a regulation It's also a platform for organizing which commons based projects their form quote-unquote Collaboration packs with the city and you know What's really groundbreaking about Sheila and Christian's work is it fills a hole in the administrative law, right? That you know, I think people are ordinary residents are aren't allowed to make the city They're not allowed to do things like put up their own park bench exactly the piazza, right? They're not allowed to do that. It's not legal, right? So they're saying here's the pathway to make it legal and on top of it It can be a paradigm which can bring environmental sustainability and social justice at the same time if done, right? That's what excites us about what you know what that's why I wanted you to meet I love that. I love that. Thank you. That's right And you said something important now in and I would say this that the commons has to be very generative of good, right? It has to actually generate things for people to live well in cities and to be able to Create the things, you know, whether it's housing whether it's internet access whether it's park space or whether it's You know a host of other things. Yeah food to food, right exactly to flourish in cities So in that sense, I think it's not a utopian. It need not be a utopian idea But it is in a sense because we're not there yet, right, right, but But I love the idea of it being concrete and material because not because I'm very much about You know redistribution and getting things into people's hands that they need to live well. Yeah Yeah, and then the comments is almost like pre-distribution. It's like You know, let's create it together and Instead of commoditizing it and then generating some sort of income or and then that being taxed and given back It's like, you know, this is why I like the commons Over UBI, you know universal basic income as a as a concept because it puts Ordinary people in charge of the assets. They need to live well, right? Not, you know, they get the apple tree not the apples not a promise of the apples So I had said at the start of our call that how did we forget the commons and Sheila you Didn't like that so much. I think partly because you are minding the comments more than most everybody Let me let me explain a little bit what I meant And then we can maybe dive into that a bit. One of my favorite books around this is Carl Polanyi's The Great Transformation where he talks about the transformation from pre-industrial society to early industrial society And basically he makes the argument that the market economy Requires market society that it pushes aside that it eats and destroys the old ways of living together And I happen to believe that we used to know pretty much everywhere how to live in community on the commons We understood that any any average villager had been raised to understand how to take care of their their area What their role was in their community how this all kind of worked together and if you look at pre pre-colonial indigenous cosmologies around the world you will see Rules and regs kind of about how to take care of the bad actors in the village about how to you know What what to do and what not to do about? The animals you subsist with the territory you live on all that kind of thing And then Polanyi says look and then we invented three new fictitious commodities Land labor and money and most people are shocked to realize that you know before 1700 Yes, there were coins, but everything didn't have a price There weren't markets for everything markets were very carefully segregated and separated There was no real estate You couldn't walk down to century 21 and buy land for you to factory and there was no separate labor force people were tied to the Land we were in community. We were you know everything was kind of locked down and Part of the reason I say that we lost our understanding of the commons is that we replaced it with the idea of natural resources That some somehow we ate all our old mental notions about how we lived life and they got taken over But by what Neil was just describing as those artificial sort of corporate versions of what an economy is those abstractions Including the I think very not useful abstractions of hey If there's a whole bunch of selfish actors who just working for their own benefit Somehow the invisible hand makes this whole thing work out into an economy and don't worry it all works out Just let it run rampant right and and we let that happen for a long time and it kind of aid our world Right, and I think what we're doing now is we're kind of rediscovering these notions and a few people never forgot them in particular Go ask any indigenous population on earth. How hard they've been working to defend these ideas against this title force This tsunami of change that whacked them all on the side on the on the head But we as the broader society are beginning to understand again that these things mattered That they're in fact not just sort of kind of cute and cool But they're central to human existence on the planet together in community taking care of you know the pale blue dot so so Maybe I'm interested in what was your did you start thinking things like that or did you wake up to the commons? And if so kind of how So the comments was embedded in me in the environmental work I was doing because it's embedded in that framework, right? You can't think about The environment or how or why we regulated or whether we should privatize some of it, right? So the the debate in environmental law and policy has long been framed around this issue Okay, so we if we have these collective goods the global commons, right? How do we protect them given that and it's hardens right Garrett Harden with the tragedy of the common his assumption people are Selfish actors, so we either need to bring the state to regulate it or we need to privatize it And so emissions trading is a form of privatization. So that's always been a framework for me and I would say that the people who work in the natural resources environmental field haven't have never forgotten about it In fact Lynn Ostrom, you know, that was her point Which is to say to reject this idea that we've that we've only had these two choices the market of the state, right? And her work is dedicated to saying, you know, that's really not true, right? There are long-standing commons institutions in the natural world the innovation to me is to bring it into the the urban world right Into the world where you have density and diversity and a regulated environment and where the market is actually incredibly strong and overlapping jurisdictions Really like the adopt the adaptations you made to Lynn's principles for governing the commons Adopting them to urban settings that makes a ton of sense to me, right? And so because urban settings are already designed and regulated then the commons functions there as a kind of disruptor, right? Because not only are we kind of hacking the current governance scheme and that's what happened in Bologna, you know So Christian Ioni my partner, you know would say it's that you know, we had to redesign city hall how governance works there Be able to bring other actors in to govern city space because city space is heavily regulated space, right? So the commons first of all has to hack into that system the zoning rules the land use rules as well as Local administrative culture so you describe a little more what happened in Bologna so in Bologna what happened is that there was a process of really talking as You know, Ostrou would say cheap talk this idea that you talk with people in the government You talk with communities you talk with people living city and what is your vision of the city? Bologna started out as wanting to be a smart city and Actually changed at some point in the course to say that there's this other framework that we're interested in so talking through that and Mab gov, you know went to Bologna and work with The various stakeholders as we call them there to figure out what it is they wanted and that led to This experiment this regulation which at the heart of it is as Neil has mentioned the idea of collaboration packed right the idea really the city giving up some of its power over a city space and Resources in the city over abandoned buildings even over neighborhoods or or housing complexes to co-manage them right or to co-govern them with other People right they could be individual residents. They could be You know nonprofits etc. So But also there was more in Bologna than that most people stopped there But actually what happened in what's continuing to happen is really to redesign the way They did procurement processes in the city to incorporate this to set up a new office off-site That is to say not in City Hall, but in one of the neighborhoods the office that would oversee these packs and and And it's a continual process of I mean Bologna is an ongoing experiment actually the evaluation phase of really looking at The now almost 300 packs that have been signed to see you know, who's really a part of those packs? What are the resources that are being governed? Are they kind of low-level resources in which there's not much at stake? You know, you're cleaning up the piazza or your cheat or are they high-level kind of impactful resources that can really change the culture of the city and Give people and in particular on the peripheries and other parts of Bologna Begin to remake their lives so the comments so One idea of the commons that I embrace is an idea that puts kind of Justice and the right to the city at the heart of it and the right to the city is the right to remake the city, right? The right to be involved in remaking the city and if and so if we look at the Bologna experiment through that lens, we might have a different Assessment actually of how successful it is And and so So Bologna all that say is an ongoing experiment with Some real question marks about how effective it was depending on the normative and the kind of lens you bring to it Is it a right to the city lens or is it a more kind of utopian lens of oh We just want people to you know get together and work together and you know You know and to clean up the piazza, you know the kind of common in that we talk about I think we I think the commons needs to scratch a little deeper And that because in fact cities are places of vast inequality right now And if the commons can't speak to that then we're just another leftist liberal I Won't be speaking to I think some of the more fundamental pressing challenges that face cities all over the world no matter where you are Well, it's interesting. I said earlier that that my journey started with the word consumer And one of the one of the things that happened was we consumerized civic life And we went from being citizens to being mere consumers Right and one of the things that happens when you are consumerized is that your sense of agency is taken away Your only job as a good consumer is to choose between the things that are advertised to you whether it's government officials or the Ford or the Mercedes or whatever and we kind of we in some weird way abdicated our Responsibility for it and left and right are kind of alike guilty of this because on the left We abdicated our responsibility over to large institutions, right, which is the right side critique of the left Which is oh all you want is big government solutions It's like well kind of they do because they don't none of them neither of them trust the humans that are actually the citizens That are actually in the city and yet the more we treat them as mere consumers the stupider They get the more selfish they get because that's what's expected of them and the educational system is Reinforcing this because we consumerized it as well So we're sort of in a nexus of overlapping Messes that have led us to the place that you're busy going like all right all right We got parts like let's fix that for a little bit. Oh damn. We've got inequality and injustice and it's rampant Now how do we do that and then by the way? Nobody wants to talk to each other because everybody's afraid of the boiling over of discourse because we destroyed discourse as well No, that's exactly right and you know the comments can be a way to bring people together across those lines I think on the other hand it also can be quite naive to the social lines Right to the ruptures the social ruptures I should say that that we see in society and the immense stratification So, you know Richard Florida the creator or the guy who created the creative class and saw that as a way to kind of regenerate Cities is now writing about the urban crisis, right or and he helped create that he helped create an urban crisis as he rightly to give him credit for You know spending resources on this mapping it out is really Tremendously concentrated, you know advantages and disadvantages in cities right now the world and And within those areas of concentrated disadvantage and advantage. We see a lot of homogenity. I mean a lack of Really diversity and you know economic and racial and ethnic and so the commons can't Do a lot of work there unless we're able to be honest and think about What's driving right? Those ruptures the fact that people are still living separate for one another still segregated, you know racially economically And I struggle with again because I started you're working on environmental justice Not just environmentalism, but the way in which that concept lands in poor communities in communities of color the way that Environmental amenities and you know disadvantages get shaped in those neighborhoods in places like Camden where I work So so, you know, this is you talk about concrete or material I'm constantly trying to bring the commons down to those grant, you know that ground And yeah, that's very hard because you talk to folks in those communities who are common in let's be clear And in those communities they have, you know informal and Norms that you know govern how they interact with each other they have institutions that Take care of right that are cooperative There's a lot of sharing in those communities, that's not how we talk about the commons We don't point to those communities often, but and that's why the concept Lands very roughly there, right if you talk to people about the commons. Yeah, I think Part of the problem is that sort of stress and scarcity tend to drive some commons behavior It's not that we're all selfish is that is that when we don't have that much We sort of have to share but then that gets deprecated that doesn't get seen as cooperation in society That could seen as oh, that's how poor people Resorted, you know resorted to some kind of clever answer as and then and then wealth and affluence There's a documentary titled affluenza with a book alongside You know that that leads us toward cocooning and not sharing and everybody owns their own thing, right? But I don't think it's just class actually I I mean I would push back a little about that because there is true But these neighborhoods also there are cultural norms there that are true in middle class as well as poor Let's say Latino and African-American neighborhoods in which people do gather around shared institutions It could be the church could be other things They do have these norms of oh auntie and you know my neighbor down the street We're all going to do this together and that's you know not to be kind of reductive or essentialist about it But I do think that you know if we think about again back to Lynn Ostrom's work We think about whether certain communities have You know norms within them that they can enforce Because in part they're homogenous communities. I mean that's an important part of her finding that she found these institutions really work Around small resources and in homogenous communities and also where people aren't transitory where people are actually what people have to stay in the Community matters that you remember the community precise, but if you bring that to a city a complex Ecological space ecosystem like the city To me that's the exciting work is when we get out of community right because I could give you many examples of Common in and many types of communities in urban communities But what happens when you scale that concept up and that's really I think what we're struggling with what happened because there's always been Common in there always been co-ops there always been this behavior in cities but if we wanted to be the norm the operation or Or the way in which you know cities begin to operate then we have to scale it up And so that's why Bologna is a green experience or experiment and there are other City-level experiments going on and in fact we're gathering at The Rockefeller Retreat Center in Bellagio where we're bringing cities together European and American as well as Mexico City and Accra Ghana and other urban innovators to Have a workshop on the co-city right on how do we kind of bring this to more cities? And so we have people from the mayor's office from the city You know sitting around those tables who are interested in you know How do you do this at a city level that to me is the challenge part part of our Barrier here one of our obstacles here I think is the notion and this is kind of the modernist Scientist lens that that these things won't scale like it won't scale those three words have killed more interesting projects Anything else people like oh, that's so cute. It's it's so nice that that works on a low on a local level But it won't ever scale can you elaborate a little bit more on the laddering up part on the dilemma you just described like Can you say more about what that feels like and what some of the possible solutions smell like right now, right? so Some of the so how do we create a culture in the city and when I say the city both I mean the place the city, but also the governance of the city which does come back to the city right Officials so to speak So how do you create an infrastructure where this becomes more than a few projects, but a way of actually operating? And so a cup so obviously the Bologna regulation is one kind of institutional tool to do that. I think there are others and One is that you find a city department the office of innovation The housing department in New York, which has just rolled out, you know community land trust and now that's been voted on By the city council you kind of seeded somewhere within a big city So New York City's a big city for instance and in smaller cities. It'll look different So Bologna you could tackle the entire city once but you can't do that in Amsterdam or New York or Mexico City But you see it somewhere and you experiment and you show that it can work and then it Begins to permeate out So that's one kind of way in which you can scale this up another way I think is that is networking the things that are already happening in the city the the the way in which people are Creating innovative what we call pooled right urban pooling and that's my colleague's term Christian Ioni and it comes from the idea of a common pool resource which is the scientific or technical word for a natural resource or For the commons, but the idea is that in the urban environment you create a pooled good by pooling the actors and their resources So what are the examples where you have what we call the five actors coming together? You know city officials the private sector Social innovators the public or the right the people that live there the users and then usually a knowledge institution Right. It could be university. It could be you know shareable. It could be a nonprofit but where the instances where those folks are coming together and pooling their resources and goods to create Goods in the city that are both shared widely That are governed in a collaborative fashion right and that enhance or Meet some notion or further You know a vision of the city could be sustainability right it could be social justice it could be you know housing affordability and How do we make sure that those efforts are networked that people doing those projects are working together across those projects That's harder than passing a piece of regulation. I think actually But that's the kind of work that we hope to continue to do and that's why we spent time on thinking through design principles Thinking we continue to think about a Toolbox of a an institutional and legal toolbox So the regulation might be one, you know kind of tool, you know community land trust might be another kind of tool This broad band the whole compendium of them at shareable, right? So the broadband Network project in Harlem that we're working on is another kind of tool a trust that in which a User-centered and user-managed, you know network goes into And so so there are various tools there are financing tools for the commons So I think that the more we develop this Ways in which you can network this stuff ways in which you can see it in the tools the Institutional and legal tools that support that the more I think we can really see a scaling right but scaling's not just going to Happen just because we want to scale it right Yeah, you actually Yeah, it takes effort and I would say it takes some really interesting thinking about bringing old tools or old regulations or Right, so there are Ways in which again you can hack into the way the current system works use some of their tools to create this environment and We don't have to start from scratch and frack, you know starting from scratch is where I think you set yourself up for failure You know again the city is a regulated space The market is there It's a thick it's a thick space And the government is there and you can't do away with those things Yeah, it's funny. How do you work them? How do you hack into them? Yeah, one of my one of my heroes in this in this sort of work is Hans Mondermann Who died a couple of years ago? He died in 2008, but he was one of the pioneers of traffic hauling or shared spaces And he went around Holland and he did a hundred and thirty hundred and forty built towns around Holland Where he helped remove stoplights and re-engineers streets and intersections Reducing the accident rate because people had to make eye contact At the intersections the bikers and the and the motorcyclists and the drivers all and the pedestrians all had to sort of see each other to match speed And his MO was really interesting. He would go to a new town He would not go to the traffic people because they know exactly how to make streets Which is like here's where you draw the line. Here's where you put the stoplight He would go to the city planners or somebody else so find find some new constituency He would tell them what he had done and give them a walking and a driving tour of a nearby town with this It already happened so they could experience it and then his MO was he would go away for three or four months He knew that the thing had to percolate in their heads They needed to go try it out themselves talk with family discuss among themselves whatever else it was They needed to figure out and when he came back They were usually ready and then they would sit down and do thoughtful design because you don't just rip out the Stoplights that doesn't actually work. You have to you have to think through what you're going to redesign and how it's going to work and then I find that fascinating and then I've been thinking about in various sectors of human activity How once you've had an aha experience like that once you've had a little bit of felt sense of agency come back to you How do you make that contagious so that you begin then to look at? Well, there's the playground and well there's you know There's our educational system and so forth and and I think if we can figure that out We get a general sort of a bootstrapping of all these things. Yeah. Yeah, and I think taking the experimentation You know seriously, what does it mean to experiment? I think is One way of thinking about contagion As people like experiments people like Being a part of something that's new but that doesn't require them to again throw the whole You know baby out with the bath water And I think it becomes contagious. So what we're noticing, you know with these experiments in Italy is a really good example of this And both a very positive and actually a problematic sense in a positive sense people looked at Bologna or other cities and said wow Interesting, you know, what if we did that, you know, that seems to be a really great way of Rethinking how you know cities can still thrive and survive in what was a financially perilous time, right? We can use actually the energy of our own citizens and of and of other actors So that's great, right? Bologna became contagious the bad side is right the negative of that that is that there was a cut in pasting of the regulation and a Kind of blind adoption, right? Oh, let's take it word by word and let's put it in this city And the problem with that is is that you've got a Commons only works if it comes from That place or if it's adapted I should say adaptive to that environment So Chris and I were in Accra Ghana this summer working with some people there who want to redevelop the old And historic area of Ghana of Accra called Jamestown. It's where the slaves came in has a rich culture, but it's also You know a very poor area and you know there if you talk about You know the city Government the first thing people think is corruption, right? So you wouldn't go to Ghana and try to get a regulation pass or even really work closely with the city government without a lot of Thinking about how to do that and so There you might actually want to work with market actors, right? So when we say that so I'm very careful. I mean, there are all these Hard-left critiques using the Commons of neoliberalism. Of course I buy all that Yeah, but I'm very careful again to throw the baby out the bathroom to say that all the market is awful, you know Making money's awful market actors have taken, you know, actually, it's a way that we can leverage and hack into Market right thinking and market actors to actually fund and to regenerate the city using the Commons methodology Yeah, and and that becomes so important in places where the government actually is not functioning well and Where the government is actually harming the interests of the people and you have certain market actors And again, just like you can't put any other group in one box You can't put market actors in one box, right? And so it's really a matter of finding the right people to help to construct this pooled good and pooled Resource and pooled governance scheme so that you can regenerate an area like Jamestown for instance in a way that doesn't displace the artists that have long been there that actually Creates housing for you know people need But that also, you know, I always say that someone's got to finance the comments. It's not free. Yeah, exactly Neil, I'm sorry jump in I've been monopolizing Apologize I Mean that was one of the attractive things about speaking with Sheila and Christian about these issues is the flexible The flexibility in their thinking the pragmatism and practical approach You know moving beyond ideology and and going into inquiry and experimentation and Let's see what works, you know, let's not use our pre-format pre-formatted ideas or or models to figure out what works And and that into me is very liberating and And something I would I hope to see more in cities and an attitude at a practice more in cities we could something we talked about in her book and and just to go back to to You know your question about scale You know the you know Jerry spent lots of times is lots of time in Silicon Valley or a tech analyst I live in Mountain View Google's just down the street the first semiconductor company in the in the world was like started here Shocking semiconductor like the mid 50s or something and so I'm in the middle of it And you know, there is this kind of fetish for scale. It's like nothing Only scale, you know, you only work on things that are scalable period, right, right? and you know what I think people fail to realize and it's kind of obvious, but you know, I think it's good to bring it on the table is that that is a Philosophical accommodation to investors Yes, please do and and and you know you only want to invest in scalable things because that's where you get the big return It's actually not so much philosophical as a pragmatic accommodation to investors You're actually shaping yourself so that they will even invest. Yeah, but you have to understand that it's not just an idea It's an ideology. Yeah, so it's it's part of the culture and the mindset and worldview. Yeah, that people Beyond investors adopt as their own without realizing what that I what that ideology serves And and and then and thus they just empower themselves When in fact there is, you know, lots of different ways to to To do economy, right? You know instead of this was an issue that was at the Bologna conference, you know It's neoliberals will say there is no alternative capitalism and commenters would say There are many, you know, Tina there is no alternative capitalism And and Tama there are many alternatives to capitalism and then speaking about about Bologna if you Look at the cooperative sector Surrounding and in Bologna in the Emilia Romana region 30% of the economy is cooperative and it's composed of this incredibly diverse collection of Cooperatives and including high-tech small high-tech manufacturers. That's right You know banks grocery chains, you know, etc And the way that they compete is because they cooperate with each other and there is a institutional support for that Both in taxation and regulation, right that it's a Systematic approach to spread wealth. It's right intentional, right and it's and it's also Especially in the last decade or more Recently, it's something that the conservatives in that area Will they couldn't fight it really and and and so they joined and like, yeah, we should do co-ops, too You know, interesting. Yeah. Yeah, and and So so there is a different way to do economy and instead of the you know Scale it and extract wealth and concentrate in the hands of a few people you can systematically design an economy to spread the wealth And and you know, here we are in America. We have these debates about about economy and it's like it's some sort of puzzle that You know, how do we get ourselves out of this? You know, like come on, you know, like Take a trip Look around a little bit look around do some research. I mean, I mean, you don't need to take a trip You just do a search on the internet and right Well, do your do your friggin homework for crying out loud, you know, it's it's super frustrating Here in Silicon Valley because there's you know, this is the new thing in Silicon Valley to talk about the economy, right? You know, you got O'Reilly's next economy and etc. Et cetera and they and they look at it about the next economy the same way they look at the old economy, it's like What is going on? This is one of the reasons my wife and I moved to Portland two years. Yeah Yeah, so that's why we need to have other conversations about about the economy And so Neil made a point that's so important and I'm glad to hear it again Articulate it and you know this idea that the comments can't mean that That there's profit or that there's wealth right and what concerns me when I hear that In our circles is that And I'll be very blunt, you know You're gonna tune out a whole lot of people of color right because you can't tell people who have been left out of the economy for so long That yeah, you can't benefit economically, you know, that's easy to say when you've gotten used to and even Unconsciously, I think it's easy for a lot of folks to think this way Or to take for granted that like the wealth that the what built this country, right was You know, not only indentured servitude, but cheap labor and often that was provided by the very people who are now in Areas of concentrated, you know disadvantage high foreclosure rates. There's still retlining So you can't tell people who have lived that experience, right? Who have grown up as I have with my mother talking about the South and the KKK and who are one just one generation in Sharing in the American dream that we want to move to an economic system in which we share everything But there's no wealth of that. We just I mean you just lose a whole so for me I'm all I'm in these circles that are often white in which people talk this way and I just go no no no no no no No, that can't be the math. That's not an inclusive message No, I think when you always say this idea that no actually, you know, we can have a you know A robust economy in which people yeah in which wealth is generated but shared more evenly, right? In which it's not just extractive, but it's circular So I'm speak to people. Yeah, I'm a broader swath of people Thank you. You're you're waking up things. I hadn't thought about My favorite story about profit on top of the commons is IBM adopting open source software Where there's the new commons or the information commons and they figured out one day that oh my god We're about to go under we need to use Apache and Linux and a bunch of other things And we need to donate a lot of our intellectual property to the open source commons Which saved the company and then they made a couple billion you know a couple three billion dollars worth of service revenues on top of Community, you know governed software, which is a nice story So so one of the things I'm asking over and over again is how do we create profitable business on top of healthy commons? Right, and I think that matches what you were saying a moment ago But but you just gave it a whole different angle that I hadn't I hadn't thought about Um What are the best things that could happen that would propel your work at this point Sheila? I think You know this idea of pooling we need more people to work with us on this Obviously there are resources we need resources We need there are a lot of people interested in this I mean we're busier than we should be at people saying how do we work with you? How do we bring this to our city? How do we do this? And it's just you know Christian and I and the young Researchers that happened to be at our university So part of going to the Bellagio Center part of trying to cede this other places is to try to attract More people thinking about this. So we have what we call 1.0 of our co-city protocol that is to say it's designed to be improved It's in dying. It's really designed in a collaborative for a collaborative You know process of thinking we'd like to create a Common school and actually below knew was interested in this and the foundation there in which we bring people who are experimenting in cities You know together every year to share, you know our research to share our experiments to continue to Improve the protocol to improve the design principles. So I guess number one resources number two that includes people right more people interested working with us and Experimenting with us. Yeah. Are you connected to the Civic Hall folks in New York? Yes, I was part of Aspen Urban Innovation Group and someone from Civic Hall was there Fascinating. Yes. So I in the two business partners who founded it. I introduced them years ago I've been to a couple of their PDFs and when I'm in New York, I try to stop through Civic Hall But Mika Sifri one of the two founders is an advisor to Rex my group And I'll talk to you more about that because I think that you ought to be speaking at PDF next year Okay, and there's probably probably other interesting avenues to to go through there The other thing is One of my beliefs about development is is like and this is gonna be it's gonna sound overly simplistic But it's telling stories leaving leaving open tools at hand And then having experts nearby who are not trying to tell anybody what to do Right, but if but if you'd like to adopt and appropriate something and make it your own This person here might be able to help you accelerate that and you know connect to connect it up properly and part of the problem with All the kinds of movements that I think we're fans of is that the tools are not available and not easily at hand right and Some of its policy, but a lot of it is like hey, I want to start a co-op. That's also a workaround co-op That's also for benefit What's my what's my platform what paperwork do I fill out? How do I and that road has not been paved yet, right? So I think Neal's book actually is quite helpful in that regard in terms of One issue with providing tools is that some of this stuff is so Specific locally how you do certain things because when you work at the local level the laws the frameworks local But there are general tools that so we're gonna come out with what we call a co-city report in a month or two in which Because we've mapped a hundred cities in which there are these experiments going and partly what we're trying to do is extract a tool kit And we're gonna come out with that to say, you know, here are some of the institutional tools Here are some legal tools here are some other tools here are the design principles It's kind of here's what we're learning as we look at commons urban commons in cities and cities as commons I love that. That's brilliant. Oh, this means I agree. Yes, we've got a platform. It's called www.commoning.city that building That's in the Ostrom blog that I sent you the the Ostrom in the city. There's a connection from there To the platform So that is the point is to make this all available as we learn it as we think through it as we present it To put it up to share it to make it available as Neil has done in the share in the wonderful book Cool, so it sounds like maybe you could use more resources and more humans involved interested in commenting that city Yeah, maybe maybe wait till you have the 1.0 out But then bring more people in and hook up community so that they can improve this thing While using it while putting it to the test in different places And in fact the open platform will be open so anyone can go in and input their city and their example and their tools So that's the idea is to drive people there and to say, you know, listen, it's a collaborative. It's an opening It's a commons, you know a knowledge commons really so You know, we have RAs again, you know doing interviews and inputting it But I think the idea is to make it a lot more open and receptive We need to move beyond the grad grad student as as well as labor stain. They're very good They're smart. They're so smart Respect One last question for me anyway, because then we're gonna be out of time But what are some neighboring communities initiatives movements and by communities? I don't mean towns I mean groups that are involved in parallel efforts to yours What are the what are the neighboring ones that you that you care about the most that you point to and use as examples and And are building sort of good relationships with what one of those parts and Neil you probably have a map a long list, so there's some examples, but I think about Participatory city right out of the UK Doing a lot of terrific stuff Around the UK and in developing a model in which you know people participate in building the city That's the first one actually that comes to mind And I'm trying to think of others Neil can you yeah Just a quick comment on participatory cities. We're doing a we're gonna on it right now or publish within the next month about what we call the urban villages movement, which is like taking this Sharing city or coast city idea and like really putting it at the neighborhood scale and and this is what you know Tessie Britton and her crew at participatory city is doing they just got a $8.5 million grant to do it in a in a borough of London And you know, this is off of the trial they did I think a one-year trial and actually another neighborhood of London So I think they share a lot of commonalities in what Sheila and Christian are doing but just doing it at that More focused scale and then you know get our book right it has yeah tons of stuff Yeah, and the link is You can get a you know get the free PDF right at trouble net slash Sharing cities sharing dash cities slash downloads, but Jerry you'll put the link in it'll be there I do want to mention is from within city government itself. There is this These laboratories for the city that I think are really interesting So the laboratory for Mexico City for instance is an innovative new Agency that the city created Washington DC now has the laboratory for DC and these are I think a new innovation in which you know cities recognize that there needs to be a cross-cutting Space to rethink the city and I think a lot of these experiments can come out of and be based in there So we're gonna have Gabriela Montez Gomez from the laboratory. I know she's fabulous. Yes in Bellagio, you know, because And so often we're looking for people in cities that are in places like that that are not in the thing about cities It's their siloed places and hot and heavily ossified very hard to move the pieces So when you know cities create these kind of Agencies that are not the regular kind of agency but that are very much of the city But that have freedom a lot of freedom to innovate that's I think you know Yes, there are groups like just for a city like us and doing stuff But it's so important for the city to start thinking differently about itself and how it's yeah So I so so I want to point to those laboratories as an emerging place to watch and where a lot of our work You know can be placed. Yeah, just add to which which Sheila was saying is in UK They have this thing which is similar to what is happening in Bologna Are these things called collaborative city councils? And you know one example is in Froome, UK. It's like a market town outside of like London And and yeah, the the city council, you know, it has its typical traditional functions But also they turn it into a kind of participatory platform in which projects can connect and in the case of Of Froome they they actually had like organizer a couple of organizers on the staff of the city council are hired by the You know city hall To work and connect all those projects together and do things like shared crowdfunding for the projects, right? And and so the idea of governance of the city becomes, you know, again, it becomes a more open commons oriented Approach and that that line between, you know, a city official and resident, you know becomes much more permeable You know, it starts to fade actually um and space for governing You know radically expands and that's like kind of an interesting thing, you know, it's like There's this argument about in the United States about small government big government I'm for big government and if everyone is part of it, you know, yeah Because everyone is making the decisions everyone's part of the process. I'm for big government, you know One of my inspirations at the local level is an old TEDx Houston talk by Jason Roberts the founder of our block Have you guys ever seen this? No, I'll put I'll put the link in as well But uh, he's a young guy and and he did he did talk later, but his early one is so so nice He's got like a beanie on and he's so he's so excited He's jumping up and down as he's getting his talk And these are where they basically took an intersection in south Dallas in oak creek south Dallas And they painted straight a bicycle lane on the sidewalk. They borrowed some trees from a nursery and put them along the street They made a cafe and served coffee They they then put a big banner on this empty warehouse brick wall that said oak creek arts district And they pretended just for a couple days As if they had upgraded the intersection people started stopping people started talking And they printed out and pasted on the wall all the ordinances they were violating That's great Less less city, you know hall members come by and say well, why aren't we doing this kind of thing? Right, right so so they could see exactly why they weren't doing this kind of thing So I think waking people up is as important as these tools we've been talking about and I I love things like our block that Try to do that once they get institutionalized. They lose some early sort of pepper, right? They lose the early spice that that made people That excited so I hope we'll share more of those things Is there anything that we can answer for you? No, no, no, no, this has been great. It's great to be introduced to you jerry. It's great to You know to be part of your orbit Same here. Thank you. I I really And part of his brain. I can't right. Oh, yeah, I'm sending you a link. You you're definitely in my brain now You'll see you're in mine Jerry's brain is a commons It actually kind of is it's not a very collaborative commons because it's not a tool that that's easy for many people to feed but But I publish it openly and exactly and then and what you tell me goes into it and then gets published back out So there we are. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Well, I look forward to the follow-up. So Thank you. Same here. Neil. Thank you for suggesting this. Thank you for uh making the connections And, uh, we'll we'll we'll keep talking. Yeah, absolutely should and happy halloween That's right. Happy halloween. Be careful out there. My my costume is a trash bag that says 2017 on the front That's great. Okay on that note. Exactly Exactly Thank you. Bye. Thanks. Neil. Cheers. Thanks. Sheila. Thanks jerry