The future of smart cities has arrived, courtesy of citizens and their phones. To prove it, Daniel T. O’Brien explains the transformative insights gleaned from years researching Boston’s 311 reporting system, a sophisticated city management tool that has revolutionized how ordinary Bostonians use and maintain public spaces. Through its phone service, mobile app, website, and Twitter account, 311 catalogues complaints about potholes, broken street lights, graffiti, litter, vandalism, and other issues that are no one citizen’s responsibility but affect everyone’s quality of life. The Urban Commons offers a pioneering model of what modern digital data and technology can do for cities like Boston that seek both prosperous growth and sustainability. Analyzing a rich trove of data, O’Brien discovers why certain neighborhoods embrace the idea of custodianship and willingly invest their time to monitor the city’s common environments and infrastructure. On the government’s side of the equation, he identifies best practices for implementing civic technologies that engage citizens, for deploying public services in collaborative ways, and for utilizing the data generated by these efforts. Boston’s 311 system has narrowed the gap between residents and their communities, and between constituents and local leaders. The result, O’Brien shows, has been the creation of more effective policy and practices that reinvigorate the way citizens and city governments approach their mutual interests. By unpacking when, why, and how the 311 system has worked for Boston, The Urban Commons reveals the power and potential of this innovative system, and the lessons learned that other cities can adapt.

If cities are the places ...

Urban space is a commons: simultaneously a sphere of human cooperation and negotiation and its product. Understanding urban space as a commons means that the much sought-after productivity of the city precedes rather than results from strategies of the state and capital. This approach challenges assumptions of urbanization as capital-driven, an idea which resonates with a range of recent urban social movements, from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement to the “Right to the City” alliance. However commons exist in a tense relationship with state and market, both of which continually seek to exploit and control them. Initiatives to create “commons” are welcomed and even facilitated by governments in order to (re-)valorize urban space and lessen the impacts of economic restructuring, while, at the same time, the creative and reproductive potential of the urban commons is undermined by continuing attempts to commodify them. This volume examines these topics theoretically and empirically through a wide spectrum of international case studies providing perspectives from a variety of cities as diverse as Berlin, Hyderabad and Seoul. A wider discussion of commons in current scientific and activist literature from housing, public space, to urban infrastructure, is explored through the lens of the urban condition.

The book presents a novel examination of urban commons which provides a robust base for education initiatives and future public policy guidance on the protection and use of urban commons as invaluable urban green spaces that offer a diverse cultural and ecological resource for future communities. The book's central argument is that only through a deep understanding of the past and a rigorous engagement with present users, can we devise new futures or imaginaries of culture, well-being and diversity for the urban commons. It argues that understanding the genesis of, and interactions between, the different pressures on urban green space has important policy implications for the delivery of nature conservation, recreational access and other land use priorities. The stakeholders in today’s urban commons, whether land users, policy makers or the public, are the inheritors of a complex cultural legacy and must negotiate diverse and sometimes conflicting objectives in their pursuit of a potentially unifying goal: a secure future for our urban commons. The book offers a unique and strongly interdisciplinary study of urban commons, one that brings together original historical investigation, contemporary legal scholarship, extensive oral history research with user groups, and research examining the imagined futures for the urban common in modern society. It explores the complex social and political history of the urban common, as well as its legal and cultural status today, using four diverse case studies from within England as exemplars of the distinctively urban common. These are Town Moor in Newcastle, Mousehold Heath in Norwich, Clifton and Durdham Downs in Bristol and Valley Gardens in Brighton. The book concludes by looking forward and considering new tools and methods of negotiation, inclusivity and creativity to inform the future of these case studies, and of urban commons more widely. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the commons, green spaces, urban planning, environmental and urban geography, environmental studies and natural resource management.

This book explores the application of service design to urban commons. It originates from a project developed by the research group of POLIMI DESIS Lab of Politecnico di Milano, aimed at imagining the future of the Reggio Emilia Ducal Palace and its park - the Reggia di Rivalta. The peculiarity of the project lays in the idea that the design of a (public) space should be informed by the design of its services, because the development of specific activities actually builds a fundamental part of the identity of a place, conceiving both the tangible and intangible dimensions as part of a single creative process. The combination of a participatory process and the integration of spatial and service design led to infrastructuring a multi-stakeholder participatory action research of envisioning the future of a public good. This effort has been thus framed into a working methodology, specific tools and progressive outputs, which are defined as Service Master Planning (the process), and Service Master Plan (the product), allowing service design professionals to expand their knowledge and develop skills for a new field of application connected to urban planning.