Cities and Regions

Commons Network is working with the Ministry of Internal Affairs on the Digital Commons Transition Collaboratory in 2024. Here, we are collectively answering the questions: what are the digital commons and how can government relate to them? In the Digital Commons Transition Collaboratory we are developing ideas with partners, build bridges between research, society and policy, and work together towards a sustainable digital transition.

In December 2023, Commons Network organized a roundtable on welfare beyond growth in the European Parliament with national MPs and trade union representatives. This event was the second of a series that aims to establish a pan-European network for knowledge exchange and strategy building on post-growth policies.

Commons Network started the 2 year Transition Laboratory project on Community Wealth Building and the community economy. With various municipalities and neighbourhood actors in Amsterdam and other cities.

Commons Network is activating the community economy in the 2 year Transition Laboratory project on Community Wealth Building. Together with various municipalities and neighbourhood actors in Amsterdam and other cities, we are helping build caring economies where collective wellbeing, democratic ownership, and participation take centre stage.

Commons Network joined the coordination of the translocal network in April 2022. After a kickoff session in Berlin in the autumn of 2022, we also organised a series of online skills-share sessions. These aimed to reinforce peer-to-peer learning among municipalist actors facilitating exchange and learning on practices, methodologies, experiences and strategies that we need to transform the system.

A next step to democratise the digital transition is to create a European Public Digital Infrastructure Fund. Together with many other civil society organisations, we urge Member states and the European Commission to start exploring avenues towards such a Fund.

During three days, a landmark conference on post-growth took place in the European Parliament. As a contributing partner, Commons Network co-organised two events in the Beyond Growth conference: a session on what post-growth means for the digital transition and a round table with MP’s.

Commons Network was a partner in the Beyond Growth conference and we were able to make digital commons part of the Beyond Growth agenda.

With Human Stories of Digital Transformation, we aim to further the idea of online spaces where citizens and communities take centre stage. We collected stories and experiences from people who are affected by digital transition on a daily basis, and present alternatives and policy proposals with a broad coalition.

Commons Network becomes part of the core coordination group of Shared Digital European Public Space (SDEPS), a coalition of organisations and initiatives united in our belief for the need for public digital infrastructures. Our contribution builds upon our earlier work on Generative Interoperability, Public-Civic ecosystems and Digital Commons.

We took the initiative to establish a cross-party working group for and with parliamentarians from the First and Second Chamber in the Hague, that would function as a sound board, inspiration hub and an instigator of postgrowth thinking within national politics in The Netherlands.

Even though the effect of the ecological crisis is already a daily reality for many people living in the Global South, those who have an interest in preserving the status quo continue to defend why we need more economic growth in the Global North. In this series of articles, we respond to their arguments one at a time.

This report builds upon our earlier publication from 2019 named Our Vision for a Shared Digital Europe and culminates the research supported by NESTA. In collaboration with Open Future.

We publish our Manifesto for a Caring Economy, which is a plea for caring as an antidote to neoliberalism. In it, we argue for a regenerative and provisioning economy in which caring communities are the foundation of a truly democratic and sustainable society.

Common In: A half year-running project together Art Collecive TAAK  on the intersection of commons and art. Common in is a process of collective imagination, where artists, organizers and participants together experience a commons-inspired world.

We interviewed a range of experts from academia, policy, activism, public broadcasting and programming on the role of interoperability for digital ecosystems where communities and citizens take center stage.  Together with our partner Open Future we published this series over the course of 6 months.

We publish our new book which is the result of a two-year exploration of the degrowth movement, merging planetary health thinking, feminist economics and fieldwork from Dutch caring commoning practices.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla fringilla, urna interdum tristique semper, leo arcu iaculis quam, non consequat est enim quis orci. Sed congue tellus lectus, a volutpat leo viverra eget. Morbi convallis auctor leo in consectetur. Nunc viverra, nulla vitae scelerisque bibendum, felis mauris sodales nisi, in congue ex dolor et mauris.

Our new publication (in Dutch) about the future of social security in the Netherlands is launched! Based on our collaborative theoretical and empirical research with the innovation lab Novum, the book contains a rich bundle of insights about a possible new meaning of the term ‘social security’ – one that is built around values like care, reciprocity and trust. We then discuss a set of ‘building blocks’ and ‘transition paths’ towards a society that serves this novel understanding of social security.

Datafication, algorithms and AI are shaping how we live, reside, and work – and profoundly affect power relations in the city.  As part of the Cities for Change team, during Fearless Cities in Amsterdam, Commons Network explored the concept of digital courage: the courage of cities to choose and invest in technologies that benefit their citizens and communities in the long term.

Together with the municipality of Amsterdam, Commons Network started researching and piloting Community Wealth Building in three disenfranchised areas of the city.

We kicked off our new research to explore what a degrowth transformation could mean for how we think about health and organize care. We dived into literature on degrowth & (planetary) health and conducted fieldwork to caring citizens collectives in the Netherlands part of NLZVE.

In 2020 Commons Network worked together with Novum, the innovation lab of the SVB, which is the institution responsible within the Dutch government for national insurance schemes, to find out what the commons can teach us about social security.

Commons Network partnered with the Fearless Cities programme of the municipality of Amsterdam to bring the new municipalism to Amsterdam and to empower local movements. We organized a 2 year program in Amsterdam for municipalists, policy makers, researchers, students and local activists. We developed policy ideas, papers, as well as live and online gatherings and events.

Our Vision for a Shared Digital Europe provides a policy framework that can guide policymakers and civil society organisations involved with digital policymaking in the direction of a more equitable and democratic digital environment, where basic liberties and rights are protected, where strong public institutions function in the public interest, and where people have a say in how their digital environment functions.

In collaboration with the municipality of Amsterdam, Commons Network researched the chances and challenges of the commons in Amsterdam.

Together with partner Raumlabor, Urban Commons – Shared Spaces was a research project, published by Commons Network, about the emerging urban commons, based on research on scientific literature and fieldwork in Berlin and Amsterdam.

This paper takes on the pharmaceutical system and presents real alternatives, based on open source research and the knowledge commons. Here, Commons Network proposes a new vision for the biomedical research system that safeguards universal access to affordable medicines and scientific advances.

Taking a commons approach to European policy, this paper analysis EU policy with regards to Urban Commons, Digital infrastructure & the Collaborative economy and Knowledge management.

Together with partners Remix the Commons and P2P foundation we organized the European Commons Assembly, a two-day event in the European Parliament and in a social centre, with hundreds of commoners from across europe.

In order to have a strong joint voice and coordination among different actors advocating for access to medicines CN founds a civil society alliance together with Health Action International and other partners. The EU Alliance consists of more than 80 organisation from many different countries across Europe and focuses on EU policy.

The past two decades have seen unprecedented new forms of collaboration in the creation and sharing of knowledge.  This paper describes how the commons perspective, as a new framework for understanding knowledge, can contribute to some important, long-overdue EU policy discussions.

A report by Commons Network and civil society partners shows that the pharmaceutical industry’s wish list for the TTIP is detrimental to public health, will increase the cost of medicines and undermine democratic processes.