Commoning initiatives in towns, tower blocks and beyond

“This evening, it feels like voters are giving us one last chance for France. It's up to us to unite the France of villages and the France of tower blocks...”, declared François Ruffin on the evening of the second round of the parliamentary elections on 7 July.

The fragmentation of the French parliamentary chamber into three blocks , making France currently ungovernable, reflects the fracturing of the country itself, with the population divided between territories but also within a single territory. Finding an honourable solution to this impasse, by remaining true to the tenets of Republican values, means bringing these people together rather than continuing to fan the flames of their division for hypothetical electoral gain.

So let's bring people together. That is easier said than done Our aim in this article is quite simply to draw on the commoning experiments that we have launched or observed at local level in order to propose ideas whose development may be both useful and necessary, while warning about their limitations. Because it is by doing things together that living together becomes possible and, above all, desirable.

Bringing territories together through common fronts and funds

Since its launch in 2016, the Territoire zéro chômeur (Zero Unemployment Territory),experiment featuring local responses to long-term unemployment, has been particularly edifying.

Today, the governance bodies of some sixty territories include members of the Local Employment Committee and stakeholders from the public employment service, companies and associations, along with long-term jobseekers and volunteers.

Their mission is, firstly, to identify new activities that meet unmet needs, particularly in the green economy, in line with jobseekers' abilities and desires, and secondly, to ensure their implementation in the new “employment-oriented companies” (entreprises à but d'emploi).

These territories include rural areas such as Prémery in Nièvre, industrial areas in decline such as Thiers in Puy-de-Dôme, and working-class neighbourhoods like the 13th arrondissement of Paris. These territories with their different social geographies are united in both a common front, devoted to tackling long-term unemployment, which primarily affects the most vulnerable members of society, and in a common fund – the Fonds national d'expérimentation (National Experimentation Fund) – which converts minimum social benefits into aid for employment-oriented companies. Only a law on experimentation with a derogatory right would authorise this transfer of social benefits to employment-oriented companies.

Other very different experiments are also being conducted, such as Échanges paysans in the Hautes-Alpes. It all started with the observation that milk producers in the Champsaur region could not survive on the thirty-five cents a litre that Nestlé was paying them for their milk. The “Échanges paysans” platform then devised another shorter commercial circuit, including the processing of milk into cheese, for example, and targeting the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region's mass catering industry. Today, milk, cheese, vegetables, meat and eggs from the Hautes-Alpes are cooked and served to schoolchildren in Marseille and to military personnel at the Toulon base. Through its status as a public interest cooperative, Échanges paysans' membership includes local producers and the members of the region's mass-catering sector, in addition to its employees.

Because territorial involvement should not be limited to the regional or even national level,fab labs– digital manufacturing laboratories – are organising a different kind of globalisation of territories from that orchestrated by the financial markets. For example, Humanlab in Rennes manufactures hand prostheses using shared-access digital technologies that can be used by all the world's fab labs – more than 2,300 according to a survey by the Fabfoundation– because they all have access to the same knowledge base.

Connecting with one another in a local territory

Social divisions do not only occur between distant territories. They also develop within the same area.

Our Territorial Research and Development program draws on fundamental research on the commons to develop joint activities in territories. It is strongly influenced by the work of Elinor Ostrom,an American political scientist and economist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009. To this end, we have launched the Braque eco-locality experiment to forge links between the populations of the working-class Pablo Picasso neighbourhood and the Cité Universitaire Descartes, two districts in the municipality of Champs-sur-Marne (Seine-et-Marne) that are adjacent but separated by invisible and impenetrable borders.

Today, as part of their curriculum, students run a free shop and play a pivotal role in its two annual events, held at Christmas and in the spring.

We also took part in the Narse de Nouvialle festival in the Cantal region during our tour of solidarity and commons-oriented territories in France and elsewhere. For the last four years, this festival has been organised at the end of August by a group of local hunters and anglers, together with environmental activists and green tourism stakeholders, with the support of elected representatives from the Saint-Flour intermunicipal authority (Cantal). Together, far from illustrating the exaggerated divide between vegan hipsters and carnivorous hunters, they have joined forces in protest against plans to open a diatomite mine on this wetland.

At Sainte-Honorine-la-Guillaume in the Orne department and Saint-Firmin in the Hautes-Alpes, tensions are rife between young, recently settled newcomers and older natives with “two generations of family in the cemetery”. Our work in these two cases has brought these people together through workshops, creating an opportunity to tell the story of past and present commons, and to finance the renovation of a hotel-restaurant destined to become a lively shared venue.

Our method and the lessons learned

As teaching and research faculty members, we are developing a Territorial Research and Development method that experiments with commons-based initiatives in territories in order to analyse the conditions of possibility and the difficulties as well as the keys to success.

For example, in our Marne-la-Vallée territory, we are experimenting with a shared malt factory that forges links between organic cereal producers and microbrewers from the Île-de-France region to create a festive and responsible alternative mode of production and consumption. Although this experiment is still in its infancy, our students are already participating by producing their own beer – “Fac-bulleuse” – using hops they have personally planted and picked.

The main lesson to be learned is that it is the process of commoning enables everyone to find their place by placing their differences at the service of a common action, generating pleasure from productive coexistence. In this process, engineering plays a key role in the creation of these shared territories, as it ensures long-term mobilisation in an open project that can be both invented and shared.

The difficulty in financing the project is often the first limitation. Secondly, the ability to bring people together depends on the success of the actions undertaken in this new way of commoning, without which the process is likely to grind to a halt.

We have realised that this success is no longer decided by the market but by the territory, based on the criterion of the value added for life in the territory, rather than the financial value added for capital Increasing the number of common territories is the only way to overcome the limitations inherent to globalised competition based on all kinds of self-interest.