Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 4.1 Reflecting on the future of the commons
Radical geographer David Harvey points out that Garret Hardin's fundamental concern
was population growth rather than the inherent superiority of private property
relationships and the drive to maximize individual utility. If the cattle had been held
in common rather than the land, Hardin's metaphor would not work. 'It would then
be clear' writes Harvey (2011: 101) 'that it was private property in cattle and individual
utility-maximizing behavior that lay at the heart of the problem'. By contrast, for
Hardin and others who in the 1960s were concerned with the population time bomb,
the crucial issue was whether the individual family should retain the right to decide
whether or not to have children and if so how many. The point for Harvey is that
the commons is being continuously reproduced by human action at various scales
from the local to the global. He is interested in how appropriate policies and actions
can maintain and extend them conceding that different actions will almost certainly
be required at different spatial scales. That is, what works at the global scale may
not work at the local; but whatever the case, a clear way of valuing nature and
human endeavour that transcends the ethic of individual profit maximization is what
is really required. Harvey writes:
The human qualities of the city emerge from our practices in the diverse spaces
of the city, even as those spaces are subject to enclosure both by private and
public state ownership, as well as by social control, appropriation, and
countermoves to assert what Henri Lefebvre called 'the right to the city' on the
part of the inhabitants. Through their daily activities and struggles, individuals
and social groups create the social world of the city and, in doing so, create
something common as a framework within which we all can dwell. While this
culturally creative common cannot be destroyed through use, it can be degraded
and banalized through excessive abuse.
The common is not, therefore, something extant once upon a time that has since
been lost, but something that, like the urban commons, is continuously being
produced. The problem is that it is just as continuously being enclosed and
appropriated by capital in its commodified and monetary form. A community
group that struggles to maintain ethnic diversity in its neighborhood and to
protect against gentrification, for example, may suddenly find its property prices
rising as real estate agents market the 'character' of the neighborhood as
multicultural and diverse as an attraction for gentrifiers.
Source extracts: David Harvey (2011: 103-4 and 105-6)
Contemporary failures to engage people are often seen as resulting from a decline
in membership of voluntary associations that produce the relationships and networks
of reciprocity, trustworthiness, obligation and perceived mutual benefit (in other
words, social capital) necessary for participation and engagement (Putnam, 2000).
For James A. Coleman (1990), social capital influences the ability of people to
participate in social and community affairs and is often a by-product of everyday
leisure or hobby activities. There is a strong link between social activity and civic
 
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