Stewarding the City as Commons: Parks Conservancies and Community Land Trusts

Urban land is one of the commons most in danger of enclosure in the present era. “Commons” emerge out of and are enacted through sustained patterns of local use, through collective actions that give life to and re-assign the roles of spaces, and through individual investments of time, love, and energy. Creating commons—or commoning—makes place out of space, while asserting the “right to not be excluded” from the use of that place. Commoners have a right to be part of the decision-making for the distribution of shared assets. Management of commons should be voluntary, adaptive, inclusive, and available to all. As Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione explain, “what the commons can do, both legally and conceptually, is to stake out the claim that at least some socially produced common goods are as essential to communities as are water and air and thus should be similarly protected.” Sheila Foster & Christian Iaione, The City as a Commons, 34 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev 281, 310 (2016). This paper considers efforts by Community Land Trusts (CLTs) to steward affordable housing and by conservancies to steward public parks over the long term as elements of the city as commons against the background of Elinor Ostrom’s “design principles” for the governance of common pool resources, focusing on New York City from the 1980s until today

Marxism and Social Movements: An Introduction

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Evaluation of the eOrganic Webinar Program

eOrganic evaluated webinars on organic agriculture topics to assess the size and composition of the audience, how attendees heard about webinars, webinar quality and utility, whether participants use other eOrganic resources, and the impact on farmer and advisory practices. Results showed that eOrganic webinars reached their target audience. An average of 97% of respondents indicated that the webinars improved their understanding of the topics to some degree, and 96% intended to apply information to their work to some degree. Follow-up surveys on a subset of webinars revealed that they influenced changes in farming and advisory practices

A genetic cause of Alzheimer disease: mechanistic insights from Down syndrome

Down syndrome, caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21, is associated with a greatly increased risk of early onset Alzheimer disease. It is thought that this risk is conferred by the presence of three copies of the gene encoding amyloid precursor protein (APP), an Alzheimer risk factor, although the possession of extra copies of other chromosome 21 genes may also play a role. Further study of the mechanisms underlying the development of Alzheimer disease in Down syndrome could provide insights into the mechanisms that cause dementia in the general population

Learning to common, commoning as learning : The politics and potentials of community land trusts in New York City

Through a study of a coalition to promote community land trusts in New York City, this article asks how collective learning unfolds in the context of activism against gentrification and displacement. Drawing on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), we illustrate how the coalition develops as it confronts the contradictory nature of commodified land and housing and navigates the contradictions and other challenges entailed in the process of commoning. Understanding this as a learning process is critical to understanding the politics of urban commoning practice and of particular approaches to it such as community land trusts (CLTs). © 2020, Okanagan University College.Peer reviewe

"Déni de travail: l’invisibilisation du travail aujourd’hui. Introduction"

International audienc