Design PhD Thesis_Design for the sustainment of urban commoning by CHUN(PURE) ZHENG

Doctoral Dissertation｜School of Design｜Carnegie Mellon University

Design for the Sustainment of Urban Commoning Based on Multi-dimensional Scaling Processes

Chun Zheng

Design for the Sustainment of Urban Commoning Based on Multi-dimensional Scaling Processes 为基于多维过程的可持续城市共治而设计 Chun Zheng 郑纯

Doctoral dissertation 2018-2022 School of Design｜Carnegie Mellon University

Advisory committee Prof. Stefan Gruber Prof. Dr. Peter Scupelli External reviewer Prof. Dr. Jeffrey Hou Program director Prof. Dr. Jonathan Chapman

A dissertation submitted to the College of Fine Arts, School of Design of Carnegie Mellon University, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Design.

This research is funded by China Scholarship Council doctoral program.

© Copyright Chun Zheng 2022 All rights reserved. This copy may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission from the author. All diagrams are produced by the author unless stated otherwise.

Abstract

This thesis explores the possibilities of designing for more resilient citizen-led initiatives, also known as urban commoning, through the lens of scaling. This research investigates and answers the following questions: What is the relationship between the institution, sustainment, and scaling of urban commoning? How can the sustainment of urban commoning be defined through multidimensional scaling? Is the sustainment of urban commoning the same in American and Chinese contexts? How can design facilitate scaling processes? These questions are explored and answered by theoretical research and empirical study. The importance that urban commoning plays in contemporary cities makes their sustainment crucial. Commoning can be a response to socio-political, ecological, and economic crises, as well as government’s inadequacies. Urban commoning emerges in forms such as community gardens, cooperative housing, and municipal movements. These projects become challenging to sustain as they attract increasing attention. The sustainment of urban commoning is often conceived as its temporal and physical durability in disciplines of economics, ecology, and public policy. The socio-political conditions as well as commoners’ needs, social relations, and worldviews are often neglected. Therefore, this research aims to understand the sustainment of urban commoning from an interdisciplinary perspective, to explore the similarities and differences of sustainment strategies of projects in different cultural contexts, and to distill design insights to facilitate the sustainment of urban commoning. This thesis hypothesizes that to avoid over-institutionalization, privatization, or gradual enclosure, urban commoning should be investigated through a multi-dimensional scaling perspective that includes out-, up-, and deep-scaling. Designing for the sustainment of urban commoning requires a paradigm shift from design as form-making and problem-solving to design as process-enabling. Among all three scaling dimensions, commoning designers need to prioritize catalyzing the up- and deep-scaling processes. This hypothesis was analyzed through three stages of research. The theoretical research stage reviews existing literature at the intersection of the commons, design, and urban agriculture. This phase identifies the main research gaps, aims, and scopes. Based on existing theories, a theoretical framework of scaling is synthesized, so it could be applied to the practice stage and used to analyze scaling processes of two case studies. The practice stage involves case studies of the Garfield Community Farm in Pittsburgh, US, and the Knowledge and Innovation Community Garden in Shanghai, China. Data for case studies was acquired from document reviews, interviews, and participatory observations. Each case study’s out-, up-, and deep-scaling processes are analyzed in relation to their sustainment. In the final analysis and reflection stage, the case studies, their scaling processes, and their sustainment strategies are compared and analyzed to inform an overall 4

adjusted theoretical framework and design insights that offer useful references for commoning designers to balance design strategies. There are three key findings from this thesis. First, urban commoning cannot simply expect to scale out to sustain itself and remain resilient in the long run without building up the capacity of up- and deep-scaling. Commoning practices often hinder the articulation of up- and deepscaling. Furthermore, because up- and deep-scaling processes happen implicitly and are difficult to implement directly, design with tangible materials, spaces, and narratives can catalyze intangible, non-material processes of scaling. Finally, the method of examining urban commoning from micro, meso, and macro levels and under a scaling framework yields productive results in both case studies, and the comparison demonstrates that scaling processes are associated with local conditions and suggests the benefits of developing localized scaling design strategies. For commoning practitioners and researchers, this thesis’ value lies in reframing criteria of measuring the success of urban commoning and developing design considerations related to scaling strategies. Keywords: urban commoning, sustainment, out-, up-, and deep-scaling, urban farms and gardens, transition design, pluriverse design, case study.

摘要

本论文探讨了通过多维度发展的角度为城市共治，也就是自下而上的城市空间项目的可持续性而设计的问题。通过研究，本论文回应了以下几个问题：城市共治可持续、多维度发展、和治理机制之间是什么关系？共治的可持续性是如何通过多维度发展来定义的？中国和美国的城市共治的可持续性是否相同？设计如何来干预多维度发展，进而帮助城市共治实现可持续？本研究通过理论和实践两方面来探索这些问题。城市共治在当代城市中至关重要的角色使得它们本身的可持续也需要被关注。城市共治是一种对社会政治、生态、经济危机，以及政府应对这些危机的不足的回应。它通常以社区花园农场、合作社住房、市政运动等形式出现。这些共治在受到越来越多关注的同时面临着自身的生存挑战。在大部分西方研究中，尤其是经济学、生态学、和公共政策学中，共治的可持续性通常被认为是时间上的和物质上的耐久度。而像公民需求、社会关系、价值观等社会政治条件往往被忽视。因此，本研究旨在从跨学科的角度理解城市共治的可持续，探索不同文化背景下可持续发展策略的异同，提炼设计反思来协助城市共治的可持续设计。本论文提出这样的假设：为避免过度制度化、私有化、资源闭锁，应通过多维度发展的视角来研究城市共治，这些维度包括横向维度、纵向维度、深度维度。为可持续的城市共治而设计需要进行设计范式的转变，即设计应当从作为形式创造和问题解决的角色转化为催化过程和维系关系的角色。在所有三个发展维度中，设计师尤其需要催化纵向和深度这两个维度。本研究用三个阶段来探索此假设。第一阶段是理论研究阶段，回顾了在共治、设计、城市农耕领域的文献。此阶段定义了研究问题、目标和范围。基于文献综述提出了一个多维度发展理论框架，此框架用于指导第二阶段的实践研究并为两个案例提供了叙述结构。在以案例研究为主的第二阶段实践阶段，对两个案例：上海创智农园和匹兹堡加菲尔德社区农场，进行了深入的分析。案例研究的数据来自资料、访谈、参与式观察。每个案例对其横向、纵向和深度发展，以及它们如何影响共治的可持续，进行了详尽的阐述。在最后的分析和反思阶段，两个案例的基本情况、多维度发展过程和主要可持续策略的对比产生了能在理论和实践中参考的结论。主要结论有以下三方面。首先，为了建立长远的可持续性，城市共治不能简单地依赖于单一维度的发展而忽视多维度的协同发展。尤其因为城市共治项目通常只注重横向发展，而疏于纵向和深度发展的规划。其次，由于纵向和深度发展通常以隐性形式存在而无法进行直接的干预，设计需要着眼于显性物质、空间、叙事来催化隐性的过程。最后，微观、中观、宏观，以及横向、纵向、深度的多重维度的分析全面而有效地剖析了城市共治。在各个方面的对比中可以发现，本土化的社会、政治、文化环境对共治的多维度发展有很大的影响。设计需要进行相应的本土化的调整。对于城市共治实践者和研究者而言，本论文的价值在于重新定义了如何界定城市共治的可持续性，尤其是其深度发展的标准。在项目立案、政府协商、游说资助人、制定设计策略等实践过程中，可以利用本研究的框架来帮助不同维度设计策略的决策。关键词：城市共治；可持续；横向、纵向、深度发展；城市花园、农场; 多元设计；案例研究

Acknowledgment

It has been four years since I started this journey. It has not been easy, especially when over two years of it has been during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, I would like to thank the people who have influenced, supported, and contributed to this thesis. First of all, I want to express my significant gratitude to the people who have selflessly offered their knowledge, support, and care to make the accomplishment of this PhD possible. I give special thanks to my advisors, Stefan Gruber and Peter Scupelli, as well as our program director, Jonathan Chapman. Thank you for your interest in my research topic and for having great conversations whenever I needed assistance. Your advice provided directions for my work and pushed my research further. Thanks to scholars who have similar research interests for sharing your valuable research insights and some assistance in publications, including Jeffery Hou, Eleni Katrini, Dimeji Onafuwa, Yuelai Liu, Jianyuan Mao, Ye Tian, Safouane Azouzi, Stavros Kousoulas, Gerhard Bruyns, and Weining Xiang. My thanks also go to faculty members in the School of Design and School of Architecture, CMU who provided me with inspiration and feedback along the way: Gideon Kossoff, Terry Irwin, Molly Steenson, Kristen Kurland, Stuart Candy, Dan Lockton, Nida Herman, and Jonathan Kline. My gratitude also goes to Prof Ying Chang for providing local Chinese IRB advice and approval. I would like to thank my dearest friends without whom I cannot survive a PhD and a pandemic altogether. You were the sunshine in dark days. My deepest gratitude goes to Jiayang Li, Yunlei Xie, Yidan Gong, Chujun Zhang, Qi Wang, Yini Tang, Yixin Xu, Jianxiao Ge, and Lu Zhu. Thank you to my PhD colleagues who made the PhD experience more enjoyable and gave me great encouragement to run towards the finish line: Marysol Ortega, Sofia Bosch, Hajira Qazi, Ahmed Ansari, Francis Carter, Megan Urban, and Esther Kang. The case study part of this research was supported by two community organizations. I’m grateful to have all the support from the staff and volunteers on the Garfield Community Farm: Elizabeth Lynch, AJ Monsma, John Creasy, Bre Stanton, and Darrell Frey. Thank you for sharing valuable knowledge and hands-on skills with me during the time that I volunteered and researched on the farm. The Knowledge and Innovation Community Garden in Shanghai is another crucial case study in this research. I’d like to thank Yuelai liu, Keluan Yin, and Jun Cai, who are so knowledgeable about urban gardens and the planning system in China and were willing to share the information with me virtually.

I’m grateful for China Scholarship Council (CSC) to provide the doctoral fellowship to financially support my study at CMU. I also wish to acknowledge my writing tutor Catherine Evans at the CMU Communication Support. Thank you for giving me a lot of encouragement and making the writing journey much more enjoyable. Thanks to proofreader Kirsten Heuring for making this thesis more accessible to readers. Finally, I am deeply thankful to my family, especially my mother and my father, Lu Wenjuan and Zheng Jian, for supporting my dreams and always standing by my side even though we are thousands of miles apart. I want to send my special thanks to my partner Zhaozhe Wu for your patience and optimism. In the days when I was anxious, down, and wanted to give up. It was you who cheered me up, found happiness in everyday life, and took up all the life challenges. It was only you and always you. And thank you, Pure, for always being true and honest with yourself. 故事不会停留在第八章，写下去才知梦有多长。无问西东，无愧于心。

Glossary

The commons The commons is the shared material resources and non-material processes and relations that are held in common by a collective of people. Commoning Commoning is the verb of the commons. It is the constant and dynamic actions of (re)negotiating differences among commoners and (re)production of the commons. Transition Design Transition Design is a design research approach. It aims at addressing many “wicked” problems existing in the 21st century such as climate change, political polarization, social injustice, global pandemics, lack of access to affordable housing/healthcare/education, etc. It is the core theoretical framework guiding the Transition Design PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University. Community garden and urban farm A community garden or an urban farm is a form of urban agriculture where flowers, vegetables, and fruits grow. Residents who participate in gardening are empowered to design, build, and maintain the garden. Practice Practice refers to bodily action, which is often positioned opposed to theory. It is the execution of an idea, belief, or method. An action or behavior is part of a practice. Production, reproduction Production is the process of using material or immaterial tools to create something new and useful. Reproduction is intended as the complex of activities and relations by which our life and labor are daily reconstituted. Environmental justice Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the design and implementation of environmental schemes, laws, and policies. Pluriverse Pluriverse is a challenge to the postcolonial Western-centered ideology. It comprises coexisting epistemologies and practices of different worlds and problems that we live in and encounter. 9

Contents Abstract

Acknowledgment

Glossary

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Motivation and positionality

1.2 Research hypothesis, objectives, and research stages

1.3 Structure of this dissertation

1.4 Summary of contributions to knowledge

Chapter 2 The Commons and Urban Commoning

Introduction

2.1 The commons, its definition and historical arguments

2.2 Urban commoning

2.2.1 Commonality of spaces and spatiality of commoning

2.2.2 Right to the city and right to green

2.2.3 Temporality and survival challenges

2.3 Expanding institutions and scaling of urban commoning

Conclusion

Chapter 3 Design for the Sustainment, Transition, and Pluriverse

Introduction

3.1 Positioning in a tri-dimensional design landscape

3.2 Social design and design for social innovation

3.3 Transition Design

3.4 Sustainable design and the Sustainment

3.5 Pluriverse, many worlds of commoning

3.6 The pluriverse of urban commoning by two exhibition projects

3.6.1 An Atlas of Commoning

3.6.2 A Dialogue Must Take Place, Precisely Because We Don’t Speak the Same Language Conclusion

78 82

Chapter 4 Urban Community Farms and Gardens

Introduction

4.1 At the intersection of traditional commons and urban commoning

4.2 Pathology of the dominant food system

4.3 Re-commoning the food movements

4.4 Dynamics in community gardens and farms

4.4.1 Important characteristics

4.4.2 Motivations and benefits

4.4.3 Challenges and conflicts

Conclusion

4.5 Summary of literature review, research hypothesis, and the framework

Chapter 5 Research Methodology

104

Introduction

105

5.1 Research philosophy, methodology, and rationales

105

5.1.1 Epistemological stance and research philosophy

106

5.1.2 Abductive and qualitative methodology

108

5.2 Research “into” and “through” design

109

5.3 Research methods, tactics, and their limitations

111

5.3.1 Curatorial research

111

5.3.2 Intertwined case studies and ethnographic research

112

5.3.3 Strengths and weaknesses of qualitative research

115

5.4 Validity and reliability

116

Conclusion

117

Chapter 6 Focus Case Study I: Knowledge and Innovation Community Garden in Shanghai, China

118

Introduction

119

6.1 Background

119

6.2 Micro, meso, and macro level structures

121

6.2.1 Micro level: Clover Nature School team and individual participation

121

6.2.2 Meso level: spatial layout and programs

122

6.2.3 Macro level: phases and financial structure

128

6.3 Scaling analysis

130 11

6.3.1 Scale out

130

6.3.2 Scale up

132

6.3.3 Scale deep

135

Conclusion

143

Chapter 7 Focus Case Study II: Garfield Community Farm in Pittsburgh, USA

146

Introduction

147

7.1 Background

147

7.2 Micro, meso, and marco level structures

148

7.2.1 Micro level: staff and participant roles and motivations

148

7.2.2 Meso level: organizational structure and spatial layout

149

7.2.3 Macro level: external supports

157

7.3 Scaling analysis

159

7.3.1 Scale out

159

7.3.2 Scale up

161

7.3.3 Scale deep

164

Conclusion

173

Chapter 8 Findings and Conclusions: Scaling for Sustainment

176

8.1 Scaling analysis template

177

8.2 Comparison of case studies and their scaling trends

181

8.2.1 Scale out

186

8.2.2 Scale up

186

8.2.3 Scale deep

188

8.2.4 Correlation of scaling dimensions

189

8.3 Discussion of sustainment strategies in relation with existing principles

190

8.4 An overall explanation of the research hypothesis

192

8.5 An adjusted design research workflow and design insights

194

8.5.1 Design the visible to shift the invisible

196

8.5.2 Design as a process-enabling practice

196

8.5.3 The changing role of commoning designer

197

8.6 Conclusions

198

8.6.1 Summary of the research

198

8.6.2 Contribution to knowledge

198

Contribution to the commons discourse

199

Contribution to design research

200

Contribution to Transition Design

201

Contribution to the research of urban agriculture

201

8.6.3 Subjects for future work

202

References (by chapter)

204

Appendix

226

A. List of figures

227

B. List of tables and needs and satisfiers tables for Chapters 6 and 7

229

C. Interview transcription exemplary excerpts

233

D. Atlas. ti. coding example

238

E. Interview participant consent form and IRB approval forms

240

Chapter 1 Introduction

As urbanization and globalization continue to expand, social, spatial, and economic inequalities in our cities are growing. By 2030, the global population will reach 8.5 billion, two-thirds of which will live in cities (United Nations, 2015). Limited natural and spatial resources pose one of the greatest challenges to human society. A small number of the population dominates the access to urban resources such as housing, food, clean environmental resources, employment opportunities, healthcare, open spaces, and transportation. Centralized top-down urban planning and architectural design reinforce the unequal access to resources and fail in addressing the unprecedented urban inequality issues. Meanwhile, globalization is another driver of growing urban inequalities. When global cities are more connected than ever, the mobility of resources and labor creates a wealth gap between individuals and cities. The wealth gap is becoming even more extreme as the rich part of the world accumulates its wealth by exploiting the resources and labor from the rest of the world. In the globalized competition, the success of cities is measured solely by their economic production. The local market and wage workers are also threatened by international merchandise and technologies. Ordinary urban citizens continue to be silenced as they struggle to gain access to resources and rights at the everyday level. Although urban inequalities are escalating, increasing numbers of do-it-yourself tactics, bottom-up citizen groups, and grassroots initiatives are finding their own way to claim resources. These initiatives are known as urban commons1 where material resources and immaterial processes and relations are collectively governed by a group of citizens. Commoners are the community who engages with the creation and governance of the commons. Urban commoning, the active tense of urban commons, is the constant practice of sharing, sustaining, and negotiating common resources. In fact, the commons is a subversion and alternative to the dichotomy of the market and the state in regard to resource governance. While resources originally belong to the public (common people), either the state or the market claims property ownership. Fundamentally, common resources were never intended to be owned but rather collectively shared. Following these lines, urban commoning is differentiated from private urban development and top-down state-controlled planning. The market and state often join hands to maximize economic and political benefits, while the commons removes shared spaces and resources from the market and defends citizens’ right to the governance (instead of the ownership) of resources. When the government and the market are incapable of addressing the needs of housing, health, food, etc., urban commoning has the potential to be a vehicle to reshape urban lives into more desirable, resilient, and collective forms (Baibarac & Petrescu, 2017). Behind the growth of cities are smallscale self-help efforts from the bottom up that are supposed to be valued the same as top-down market-driven ventures. Community gardens and farms are one of the earliest types of urban commoning that have become salient sites for citizens to claim their access to land, food, and green spaces. The Community Garden Movement, also known as the Green Guerillas in New York, seeded over 700 gardens in the 1970s and incubated the nation’s largest urban gardening program GreenThumb which 1

‘The commons” in this thesis is a collective noun. Its singular and plural formats are the same. 15

currently supports more than 550 gardens in New York City (Krasny, 2014; GreenThumb, 2022). Food sovereignty, coined by the international farming movement La Via Campesina, is another resistance to the erosion of indigenous sustainable agroecological practices, food culture, and local production and consumption channels under the influence of the globalized food industry (Weibe et al., 2010). 500 delegates from more than 80 countries in the 2007 Forum for Food Sovereignty agreed to the declaration that prioritizes the culturally appropriate and ecologically sustainable methods of food production, distribution, and consumption rather than the benefits of global markets and transnational food corporations (Weibe et al., 2010). These movements have built up urban gardens’ and farms’ capacity to advocate for commoning-based rights to resources. Community gardens and farms exist at the intersection of traditional commons and urban commons, where natural resources like plants and land are shared; urban spaces and governance of food distribution are collectively negotiated. These gardens extend the right to urban resources, prioritizing the rights to healthy food, a just living environment, and green spaces. We can find not only the circulation of natural resources like energy, fertilizers, plants, soil, and water in community gardens and farms (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013), but also processes of commoning existing in community engagement, (re)production of social relations, collective decision-making, and negotiation with the state and market. This thesis’ practice domain is within community gardens and farms as they are commoning practices at the heart of city dwellers’ everyday lives and represent processes and relations in urban commoning. Community gardens and farms are also among the most executed types of urban commoning around the world which makes cross-cultural study possible. In the meantime, the commons has attracted a growing number of researchers to conceptualize and theorize it. Urban resources and spatial qualities in urban commoning draw attention from architects, urbanists, and designers to work in this field. Scholars such as David Harvey, Doina Petrescu, Stavros Stavrides, Silke Helfrich, Arturo Escobar, John Thackara, and Elke Krasny have engaged with the commoning research in their respective disciplines. A common theme in all these scholars’ work is the institutional structure, which is informed by collective approaches to emergent urban issues. Institutions of the commons are defined as the established mechanism among commoners and resources that regulates its governance. Based on existing literature and empirical research, institutions of the commons is argued to be essential for the governance of the commons. The institutionalization and long-term governance of the commons coincide with the notion of sustainability in fields like ecology, design, and economics. Sustainability is often comprised of social, environmental, and economic balances. It is more widely known as the Brundtland (1990) definition of “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need”. Current commons research and the use of sustainability both emphasize temporal concerns and the tension between limited natural resources and increasing human needs. However, forming institutions to make the commons sustainable is no longer sufficient, as static institutions can lead to the rejection of new commoners and collaborators.

While maintaining the internal sustainability of urban commoning, external challenges can also privatize or over-institutionalize the commons. Urban commoning can be absorbed into the market because of the rise of land prices and the incapability to generate enough revenue to confront developers. Another risk that urban commoning faces is the control by the state in exchange for political and financial support, which leads to the loss of self-governance. Therefore, a fixed state of sustainability or long-term endurability is not enough to resolve the survival challenges. Changing institutions in a process called scaling in different directions to respond to internal and external challenges are instead imperative to urban commoning. A more nuanced, dynamic, and diverse reading of urban commoning is needed to understand and facilitate its survival. The concept of “the Sustainment” by design theorist Tony Fry and the multi-dimensional scaling model by systems researchers Frank Geels and Rene Kemp are introduced in this thesis to capture the complex, dynamic, and socio-political structures of urban commoning. “The Sustainment” is positioned against the functionalist and exploited notion of “sustainability” and associates with a quality-based economy rather than a capital- and technology-based one (Fry, 2003; 2009). It emphasizes the commonality of resisting unsustainable futures and calls for alternatives in sustainable cultures, lifestyles, economies, education, and design. In reference to “the Sustainment”, the sustainment of urban commoning concerns its ability to not only maintain material and temporal durability but also (re)produce immaterial social values, relations, worldviews, and politics in every dimension. This is also referred to as the deep-scaling process. Compared to the conventional understanding of the sustainability of urban commoning, the sustainment cares more about its invisible deep-scaling dimension than its physical expansion (out-scaling) and cross-sectoral collaborations (up-scaling) (Geels & Kemp, 2000). In the current commons discourse, the success of commoning is often measured by the material and economic performances, which are known as the out and up-scaling processes. Investigating urban commoning from all scaling dimensions (out, up, and deep) allows associated designers, urbanists, funders, and commoners to have a systematic and comprehensive understanding of its sustainment. Deep-scaling is particularly in demand of a thorough exploration because it does not have a clear theoretical construction, but it contributes to the sustainment of urban commoning significantly. This dissertation studies the sustainment of urban commoning and the design practices in it from a multi-dimensional scaling perspective. In writing, the commons is used to refer to the broad discourse and research field while projects and practices are called commoning after the full concept of urban commoning is introduced in Chapter 2. The recent rise of urban commoning practices and research reveal the opportunity to further the study on the sustainment challenges; in particular, its deep-scaling process that has not been fully theorized. The aim of this thesis is to synthesize a framework to research scaling dynamics of urban commoning in different contexts and investigate how designers can facilitate the sustainment and catalyze up- and deep-scaling commoning processes.

1.1 Motivation and positionality I grew up in a socialist country where the political system claims to belong to the public under one-party sovereignty. In our culture, sharing and cooperation commonly exist and are highly praised as virtues. Socialism is taught to us as a utopia that we are all pursuing, where every person is the owner of society and, they will all be rewarded equally. During my childhood, whenever neighbors in our apartment had a potluck dinner together or met to discuss the removal of the weed in front of our building, I would think I was part of this community that is closer to the socialist utopia. As we all knew, this utopia was disrupted by autocracy and the advent of capitalism. When I went to study landscape architecture at Tongji University, I realized we don’t even own our houses, so how could we be owners of society? I encountered top-down design through the architecture and planning system in China. During an internship in Shanghai’s largest architecture design institute, I was assigned to work on a public green space in a newly developed urban district in Shanghai. The entire design process was just between government officials and our design team of two. The officials demanded us to add marble slogan walls and nicely cut bushes to the site plan. We carefully made all required changes and produced nice-looking renderings to avoid another round of revision. The technocratic and bureaucratic ways of designing frustrated me and raised many questions in my head: Who are we to draw on the map and change people’s lives? What is the purpose of making nice drawings and renderings? How can I design for an entire community that I’ve never met? I felt lost, meaningless, and guilty about my profession and my role as a designer. After I came to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) for my master’s study, I encountered the notion of bottom-up design and the commons through the research assistant work for Prof. Stefan Gruber, who became my thesis advisor. I recalled my childhood memories and began to realize that the self-organized activities that I experienced in our neighborhood were commoning activities — a group of people collectively governing shared resources (such as food and community spaces). Bottom-up design approaches and urban commoning quickly raised my interest. As part of my year-long master thesis studio, I improved my knowledge about how urban design intersects the commons using existing literature. At the same time, I conducted intensive case studies which used a framework developed from Stefan Gruber’s long-term research on the commons (Baldauf et al., 2016). The case studies ultimately contributed to the traveling exhibition An Atlas of Commoning and helped me learn more about the elements of urban commoning, designers’ roles in these projects, and the opportunities and challenges they face (Gruber & Ngo, 2018). Informed by theories and practices of urban commoning, in my master’s thesis project, I proposed a mobile community kitchen design that employed co-design and co-management strategies to respond to the temporality issue of the precarious traditional Lilong spaces in Shanghai. The potentiality and importance that urban commoning plays in contemporary cities, especially in areas that the public and private sectors ignore became clear. I also started to notice the survival challenges of urban commoning — it often needs to come into being swiftly, but as it grows, external and internal conflicts can make its sustainment difficult. 18

Figure 1.1 In a community design discussion session, a resident attendee diagramed the talk by a community committee member and my talk on urban commoning together Are theories that I learned in my master’s study applicable in these non-Western projects? This question led me to notice the appearance of urban commoning in China, mainly in forms of community gardens and neighborhood sharing centers. I’m curious about how the commons can co-exist with the political ideology in China. Would these projects quickly be absorbed into the market or be institutionalized as government-managed public spaces? I visited the Knowledge and Innovation Community Garden in Shanghai in the summer after I graduated from the urban design program. It was the first community garden that was co-built with residents in Shanghai. I was fascinated with their commons-civic-government collaboration model, and wanted to further compare it with case studies in the atlas and projects in the United States. I was invited to a Chinese scholar group that was newly formed to research participatory urban design in Chinese cities. I was greatly encouraged by having allies with the same interests (Figure 1.1). The experience during the time of my master’s study shaped my PhD research interest at CMU’s Transition Design PhD program. I decided to continue using case studies to investigate the sustainment issue of urban commoning, the influence of context on the issue, and the designer’s proposition to tackle it. Transition Design is an overarching design research framework for all PhD students in the program. 19

It aims to address complex social, ecological, and political problems existing in the 21st century such as climate change, political polarization, social injustice, global pandemics, lack of access to affordable housing, education equality, etc. (Irwin et al., 2020). Systematic and historical approaches in Transition Design informed my research framework and pointed me to the area of pluriverse, which recognizes the existence of different non-Western epistemologies and practices in design. I have shared my personal reasons to take the path to this research area and wish to clarify my positionality in the research process. I have ontological and epistemological beliefs that can influence my research perspectives. My cultural, political, and social background and worldviews inevitably shaped the design, execution, and interpretation of the research process and findings. My motivation and qualification to research the thesis questions are brought into the project, representing my previous experiences and beliefs (Darwin Holmes, 2020). My ethnicity as an Asian, my atheist beliefs, and my previous career as a landscape architect would influence my lenses to interpret certain information or prioritize some aspects of the research over others. As an Asian, I tended to search for more non-Western examples. My atheist religious stand might make me pay less attention to the spiritual aspects of the research. Having worked as a landscape architect, I foreground public spaces and green spaces as research subjects. Although my personal positionality has biased influences on the research, my past experiences and pre-developed worldviews led me to develop interests in urban commoning, making this research possible.

1.2 Research hypothesis, objectives, and research stages Research questions and hypothesis The motivation of this thesis is to reveal the importance of urban commoning in response to social inequalities that the market and the state are not capable of resolving. Thus, this research foregrounds the necessity to sustain urban commoning for continuous built-up of the social, environmental, and political agency from the bottom-up. This research hopes to tie the sustainment of urban commoning with a scaling perspective that is developed from the commons discourse, sustainable design, pluriverse design, and Transition Design. It seeks to explore the following questions: · Why is the sustainment of urban commoning important? · What constitutes the sustainment of urban commoning? · How can design help facilitate urban commoning’s sustainment? · How do different contexts and epistemology of commoning influence previous questions? Practitioners and scholars tend to measure the sustainment of the commoning by its size, productivity, or lifespan. Arguably, these criteria still treat urban commoning as merely material. 20

While the temporal duration and out-scaling — the geographic or numeric disseminations — are inseparable and necessary for the discussion of managing urban commoning, they alone are not sufficient. My hypothesis is that — Urban commoning is not only the management of a certain entity but a process through which people transform their worldview and the quality of social relations. Because static institutions would make urban commoning fall into over-institutionalization, privatization, or gradual enclosure, the transitional and systematic concept of scaling is introduced to study the sustainment of urban commoning. Scaling has out, up, and deep dimensions. Existing studies emphasize the temporal and out-scaling dimensions of urban commoning while up- and deep-scaling dimensions are under-studied. Thus, to fully understand the sustainment of urban commoning, up- and deep-scaling dimensions need to be foregrounded. A systematic analysis of the multi-level scaling is essential to explore the hypothesis. However, within commoning theories, a structured approach for such analysis is so far lacking. Therefore, by bringing design theories, especially Transition Design and pluriverse design, into the investigation of urban commoning, systematic frameworks are introduced to help build up my research. In addition, I propose that more attention should be paid to the coexistence and correlation of the scaling processes and the role of design in these co-formation processes. These scaling processes and their co-development are partially identified and narrated in past research but are more often under- or unnoticed by initiators, organizers, and participants of urban commoning projects. The processes of such combinations are where design and designers can intervene and promote, in the pursuit of more sustained urban commoning. My proposition is that — Design for the sustainment of urban commoning requires first, a comprehensive understanding of its multi-dimensional scaling processes, and then it takes a paradigm shift from design as form-making and problem-solving to design as process-enabling and relation-sustaining. Designers that facilitate urban commoning’s sustainment need to prioritize catalyzing the up- and deep-scaling processes. Because urban farms and gardens are one of the most practiced types of commoning that intersect the traditional natural resource commons and the new urban commons, involve the most basic material and immaterial needs of people, and have a relevantly low threshold to initiate, they become the focus of the research to explore the research hypothesis. Literature in areas of the commons, design, and urban agriculture is reviewed to understand existing discussion around the sustainment of commoning, the design for bottom-up processes, and the systematic theories of design research. Case studies, comprised of secondary research, interviews, mapping, and

observations aim to find empirical explanations to the scaling strategies of urban commoning and provide inspirations for the design’s role in sustaining urban commoning practices. Research objectives In line with the research hypothesis, this thesis reviews theories of the commons, design, and urban agriculture and examines two case studies’ sustainment characteristics. Overall, the thesis has the following objectives: · To develop a framework based on multiple existing theories for a holistic and systematic analysis of the sustainment of urban commoning. · To employ an interdisciplinary research methodology to investigate thesis questions under the framework. · To create detailed comparative case studies of urban farms and gardens in different cultural contexts, namely the US and China, to provide empirical evidence to support or oppose the hypothesis. · To conclude with design suggestions that contribute to the sustainment of urban commoning and can be used by commoners, designers, and researchers in their work in this field. Research stages To follow the thesis inquiry and achieve the research objectives, the research is divided into three stages. 1. The theoretical research stage reviews existing studies in the intersection of the commons, design, and urban agriculture. Literature review and curatorial research are employed in this stage. Specific areas of inquiry include the commons, institutionalization of the commons, spatiality and temporality of urban commoning, design for social innovation, transition design, pluriverse design, food system, food re-commoning movements, and urban farms and gardens. This phase identifies the main research gaps, aims, and scopes. Based on existing theories, a theoretical framework is synthesized to guide the two focus case studies in the following stage. 2. The practice stage involves case studies of the Garfield Community Farm in Pittsburgh, US and the Knowledge and Innovation Community Garden in Shanghai, China. Data for case studies was acquired from document review, interviews, mapping, and participatory observation methods. In reference to the overarching theoretical framework developed in stage one, each case study’s out-, up-, and deepscaling processes are analyzed and reflected regarding their contribution to sustaining the project. 3. The analysis and reflection stage compares two case studies, their scaling processes, and 22

sustainment conditions in different contexts. Similarities and divergences are discussed to inform an adjusted theoretical framework that can be adopted in future research on the sustainment of urban commoning. A set of reflections on design and the designer’s role in supporting the scaling processes of urban commoning are also summarized.

1.3 Structure of this dissertation Three stages of research form an expanded thesis which is organized into eight chapters (Figure 1.2). The purpose and content of each chapter are briefly described below. Chapter 1 is a brief introduction of the research context, motivation, thesis hypothesis and questions, study objectives, research stages, and thesis outline. Chapter 2 aims to provide a context to the commons and urban commoning and establish the scope of the research. It intends to explore specific questions including: · What are the commons and urban commoning? What is the limitation with a Western epistemology of commoning? · What is urban commoning’s role in the stewardship of urban spaces, especially urban gardens and farms? · What are the sustainment challenges faced by urban commoning? · What are the relations among urban commoning’s sustainment, institutionalization, and scaling? · How do the spatiality and temporality of urban commoning influence its sustainment? By reviewing existing literature that relates to these questions, Chapter 2 presents a brief Western etymology and history of the commons and continues with discussion around bottom-up community farms and gardens as a way to gain the citizens’ right to urban green spaces. Existing literature on the institution, spatiality, and temporality of commoning is examined, and its limitations are identified, particularly in the sustainment of urban commoning. Chapter 3 presents a design worldview to explore responses to limitations mentioned in Chapter 2. It begins with mapping the position of commoning practices on the landscape of design research and practice. Then, four specific design areas — design for social innovation, transition design, sustainable design, and pluriverse design — are further introduced in relation to the following research questions: · How to understand the sustainment of urban commoning as a design question? 23

Figure 1.2 Research stages and thesis structure

· What kind of design is needed here? · Are there existing design theories, methods, or frameworks that can complement the limitation in the commoning field to research the hypothesis? Chapter 4 explains the choice of urban farms and gardens for the research fieldwork and provides the context for their situated area of urban agriculture. This chapter concerns questions such as: · Why choose urban farms and gardens as the sites to explore the hypothesis? · Why do we need to re-common the food system? · What are existing examples of re-commoning the food system? · What aspects are focused on in the previous research on these example practices? Are there limitations? This chapter first elaborates on the reason for taking urban farms and gardens as the central field of practice. Then the pathology of the food system, which urban farms and gardens belong to, is articulated to argue for the necessity of re-commoning the food system. Existing analyses of urban farms and gardens are presented next to find the gap in their focuses and methods which the thesis’ perspective from socio-political design and commoning institutions can fill. Chapter 4 concludes the literature review chapters with a summary of the research gap in the knowledge and a proposal of a theoretical framework for investigating the sustainment of urban commoning. Chapter 5 elaborates on theoretical considerations that are relevant to the research methodology in this thesis. The epistemological stance, research philosophy, methodology, methods, and tactics are explained. Questions addressed in this chapter include: · Why take these stands and use these methods to research the hypothesis? · What is the process of data collection and analysis? · What are the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology? Chapters 6 and 7 report on two focus case studies respectively — the Knowledge and Innovation Community Garden in Shanghai and the Garfield Community Farm in Pittsburgh, which provide the main empirical evidence for the research hypothesis. Preliminary analyses involve the collection and synthesis of interview scripts, participatory observations, and secondary research. Both case studies explore the projects’ development and structure from micro, meso, and macro levels and from aspects such as the history, programs, the spatial layout, broader impacts, and staff and volunteers’ roles and motivations. Then, following the theoretical framework developed from the literature review, the analyses through the lens of scaling lead to the reflection of how the projects have self-sustained through scaling.

Chapter 8 first summarizes the integrated theoretical framework of scaling analysis and discusses findings from the comparison of the two case studies — the overall explanation they provide to the research hypothesis, their similarities and differences in self-sustainment strategies, the influences of specific political and cultural contexts on their strategies of self-sustainment, and their inspirations to design suggestions. Lastly, Section 8.6 brings a conclusion to all previous chapters; presents this thesis’ contributions to knowledge in broader fields of the commons, design, and urban agriculture; and ends up with a lookout to future areas of research.

1.4 Summary of contributions to knowledge The first overall contribution of this thesis is that it is a transdisciplinary study that bridges multiple areas to explore the design for the sustainment of urban commoning, including the commons discourse, design research and practice, especially Transition Design, and urban agriculture. The commons has mainly been investigated from economic and ecologic perspectives. Working with the commons through a design lens is novel. The original contribution of this research to both the commons discourse and design research lies in the analysis of urban commoning under a design theories-based scaling framework, which has never been used in the research of the commons. Contribution to the commons discourse This dissertation departed from the survival challenges of urban commoning and incorporated a multi-dimensional scaling perspective to investigate the institution of commoning. The literature review of the commons shows the lack of research into the relationship between the institution, sustainment, and the scaling processes of urban commoning. An original contribution to knowledge in the commons discourse is made by continuing the previous work of expanding the institution of commoning by making explicit connections between institutional sustainment and systematic scaling. A research framework based on multi-dimensional scaling was developed to understand the sustainment of commoning, which is an original contribution to the commons discourse. Two case studies contribute to the knowledge of the commons by carrying out empirical work with projects that have not been researched before (Phillips & Pugh, 2010). The empirical study discovered implicit up- and deep-scaling processes of urban commoning and identified contextspecific opportunities and challenges for future sustainment through scaling. Another contribution is that this research challenges the one-worldness in the mainstream commons discourse by introducing the pluriverse design theory, exploring diverse epistemologies of commoning in exhibition projects, and bringing in a non-Western case study in comparison to a Western one. The comparison of the US and Chinese case studies suggests that the design for the up- and deep-scaling of urban commoning are largely influenced by external policies and cultures, and design needs to be adaptive to local socio-political contexts.

Contribution to design research This thesis contributes to design research as it adopts a cross-disciplinary methodology that uses methods including systematic mapping from Transition Design, architecture case studies, and interviews and participatory observations from ethnographic research (Phillips & Pugh, 2010). Interdisciplinary methods allow a holistic analysis of research questions and are used differently according to target questions. Researchers and designers who want to advance the research on other case studies or related survival issues of commoning can modify and expand the methods by adding additional methods, like grounded theory and action research, to further integrate interaction, reiteration, and participation into the research process. This dissertation also contributes to design practice with reflections on design and designer’s roles when working with urban commoning projects, which can be extended to design practices in social design. The results of this thesis suggest an approach of designing by users instead of designing for or with users. Design by users requires a long-term trust-building with communities, changing roles of designers along the course of design, and shifting users’ design worldviews to make them citizen designers. These design insights lay a foundation for a process-enabling design approach which is a novel contribution to design knowledge. Contribution to Transition Design Employing Transition Design theories in the research of the commons presents a new possibility for the application of Transition Design. The multi-dimensional scaling framework is based on Geels & Kemp’s (2000) technical innovation scaling model, which is a close theory to the socio-technical transition theory in Transition Design. Examining the sustainment question of urban commoning based on Transition Design knowledge and capturing Transition Design’s key philosophy contributes to the theories of change area in the Transition Design framework by applying the theory in a new field. Besides, this thesis’ exploration of the deep-scaling of commoning contributes to the mindset and posture area of Transition Design. As findings from the case studies noted, changing worldviews, values, and social relations are among the deep-scaling implications of urban commoning. The design recommendation to facilitate the deep-scaling process more intentionally aligns with Transition Design’s argument that to design the external, we need to shift the internal (Irwin et al., 2020). Transition Design has lacked actual projects to validate the mindset and posture changes in design processes. Focus case studies in this thesis are attempts to experiment with Transition Design theories in practice and encapsulate worldview and posture changes in the deep-scaling analysis. Contribution to the research of urban agriculture Research on urban agriculture has concentrated on its environmental impacts, public health 27

values, agrotechnology, and relevant policies and programs. This research brings attention to urban farming’s socio-political values, accessibility in everyday practices, and micro-organization and politics. Two case studies investigated growers’ individual needs and motivations, decisionmaking processes, and stakeholder relations that would not be included in the study of urban agriculture in disciplines of geography, agriculture, and ecology. By tapping urban farms and gardens into the commons discourse, this dissertation provides a new vision of scaling urban agriculture practices up to work with other commoning projects and gain greater capacity to respond to social issues such as disparities in communities, indifference among urban dwellers, and loss of traditional food cultures.

Chapter 2 The Commons and Urban Commoning

Introduction As explained in Chapter 1, this thesis aims to contribute to the sustainment design of urban commoning. It does so by introducing institutions of expanding commoning as the foundation for a theoretical framework of multi-dimensional scaling to guide empirical research. Urban commoning has survival challenges that can be systematically understood through this framework. To make such an argument, this chapter offers a detailed account of existing literature and perspectives in the commons discourse and their relationships to this thesis. To situate the discussion, Section 2.1 begins with reflections on the background, definition, and historical arguments of the commons. The aim is to place urban commons in the commons discourse at the outset and explain the problematic one-world definition of the commons. With the emphasis on immaterial commoning processes, Section 2.2 focuses on urban commoning, its characteristics, and its challenges. The commonality of spaces and spatiality of commoning have intertwined social, spatial, and political facets in urban commoning. The right to access urban resources and shape the living environment, especially green spaces, is the heart of urban commoning’s value as an alternative to respond to intractable social problems. After the importance of urban commoning in our cities is recognized, the sustainment mechanism is further examined through survival challenges, such as temporality and political control. To respond to these challenges, Section 2.3 explains that expanding institutions — the intangible, complex, and dynamic organizational processes in urban commoning — are at the center of the sustainment of urban commoning. The existing attempts to devise the institutions of urban commoning and measure the expanding institutions are reviewed but identified as insufficient because they do not illuminate enough the non-material aspects. Institutions of expanding capture dimensions of up- and deep-scaling to understand the sustainment of urban commoning. Because these dimensions do not have effective ways to be fully studied, this thesis identifies a gap in synthesizing a systematic framework to measure the invisible deep qualities of urban commoning that contribute to its sustainment.

2.1 The commons, its definition and historical arguments When I talk about my research, people always look at me with a puzzled smile and ask, “So, what exactly is the commons?” People are confused by the term in the U.S because it can intuitively connect to other meanings. “Commons” is often used in the names of apartment buildings, public parks, and office plazas, and in that context, it only means that many people share the use of a place. To find out what the commons is to ordinary people, I decided to interview some passerby early in my research. I asked them to provide a short explanation of the commons and, if possible, visualize their understanding. A majority of interview subjects mentioned the idea of “shared,” “in-between,” and “public-private collaboration.” The sketches produced by these subjects also speak to these understandings, among which two similar sketches stood out (Figure 2.1). One

Figure 2.1 “What is the commons” sketches

depicts the commons as the “we” between “you” and “me.” Another illustrates the common ground between the private and public domains. These two understandings draw a preliminary definition of the commons — an alternative to the public and private where you and me share spaces of us. It turned out that the public’s understanding of the commons is not too distinct from the ones in academia. The commons is about property ownership; occupation and use rights; shared material resources and knowledge; and the practices of sharing, exchanging, and collaborating. Bauwens et al. (2019) outlined a synthetic definition of the commons, which many commons researchers (Bollier, Stavrides, Gibson-Graham, De Angelis) would agree on: The commons has been defined as a shared resource, which is co-owned and/or co-governed by its users and/or stakeholder communities, according to its rules and norms. It’s a combination of a “thing,” an activity, commoning as the maintenance and co-production of that resource, and a mode of governance. (para. 3) The commons exists at multiple scales of our lives, but the term itself is not always used. It is the Creative Commons license that allows the sharing, use, and reinvention of knowledge. It is Casey Fenton, the founder of Couchsurfing, randomly sending out an e-mail to strangers and asking for a couch to crash on in a trip in 1999 (although this later became a non-profit and then a forprofit business). It is a village in rural Japan that self-organizes its agricultural tools, machines, and villagers’ labor during harvesting seasons. In this thesis, the term is used as a collective general concept in parallel to the state and the market. It also refers to a project that has the abovementioned characteristics. By definition, the commons is almost ubiquitous, but the concept can be elusive because of the historical arguments associated with it. The commons has traditionally been tied to land ownership. The term “the commons” can be traced back to 11th-13th Britain, when it described the land use of farming and grazing. In medieval Britain, common land was owned by the local manor within a feudal system. Local villagers had a range of usage rights (Wall, 2014). The industrial revolution (1760-1840) shifted the policies 32

for common lands in the U.K. Under governmental pressure, the commons were enclosed and became private lands. Unsold common lands were turned into government properties and thus became public properties. New commons appeared during the late- and post-industrial revolution, as transportation and communication infrastructure advanced, and urban areas expanded. At the same time, the confusion around the access and ownership of the commons arose as what was referred to as “the commons” and connected with it diversified (Laborda-Pemán & De Moor, 2016). The correlation between resources and population growth was made explicit with the publication of The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968. The commons was brought to people’s attention again with the question of if the commons would fail to solve the no-technical-solution-problem of population growth (Hardin, 1968). From Hardin’s ecologist perspective, the relationship between the population and resources resembles grazing — every herdsman seeks to benefit the most from the land and leads to the degradation of the common land. In his own words, the tragedy of the commons is — Each man is locked into a system that compels home to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. (p.1244) Hardin’s main concerns are the consequences of overpopulation and overconsumption and human beings’ lack of willingness and incentive to prevent these consequences. However, the solution that Hardin suggests in the end seems to be privatization — bringing enclosure to all common resources. As most critics of Hardin’s article argue, the scenario of the tragedy remains within the paradigm of capitalist growth and resource limits (The ecologist, 1993; Forsyth & Johnson, 2014). What Hardin describes is obviously an open-access scenario where nothing is regulated. In this scenario, the total resources have a limit, resources are free for all, the community is a general population, and the give-and-take solely relies on individual interests. In fact, Hardin’s scenario is spurious because he describes an unregulated open-access scenario that does not match characteristics of the commons. As a benchmark in the commons discourse, Hardin’s article created the misperception that the commons is about a claim on the scarcity of natural resources. However, unlike resources in the market economy, the commons is not perceived as scarce (The Ecologist, 1993). The commons is not defined by the growth-oriented system. Common needs are not always material, and they do not grow incessantly. Scarcity is not a priority for the commons, but it is prioritized by Hardin. Without any empirical research, The Tragedy of the Commons is speculation about human behaviors in a hypothetical free-for-all, greedy, unregulated context. Despite its flaws and its misrepresentation of the concept of the commons, the idea of The Tragedy of the Commons has endured over time. It is still often used to justify the privatization of common resources or to criticize the conflicts within the commons.

The Tragedy of the Commons was challenged by Carol M. Rose (1986) in the paper entitled The Comedy of the Commons: Commerce, Custom, and Inherently Public Property. Rose discusses instances in which making a resource available to more people increases the value of the common resource and individual benefits — the comedy of the commons. Free speech and socialization in public spaces are examples where more users entail more individual contributions to the common good instead of the depletion of the common resource. The comedy of the commons also has conditions. Examples mentioned by Rose are non-material common resources that require less labor and time commitment as well as low maintenance costs. In cases that involve material resources, Rose defines them as the “inherently public property” (p.720) which is not equivalent to the commons. Although Rose’s comedy of the commons only speaks to certain types of the commons, it is an important contribution to the realms of digital and knowledge commons, and it provides a genuinely different view from the argument of the tragedy. Another antithesis to the Tragedy of the Commons is the renowned book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institution for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom (1990). Ostrom argues that the free-rider tragedy can be overcome precisely by the common resource users themselves because human beings are rational to make collective decisions. Her research is based on the “common-pool resource (CPR)” concept in economics, which refers to a subtractable natural or human-made resource system (Ostrom, 1990). Empirical case studies from Kenya, Turkey, Los Angeles, etc. lead to her eight design principles that are shared by enduring CPRs, regardless of their settings, which include: 1. Clearly defined boundaries 2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions 3. Collective-choice arrangements 4. Monitoring 5. Graduated sanctions 6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms 7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize 8. Nested enterprises (for CPRs that are parts of larger systems). (p. 90) Ostrom illustrates the possibility to avoid the tragedy of the commons and to maintain the commons by defining governance rules. CPRs or case studies in Governing the Commons are natural or man-made resources such as fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, and bodies of water that have lasted over 100 years. They are now also categorized as the traditional commons or the environmental commons, which means that the adaptation of Ostrom’s principles in other types of commons is still being researched. Later, Ostrom expands her research into larger-scale regional and global commons, digital and knowledge commons (Bollier, 2014; Bollier & Helfrich, 34

2015). Although these areas are secondary considerations in her entire research trajectory, the expansion of her work also leads to a more refined and inclusive definition of the commons for our reference (Hess & Ostrom, 2007) — Commons is a general term that refers to a resource shared by a group of people. In a commons, the resource can be small and serve a tiny group (the family refrigerator), it can be community-level (sidewalks, playgrounds, libraries, and so on), or it can extend to international and global levels (deep seas, the atmosphere, the Internet, and scientific knowledge). (p.4) Ostrom’s research is essential for the thesis question of what constitutes the sustainment of urban commons because although her research targets natural commons instead of urban commons, Ostrom stresses the institutions of the commons as the key to successful governance. Some would criticize the Governing the Commons for predominantly discussing the internal institutions and the capacity of self-organization but underestimating the impact from external and top-down interventions. The critique can be said for most of the design principles, but the nested enterprise principle and the framework for analysis of CPRs developed at the end of the book take external factors into consideration, which will be expanded in Section 2.3.1. Following Ostrom’s pioneering work, a wide array of commons researchers, including Peter Linebaugh, Stavros Stavrides, Massimo De Angelis, David Bollier, and Silke Helfrich, have added layers and clarity to the definition of the commons. In the recent decade, commons discourse has moved beyond environmental resources (CPRs) and instead emphasized the commons as a radical paradigm, an ethic, and a set of social practices that transcend dominant public or private paradigms of living and production (Bollier, 2020). David Bollier (2014) asserts: Commons certainly include physical and intangible resources of all sorts, but they are more accurately defined as paradigms that combine a distinct community with a set of social practices, values and norms that are used to manage a resource. Put another way, a commons is a resource + a community + a set of social protocols. (p.21) Here, three key elements of the commons are identified. The common resource refers to the shared material and non-material resources which have the quality of being in-between the public and the private ownership (what). Commoners are the group of people who are part of the co-creation and co-governance of the commons (who). Commoning is the constant and dynamic actions of (re)negotiating the differences and disagreements among the commoners (how). The commons becomes a multifold concept that contains a plurality of people with resources, relationships, and governance rules in common (De Angelis, 2017). These three elements can be found in all types of commons but have distinct configurations and performances. The notion of “commoning,” a verb rather than a noun, indicts that the commons is primarily associated with social practices of commoning (Linebaugh, 2008; Bollier, 2020; Gruber & Ngo, 2019). In this respect for the rest of

this thesis, “the commons” is the general commons discourse and research field while specific practices and projects are called “commoning.” The dominant understanding of the history and epistemology of the commons is still restricted to the Western world. It is problematic to adopt only one worldview of the commons while the commons is supposed to be a collective of differences. The concept of the commons is not strange to most countries, cultures, or civilizations, especially the ones with long histories. Because these latent existences of the commons are not given the exact title of “the commons” or are not translatable in English, they are overlooked. The Western history and epistemology of the commons is a homogenizing construct that is automatically related to the European land ownership and the history of the enclosure when common land was converted to private or state properties (Kothari et al., 2019). These concepts are widely accepted and prioritized by the majority of the commons researchers under Western material and power duress. The enclosure or the colonization of the commons discourse is coerced by the dominant positions of the Western capitalist model, language, and technologies. The counter notion of a plural epistemology of the commons requires us to concede that non-Western ideas, practices, and examples of commoning also share the characteristic of being collective governance of common resources. Sections 3.5 and 3.6 will elaborate on this further by discussing “design for the pluriverse” and two curatorial projects on the exploration of diverse forms of commoning across the world.

2.2 Urban commoning For years, theorists like Hardin and Ostrom viewed the commons as a synonym for environmental commons — shared natural material resources and systems. With the expansion of the commons field, all material, immaterial, natural, and man-made common resources are regarded as the commons. According to the materiality of the common resource and how the resource comes into being, Bauwens (2017) categorizes the commons by two axes: material-immaterial and producedinherited (Figure 2.2). Bauwen’s diagram shows us that oceans, farmlands, the atmosphere, forests are environmental commons (inherited and material). The emphasis of environmental commons involves the right to use common resources and subsequently the reciprocal relationships between natural systems and human beings. The environmental commons is characterized by the possibility of decay of its material quality over time and with intensified usage, and therefore, it requires restrictions to sustain. Ostrom (1990) studies a village in Törbel, Switzerland where the villagers successfully maintained the common land for centuries. Törbel villagers formed an association based on the former law and regulated access to the land. In the regulations that villagers created, they stated that “no citizen could send more cows to the alp than he could feed during the winter” (p. 65). Those who violated the regulation would receive penalties from the staff elected by villagers. More similar evidence has shown that the long-term governing of environmental commons relies on regulations of the access to common resources.

Figure 2.2 Four quadrants of the commons categorization (Based on Bauwens, 2017, para. 20)

The other three quadrants of the matrix are mostly new commons, spanning cultural commons, digital commons, knowledge commons, and urban commons. They are new types of the commons that have emerged in response to the recently developed precarious status of common resources (Hess, 2008). New commons highlights immaterial commoning processes or the complementary relations between material and immaterial common resources, which means for their enduring governance, except for the access to common resources, other aspects may prevail. As a new commons, urban commons sits in the material and produced quadrant of Beuwen’s diagram because its common resource is primarily considered to be shared spaces, although much more than the spaces are shared in urban commoning. Urban commoning consists of both material shared resources and immaterial relationships and processes, and it aims to respond to urban problems from the bottom-up. Urban commoning has arisen against the rapid urbanization in the twenty-first century. Spaces in the city could be a means of control and power domination (Lefebvre, 1974). Politicians and technocratic elites have more voices in city decisions while others are either marginalized or silenced. The power asymmetry in urban spaces makes urban commoning an emerging channel for citizens to seek equal rights to access resources such as housing, food, mobility, and water. It is based on the idea that urban spaces are accessible to and able to be utilized by citizens for their needs (Foster & Iaione, 2020). Because common spaces can be employed as a form of agency, urban commoning responds to issues in contemporary cities including housing, public spaces, social facilities, migrant and refugee rights, new municipalism, and so on. Examples of how these issues have been addressed by urban commoning are cooperative housing, municipalism movements, intentional communities,

community land trusts, and urban farms and gardens. The following sections discuss aspects that differentiate urban commoning from other types of commoning and determine the complexity of the study of its governance. First, I introduce an important aspect of urban commoning, the commonality of spaces and spatiality of commoning. They give shape to the intertwined social, spatial, and political facets in urban commoning. Second, I argue that the right to access urban resources and shape the living environment, especially green spaces, is at the heart of urban commoning’s value as an alternative way to respond to intractable social problems. Finally, after recognizing the uniqueness and importance of urban commoning to our cities, I bring attention to the survival challenges it faces to inspire a further examination of its sustainment mechanism. 2.2.1 Commonality of spaces and spatiality of commoning Commonality of spaces The commonality of spaces and the spatiality of commoning underpin urban spaces’ ability to host commoning practices and thus form urban commoning. Three layers are prominent in understanding the commonality of spaces — the position of architecture as a profession, a set of practices, and design products in serving common people; the architectural common ground between the individual and the collective, the past and the future, and people and space; and the socio-political agency in spatial design. Architects are people who have ideas and deliver these ideas through spaces (Schneider &Till, 2009). The capability of fulfilling ideas through spaces entitles architects (or broadly, designers) with expertise and power in building for people. Buildings are supposed to represent the relationships of the people living in them (de Graaf, 2017). However, in this sense, the role of contemporary architecture and architects is experiencing an enclosure. Instead of a socially aware way of practicing architecture, we see more bourgeois architects, elite architecture associations, and technocratic strategists that tend to use architecture as the tool to retain their power and expertise. The retainment is realized through the enclosure of an architectural system that conflates architects (as experts) in the architecture field (as a profession) and their building (as practices) spaces (as products) (Till, 2009). Architecture is more so subjected to the self-satisfactions and worldviews of those in power (Till, 2009). It becomes a formal and tectonic system of more typologies, codes of conduct, specifications, and categories to control spaces and people (Till, 2009). In the opposite position is the practice of socially aware architecture, where laypersons are not excluded from the discipline but are “co-authors” of spaces. To this end, the first layer of the commonality of architecture is the repositioning of architects, architecture, architectural practices, and architectural spaces, removing them from their elite circles so they represent the common people. The second layer of commonality of spaces is what Christopher Alexander called “living patterns” (1980, p.125), or in Yoshiharu Tsukamoto’s notion — architectural behaviorology. Smaller spatial elements (“patterns” by Alexander) contribute to larger elements. No matter what a space’s scale 38

is, it can only be stable and alive if smaller elements are alive, such as material components as well as immaterial movements and relationships. The quality of one space influences that of collective spaces (Tsukamoto et al., 2010). In the process of creating a collective space, certain attributes of spaces, whether they are designed or unintentionally created, repeat, accumulate, and become the commonality of architecture (Tsukamoto, 2016). The commonality is different from typologies where we seek repetitive, rigid patterns; instead, they are more like “living patterns,” the spirit, moments, and the inner forces, or “qualities without a name” (Alexander, 1980, p.ix) that are carried by the space. It is the commonality of architecture that allows spaces to transcend time and channel the past and the present sensation of space. The commonality of architecture exists to intersect the individual and the collective, the past and the future, and people and space. Being able to serve as a “socially and politically aware form of agency” (Schneider & Till, 2009, p.98) and empower the community that this agency gives rise to is the third layer of the commonality in spaces. Spaces can be the agency for various things since agency means to provide a service to another. By placing Anthony Gidden’s (1979) reframing of agency as “the capability of acting otherwise” in the dominant academic and professional architectural context which focuses on functions, buildings, and aesthetics, we can see the agency “otherwise” is to be socio-political. In Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, Awan et al. (2011) attest that the sociospatial agency of architecture is to deploy design intelligence in politically progressive ways without dismissing architects’ skills. Both humans (including architects and space occupants) and non-humans (like buildings and flows) are collective agents that have responsibilities to engage with the contexts and changes of spaces (Schneider & Till, 2009). Spatial design practices that foreground their socio-spatial capacity often utilize indeterminacy, appropriate certain under-used spaces, and react to oppressive agendas (Awan et al., 2011; Lorne, 2017). The socio-political agency is not necessarily about opposing the state and(or) the market. It is closer to Manzini’s (2018) description of the politics of the everyday, where the human and non-human agents are in harmonious solitudes. Agents of spaces each have their socio-political agenda and form a dynamic community together. The community is where spaces’ socio-political agency keeps growing (Delanty, 2010; Cummings, 2000). This resonates with John Dewey’s philosophy of community, in which some degrees of commonalities are the basis for a community, and a community is the best environment to foster socio-political agency (Delanty, 2010; Manzini, 2018). Spatiality of commoning The commonality in spaces enables urban commoning to be a spatial agency. Urban commoning entails spatial practices because it is a type of produced space. The research on environmental commons already touches the spatiality of common resources but is limited to three aspects. First, commoning is place-based collective actions. Local contexts induce place-based identities around specific common resources. Second, the functionality and governance rules are influenced by biophysical boundaries. Third, the effectiveness of the governance is related to its spatial scale. Scholars specifically look for the optimal physical scale of common resources for the best

governance performances. These three aspects represent spatial features of environmental commons but only treat spaces as contextual elements, physical boundaries, and sizes instead of “something constitutive” to commoning (Moss, 2014, p.460). The spatiality of urban commoning needs to evaluate constitutive implications that spaces have on commoning and reciprocally, the spatial (re)productions by commoning. Spatial practices are embedded in all ordinary people (de Certeau, 1980). People are not merely passive and submissive consumers of spaces but can actively manipulate spaces through everyday activities. Spatial practices are socially defined; as Henri Lefevre (1974) says, “a social space is a social product” (p.27). This framing leads to four considerations in relation to urban commoning’s spatiality. First, generation of new spaces is often associated with the depletion of natural spaces. However, rather than producing new spaces, urban commoning tends to reclaim and rehabilitate underutilized spaces. Therefore, for urban commoning, the lack of natural resources is not a restriction. Those spaces that had once been produced but were turned into waste appear to be sites of commoning. Second, every society gives its own meaning to spaces and forges its own spatial practices (Lefebvre, 1974). As a result, nuanced intersections in different contexts generate multitudes of spaces. This is particularly true in urban commoning, as desires to participate in commoning are intertwined with specific cultural and societal environments. Spatial forms and the agency to interact with spaces are largely influenced by their situated social history and spatial conventions. The third consideration is the iterative process of producing spaces, which “subsumes signifying processes without being reducible to them” (Lefevre, 1974, p.37). Thus, forms of spaces and past relationships between spaces inform the current and future production of common spaces. In other words, the present and future common spaces are iterations at their current moments but never duplicates of their past. This implication suggests the possibility of projecting past and present spatial configurations of urban commoning to inform or redirect future urban commoning. Lastly, in order to interpret spaces, Lefevre (1974) recommends studying spatial codes, the smallest being like a window, a door, or a table and larger being streets and squares. More importantly, these spatial units are means of “living in that space, of understanding it and of producing it” (p.47). Building on the previous considerations, to live with urban commoning, to understand it, and to (re)produce it, spatial elements need to be studied in their contexts and interpreted to uncover their contributions to the sociality and spatiality of urban commoning. Drawn from these abovementioned considerations, the spatiality of urban commoning includes following aspects: 1) the socio-spatial elements that can be perceived in the everyday routines of running urban commoning, like walking, talking, laboring, collaborating of individuals (Gieseking, 2014) as well as in the urban fabric that fosters or conflicts with these routines; 2) the plans and visions for common spaces that are designed, imagined, and discussed by commoners in order to facilitate behaviors and relationships; and 3) the reflection on the lived common spaces and the resulting creative spatial thoughts. The commonality of spaces and the spatiality of commoning complement each other and become

important features of urban commoning. The commonality of spaces aligns with urban commoning’s mission to serve the citizens, empower them with spatial rights, and the demonstrate socio-political agency embedded in these spaces and spatial practices. The spatiality of commoning attests that spaces are not merely physical boundaries. In the representation of material resources, spaces also contribute to immaterial behaviors and relationships, and they are reproductive in urban commoning at ground zero. Spatial qualities are not the prime concern in this thesis, but they differentiate urban commoning from other commoning practices. In Chapter 7, the case study of the Garfield Community Farm includes an analysis of its spatial structure, as the observation on-site identified the relevance between its spatial structure and social interactions. The analysis uses Christopher Alexander’s (1965) theory of the “tree” and “semilattice” structures. Semilattice common spaces

Figure 2.3 A tree structure, a semilattice structure, and a semilattice of a neighborhood (Alexander, 1965, p.3 & p.12; left two diagrams by Nikos Salingaros)

Urban commoning does not follow conventional architecture rules of regulated construction procedures and one-time investments; rather, the common spaces intend to build living cities through a do-it-yourself manner. Artificial spaces are often designed and constructed as merely functional components. Designers also think of spaces in a hierarchical way, which is referred to as the “tree” structure by Alexander (1965). Components within the tree structure are individual units, not designed to connect with other units but form a whole. Most contemporary buildings and zonings function in the “tree” way. A school has classrooms, fields, bathrooms, offices, etc. The simplicity of function and a clear boundary of each unit make it easier for both design and maintenance. The tree structure guides most spatial designs. The separation of functions in design processes, like work and play, work and housing, and housing and commercial, has been dominant because it is an accessible structure for designers. However, these separations of visible spaces lead to the disassociation of invisible ties. Therefore, urban commoning’s spaces and spatial design need to avoid the tree structure to maintain its social interactive qualities.

In contrast to the tree structure is the “semilattice” structure where elements of systems make up a large complex system, and interactions of elements generate countless subsets and relationships (Figure 2.3). The semilattice structure has overlaps and is sometimes ambiguous and chaotic. It is “a thicker, tougher, more subtle and more complex view of structure” (Alexander, 1965, p.11). If we draw connections between the semilattice structure, Stavrides’ argument of institutions of expanding commoning (Section 2.3.2), and the living system theory from Transition Design (Sections 3.3 and 3.4), we can conclude that the purpose of examining the spatial structure of urban commoning is to discover not the exact material components but the living organism embedded in vast connections. A semilattice structure allows us to reveal hidden social and spatial logics in the living systems of commoning. 2.2.2 Right to the city and right to green Urban commoning is an important means to exercise or instantiate the right to the city. Through her observations of urban life at different scales, Jane Jacobs (1961) argues that urban neighborhoods should be considered as “mundane organs of self-government” (p. 113–122). Lefebvre (1968) coined the idea of “the right to the city” against the context of denaturalized, commercialized, industrialized, and institutionally organized cities. Lefebvre (1968) claimed that the right to the city cannot be conceived as a simple visiting right or a literal return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as “a transformed and renewed right to urban life” (p. 64). The right is achieved through prioritizing the encounters, use-values, and time heritages in urban life among all resources. The essence of the right to the city is the social relationships, human-nature relationship, lifestyles, and spatial agency that people desire for their collective habitants. In Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Harvey (2012) writes: The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and reinvent the city more after our hearts’ desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right, since reinventing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. (p.4) Harvey (2003;2006;2012) suggests that having access to urban resources alone is not enough to constitute the right to the city. The right to the city should shift from antagonistic actions to agonistic collective transformations to shape citizens’ own cities (Gruber, 2021). Either Lefebvre or Harvey’s right to the city activism promotes an ideology against trends of enclosure, control, the appropriation of urban spaces, and the reduction of commonalities in urban life. Through the action of establishing common spaces, people can experiment to find solutions towards issues such as food insecurity, ecological sustainability, land stewardship, housing affordability, and immigrant rights; discrimination, barriers, and disagreements are put into conversation directly to reach a common ground (Stavrides, 2015; Gruber, 2021).

Derived from the right to the city is the right to green, which refers to citizens’ right to occupy and manage green spaces, such as vacant lots, urban farms, roof spaces, schoolyards, and community gardens, so they can meet the need of food production. The right to green claims that urban farms and gardens’ political, intellectual, and social genealogy take on a significant role in shaping the cities from the bottom up (Krasny, 2012). Self-organized green spaces are characterized by self-governance, creative citizen power, and self-help (Krasny, 2012). Organizations like the food sovereignty movement in Latin America, Green Guerillas in New York, allotment gardens in Europe, and transition town initiatives exemplify practices of defending the right to green, and they represent thriving forms of alternative urban agriculture. Their re-commoning of food, which will be discussed in Chapter 4, is a manifestation of the right to green in growing-oriented urban commoning projects. People, who often call themselves urban farmers and gardeners, farm citizens, or garden activists, are motivated to appropriate urban spaces for food production for different reasons. These bottom-up self-made green spaces become the site for urban dwellers, rural-to-urban migrants, and immigrants to achieve the right to green when the government is unable to provide them with land ownership and healthy food supplies (Krasny, 2012; Petrescu & Trogal, 2017). Rural-tourban migrants and immigrants often have little access to land and affordable healthy food. At the same time, they might have traditional farming skills and knowledge from their own places of origin. These two factors contribute to their actions to claim the right to green. Although urban dwellers’ personal motivations are hard to generalize, they are beginning to realize how little effort they have put into growing food, even though it is literally the most fundamental human need (Thackara, 2015). Desiring green spaces for organic food, education and play sites for children, or spiritual sanctuaries, urban dwellers begin to pick up ecological agriculture skills to actively engage in growing food. Self-organized green spaces attract people with various motivations, and in turn, diverse socio-political pursuits converge in these spaces. Both historically and presently, the right to green is often a political claim through the act of gardening (Krasny, 2012; Hou et al., 2009). Allotment gardens, as wartime food supplements and as a resistance to the land enclosure, accompanied by self-help housing movement, have been around for centuries. In 1919, the afterwar food shortage and famine in Vienna brought people together to cultivate their own food, which then quickly extended to the takeover of land, hoping to address the housing shortage (Novy, 2012; Gruber, 2016). The Vienna Settlers’ Movement started from such a grassroots emergent reaction to hunger and poverty caused by catastrophic crises. Thousands of settlers built gardens and dwellings without any municipal support or land ownership permission (Rumpfhuber, 2016). The massive impact achieved by the settlers pressured the government to ultimately institutionalize the movement into the Red Vienna public housing program (Gruber, 2016). Similar political interrogations of whom the state, the urban land, and green spaces are serving continue in the present urban gardening. Community gardens in contemporary America are places that flourish within or near any area of human settlements, and they encourage empowerment, connectedness, and common concerns among

the residents (Breslav, 1991; Hou et al., 2009). Citizen gardeners hope to establish meaningful social connections, steward the local environment, and address healthy food demands that are underserved by the governmental leaders and the monopolistic food market. 2.2.3 Temporality and survival challenges In contrast with traditional urban production modes, a key characteristic of urban commoning is employing existing or abandoned resources and taking timely advantage of them to respond to pressing social problems. As a result, urban commoning often begins with ad-hocism, temporality, and open-endedness (Pak, 2017). These qualities create a sense of informality and weaken the power hierarchy that might exist between project initiators and other commoners. They also provide opportunities for urban commoning to experiment with alternative ways of live-work without waiting for a large amount of financial investment and while sometimes avoiding administrative and political restrictions. The temporality of urban commoning includes two aspects. One is that urban commoning involves making ephemeral spaces or creating a temporary group of commoners for a short-term crisis. This situation is seen in squatting projects, occupy movements, and tactical urbanism interventions. The other is the temporal challenge faced by many urban commoning projects. Because responsive urban commoning has to come into being in a short time, the priority of urgency and the lack of pre-planning can create vulnerability to internal and external challenges. Some projects can only last temporally due to the improvisation at the early stages and the lack of time to form a resilient survival structure. This issue is also prevalent in various community gardens and farms; as Hou et al. notes, “individuals often start a garden opportunistically — cultivating an otherwise underused plot of private or public land — yet this does not mean that activists intend the garden to be temporary” (2009, p. 4). The temporality of urban commoning projects that are not intended to be interim is the result of other survival challenges and is their manifestation grounded in time. Urban commoning has a precarious status because of various survival challenges. Enclosure, individualistic mentalities, political control, or financial difficulties could all lead an urban commoning project to the loss of its participatory and emancipatory qualities and ultimately to its end. Some of these challenges are known as “the dilemma of the commons” in social science, in which case material common resources held jointly by social or economic segments are depleted by either internal commoners’ self-interests or external social or political impositions (De Moor, 2015; Edney & Harper, 1978). Survival challenges expand on the concept of “the dilemma of the commons” since both the material resources as well as the self-governance rights and established social or political capacity and relations are threatened. There have been numerous instances of urban commoning in face of survival challenges: appropriation by the authorities and overinstitutionalization, failure to generate enough financial income to keep up everyday operations, and internal disagreements among commoners. R-Urban and the Mapopo Farm are both urban farm examples that are threatened by external forces but have demonstrated great internal resilience to combat these challenges. 44

Figure 2.4 R-Urban in Colombes, 2015 (Source: Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée)

Figure 2.5 Petition to save R-Urban (Source: change.org)

R-Urban is a set of resident-run facilities that aims to create socially and ecologically resilient forms of food production and consumption (Baibarac & Petrescu, 2017; Gruber, 2018). The community farm is the main construct of R-Urban which is a rental space for growing food, connecting people (especially immigrants), and promoting a localized production-consumption model. However, plans changed in 2017 when the group was suddenly evicted because of a change of city leadership (Petrescu et al., 2020; Gruber, 2018). The city council decided to replace R-Urban with a car park. A bulldozer was sent to the site without any notice and started demolition. R-Urban managed to relocate to another city and bounce back. In a talk given by the initiators of R-Urban (The Swamp Pavillion, 2018), they mentioned that participants who were involved in R-Urban for years before the demolition became more politically motivated in advocating for saving it, and after the relocation, they still would travel a longer distance and participate in the reconstruction at its new home in Gennevilliers. The rebirth of R-Urban was possible because of social relationships, awareness in defending the right to green, and solidarity generated subliminally throughout the commoning processes. The Mapopo Community Farm in Hong Kong also experienced conflicts with the government and land developers, and the commoners risked losing their farm in several violent evictions. The precursor of the Mapopo Community Farm was the squatter houses and leased farmlands of immigrant workers from mainland China in the Mashipo village, Hong Kong (Huang, 2012). Founded in 2010 on abandoned farmlands, the Mapopo Community Farm aimed to revitalize the village, reducing the reliance on food imported from mainland China, reestablishing organic farming and food cultures, and restoring villagers’ social and natural relationships through sustainable agriculture. Land developer the Henderson company purchased over 80% of the land in Mashipo village from indigenous landlords during the booming years of the property market in Hong Kong. Henderson suddenly ceased the leasing contract and violently evicted tenant farmers who had been living in the village for decades in 2008 (Huang, 2012). The Hong Kong government

Figure 2.6 Developer hires security guards to evict farmers (Yuen, 2016)

Figure 2.7 Mapopo farmers (Chung, 2012)

was also collaborating with the developer and designated the village as a new real estate and commercial development zone that would serve the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong crossborder development (Chung, 2012; Huang, 2012). Villagers and farmers continued farming on their land as a protest against the commercialized urban development and the developer’s habit of hoarding farmland. Henderson also continued appropriating pieces of land in the village to claim their legal right of ownership (Yuen, 2016). The fight to save the Mapopo Farm lasted for over a decade and was terminated in July 2021. The land was taken away by the developer, but the farmers left a message — “The seeds now have been sown and will continue to thrive in the soil at the right time.” Both R-Urban and the Mapopo Farm showcase that commoning projects can easily be destroyed by outside forces; the commoners involved were left on the periphery, unable to exert notable power (Tehrani, 2014). Both farms were aware of the risks of temporality and were challenged by the brutal intrusion of myopic market and state. Both also flipped the challenges into opportunities to build social and political strength. We can only assume these challenges will continue whether in the U.S. and Europe, where the privatization legacy of the last three decades has persisted, or in China, where pragmatism and ambition for fast development will still prevail in the coming years. On account of the survival challenges, urban commoning projects need to be prepared. We tend to affirm the contribution of urban commoning to the resilience and sustainability of our cities but forget that the premise for them to continue to fulfill that function is their own success. Drawing from concepts that are typically used to define the endurance of a system, we can begin to develop an understanding of what the success of urban commoning is. In doing so, concepts including “sustainment”, “resilience” and “robustness” need to be reviewed. Sustainment, as defined by Sutton (2004), is the process of assessing and improving a system’s ability to preserve its functions and value under continuous operation, maintenance, and unexpected change. It stresses the stable and enduring management of a system in its lifetime. Derived from socio-ecological

theories, resilience is a system’s ability to absorb disturbances and continue to function (Walker et al., 2009). It is widely applied and advanced in different fields, such as ecology social science, psychology, businesses, and planning, highlighting a system’s capability of recovering to either static or dynamic equilibrium (Folke et al., 2010). In some other areas like engineering, the synonym is “robustness,” which refers to the ability of a system to maintain its performance when it is subjected to external, unanticipated disturbances or when the values of internal design parameters are unknown (Carlson & Doyle, 2002). The field of sustainable design and the notion of “the Sustainment” continues this inquiry in Section 3.4. “The Sustainment” inspires the rhetoric of the sustainment of urban commoning in thesis, as it includes both the material and environmental sustainability as well as the socio-political resilience to respond to unsustainable futures and the internal and external disturbances that follow along. This definition is the foundation for us to then ask what exactly constitutes such sustainment.

2.3 Expanding institutions and scaling of urban commoning The ability of urban commoning to sustain ultimately depends on formalized structures or mechanisms to mediate common resources and commoners. These structures and mechanisms are to maintain orders of commoning and plan ahead for internal and external risks. The third key element of the commons — a set of social protocols, or some would call them a form of “governance” (Džokić & Neelen, 2015, p. 21) — is at the center of this. Ostrom (2014) calls those structures and mechanisms “institutions for collective action” (p. 467). The term “institution” has often been taken for granted and used bluntly without any clarification, as well as the “institutions of urban commoning”. In fact, there is a twofold explanation of “institution”. From a bottom-up and micro perspective, institutions are the outcome of collective individual actions and are often identified as organizations (Ostrom, 1986; Askvik, 1993). In Ostrom’s (1986) definition, they are “rules about behavior, especially about making decisions” (p.3-4). From a normative and macro perspective, institutions are entities such as the state, the market, or the political structure that shape commoners’ actions and preferences (Askvik, 1993; Knudsen, 1995). North (1991) summarizes the definition of institutions as “humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction” (p.97). He also divides institutions into two forms — informal constraints, like customs, traditions, and codes of conduct, and formal rules, like laws and property rights (North, 1991). From all points of view, institutions of urban commoning can be divided into two layers which also correspond to their endogenous and exogenous reproductivity. One level is the organizational structure of commoners in relation to their common resources and the way they collaborate and make decisions (endogenous). Another layer is the internalization of external institutions in the processes of commoning (exogenous). For instance, to respond to changing local policies, new rules can be enacted within the commoning community. Ideas and research about institutions of commoning already started in Ostrom’s work. Ostrom’s design principles are to assist the establishment of institutions of commoning. In the final chapter of 47

Governing the Commons, Ostrom proposes a framework of complex sets of variables for analyzing and predicting institutional changes of CPRs for policymakers and resource users to consider. She points out that the real challenge for the commons to endure is to develop each commons’ own model for its empirical niche, as there is no general model for collective actions and the application of her framework (Ostrom, 1990). Notably, the last principle — nested enterprises — begins to discuss the institutions of commoning beyond the boundary of commoning itself and raises the question of how to create a multiple-layer, polycentric system that can be dynamic, adaptive, and effective over time (Ostrom, 2012; 2015). Ostrom states the importance of nesting small-scale commoning actions into regime or global level systems to address larger issues such as climate change, deforestation, and hunger (Ostrom, 2009). Nested enterprise is a specific up-scaling principle for commoning. This implies that urban commoning, which still mainly acts on small scales, needs to scale up across levels to sustain and gain increasing impacts. Most recently, Farjam et al. (2020) conducted a study of over 3,800 activities in eighteen European traditional commons and discovered a U-shape pattern of the long-term governance of the commons. The study indicates that typically, the commons has an initial high dynamic institutionaldefinition phase, a stable period, and a final burst period in response to challenges. It further attempts to advance Ostrom’s study by expanding research samples. This study explored institutions of the natural commons, and these discoveries are still prevalent in the commons discourse today. However, the rigidity and static state of design principles and patterns are called into doubt in the application for urban commoning, as it is more dynamic and in-the-making. Stavros Stavrides (2013) argues: If institutions are forms through which people organize their ways of being together, and if these institutions always represent some forms of coagulation, some forms of concretization of power relations, then it is not enough for us to just be for urban commoning as a liberating process. It is not enough for us to find new institutions that look like the institutions that are in the service of the dominant classes. We have to find not simply other institutions but perhaps new forms of institutions. (timeline 52:12) Otherwise stated, simply regulating people’s rights and actions in a stable and defined community makes the commons not much different from the dominant institutions (Stavrides, 2016; Džokić & Neelen, 2015). Institutions of urban commoning must derive their own power and continue into a collective endeavor out of the existing dominant institutions (Hardt & Negri, 2009; Stavrides, 2016). French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2010) echoes the point that the notion of a community of commoners resembles an open political process, through which the meaning and the forms of living together are always questioned and transformed, so the institutions of the community continuously expand. The resistance to transitional institutions lies in “institutions of expanding commoning” (Stavrides, 2016, p.77), which are motivations or qualities that keep urban commoning’s capacity and network of sharing and collaboration growing.

Institutions of expanding commoning ensure urban commoning to be “porous” (Stavrides, 2016, p.54) which manifests in self-managing, openness to newcomers and non-hierarchical relationships. According to Stavrides (2016), three necessary qualities of institutions of expanding commoning are: 1. Comparability. Instead of separating, competing, or defining boundaries, comparable institutions facilitate the meeting of different and mutual understandings. 2. Translatability. Institutions can be translators among commoners of different political, cultural, or religious backgrounds. Translation allows diverse opinions to emerge rather than to diminish to singular agreements. 3. Egalitarian sharing. Egalitarian sharing, emphasizing social and processual equality instead of equal outcomes, will prevent power accumulation of any kind and maintain openness to new incomers. The utopian book Bolo’ bolo is a notable example that shares similar findings with these three qualities and explores institutions of expanding commoning in a fictional manner. In Bolo’ bolo, Swiss activist Hans Widmer, under his pseudonym P.M. (1983), envisions a utopian society in contrast to the capitalist society. From individual roles to state functions, he depicts detailed structures and rules of the utopia. Its thoroughness and complexity in creating a commoning-oriented society function is a significant attempt to consolidate institutions of expanding commoning. For instance, in the utopian community, the ideal size of a bolo(community) is from 300 to 500 ibu (individuals). A bolo has porous institutions of commoning, where the ibu can have basic economic and social exchanges and be self-sufficient. Individuals have the freedom to quit or join the bolo. Multiple bolos can collaborate to compensate for each other’s self-sufficiency (P.M., 1983). P.M.’s descriptions agree to Stavrides’ points and became the visionary guidelines for many cooperative housing organizations in Europe. Petrescu et al. (2020), the initiators of R-Urban, try to quantify how the project has sustained financially and socially. In reference to the economic cost-benefit method, social institutions and outcomes of commoning are turned into social cost-benefit variables and translated into financial terms. In this way, the value of R-Urban is presented with a set of financial tables and an economic return on investment index of 2700%. It is an intriguing and productive approach to visualize, enumerate, and calculate the growth and institution of an urban commoning project. However, it raises doubts about whether this approach falls back into the capitalist cliché of measuring everything with monetary scales. The recently launched Urban Commons Cookbook is another effort to unpack ingredients and recipes of the sustainment of urban commoning (Dellenbaugh-Losse et al., 2020). Interviews of eight urban commoning projects are included, which serve as valuable references to understand

past paths. Then, by providing a series of thorough checklists of principles and criteria as well as offering steps of initiating, managing, and assessing a commoning project, the book offers hands-on guides to plan for every step of urban commoning. The cookbook is a theoretical and technical resource for commoners and other intersectoral stakeholders (since scaling up is prioritized in the toolkit) to learn about commoning. The checklist to design commoning can be disputed, especially suggestions like reaching group consensus, cooperation with larger groups to get big initial investments, or pre-defining all rules, which might actually act against expanding institutions of commoning as they follow logics of the enclosure, coming to an agreement, or prioritizing financial outcomes. In all attempts to actualize and measure the sustainment of urban commoning through calculating equivalent financial benefits and listing guidelines, an inadequacy surfaces in finding a system that captures and measures the implicit qualitative social, political, and cultural aspects of urban commoning. The 24-hour clock and well-being scorecard developed in Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities by Gibson-Graham et al. and Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation stood out from the literature on civic engagement and bottom-up community. They begin to consolidate individual and organizational levels of socio-political impacts and provide a reference for further construction of a system of measurement without relying on abstraction or financial metrics for the invisible qualitative dimensions of urban commoning. 24-hour clock and well-being scorecard Building on Rath & Harter’s (2010) five elements of well-being, which are the love for our daily job, the quality of our relationships, the security of our finances, our physical health, and the pride for our communities, Gibson-Graham (2013) proposes a 24-hour clock and a five-indicator wellbeing scorecard to evaluate a person’s well-being status. The 24-hour clock indicates a person’s allocation of time and activity in an average day. The well-being scorecard rates a person’s wellbeing in five aspects of material, occupational, social, community, and physical well-being on a scale of 1 (poor), 2 (sufficient), and 3 (excellent). This thesis assumes that commoners with more balanced well-being and diversified 24-hour clock are directly associated with the sustainment of urban commoning. As past empirical experience shows, being part of commmoning projects often means allocating more time to low-wage or unpaid labor dedication. Therefore, some believe that people fail to contribute to commoning because of the “reality,” meaning they are unable to commit time and energy without enough monetary or material returns. On the contrary, others argue that the social and community wellbeing generated by commoning transcends people’s material needs. The employment of the 24-hour clock and well-being scorecard in the focus case studies aims to identify the role of commoning in commoners’ everyday life. For commoning to gain depth and to sustain, must it contribute to commoners’ individual well-being? When people allocate more time in commoning activities, are certain elements of well-being respectively improved?

Figure 2.8 24-hour clock and well-being scorecard (Gibson-Graham, 2013, p.23) Ladder of citizen participation Written in 1969, the “ladder of citizen participation” is presented by Sherry Arnstein regarding citizen involvement in planning procedures in the United States. The ladder shows participation levels ranging from high to low and has been applied as a tool to reflect on the governance and micropolitics of urban commoning. We talk about general terms of “collective decision-making” or “citizen participation,” and the eight-rug ladder helps unpack the granularity of participation. Manipulation (1) and therapy (2) are bottom layers of nonparticipation, where powerholders do not truly intend to engage participants but seek to “educate” or “cure” participants. Powerholders position themselves as saviors. The middle layers of informing (3), consultation (4), and placation (5) are types of tokenism participation. Participants are allowed to hear, be heard, and advise but still passively accept arrangements of powerholders without any genuine change of power relations. On higher rungs of partnership (6), delegated power (7), and citizen control (8), participants have a key role in decision-making. Only at the topmost citizen power level, the power dynamic shifts away from the traditional way of powerholders taking the lead and towards the empowerment of the powerless (Arnstein, 2019). The upper tiers are deeper participation, as they are processes of power redistribution to the powerless (Arnstein, 2019). The sustainment of urban commoning requires higher levels of citizen participation. The ladder helps diagnose if urban commoning scales in the decision-making and participation aspect. Its juxtaposition of powerholders and the powerless can be interpreted in two ways in commoning processes. One is the relationship of power between a commoning project and the external environment. The conventional powerholders are the market and the state. As a whole, commoning is the powerless. Although commoning projects are always citizen power level initiations, they

Figure 2.9 Citizen participation ladder (1969) (Arnstein, 2019, p. 26)

still have variations in their levels of autonomy. Another interpretation of the ladder is the micro power dynamics within the commoning group itself. Different activities, programs, and their decision-making processes might involve different levels of participation. In this case, if we still have to make the juxtaposition, the powerholders are those who are already commoners, part of commoning processes, and active in shaping commoning. The powerless are those have-nots, or in Stavrides’ words, the “newcomers” (2016, p.81).

Conclusion Urban commoning is a unique type of dynamic socio-spatial practice. After reviewing existing literature, bearing the inquiry of how to design for the sustainment of urban commons in mind, there are three theoretical threads that I want to reflect upon. First, in the thread of the research on governing the natural commons, the temporal duration always stands in the center of all goals. However, as urban commoning is an emergent response to urban issues, it is established in a fairly short time, so life span is not sufficient to define its success. Therefore, our study of urban commoning cannot stay with the durability of material resources but should gravitate towards the verb — commoning, the processes and relations — to better delineate what urban commonig is. Second, urban commoning’s social, political, and spatial agency differentiate it from traditional 52

Figure 2.10 Relationship of sustainment, scaling, and institutions of expanding commoning

commons and determine the complexity in its survival to defend the right to the city and the right to green. Internal conflicts and external pressures are expected to continue threatening urban commoning’s sustainment, so preparing commoners and urban commoning projects for challenges can be a designer’s task. Lastly, the examination of institutions of the commons is essential to learn and intervene in urban commoning and maintain its functions. However, institutions of the commons can also encounter the challenge of being static and enclosed. Rather, institutions of expanding commoning that promote the fluid openness of the commons are at the heart of the sustainment of urban commoning and should be foregrounded in research (Figure 2.10). All the while, two underexplored areas are how to measure institutions of expanding commoning and how can they be designed. Focusing on these areas creates a complex discussion on what the sustainment of urban commoning is actually about and what approaches are appropriate to explore such a topic as complex and intertwined in every aspect of commoning theories and practices. Prior discussion showed the importance of scaling but did not fully address it. Traditional commons emphasizes the temporal duration and out-scaling, which are visible and measurable by existing metrics. More recent research tries to capture the up- and deep-scaling dimensions of urban commoning that are often invisible, difficult to articulate, and hard to measure. Current research on these elements is fragmented. A systematic view is needed to synthesize a framework to look into the multi-faceted institutions and scaling processes of urban commoning and connect it to practice. In this thesis, approaches and perspectives are co-formulated by multiple disciplines and practical factors that will be further explained in chapters to come. 53

Chapter 3 Design for the Sustainment, Transition, and Pluriverse

Introduction Chapter 2 provided an overview of the evolution, trends, and arguments in the area of urban commoning as well as a summary of limitations in the research of the institutional, political, and socio-spatial aspects of sustaining urban commoning. Urban commoning has rarely been placed in a design research and practice context, although the practice and thinking of design are infused everywhere in commoning. This compels us to reflect on urban commoning in a design worldview to explore potential responses to the limitations mentioned in the previous chapter. According to Herbert Simon (1969), “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situation into preferred ones…Design, so construed, is the core of all professional training: it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from the sciences” (p. 55-56). At this abstract level, it is a design proposition to sustain urban commoning and maintain its agency, so people can access the right to the city. In urban commoning, we see this proposition realized by professional designers, especially architects and urban designers who are considered design experts. In other cases, non-experts also take lead in actualizing this design proposition through their designerly thinking and actions. Therefore, design theories and methods can offer more for theorizing empirical commoning practices and distilling tacit design insights from commoning processes. On one hand, they enhance the design learning process by bringing more intentional design thinking into the understanding and analysis of commoning practices. On the other hand, the review of relevant design theories suggests pragmatic methods and frameworks for advancing the exploration of the design for the sustainment of urban commoning. Bearing these purposes in mind, this chapter first attempts to position commoning practices and this thesis’s research in the landscape of design research and practice (Section 3.1). Then, four specific design areas — design for social innovation (Section 3.2), Transition Design (Section 3.3), sustainable design (Section 3.4), and pluriverse design (Sections 3.5 and 3.6), are further introduced in relation to the research questions: how do we understand the sustainment of urban commoning as a design question? And what kind of design is needed here?

3.1 Positioning in a tri-dimensional design landscape The word “design” has many meanings. As a discipline, it can be further categorized into product design, fashion design, graphic design, service design, urban design, to name a few. As a verb, it is too broad and abstract, as it includes almost all forms of conceptions of ideas and plans (Margolin, 1989; Manzini, 2015). To situate my research question and urban commoning in design, I started to understand the landscape by asking what design is supposed to do and who are designers. Manzini’s (2015) design mode matrix (Figure 3.1) and Sanders & Stappers’ (2008) landscape map of design research and practice (Figure 3.2) are two frameworks that help navigate these questions.

Figure 3.1 Design mode map (Manzini, 2015, p. 44)

Figure 3.2 The landscape of human-centered design research and practice (Sanders & Stappers, 2008, p. 2)

Expectation of design The first dimension of a design landscape is formed through problem-solving and sense-making, which determine what design is expected to do. Departing from what design concerns with is “how things ought to be, with devising artifacts to attain goals” (Simon, 1969, p.114), Manzini (2015) unfolds two purposes of design — problem-solving and sense-making. Like all human activities intersecting both the physical and social worlds, design is meant to tackle problems at all levels in the physical world (problem-solving) and to create meaning to construct quality, value, and beauty in the social world (sense-making). Problem-solving and sense-making activities coexist, interacting with each other, but they are not “either-or” for design purposes (Manzini, 2015). They lean towards different expectations. Design as problem-solving expects the design outcome to technically function, and design as sense-making expects the outcome generate meanings and feelings (Manzini, 2015). The second dimension relates to who designers are. This dimension prompts us to think about userdesigner paradigms. Design has always been a user-centered activity, which means whether to solve problems or make sense, design has been searching for techniques and means to produce objects, communication, places, services, etc. to fulfill the needs of users (Sanders, 2002). Designers, who are professionally trained to design for users, always seem to be placed in a separate category from users. The separation forms the two poles of who designs. One end of the pole is diffuse design, in which non-experts display intuitive, natural design abilities (Manzini, 2015). The other end is expert design, in which professional designers are equipped with specific design knowledge in order to oversee the turnout of a design from a concept to a final result. Design knowledge encompasses tools to devise the turnout and design thinking, critical and constructive mindset to generate creative thoughts (Manzini, 2015). Designers’ expertise comes from their possession

of design knowledge and their ability to use it in adaptive ways as well as reproduce it in practice and research. There is an evident trend of changing the user-designer dichotomy, shifting from the user-centered mindset and approach to the participatory or co-design one that blurs the user-designer boundary (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). Design for, with, and by users Connections can be drawn between Manzini’s diffuse–expert design axis with Sanders & Stappers’ user-centered–participatory design mindsets together and identify three types of user-designer relations (Figure 3.3). User-centered design overlaps with expert design. The designer collects primary data or uses secondary resources to understand users’ needs. The designer then interprets the needs into design criteria, usually through conceptual sketches or scenarios that are subsequently turned into design outcomes. The designer may or may not further involve users for usability tests. (Sanders, 2002). In user-centered or expert design, designers’ and users’ roles are distinctly separated. Users are information suppliers, subjects to be designed for, and potential consumers of design outcomes (Sanders, 2002; 2008; Sanders & Stappers, 2008). In participatory design, users are critical components of the design process. Instead of giving information and passively accepting the design, users are partners that actively contribute to the early conceptualizing and ideating phases of design. Designers in participatory design often use certain artifacts, or generative tools, to facilitate non-designers’ engagement and prompt their thoughts. The design process thus is a collective experience of both designers and users. This is also how co-design was conceptualized as a synonym of participatory design, referring to the creativity of designers and untrained people working together to create throughout the design development process (Sanders & Stappers, 2008; Steen, 2013). As the prefix “co-” in co-design suggests, this mode of design brings users closer to designers and vice versa. Designers design with users. Diffuse design is the complete meld of designers and users. Users are designers, so design activities are conducted completely by non-designers. This category can easily be overlooked in the design discourse because, in a narrow sense, the missing of user-designer differentiation makes it meaningless to some design professionals. Diffuse design can appear to be common people’s intuitive reactions to certain problems with some demonstration of human beings’ natural creativity. However, some would argue the opposite. Design by users shows important values, as users have the best judgment in local or bespoke problems (Eason, 1995). Examples of diffuse design include grassroots groups seeking to deal with local issues and cultural and activist groups creating occasions for presentation, exchange, and debate of opinions (Manzini, 2015). In particular, diffuse design speaks most closely to what Richard Buchanan (2001) describes as design, which is “the human power of conceiving, planning, and making products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of their individual and collective purposes” (p. 9). Diffuse design has value in both informing and expanding professional design as well as cultivating design capacity in a growing public population.

Figure 3.3 Three types of designer-user relations: user-centered design, participatory design, and diffuse design (design for, with, and by users) (Based on Manzini, 2015; Sanders & Stappers, 2008)

From user-centered design, participatory design to diffuse design, we can also see the emergence of different design areas: product design, industrial design, graphic design, etc. that emphasize designing for users and the designing of products and service design, interaction design, sustainable design, etc. that focus on designing for purposes and experiences (Sanders & Stappers, 2007; Moggridge, 2007). Social design and Transition Design (section 3.2, 3.3) are pioneering to prioritize design to change values and worldviews and developing design awareness in more people. The second dimension of the design landscape, in short, helps position actors in design and domains of design practices. Design research While the previous two dimensions of the design landscape clarify design practices, the third dimension concerns design as a research field. Designers’ expertise is defined by design knowledge. Design as a practice was first conceived as the immediate actions and materiality that are associated with it. As the discipline matures, the acquisition and reproduction of design knowledge to support design practice consequently forms the notion of design research. Conventional design research is “analytic and synthetic” (Buchanan, 2001, p.14). Design research is an examination of aspects of forms, functions, materials, and methods in making and using things, followed by a synthesis of these elements in practical situations (Buchanan, 2001). The detachment of design products and methods research from their situated living contexts raises two major concerns around design research. The first is that the product is a meditation between the designers’ intent and the expectations of communities of use (Buchanan, 2001), and research on the development of those products needs to reflect the intermediary agency of design. The second concern is that design research neglects the internal influence of design on people’s interactions with their social and natural environments (Buchanan, 2001). Design research needs to investigate the design intervention’s latent impacts on human interactions and human-environment interactions. To respond to these concerns, design research is no longer a single kind of research. Sanders (2008) differentiates two prevailing approaches of design research. The research-led approach echoes Buchanan’s notion of basic theoretical research. This approach, usually through the review of literature and historical documents, constructs theoretical foundations for design activities. It is driven by other disciplines like psychology, anthropology, and sociology but also bridges design 58

Figure 3.4 Design for urban commoning and relevant fields of design on the design landscape

with other disciplines (Buchanan, 2001; Sanders, 2008). The design-led (or practice-led) approach is the learning process through doing, but it can also have multiple meanings. A single design case can inform design knowledge, so it would be design-led research. Drawing connections among many design cases and generating explanations and hypotheses for how design takes place, design reasoning and effectiveness, etc. is an even more complex design-led research approach (Buchanan, 2001). The axis of design research is a reference for both the design research of urban commoning theories and the design research process of this thesis itself. On the dimension of the expectation of design (problem-solving and sense-making), urban commoning as a design practice typically leans towards sense-making because the creation of social value and relationships are deeper motivations. Urban commoning also responds to urban issues, such as the lack of access to land, mobility, or food, so problem-solving is the secondary purpose. On the designer-user mindset dimension, urban commoning belongs in the participatory to diffuse design end. Each case of urban commoning varies in the involvement of professional designers’ contributions and how far their interventions go. However, that the designer-user relationship in urban commoning is never user-centered. Design in urban commoning is never a designated homework-like task for designers. Lastly, on the design research dimension, the research inquiry of how design can help facilitate the sustainment of urban commoning is on the practice-led side. The development of urban commoning theories largely relies on case studies and their comparisons, like the approaches used in this thesis, where research on the thesis question mainly draws from empirical studies.

Using the first two dimensions, the thesis question and relevant fields of design are placed on the matrix to illustrate their design modes alongside each other (Figure 3.4). Next, these fields are discussed in relation to the sustainment design issue of urban commoning.

3.2 Social design and design for social innovation Social design has its roots in Victor Papanek’s proposal of designers’ expertise and problem-solving obligations. In Design for the Real World, Papanek (1971) calls for designers’ social responsibilities of lending their design skills to the population that are not considered as the consumer class in the dominant commercial market (Tonkinwise, 2015a; Margolin & Margolin, 2002). Papanek’s argument raises broader concerns in seeking design programs and strategies for social needs of marginalized populations and creates the most widely acknowledged notion of “social design:” design to improve the quality of life of those who are left out by the market economy (Papanek, 1971; Tonkinwise, 2015a). He criticizes that design of new products or services only occurs under market pressure instead of resulting from genuine design research innovation or responses to real needs. Thus, designers only design for a small number of people who comprise only the tip of a pyramid. Marginalized populations, particularly the population in developing countries, the aged, the poor, and the disabled, cannot afford products and solutions that the market offers, but they also have their own needs that are worth designers’ attention and help. Papanek sets up a binary opposition between the “market model” and the “social model” of design where the commercial market is dedicated to the mass production and the creation of excessive materials while social designers have to operate outside the mainstream market (Margolin & Margolin, 2002). However, this proposition is arbitrary, as many design products within the market model do meet social needs. Furthermore, isolating social designers’ field of operation ignores the fact that there are many non-design professionals who have the same goal as designers to take on social responsibilities in their work. Social designers can find many partners to ally with in addressing social issues. Instead of putting social design and the “market model” of design on the opposition and limiting social design’s scope, the more central problem for social design is the lack of thought given to its specific objectives and structure (Margolin & Margolin, 2002). In another word, the problem is what kind of sociality it carries. “Social” in social design is not simply the social context of design activities. Rather, Cameron Tonkinwise (2015) characterizes social design with regard to various aspects. He summarizes that, Social designing is more than remedial. It…concerns unmet needs and affords significant social change. Its outcomes must be substantial socio-technical innovations. These are political acts, but ones that make use of design’s particular transdisciplinary research-led expertise with respect to the socio-material. (p. 9)

Overlapping with Papanek’s idea, Tonkinwise emphasizes that the objective of social design is to serve the needs of communities’ well-being that are not provided by the market or governmental services. He also connects social design back to the material and technical functions of design. Designed material things are the force to promote and shape certain ways of living, working, and interacting, thereby they are socio-materials. That is to say, the material, purpose, and technical function of social design are all socially contextualized. Social design is a collaborative social practice that affirms that social designers need allies, like material suppliers, manufacturers, markets and retailers, regulatory agencies, and legal counsels. Whether designers are in the leading position or as consultants in non-designer-led social design, because of new social challenges in social design, designers’ expertise has great value in bringing the collaborative team together. Moreover, designers have the advantage in their attentiveness to the socio-material and socio-technical aspects of social issues that are not available from other disciplines or experts of anthropology, philosophy, and sociology (Tonkinwise, 2015a). The complexity within social design suggests an even larger objective for social design is to be a transformative force and approach. In most design literature, social design is still regarded as a complement to other social professions and is often criticized as the “charity mode” of design (Manzini, 2015, p.65). Margolin & Margolin (2002) point out a major reason that social design fails to achieve greater impact is that little research demonstrates designers’ contribution to human well-being. Methods of survey, interview, archival data analysis, participatory observation, and case studies are suggested for designers to enter social settings (Margolin & Margolin, 2002). The ambition to expand social design into a new, distinct design-led transdisciplinary area does exit, which consists of designing for the wellbeing of the underserved population and constructing a taxonomy of new design typologies and designers’ agency (Tonkinwise, 2015a; Margolin & Margolin, 2002). This ambition is most notable in the rising field of design for social innovation. Both inside and outside the market economy, emerging design practices and research are more concerned with the topics of social and environmental sustainability (Chick & Micklethwaite, 2011; Chick, 2012). This agenda partially takes on the social design responsibility but aims at a more far-reaching design paradigm change — a design for social innovation. Design for social innovations may sound very familiar as an extension of the notion of social design. For Murry et al. (2010), innovation is “explicitly for the social and public good. It is innovation inspired by the desire to meet social needs which can be neglected by traditional forms of private market provision, and which have often been poorly served or unresolved by services organized by the state” (p. 10). Social innovation is defined as new approaches to social issues that are more efficient, effective, and sustainable than existing ones (Phills et al., 2008; Yang & Sung, 2016). The present mainstream understanding of wellbeing is based on the product-based consumption culture, which is fueled by profit-oriented design products. Therefore, design for social innovation is needed to move from the current unsustainable models of design to new, sustainable ones, to shift from

the product- and consumption-defined wellbeing to a social and environmental constructed one. Manzini (2015) argues that design for social innovation is not a complementary activity but rather can be a new paradigm, where design may provide a set of skills, tools, and methods to guide people to new socially innovative solutions or to the improvement of current ones (Brooks, 2011; Hillgren et al., 2011; Chick, 2012). In the development of the theory and practices of design for social innovation, cases of initiatives that adopt innovative sustainable ways of living are analyzed to form the understanding of the design for social innovation. Results of social innovation design turn out to be diversified, ranging from new products and services that resemble conventional design creations in some way (Murray et al, 2010) to a radically different principle, idea, social movement, intervention, or some combination of these possibilities (Bjögvinsson et al, 2012; Design Council, 2010; Chick, 2012). Chick (2012) categorizes the wide range of social innovations into three types according to their scales and structures, which can be put into a conversation with Manzini’s (2014) definition of social innovative events with the top-down and bottom-up polarities. Grassroots social innovation is from the bottom-up; it is often realized by local communities, directed towards vulnerable groups, and responding to social demands that are not addressed by the market and the state. Organizational social innovations have more structured organizations to respond to broader levels of societal challenges, i.e., Action Against Hunger and the Red Cross. In Chick’s definition, organizational social innovations seem to be civic and humanitarian organizations. They are regarded as top-down social innovations according to Manzini because the distribution of resources and the decisions about strategies come from the organizational level and trickle down to individuals. Lastly, systemic social innovations are referred to as large-scale social changes that are often initiated by institutions and play a part in reshaping fundamental changes in attitudes and values, strategies and policies, and organizational structures and processes (Chick, 2012). Systemic social innovations are difficult to be placed on the exact end of the top-down and bottom-up pole. According to Manzini (2014), regardless of the initiation process of systemic social innovations, their long-term existence and the achievement of systemic impacts always depend on complex collaborations. These collaborations form a hybrid mode that is a combination of top-down and bottom-up processes for social innovation. We can conclude that urban commoning is a social innovation process by seeing the overlap in definitions and general practice outcomes. Commoning practices and cases mentioned in this thesis can all be taken as examples of social innovations. In lieu of explaining specific examples, the concern should be what is the role that design plays in all these social innovations, including urban commoning. First, social innovation processes can have deliberate design interventions. Biggs et al. (2010) propose two main phases in the social innovation process. The bricolage phase refers to the ideation and the integration of new ideas with realistic conditions. The contagion phase is the process of adoption and diffusion as well as continuous improvement and re-innovation after

initiating new solutions. Most design researchers perceive that the design process is only integrated into the ideation of the bricolage phase (Yang & Sung, 2016). However, this perception remains trapped by “post-it” design culture, a practice where designers ask other actors’ opinions and hopes, document them on post-its, and synthesize the ideas into design proposals (Manzini, 2015). If the outcomes of design for social innovations need time for the contagion phase (unlike conventional design where people see the immediate payoff), we cannot assert that the continuous development of social innovations will not need design assistance. Therefore, design interventions can exist in all phases of social innovation and their existence might take different shapes in different phases. Second, social innovations are discrete points and need design to connect the dots. Social innovation events, especially grassroots ones, have previously been generated by different people with various motivations (Manzini, 2007). Each case emerges in very specific conditions and involves different actors, including designers. Although individual cases have similarities in thinking and acting outside of conventional problem-solving, they still work on their own. For design, caseby-case intervention is feasible but not enough. If social innovations remain dispersed, systemic innovations can hardly be achieved. The shift of fundamental and structural social issues requires connecting those dispersed cases. For design for social innovation to become a systematic design approach, it also requires design to act as the connector among dispersed cases. In Manzini’s (2007; 2014; 2015) publications over the past decade, he has never stopped proposing the multilocal society and the network-based social innovation system. He believes that social innovation events are now only slightly overlapping but will converge, collaborate, and reinforce each other and ultimately form a complex network (Manzini, 2007;2014). Following this train of thought, the network of social innovation is very rare because of the lack of conditions and tools that can promote the convergence, collaboration, and reinforcement. This is exactly where design will be of great use. Designers’ experience of working with interdisciplinary teams and translating ideas and conversations can be utilized to weave social innovation cases into a network of collective social demands. Third, social innovation requires design researchers to expand their capacity. As design for social innovation gains growing momentum, research on how to enhance processes and practice to design for social innovation demand more attention. Design research for social innovation has two essential purposes that lead to different designers’ positions and interventions in social innovation design processes. The first type of research aims to find existing and promising social innovations, learn from their practices, and gain substantial design insights (Tonkinwise, 2015a). This type of research can be used to form guides for ordinary people that want to design by themselves, to direct design interventions that can help existing cases to be more effective and durable, or to find common ground with existing cases and inform the construction of larger networks. The second type of research aims to identify and test design procedures, methods, and tools that are used to deal with social innovation cases. To be more specific, this type of research is likely to have suggestions for what skills or toolkits are most suitable in a co-design workshop for a social

innovation project. The former begins with non-design processes and is a theoretical translation through designers’ eyes. The latter begins with designers’ existing tools and adaptations then experiments in the social innovation subject. Both contribute to understanding social innovation design and supporting design for social innovation; in practice, they are valuable for challenging problems in different stages of social innovation. The inquiry in this thesis of urban commoning as an emerging social innovation system belongs to the first type of research. Specifically, inspired by Eric von Hippel’s (2005) idea of “lead users” in co-design activities, the case studies of two focus urban commoning projects in this thesis are to learn from lead users of commoning and urban farms and gardens, people who have previously explored innovative ways to sustain their commoning practices and who are willing to share their approaches with others. To be more precise, the research on two focus case studies, unpacks their innovative and informative aspects, attempts to generate a sustaining scenario based on scaling dimensions, and explores ways of theorizing innovative solutions to sustain themselves as references for the future sustainment design of urban commoning.

3.3 Transition Design Transition Design is conceived of as a new area of design that pushes design for social innovation further regarding the time scale, depth of engagement, and complexity of design contexts (Irwin, 2015; Tonkinwise, 2015b). Design for social innovation challenges existing socio-political and economic paradigms and designs “with and for emerging paradigms and alternative economic models leading to positive and more sustainable social change” (Irwin et al., 2020b, p. 24). The proposition of Transition Design is “the design of and within radically new paradigms” that both challenges existing paradigms and envisions new ones (Irwin et al., 2020a, p. 24). It is a progressive and proactive proposition because it both proposes new ways of design practices and argues for radical structural changes in design research and design pedagogy. Transition Design is based on the context of transitions in human societies. As the number of ecological and social crises continues to rise, people will urgently and inevitably need to transition from the old models of the society that are compromised to ideologies of industrialism, capitalism, modernity etc., to sustainable, equitable, and desirable futures (Escobar, 2018; Irwin et al., 2015). Transition is omnipresent in our lives but mostly unintentional and spontaneous, and we have no concern or no control of the transitional directions. Transition Design clearly argues that if we are to pursue a transition towards desirable futures, we need intentional and systematic design interventions in navigating the transition trajectories (Transition Design Seminar, 2021). The mission for Transition Design to catalyze such design-led societal changes is stated in detail as follows (Irwin et al., 2015, p.3): · Uses living systems theory as an approach to understanding/addressing wicked problems. 64

· Designs solutions that protect and restore both social and natural ecosystems. · Sees everyday life/lifestyles as the most fundamental context for design. · Advocates place-based, globally networked solutions. · Designs solutions for varying horizons of time and multiple levels of scale. · Links existing solutions so that they become steps in a larger transition vision. · Amplifies emergent, grassroots solutions. · Bases solutions on maximizing satisfiers for the widest range of needs. · Sees the designer’s own mindset/posture as an essential component of the design process. · Calls for the reintegration and recontextualization of diverse transdisciplinary knowledge.

Figure 3.5 Transition Design framework (Transition Design Seminar, 2021)

Corresponding to these points, a framework is developed around four core knowledge and skillset areas (Figure 3.5). The first area of “vision for transition” concerns the long-term horizon of design. This area is developed using approaches such as scenario development, future-casting, and speculative design. Visioning in the Transition Design framework is not about creating unrealistic fantasies. With the help of these visioning tools and methods, this area intends to facilitate discussions and debates about alternative futures (Dunne & Raby, 2013). Having a long-term vision is the cornerstone to plan for intermediate steps between the present and the future. “Theories of change” encompasses a variety of theories and methodologies from ecology, life science, policy, sociology, etc. This area centers around the understanding and explanation of dynamics and complexity of systems. It constitutes the core knowledge generation area of the Transition Design framework; challenges designers’ linear cause-effect design thinking; reflects on various scales of design problems; and values histories, non-human systems, and ideas from nonexperts. Living systems theory, wicked problems, needs and satisfiers, multi-level perspective, and socio-technical transition are key theories espoused by this area. Living systems theory elucidates the self-organization mechanism of living natural and social systems (Capra & Luisi, 2016). Wicked problems are complicated multifaceted problems that have no single solution, such as systematic racism, global warming, and food insecurity (Irwin, 2012; Buchanan, 1992). Needs and satisfiers theory, multi-level perspective, and socio-technical transition inspire most of the overarching theoretical framework of this thesis. Both multi-level perspective and sociotechnical transition theories are formulated by Geels & Schot (2007), which capture analytical concepts of innovative events and transitions across niche (micro), regime (meso), and landscape (macro) levels. In Transition Design research, multi-level perspective mapping is used to analyze the historical evolution of wicked problems and identify transitional trends. Multi-level perspective and socio-technical transition construct a systematic structure for the research of urban commoning since they capture all scales of an organization while most existing research on urban commoning only focuses on the self-level. The analysis from micro, meso, and macro levels makes up the preliminary understanding of the focus case studies in Chapters 6 and 7. Absorbed into Transition Design theories, Economist Max-Neef’s (1991; 2007) theory of human needs and satisfiers postulates that fundamental human needs are finite, classifiable, and universal, but the means by which the needs are satisfied are diverse. He classifies universal needs into nine categories, including subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity, and freedom (Table 3.1). Human behaviors are driven by these needs. These nine categories also range from basic to deep needs. Relationships between needs and satisfiers are not linear. Needs can be met by singular or multiple satisfiers, and conversely, one satisfier can contribute to one need or multiple needs at the same time. Max-Neef differentiates satisfiers into exogenous and endogenous ones. Exogenous satisfiers are imposed, induced, ritualized, or institutionalized from the top by the external society. The consumerism culture is a typical exogenous satisfier generator, in which case, people are encouraged to purchase merchandise

to satisfy the need for subsistence. Conversely, endogenous satisfiers arise from the bottom. At a local and community level, they result from self-reliance activities and common volitions. Table 3.1 Matrix of needs and satisfiers (Max Neef, 2007, p.206-207) Fundamental Being Human Needs (qualities)

Having (things)

Doing (actions)

Interacting (settings)

subsistence

physical and mental health

food, shelter, work

feed, clothe, rest, work

living environment, social setting

protection

care, adaptability, autonomy

social security, health systems, work

co-operate, plan, take care of, help

social environment, dwellings

affection

respect, sense of humor, generosity, sensuality

friendships, family, relationships with nature

share, take care of, express emotions, love

privacy, intimate spaces of togetherness

literature, teachers, educational policies

analyze, study, meditate investigate

schools, families universities, communities

critical understanding capacity, curiosity, intuition

participation

receptiveness, dedication, sense of humor

responsibilities, duties, work, rights

cooperate, dissent, express opinions

associations, parties, churches, neighborhoods

leisure

imagination, tranquility, spontaneity

games, parties, peace of mind

daydream, remember, relax, have fun

landscapes, intimate spaces, places to be alone

creation

imagination, boldness, inventiveness, curiosity

abilities, skills, work, techniques

invent, build, design, work, compose, interpret

spaces for expression, workshops, audiences

identity

sense of belonging, selfesteem, consistency

language, religions, work, customs, values, norms

get to know oneself, grow, commit oneself

places one belongs to, everyday settings

freedom

autonomy, passion, selfequal rights esteem, open-mindedness

dissent, choose, run risks, develop awareness

anywhere

The incorporation of the theory of needs and satisfiers is valuable to understand the sustainment of urban commoning because of two reasons. First, the matrix helps interpret commoners’ behaviors and material exchanges from the surface to deeper layers of needs and satisfiers. Second, the schema can put overall aims of a commoning project in conversation with individuals’ reflection on their participation. Simply put, this theory allows us to ask — what are needs that a commoning project intends to satisfy? What satisfiers are intentionally facilitated to meet these needs, and how are they facilitated? Are there examples of synergic or endogenous satisfiers? Are there needs that are not satisfied that potentially need design intervention? The “mindset and posture” area deals with the dualistic mindsets imprinted in our minds (i.e., the individual versus the communal, the private versus the public, and ally versus enemy), as designers or individuals in the world (du Plessis, 2015; Escobar, 2018). The argument is that to transform the external world, we need to start with the internal world. If designers do not shift their mindsets to embrace relational thinking in design processes, it is impossible to imagine non-linear solutions. For individuals or any kind of community, if people remain thinking in inherent ways, they keep acting as if there are no alternatives. The importance of shifting mindset and posture is evident. However, individual and collective mindsets such as beliefs, values, and ethics, are invisible and hard to change, so people must work harder to intervene in their ways of seeing and thinking. Du Plessis (2015) shares the techniques of intentionally engaging design students with reading materials, reflective journal activities, visualization tasks, and improvisational exercises to encourage new ways of seeing and reflecting upon the world in the design studio environment. “Real change is not a choice. It is an outcome of a process” (p. 8). Catalysts like theoretical reflections and prompt exercises are a good start but must be complemented with continuous practice, which requires the development of a set of soft skills, including openness to new things, willingness to feel discomfort, awareness for our inner world, objectivity in understanding our thoughts, and courage to try new things (du Plessis, 2015). This thesis embodies the plural posture towards the practices of commoning and argues the shift of mindset (deep-scaling) provides the fundamental support for the sustainment of urban commoning. The connections between this research with the “mindset and posture” area are further illustrated in Sections 3.5, 3.6, and 8.6.2. Arising from the previous three areas, the fourth area of “new ways of designing” contributes to the reflection of design and designers’ roles. Transition designers have several distinct abilities. Instead of looking for solutions, transition designers look for the ecology of solutions (Transition Design Seminar, 2021), which means the design might be artifacts, built structures, graphics, services, interactions or visions, narratives, behavioral exercises, workshop flows, etc., a combination of several things, or a switch from one to another along the transition pathway. Other roles of transition designers are similar to designers for social innovation, such as the connector (creating connections among actors, projects, and scales), the gardener (fostering the growth of pioneer ideas, leaders, and projects), and the questioner (facilitating dialogues around problems of interest). The most demanding role of transition designers is the “acupuncturist.” Like Chinese medicine acupuncturists know the spot to prick in order to cure an illness, transition designers

are responsible for identifying leverage points that will shift the system towards desirable futures. This ability requires the master of the transition trajectory and farsighted prediction of futures. So far, the application of the Transition Design framework is in two settings. One is as a service provided to interested organizations, companies, governmental institutions, and school programs. In this setting, the design team leads a series of workshops where all participants are guided to investigate a designated wicked problem through the framework. Another setting that Transition Design is operating within is in design pedagogy. Since 2015, Transition Design was integrated into all design programs in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Design for the interactions between people (the social world), the built world, and the environment (natural world) becomes the overarching theme for all levels of design studies and programs in the school (Irwin et al., 2020a). Since I am part of the Transition Design PhD program, this thesis incorporates theories from the Transition Design framework, including needs and satisfiers, multi-level perspective, and socio-technical transition, to shape the overall theoretical framework and realize certain aspects of the sustainment analysis. In turn, this research’s outcomes contribute to the “theories of change,” “mindset and posture,” and “new ways of designing” areas of the Transition Design framework.

3.4 Sustainable design and the Sustainment The notion of sustainability is commonly known as the Brundtland definition of sustainable development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Bruntland et al., 1990). The primary tension in sustainable development is between human society’s economic growth and the earth’s preservation (Chick, 2012). Ecological sustainability has been at the forefront of the discourse of sustainable development. For a very long time, the field of “sustainable design” (or “design for sustainability”) was dominated by the bio-physical environment issues of design and had little discussion of the human dimension (Chick & Micklethwaite, 2011; Fuad-Luke, 2009). Buchanan (2001) notes that the first three orders of design — communication design (graphic design, editorial design, etc.), industrial design (product design, furniture design, etc.), and environmental design (interior design, architecture, etc.) — focus on either symbols and things that are visual and material, or they prioritize products, actions, and environments. Arguably, the first three orders of design are all, to some extent, sensible to issues of sustainability, but their approaches are still external and material-based. Out of concern that the first three orders of design lack the sensitivity to human beings’ relationships with each other through the mediation of design products, the fourth and fifth orders of design arise in response. Composed of service design and interaction design, the fourth order of design aims at addressing non-material products and human experiences (Buchanan, 2001). Meanwhile, another aspect that was negated in all four orders is human beings’ relationhip with the world and being in the world as well as the cultural, social, political interactions that design can mediate. The notion of “social sustainability” gains increasing attention, alongside the so-called fifth order of 69

design — system design (Transition Design, design for social interaction, policy design, etc.) (Garcia i Mateu, 2015). The widely accepted concept of “social sustainability” is based on the triad venn diagram of sustainable development (also known as the three pillars of sustainable development), compromising of the environment (planet), the economic (profit), and the social (people). In this model, social sustainability touches on issues, like social equity, human rights, place-making, social justice, community development, workers’ rights, etc. While previous discourse on sustainability leverages economic development and environmental protection, the triad model advocates for the equal importance of the sustained existence of human societies’ cultural, intellectual, emotional, moral, and spiritual diversities (UNESCO, 2017). The fourth and fifth orders of design broaden the sustainable design discourse from “product-based wellbeing solutions” to the “quality of our contexts for living” (Thorpe, 2007, p.11; Chick, 2012). More pillars, like politics, culture, and technology, have been added to the model, which makes sustainable development become an exploited concept. The exploitation is displayed in its encapsulation of almost all aspects of our society. The complexity of sustainability makes it a global-level wicked problem and overwhelmingly hard to resolve. On the contrary, “sustainability” can also be reduced to a very general issue (Chick & Micklethwaite, 2011). It can be employed as an overarching principle, strategy, slogan, or goal but completely lost in action. Meanwhile, all expanding models of sustainability are to some degree anthropocentric (human-centered). The basic premise of sustainable development is always that people having greater power in deciding the form of the environment. It seems impossible for people to get away from the position of “managing” the earth and all aspects thereof (Chick & Micklethwaite, 2011; Fry, 2009). The destruction of our common future (defuture) is recognized as a result of human beings’ “sustainable” management of the earth by a growing population in design. We are at a point that sustainable design is no longer an issue of designing for sustainability but more of designing against accelerating unsustainability (Fry, 2009). The sustainable design crisis is the “defuturing condition of unsustainability” (p. 2). To design against the defuturing condition of unsustainability, Escobar (2018) claims that there are two directions to be taken into account: 1) learning from nature’s selfsustainment and 2) radical changes of design practices and the reinvention of technology’s role. In alignment with the first direction, Capra (2005) proposes that sustainable design for human societies should learn from and be modeled after nature’s ecosystems instead of taking a superior position to “manage” natural systems. Ways to integrate human needs and the needs of natural systems must be built on learning from billions of years of nature’s self-design (Escobar, 2018). This awareness is the vanguard in natural science and indigenous cultures but has failed to truly grasp the attention of mainstream culture and design. By learning how nature (living systems) sustains life, humans can learn patterns and processes to inform design for a sustainable human society. Capra summarizes eight principles of sustainability derived from nature — “networks,” “nested systems,” “interdependence,” “diversity,” “cycles,” “flows,” “development (meaning changing or having successive phases),” and “dynamic balances” (2004, p. 254). These principles

can all be observed in urban commoning. To be specific, “flows,” “development,” and “dynamic balances” speak to Stavrides’ notion of expanding institutions and being porous. “Nested systems” echoes Ostrom’s last CPR management principle “nested enterprises,” which both refer to the multiple levels of interconnected networks. Of course, there are human consciousness and culture that cannot be learned from the language of nature. What Capra suggests is both learning from nature’s perspective for sustainable design and incorporating such learning into education, which implies a fundamental change of design, design thinking and design education. Regarding the second direction, sustainable design is believed to be an ontological and behavioral issue rather than a problem of technology or materiality (Chapman, 2009; Fry, 2009). Fry (2009) makes two claims for sustainable design in Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practices. First, sustainability needs to jump out of the bio-centric notion and consider the natural, artificial, and mind together. Second, sustainability (whether ecological or economic), to a large degree, depends on socio-political orders. Thus, future design no longer asks the “how-to” question. There are no straightforward sets of procedures to design with. Instead, design needs an ontological shift to become a pathfinding means to sustain action countering the unsustainability in order to create viable futures. His concrete suggestions for the pathfinding journey are to stop working within the closed design discipline and to recognize the pluralization and complexity of the design profession and design processes. To promote the idea of a shift of design, Fry emphasizes a shift of the design language and concepts. He proposes the concept of “the Sustainment” as a progressive status in comparison to the environmentally focused and rhetorically exploited concept of “sustainability”. Fry (2009) writes: The sustainment is not a fixed state; rather the reverse is the case. It is the arrival of a moment of continual material and cultural change to keep what sustains in dominance. Supported by all modes of sustain-ability, as they negate unsustainability in its existing and emergent forms, the Sustainment requires a continual identification of what needs to be destroyed or changed. Thereafter, such identification has to give way to forms of appropriate sustainable action across every dimension of the common and situated differences of our existence (for example, our relations of material and interpersonal exchange; what we make, how we make it and from what; the way we live and organize our ways of life; what we value; how we treat each other collectively at every level from the local to the international). The Sustainment has to be sought, circumstantially, in many different ways, be they in the face of the varied manifestations of environmental and atmospheric damage, conflict and inequity. (p.45) The notion of “the Sustainment” represents the plural and redirective future of design. It aligns with the sustainment of urban commoning, which involves sustainable actions that are beyond material preservation and temporal longevity and engage with the reproduction of relations, values, and politics.

In parallel, new ways of designing for “the Sustainment” are defined as “redirective design” (or “design as redirective practice”). Precisely, redirective design is an ethical and conceptual basis to be embedded in all design thinking, process, and practice, encompassing three moves (Fry, 2007). The first move is to reflect and gain an historical understanding of what has structured one’s practice and oneself as a designing subject. Informed by the first move, the second move is to start to redirect one’s existing practice towards a continuous engagement with the immediacy of one’s omnipresent habitus that had always structured the material and immaterial unsustainability. The third move is to expand one’s redirected practice into the broader engagement with the world in which one designs with specifically directed transformative intent. Although redirective design seems like an abstract concept, the emerging design for emotional durability practice and research provides some clarification. Chapman (2009; 2015), speaking about emotional durable design, is in concert with Fry’s point, saying that we need “a more nuanced sustainable design culture” that fundamentally questions the meanings, behaviors, and ethics behind patterns of product design and the consumption and waste of products. Emotional durable design begins to give form to the redirective moves by first extrapolating the pathology in the commercial model of design, manufacturing, and consumption processes of domestic electronic products. Three major factors have historically structured the practices of product design (the first move): commercial interests leading to the deliberate shortening of product lifespan, the lack of legislative action to interrupt the unhealthy production and consumption circle, and consumers’ missing ecological awareness and emotional attachment to products (Chapman, 2009). Based on the first move, one root problem gains redirective attention — even materially sustainable products often neglect the importance of establishing emotional durability, known as sustainable user-product relations. The absence of products’ emotional longevity perpetuates most users’ omnipresent habitus, so the second move for emotional durable design is to bring consciousness into working methods, design frameworks, and tools in product design processes to facilitate emotionally durable characteristics (Chapman, 2009). Lastly, an experiential framework of user-product emotional themes enables a more tangible and holistic understanding of design for durability and offers a vocabulary for those immaterial qualities (Chapman, 2009). The framework is the third move in Fry’s notion, as it intends to bring redirective emotional durable design into the broader product design area and the world, where products and users are incapable of having sustaining relationships. This example of emotionally durable design suggests that the design of “things” is redirected to the psychological well-being and human experience through formed relationships with artefacts (Thorpe 2007; Chapman 2009; Vissonova 2018). There are two reasons to discuss design for sustainability. The first is to understand urban commoning’s contribution to sustainability. The second is to clarify what kind of sustainability and design for sustainability are there in the question of “how to design for the sustainment of urban commoning.” On the one hand, urban commoning arises in response to imbalanced developments and various crises. Its contribution to urban sustainability has been mentioned in

the previous chapter. To reiterate, the basic commoning characteristic of sharing resources is a direct practice that reacts to both environmental and social sustainability. Some practices or rules of commoning also incorporate nature’s ways of sustaining. As a collective type of social practice, commoning overall is reactive and redirective to “the Sustainment” of systems like housing, food, water, open spaces, etc. The “sustainment” in the question of “how to design for the sustainment of urban commoning” intersects with Fry’s “the Sustainment,” as it encapsulates the process of assessing and improving commoning’s ability to preserve its function and value under continuous operation, maintenance, and unexpected changes (Sutton, 2004). “The Sustainment” also relates to how commoners organize their ways of sharing, collaborating, and negotiating. In this case, “how to design for the sustainment of urban commoning” is a redirective design question that is not likely to find a procedural or instrumental solution.

3.5 Pluriverse, many worlds of commoning Even though one cannot avoid being introduced to the commons from the Western definition, history, and precedents, the commons discourse and the design for the commons must embrace other histories, cultures, and practices. Commoning has typically emphasized its European origin and the following evolution with the enclosure, but the Anglo-Saxon notion of commoning is only one aspect of it. Commoning cannot be contained within its dominant worldview because it is about negotiating differences among individuals and marginalized alternatives from the dominant public and private systems. Otherwise, the enclosure of commoning is extended to the discourse and practices by limiting the understanding of them to a specific and homogeneous historical context. Such understanding requires attention to a pluriverse of commoning. Articulated by Colombian American anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2018) and based on the anti-globalization group Zapatista’s definition, a pluriverse is “a world where many worlds fit” (p. 23). Law (2011) points out that these different worlds are not simply different understandings, perceptions, or epistemologies that people have. Moreover, there are different realities being done in different practices. In the realm of commoning, it is not merely about what researchers or general people believe about commoning but rather how practices are realized differently, thus creating ontologically different worlds of commoning. Juxtaposing terms like “Western” versus “Eastern,” “global north” versus “global south,” and “developed countries” versus “developing countries” further define a Western centered world. It needs some clarification that in this thesis, I still using terms like “Western,” “Anglo-Saxon,” and “Europe and the U.S.” to refer to abstract geographic areas, but from a pluriverse standpoint, the dichotomy of such is either geographically inaccurate or blindly focuses on economic metrics (Onafuwa, 2018). Whenever it is possible, I shall refer to specific countries or places to sidestep such generalizations.

The developing literature about pluriverse and its interplay with world-making and design indicates that having a plural perspective in commoning is important in this thesis for a variety of reasons. First, the consideration of other worlds of commoning requires a search for case studies and theories from non-Western territories. Commoning practices have always existed in non-Western contexts, have more profound historical impacts, and can provide highly localized wisdom for commoning practices nowadays. Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh by Helena NorbergHodge (2016) describes closely knit communities in Ladakh, their local economies, and social networks. Before the invasion of Western cultures, economies, and technologies, the coexistence of people and the environment overrode other considerations. “It was more important to keep good relations with your neighbor than to earn some money,” Norberg-Hodge notes (2016, p. 46). The Ladakh people had a commoning-based community for over a thousand years. Similarly, Law (2011) shares the story of the Australian aboriginal people’s relationship with the land. Aboriginal cosmology does not see the world as surfaces, volumes, or spaces to be occupied. The world for Aboriginal people is for continuing creation, where all features and creatures in the world are only participants of the creation. Not taking ownership of land or any other natural resource is their commoning practice that is ontologically different from the presumption in traditional European commons’ definition of a group of people sharing a resource. Although it is most often presumed that the land is owned by people in modern urban contexts, the existence of other worlds of commoning, like the ancient Ladakh and Australian Aborigines, challenges us to reconsider the Western privilege of ownership. Section 3.6 presents An Atlas of Commoning and A Dialogue Must Take Place, Precisely Because We Don’t Speak the Same Language, exhibitions that contain urban commoning projects around the world and pluriversal epistemologies of commoning. The pluriverse view also demonstrates the necessity to rethink the criteria we use to measure the sustainment of commoning. One reason that I choose “sustainment” as the terminology to portray a desirable status of commoning instead of using “growth,” “success.” or “development” is because how these terms can immediately be related to the Western one-world doctrines of capitalism, exploitation of labor and resources, and dominate measurement of economic growth. “Growth,” “success,” or “development” can easily be co-opted. Chrono-politically, they remind people of the advancement forward; geopolitically, they are drawn equally to leading developed nations; socio-politically, they are associated with the measurement of gross domestic product (GDP); and actor-wise, they privilege experts of governments and multinational businesses (Sachs, 2019). On the contrary, sustainment, or “the Sustainment,” touches upon vital non-economic progress of environmental sustainability, social equity, and social ecologies (Fry, 2017). By implication, the sustainment of urban commoning involves its economic, social, cultural, and psychological aspects and shows clarity of the unsustainability of its counter directions of privatized or state-controlled urban practices. These one-world doctrines have been deeply embedded for centuries through colonization, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization. If we consider commoning as an alternative, we need to challenge the old criteria and be prepared for the discomfort it causes. This becomes less of a geographic problem, but to evaluate the sustainment of urban commoning, regardless of in Western or non-Western countries, we need to adopt, contest, and be selective

with the established measurements of the success of commoning. Design for the sustainment of commoning calls for a plural design thinking, meaning this specific design question is a context and place-based question (Escobar, 2018). Previous design practices that have been taken for granted need to be subverted. Expert knowledge and modern institutions have defined heteronomous design processes, which suppress the generation of social norms from the autonomous design of local communities (Escobar, 2018). Autonomous design, in Escobar’s notion, is an ontological coaching where design eventually comes from communities, themselves. Every community has its design practices, and designers’ intervention only provides more alternatives for autonomy for being in the world. “We design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us” (Willlis, 2006, p. 80). This “design designs” fact raises the question of if trained designers design commoning, let commoning shape commoners, and hope for the best for its sustainment, what is the difference between the design for urban commoning and the heteronomous model of design? Thus, what design for sustaining urban commoning needs is a radically different way of designing; it requires a shift from mindless development to design mindfulness, from object-centered design to human and experience-centered design, from “dumb design” to “just design,” from problem-solving to process-enabling. This shift connects back to design for social innovation, Transition Design, and sustainable design theories and is articulated in fields of autonomous design (Escobar, 2018), diffuse design (Manzini, 2015), and redirective design (Fry, 2009). The shift specifically speaks to the concern of how to avoid having designers impose a world on commoners during the design process, whether there is a type of design that consciously allows the taking-back of design by commoners, and whether a more neutral place exists where design would not endanger the autonomy of the commons and support its survival and flourish. My preliminary assumption is that the leverage point needs a case-to-case exploration and would require a transition for designers to become commoners or commoners’ acquisition of design thinking and design tools. The case studies in Chapters 6 and 7 also try to find case-based evidence for those questions.

3.6 The pluriverse of urban commoning by two exhibition projects This section reflects on two exhibition projects that I was part of during the Ph.D. study — the traveling exhibition An Atlas of Commoning and the digital exhibition A Dialogue Must Take Place, Precisely Because We Don’t Speak the Same Language. They present plural commoning practices and epistemologies around the world. In this section, both exhibitions’ backgrounds and outcomes are introduced, followed by reflections on the processes, insights and connections to this thesis.

3.6.1 An Atlas of Commoning Aspiring to reclaim and redefine the notion of urban commoning as self-organized spaces and practices to share material and immaterial resources, An Atlas of Commoning is an assemblage of case studies that capture commoning principles and spatial qualities in various cultural contexts (Gruber & Ngo, 2018; Gruber, 2019). It is a research-based project that challenges current social, ecological, and political structures and looks for alternative ways to manage shared resources in a collaborative and diverse manner (ARCH+ Verlag GmbH, & ifa e.V., Stuttgart, 2018). The atlas of case studies is a part of the traveling exhibition organized by the ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Germany Institute for Foreign Relations) in collaboration with ARCH+ (leading architecture magazine). The Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture is a research partner in this project. The exhibition opened in Berlin in June 2018. The second stop, as well as the world premiere, was in Pittsburgh, USA. in July 2019 (Figure 3.6). The inaugural exhibition included twenty-five case studies. Eight more local Pittsburgh cases were added to the Pittsburgh edition. In the initial ideation phase, I was a research assistant who gathered basic information of prospective case studies and iterated visual representations. In the Pittsburgh edition of the exhibition, I was also an exhibition assistant who reviewed and revised case studies and assisted in setting up the physical space of the exhibition. In total, I researched and produced six case studies that are exhibited in the atlas: R-Urban in France, City in the Making in the Netherlands, Roofless in Palestine, Western Sahara in the Democratic Arab Republic of Sahara, Zwicky Süd in Switzerland, and City of Asylum in the U.S. All cases studies in the atlas were categorized into three thematic areas, namely access — ownership, production — reproduction, and solidarity — rights. Access — ownership speaks to commoning as an alternative way of accessing resources beyond public and private ownership, represented in the instances of cooperative housing and self-organized communities. Production — reproduction calls for consideration of all forms of labor— waged and unwaged, visible and invisible, productive and reproductive, monetary and informal, etc. (Gruber & Ngo, 2018; GibsonGraham, 2013). Practices like farming in community gardens, women’s domestic housekeeping, and mutual support in the community are included in this theme. Lastly, solidarity — rights implies that the governance of a community should not be defined only by nationalities or geographic boundaries but also by collective identity and needs. This thematic tension includes citizen movements and projects in refugee camps in which people self-organize food, shelter, and administration. The three themes are one of many ways to analyze and classify commoning projects. This classification method captures three basic elements of the commons (the resource, the community, and the management), as well as indicates key social relations at individual, community, and society levels (Gruber & Ngo, 2018). Reflections and moving forward Before the interruption of COVID-19, An Atlas of Commoning planned to travel around the world

Figure 3.6 The atlas in Miller ICA in Pittsburgh (Photo credit: Miller ICA, 2019) for the next ten years. As the exhibition travels, new local case studies will be added to the atlas, as well as exhibits or events in collaboration with local stakeholders. 23 out of 33 case studies that have been exhibited so far are in Europe and the U.S. The atlas has begun to include nonWestern projects, and the trip of the exhibition will focus attention on more commoning practices in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and many more areas that were formerly lacked discussion in the commons discourse. I began working on An Atlas of Commoning even before I started my PhD. The atlas inspired my research in three ways. First, it is the passport for me to enter the field of urban commoning. Being fully immersed in commoning case studies and intensive analyses allowed me to grasp threads in this field from aspects of its history, epistemology, academic genres, and future potentials. At the same time, it kindled my interest in exploring urban commoning from the perspective of Chinese cultures and urban design practices in China because the initial atlas did not have any Asian projects except for one in Japan. Lastly, the method of case study in this project is novel, productive, and insightful. We fumbled through all of the collected materials to develop a graphic and textual system for the atlas. This system captures all basic information of the projects and is legible for non-designers. Therefore, this thesis continues using case studies as the main method of research. The initial information collection and identification of basic commoning elements for this thesis’ focus case studies took the same process as in the research of the atlas. 77

3.6.2 A Dialogue Must Take Place, Precisely Because We Don’t Speak the Same Language A Dialogue Must Take Place, Precisely Because We Don’t Speak the Same Language is a multimedia collection that intends to have a conversation around the pluriverse of commoning practices and undo the Anglo-Saxon epistemology of the commons. It elucidates diverse commoning practices and their cultural specificities by examining the language used to describe them and the challenges of translating them from one language and culture to another. It is a digital exhibition curated in conjunction with the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial 2020 and supported by the Creative Europe program of the European Union. The work is jointly funded by the research fellowship M.A.P.P. (Methods, Affects, & Practical Pedagogies) program at the School of Commons at Zurich University of the Arts. This digital exhibition of A Dialogue Must Take Place, Precisely Because We Don’t Speak the Same Language is composed of two parts: a website and online conversational sessions. The website hosts ten contributions in the form of written essays, images, audio, and/or video, each reflecting on a term that is closely related to the notion of commoning in the author’s culture and language (Figure 3.7)1. Besides the curatorial role, I also dedicated an essay to the exhibition. In the essay “大同 (Da-tong): The Great Community”, I discussed the Confucian ideal of the great community as the earliest commoning utopian in Chinese history and called for the reinvention of Chinese philosophy to guide the practices of commoning in contemporary China instead of being dependent on Western approaches2. A discussion with contributors and a workshop were hosted between November 2020 and January 2021. The discussion was based on four contributions — 作伙 (tsò-hué) in Hoklo Taiwanese,

κοινωνία (kinonía) in Greek, ሰፈር (Sefer) in Amharic, and大同

(Da-tong) in Classical Chinese. Contributors each shared their practices and research about spaces and commoning, their situated histories, diverse etymologies, and the potential of translation in the discussion. The “language, l/anguish, anguish” workshop invited participants to reflect on their personal relationship to the English language. The workshop wove together reflections on the possibility and impossibility of translation between English and one’s mother tongue, the power relations associated with language, and the reading of a selection of poems and texts.

The exhibition website: adialoguemusttakeplace.org was launched on Oct 30, 2020, for the opening of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. It is also accessible from both the TAB website: biennial.ge and the School of Commons website: schoolofcommons.org. 1

The essay “大同 (Da-tong): the great community” was published on the project website: https:// adialoguemusttakeplace.org 2

Figure 3.7 Exhibition website, displaying the essay “大同 (Da-tong): the Great Community”

Reflections on common threads from dialogues3 The etymological roots and practices of commoning structured around the self-governance of shared resources have existed for centuries in numerous cultures all around the world. Although the recent commons discussion has expanded beyond the governance of material common-pool resources to include affective labor, immaterial knowledge, critical care etc., the contemporary commons discourse continues to be dependent on Anglo-Saxon history, culture, and language. This monocracy of the language of commoning presents a risk of further enclosure, confining the discussion of what we hold in common. In this project, we asked: Can we access other worlds or rather enable other worlds to reveal themselves? How do we translate commoning from one language to another? Or how do we make tacit traditional practices in other cultures translatable? And if we cannot critique the old world in the very language it was made, can translation play an emancipatory role? Can other words enable us to move beyond merely reproducing prevailing power structures? Or can they enable us to build another world?

This section is revised from Notes on “A Dialogue Must Take Place, Precisely Because We Don’t Speak the Same Language”, co-written by Stefan Gruber, Chun Zheng, and Helen Chang for the School of Commons end-of-year online publication. Available on School of Commons website: https://issues. schoolofcommons.org/issues/issue2020/a-dialogue-must-take-place/ 3

Instead of lingering on whether the word “commoning” finds equivalence in another language, our attention veered to consider the very act of translation as a means of finding commonality. In fact, what is in common always only emerges in translation — the translation between different experiences, interests, and subjectivities. Translation occurs at the intersection of differences rather than convergence. So instead of aiming for a precise mirroring of language that would imply the erasure of difference, translation is founded on and sustained through differences. Similarly, Stavros Stavrides (2016, p. 42) states that “translation inherently could invent commoning by reproducing views, actions, and subjectivities in translation.” The title A Dialogue Must Take Place, Precisely Because We Don’t Speak the Same Language was inspired by a passage from Sara Ahmed’s (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others In Post-Coloniality, and it suggests that this project examines the Anglo-Saxon epistemology of the commons debate. It sheds light on the entanglement of power and knowledge at the root of contemporary research, education, and cultural production (Gruber, 2020). Our lively written and verbal exchanges in this project have likely sparked more questions than answers. However, when seen together, the contributions begin to weave the imagination of other possible worlds. We draw some preliminary connections between voices and identify common threads that emerge from the dialogues that took place. Practices and concepts of commoning are all around us and can be found in traditional and contemporary cultures alike. From barely visible gestures to rituals passed down from one generation to the next, they comprise the relationships between humans, non-humans, the land, nature, the cosmos, and time. Joar Nango’s photographic tour across northern Finland, Sweden, and Norway portrays Sámi culture by capturing their ingenious creativity of repurposing local materials and everyday objects to sustain their lives in the extreme climate of the Arctic. Here, Nango frames culture beyond the binary clichés of indigenous traditions versus modernity as valuable lessons in “indigenuity.” Against the backdrop of accelerating climate change, their whimsical, yet effective designs hold wisdom that might serve us well as we learn to adapt to life in harsh natural environments. The South American concept of Buen Vivir resonates with the Sámi perspective, in that it emphasizes the interdependency of humans and non-humans beyond the dichotomy of society and nature. In their essay, Mónica Chuji, Grimaldo Rengifo, and Eduardo Gudynas argue that Buen Vivir goes beyond the English notions of well-being or the good life as commonly interpreted. Buen Vivir is rooted in a deep understanding of nature and advocates for the equal rights of the more-than-human world to exist, persist and regenerate. Most practices of commoning hold material and immaterial dimensions — the materiality of a shared resource or space, as well as the immateriality of shared purposes or beliefs expressed through social practices, behaviors, rituals, or agreements. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto reflects on the reciprocal relationship between architectural typologies and human behaviors. Over centuries, buildings continuously adapt to human use, social norms, and environmental forces. Thus, the material articulation and spatial organization of building typologies becomes the expression

of social patterns or commonalities over time. In turn, the built environment shapes collective behavior. The practice of tsò-hué in Taiwan is a testimony to Tsukamoto’s point. Tsò-hué suggests a type of fluid togetherness in action. Jeffrey Hou describes how in the case of Taipei’s grassroots initiative Nanji Rice, implicit reciprocity, social connections, and mutual trust emerge from the collective practice of renovating and transforming a basement into a common space. “Tsò-hué in this case is a sequence of actions and sense of collective ownership, an experiment in sharing and community building.” These practices do not only relate to material and immaterial resources but often blur the boundaries between the material and immaterial. The Arabic concept of Al-Mosha’ refers to shared land ownership and shared activities. The Diwaniya constitutes a physical expression of Al-Mosha’ as a room where Kuwaiti men meet, socialize, and discuss politics. In her contribution, Ghalya Alsanea describes how the translation of Al-Mosha’ into the virtual sphere of social networks is enabling women to challenge the traditional gender and class divide that defines the Diwaniya as a patriarchal space. The transcendence of time and space can also be observed in Sámi’s design hacks. Sámi people reinterpret vernacular practices and creatively apply tacit knowledge to tackle present challenges. Their ability to sustain a traditional semi-nomadic life with contemporary means connects them to the past and the present. Many commoning practices reveal ongoing power struggles. Be it the Al-Masha land in Palestine, the Da-tong ideology in China, or the concept of kinonía in Greece, all three have lost their original meaning under the influence of authoritarian regimes, neocolonialism, or consumerism. In effect, commons are subject to continuous appropriation and reappropriation, their relationship to the state, or market twists and turns. Al-Masha is the only type of common land that has survived the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, with their architectural practice Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR), have been revisiting the notion of Al-Masha, seeking new interpretations in the context of their design work on common spaces in refugee camps. Similarly, Chun Zheng attempts to revive the original Confucian notion of the Great Community, Da-tong, as a society structured around deliberative democracy. Over time, and for political purposes, its meaning was diverted to express unconditional unity. Reading Confucius’ original wording through a commoning lens, Zheng calls for re-imagining Da-tong in contemporary China. Finally, in a conversation about kinonía, the Greek term for society, Eleni Katrini and Aristodimos Komninos depart from its most basic definition as a sum of free individuals, and describe kinonía as a way of being present, participating, and actively engaging in the making of a society. Thus, just as there is no commons without commoning (Linebaugh, 2008), in its original Greek meaning, society is a verb. Its subsistence depends on continuous stewardship and social reproductive labor. While the role of architecture or design is only implicitly discussed in most essay contributions, they all explore common space both as a shared resource as well as a place in which commoning unfolds. As much as we are eager to learn from the past and traditional commons, our belief in the

agency of architecture and design for commoning in the present and future remains. We are not seeking a literal return to the traditional typologies or practices. Rather, re-inventing the meaning and function of commoning in the context of the now should be our designerly undertaking. As mentioned by Katrini and Komninos, as well as Tsukamoto, architects and designers need more practice to integrate commonalities into design, and furthermore, perceptions and behaviors of people who interact with the design. As we engaged with numerous translations between languages and cultures, words and visuals, theories, and practices, it became obvious that translation itself is a precious commoning practice. It constantly and actively produces and reproduces knowledge, reshapes the understanding of one language/culture and another, and challenges our reliance on the dominant English language and the Anglo-Saxon world. A question we have yet to answer: how to find the new words and worlds that allow translation as commoning to thrive instead of suppressing it? These two exhibition projects began to answer the question “what does the pluriverse of commoning look like?” by introducing practices and epistemologies from various cultural contexts. It becomes clear that our presumptions of land ownership, language, rule, and materiality of commoning can differ from contexts and cases. Those differences show the importance of translating and reinventing diverse historical commoning practices and cultures into knowledge that today’s design for urban commoning can be aspired to. Further investigation of culturally situated commoning practices is needed for us to make such translation and reinvention from one culture to another, one language to another, and one case to another possible. This investigation is continued in Chapters 6 and 7 which illustrate differences between two commoning projects of the same type in different contexts regarding their sustainment strategies.

Conclusion This chapter set out to map the design landscape according to three axes and positioned the thesis research in design practice and research. Four design areas, including design for social innovation, Transition Design, sustainable design, and pluriverse design, were highlighted as relevant design theories and approaches for the design of urban commoning. These areas were reflected and discussed in relation to the thesis question. Some important insights are found to be further incorporated or explored in this thesis. The sustainment of urban commoning as a design question largely works with individual and citizen groups who are not formally trained as designers, which means it is a question of diffuse design. Although the design aims to address the sustainment challenges of urban commoning, the realization of problem-solving purpose fundamentally depends on the making of meanings, relationships, and values. In the design question of sustaining urban commoning, designers and commoners are not strictly defined roles, which means approaches used to design for the sustainment of urban commoning are even more diffused than participatory design. The process 82

to empower commoners to be designers is similar to social innovation design and participatory design processes but needs more consideration regarding design’s long-term role in urban commoning. Designers are not to solve problems or to be the experts in urban commoning projects but to design with and by commoners, catalyze sustainment processes, and facilitate immaterial processes. Either from the commoning or sustainable design point of view, the exploited notion of “sustainability” no longer suits the sustainment of urban commoning, encompassing the multitudes of durability in time, space, sharing capacity, and emancipatory quality. “The Sustainment” offers a rhetorical justification for the question of sustainment instead of sustainability of urban commoning. The sustainment of urban commoning prioritizes the invisible socio-political strength that builds up the internal capacity for urban commoning to confront and bounce back from internal and external future survival challenges. Another insight provided by sustainable design and Transition Design is that the sustainment of urban commoning is a wicked problem that concerns social, political, environmental, economic, and cultural issues and is changing and immaterial. For this reason, the research into the sustainment of urban commoning requires application of an equivalently non-static, systematic, multi-scale, and continual design worldview, framework, and methodology. Theories of change from Transition Design, namely the needs and satisfiers theory, the multi-level perspective, and the socio-technical transitions, provide theoretical cornerstones to build a systematic framework to investigate the sustainment of urban commoning from micro, meso, and macro levels. Moreover, as the theory of pluriverse suggests, research for urban commoning and its sustainment must move away from the unilaterally Western ways of designing. The premise to design for plural sustainment lies in the exploration of diversified ways of understanding existing design and commoning cultures, reconstructing criteria of sustainment, and giving rise to localized design suggestions and interventions. Two exhibition projects are pioneers to inquire into this argument. This chapter and the previous chapter have outlined the research area intersecting commoning and design, but it is still a broad scope. It is also a relatively new area of research that has only recently gained attention among a small number of design or architecture practitioners and scholars against the background that more traditional design, economic, and political systems have failed to support people. To retain the research within a manageable scope and to find existing empirical references, Chapter 4 elaborates on the type of food-based urban commoning to set the foundation for two focus case studies and complete the theoretical review part of this thesis with respect to the fieldwork context.

Chapter 4 Urban Community Farms and Gardens

Introduction Chapters 2 and 3 have provided an overview of urban commoning and its related design areas. At the intersection of design and commoning, the inquiry of designing for the sustainment of urban commoning can further be situated in different types of commoning activities. This thesis focuses on food-based urban commoning practices, represented by urban farms and community gardens. This focus also keeps the research scope manageable within the study duration. This chapter starts by elaborating on the reason for using urban farms and gardens as the central field of practice (Section 4.1). Section 4.2 offers an investigation of problems in the modern industrial and capitalist food system. Section 4.3 articulates the necessity to value food as a common resource and for re-commoning the food system in light of permaculture practices, alternative food networks, and food sovereignty movements. Community farms and gardens are then discussed as key fields of re-commoning the food system due to their characteristics, motivations, benefits, and sustainment challenges (Section 4.4). The current focuses and limitations in the research of sustaining urban farms and gardens are explained. Section 4.5 concludes all literature review chapters. This section summarizes the research gap and synthesizes a theoretical framework based on multi-dimensional scaling for the empirical study.

4.1 At the intersection of traditional commons and urban commoning Urban community gardens and farms are one of the earliest forms of urban commoning, and they have become sites for citizens to claim their access to the right to green. They are places for local residents to seek alternative forms of land, food, and green spaces. Though their environmental impact is important, their socio-political functions are also notable. By growing food, urban gardens and farms also grow communities. Research has found that being part of community farms and gardens supplements food production and nutrition, satisfies the desire to shape the living environment, creates more community open spaces, increases collaboration with neighbors, and fosters a resilient community (Hou et al., 2009). Two focus case studies in this thesis are urban community garden and farm because of two major reasons. First, urban community farms and gardens have features of both the environmental commons and urban commoning. Second, they are one of the most recognizable types of urban commoning in both China and the US, especially in the contexts of fast urban development in China and heated social justice debates in the US. Community gardens and farms exist at the intersection of traditional commons and urban commoning. They intersect with traditional commons in sharing natural resources, like plants, water, and soil. They are also urban commoning projects, where urban spaces and governance of food-based resources are collectively negotiated. These gardens and farms extend the right to common resources to urban food production, prioritizing access to healthy food, green spaces, and a just living environment. We can find the circulation of natural resources like energy, fertilizers,

plants, soil, and water in community gardens and farms (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013) as well as processes of commoning in community engagement, (re)production of social relations, collective decision-making, and negotiation with the state and the market. This thesis’ practice domain is within community gardens and farms, as they are commoning practices at the heart of city dwellers’ everyday lives and represent processes and relationships in urban commoning. Community gardens and farms are also among the most executed types of urban commoning around the world, which makes cross-cultural study possible. Urban community gardens have long existed in the US and China, but they have been given new meaning in contemporary cities. In recent years, rapid high-density urban development in China has led to a desperate need for green spaces beyond aesthetic purposes. In 2011, China’s urban population outnumbered the rural population, which means a large amount of suburban and rural farmland was pushed out by urban development (Figure 4.1). Either because of eviction or personal choice, more farmers and villagers are migrating to cities and living in stacked apartments. These migrants find the cities unable to host their desire to grow food. The traditional farming knowledge and skills they developed as they grew up in the countryside have no place to be applied. For other urban dwellers, the expansion of monotonous and crowded urban spaces seems to have no end. People have become siloed and distanced from neighbors, nature, and their remaining memories of food traditions. Encroached peri-urban farmland, increasing areas of contaminated urban land, and these surging social needs catalyzed the spring of urban agriculture and community gardens in China. Beijing is the earliest city to incorporate urban agriculture into the city’s strategic urban plans. Agro-parks and agro-zones are designated to meet market needs and give citizens access to agro-related events and knowledge (Cai, 2014). The project in Beijing inspired Shanghai’s community garden network that is more decentralized, accessible, and selfmanaged for urban dwellers. Community gardens and urban farms are now the most widespread type of urban commoning in China. Increasing discussions about social and environmental justice issues in the US have brought citizen-led projects to the forefront. Community gardens and farms in the US have a history of over a hundred years, including phases of allotment gardens in depression, school gardens, war subsistence and victory gardens, and civic garden movements (Hou et al., 2009). For instance, the Community Garden Movement, also called the Green Guerillas in New York, seeded over 700 gardens in the 1970s. These gardens were a revolutionary force to revitalize neglected lots, and they served as a way of self-help during the economic stagnation. The movement incubated the nation’s largest urban gardening program GreenThumb, which currently supports more than 550 gardens in New York City (Krasny, 2012). GreenThumb gardens demonstrated their continuous support for people, especially in underserved communities, during the COVID-19 pandemic (Wharton, 2021). Urban issues have shaped the motivations and purposes of community farms and gardens in the US. They address needs including food subsistence, community activism, environmental beautification, and land stewardship (Hou et al., 2009). In both China and the US, urban community farms and gardens are becoming essential sites for people in need, and they

Figure 4.1 Looking towards a new urban development that was once arable land from a suburban farm (Source: foreignpolicy.com)

are attracting the attention of the government, meaning they will continue to grow, so they need support from scholars, designers, and the general public.

4.2 Pathology of the dominant food system To understand urban community farms and gardens, we can begin with their situated agriculture and food system. The highly mechanized food industry has seemingly improved the food-insecure situation by expanding arable land, improving irrigation schemes, increasing crop yields, and lowering food prices, but the food industry has been proven rather fragile in crises. In the past few decades, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO, 2013) has been reported that fewer people are suffering from hunger. However, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed an unprecedented challenge on the food system. In 2020, there was a significant increase in the number of food-insecure people in acute need of staple food, nutrition, and survival assistance (GRFC, 2021). The pandemic further exposed loopholes in the current industrial and capitalist 87

food system. In many areas around the world, industrial food production failed to respond swiftly to the crisis. When cities, regions, and countries necessitated requests of assistance in mobilizing food, the supply networks demonstrated low capability. Inequality, inefficiency, and unsustainability are three systemic fault lines in the current food system (Vivero Pol, 2015). Inequalities exist in multiple aspects. While a large amount of the population still suffers from hunger and under-nutrition, another large number of people are affected by obesity. In fact, obesity and malnutrition together affect one-third of the world’s population (GAIN, 2013). At the same time, another discrepancy is the production versus the waste of food. About one-third of the food produced globally is lost or wasted due to every link of the food chain while many people go hungry (EU, 2014). 30-40% of food is thrown away every year in the United State alone (USDA, 2021). Inequity manifests most significantly in the form of environmental injustice. Ironically, 70% of the population facing hunger consists of small farmers or agricultural laborers (UNCTAD, 2013). The demand for water and land as well as unhealthy monoculture farming have caused soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and ultimately vulnerable ecosystems. Consequently, the food inequality problem jeopardizes those people’s living and working environments and deeply intertwines with environmental injustices. Compared to the industrial food system, organic systems, such as traditional farming and permaculture, are agronomically and economically more efficient (Vivero Pol, 2015). Industrial farms are favored by greater policy and tax subsidies. However, most industrial farming areas have reached their yield plateau, and they are limited by crop variations. On the contrary, traditional farming methods show greater energy efficiency, less year-to-year production fluctuation, and less reliance on governmental capital (Diebel et al., 1995; Smolik et al., 1995; Vivero Pol, 2015). Alternative traditional farming has improved crop yields per hectare, has provided more reasonable labor and land resource allocation, and has offered more stable annual production (FAO, 2014). Most importantly, this method follows nature’s language, the reciprocal relationship among crops and between human beings and land. The unsustainability of the industrial food system is twofold. On one hand, industrial farming, which employs intensive mechanization and chemicals, damages habitats, water, soil, and air (with greenhouse gas emissions). This pollution is expected to worsen, as the demand for food increases with the exacerbation of population growth, climate change, and meat-based diets (Vivero Pol, 2015). On the other hand, the industrial food system and the capitalist food market are not socially sustainable. By turning food into products and profitable businesses, people are deprived of cultures of food sharing; the wisdom of cultivation; and the sovereignty towards food production, distribution, and consumption. The industrial food system denies the non-economic values of food and farming practices. As a commodity, food can easily be manipulated by the capital market. During the pandemic, we have seen the best evidence of the unsustainability of the dominant food system — the hoarding of food, food price inflation, and irresponsibility of food industry giants in the face of crises.

4.3 Re-commoning the food movements Despite its modern commodification and industrialization, historically, food was a commons. Commons-based agrarian food systems are not unfamiliar in cultures around the world. Common land and commons-based food production were documented in historical records, including the Spanish irrigated huertas (gardens) (Ostrom, 1990); the iriai-chi (common land) in Japanese villages (Tsuruta, 2013); Mexico’s ejido (communal land of agriculture) (Jones & Ward, 1998); and ethnic minorities’ common lands in Asian countries like India, China, and Nepal (Norberg-Hodge, 1994). Food commons experienced three waves of enclosure. Middle age enclosure, considered the first wave of depleting food as a common resource, was the political action taken by landowners to completely privatize the common land for their own benefit. The earliest enclosure movement impoverished villagers living in those areas. The rift between the poor and the rich started to deepen (Linebaugh, 2008). The nineteenth century colonization marked the second wave of the enclosure. Native lands on the continents of America, Asia, and Africa were occupied by colonizers (Vivero Pol, 2015). State-level appropriations of arable land for food production formed the embryonic form of the current rural-urban and local-global food systems. In the recent decades, the third wave of privatizing food commons was caused by a growing population and the following uptick of property values and natural resource demands. All privatization and enclosure manifest both in the commodification of food itself and in the marginalization of food practices, rituals, and cultures that have long been associated with a livelier human-nature ecosystem. In this context, many anti-capitalist, anti-enclosure, and anti-colonial food movements have already emerged. They are the best testimony and the beginning of re-commoning the food system. Coined by the international farming movement La Via Campesina, food sovereignty is a resistance to the erosion of indigenous sustainable agroecological practices, food culture, and local production and consumption channels under the influence of the globalized food industry (Weibe et al., 2010). In 2007 at the Forum for Food Sovereignty, 500 delegates from more than 80 countries agreed to the declaration of food sovereignty as follows — Food is a basic human right. This right can only be realized in a system where food sovereignty is guaranteed. Food sovereignty is the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its basic foods respecting cultural and productive diversity. We have the right to produce our own food in our own territory. Food sovereignty is a precondition to genuine food security. (Via Campesina, 1996) Actionable approaches to gain food sovereignty were also clearly articulated in the declaration, including a guarantee for land, technology, and market and extension services. The declaration also emphasized governmental support for decentralized credit systems, the right to practice sustainable farming to preserve natural resources and biodiversity, the right for local food production not to be replaced by imported food, the regulation of food prices, and the promise of having input directly 89

from peasants and small farmers in policy-making processes (Via Campesina, 1996; Gómez-Benito & Lozano, 2014). Food sovereignty demands clarification of the actual needs from small individual farmers, peasant families, and local farmers’ unions. More importantly, it also demonstrates the intention and determination of small-scale local farmers to help reduce hunger and poverty in the global context. Following the Via Campesina movement, there were also indigenous food sovereignty movements in the United States to rebuild indigenous foodways for historically displaced indigenous people, and the Asia-Pacific regional food sovereignty network began to advocate for regional farmers, peasants, fishers, and indigenous people. Food sovereignty has become a language and a tool for collective negotiation against the status quo of the capitalist food system (Benito & Lozano, 2014). It provides concrete approaches and networks for individuals and communities to actively become decision-makers and actors in the political, economic, and social changes of food systems, and allows them to begin to reject the social inequalities imposed by globalization and delocalization. Alternative food networks (AFNs) are initiatives that have attracted attention since the mid-1990s in North America, Europe, and Australia (Goodman, 2013; Si, Schumilas & Scott, 2015; Jarosz, 2008). The primary characteristic of these networks is that the production and consumption of food are more closely tied together spatially, economically, and socially (Goodman, 2013; Jarosz, 2008). AFNs have four features (Jarosz, 2008): 1) shortening the distance between producers and consumers; 2) being small-scale and using organic or holistic farming methods; 3) setting up local selling venues, namely food cooperatives, farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture (CSA), and farm-to-school and farm-to-restaurant partnerships; and 4) reproducing non-material values, such as fairness in accessing food and food trade and the preservation of food cultures (Kloppenburg et al., 2000). Besides promoting small local farmers’ economic welfare, the close relationship between farmers and consumers fosters trust, collaboration, and educational impacts since consumers are given direct information around where the food comes from (Jarosz, 2008; Feenstra, 1997; Gómez-Benito& Lozano, 2014). First defined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1978, permaculture is a design and management system for human settlements and agricultural land use. The word itself is a contraction from permanent agriculture and permanent culture (Mollison & Slay, 1997). The three core tenets of permaculture are Earth care, people care, and fair share. An ethic of care for the earth is fundamental because without the earth, no creature can survive. Therefore, many permaculture practices start by observing natural patterns and mimicking natural ecosystems (Frey, 2011; Holmgren, 2002). People care, overlapping with the concept of food sovereignty, means that everyone has the right to resources, tools, and knowledge. People’s needs for food, fiber, and energy and the consciousness around following permaculture principles are also central in this discourse. The last principle, fair share, derived from the previous two, “sets limits to consumption and reproduction, and redistributes surplus” (Holmgren, 2002, p. 8). This requires people to produce an appropriate amount of food in consideration of environmental capacity,

Figure 4.2 Chicken-greenhouse exchange diagram (Mollison, 1991, p. 154)

take only what they need according to personal consumption, and share the surplus with the community or other people in need as a way to give back to society. Permaculture inspires the re-commoning of the food system in the manner of its holistic thinking. Relationships and feedback loops are always prioritized in permaculture. Separate elements in the world can generate new relationships and synergy, and they can maximize productivity. For instance, described in Bill Mollison’s 1980 Mother Earth News interview, the example of a chickengreenhouse exchange (Figure 4.2) is often used to illustrate the relational synergy. Combining a chicken coop, a forage yard, and a greenhouse can create several relationships at the same time. Chickens and plants exchange oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nutrients. The warmth of the greenhouse can help chickens regulate their body temperature (Frey, 2011; Hollar & Malmgren, 1980). The philosophy behind permaculture brings together diverse ideas, skills, indigenous wisdom, and ways of living. In this sense, permaculture has moved beyond a set of practices or an agriculture movement and has become an expanding design philosophy that can enable us to transition from being dependent consumers to caring and productive actors in the food system.

These rising movements, networks, and practices around food have operated independently, but in recent years, they have shown the tendency to join forces. In order to move in the direction of re-commoning the food system, we should reconsider how we perceive and evaluate the ontological properties of food and food practices. In this thesis, this reconsideration takes place in community farms and gardens, where re-commoning the food system and food practices begin to occur. Community gardens and farms do not comprise all existing forms of re-commoning food practices, but their representation will allow us to observe the transition to a re-commoning food regime.

4.4 Dynamics in community gardens and farms Urban farms and community gardens are both places in urban areas that grow food. Nowadays, differences between urban farms and community gardens are nuanced. In general, urban farms have a smaller number of people working in a designated area and have at least one salesperson for the farmer’s market, but the market is not the only outlet for the urban farms’ produce. Overall, urban farms tend to occupy larger spaces and put more focus on food productivity. Community gardens have a diverse means of produce distribution, and land ownership can be in-between private and public. Usually, community gardens have smaller sites and plots and are more socially driven. As Draper & Freedman (2010) point out, the term “community” in community gardens suggests that the activity of gardening is carried out by a collective of people working together. The setting can be anywhere, such as schools, neighborhoods, vacant blocks, rooftops, prisons, or hospitals. In this thesis, when community farms or gardens are mentioned, they refer to this working definition that is derived from the American Community Garden Association’s (ACGA, 2008) explanation — urban community gardens and farms are urban agriculture sites to grow fruit, vegetables, flowers, and community. 4.4.1 Important characteristics There is no singular structure for all community gardens and farms. Looking into the literature and case studies, many characteristics of community gardens and farms are highlighted, as they largely determine the nature and quality of gardens and farms. Fox-Kämper et al. (2018) distinguish community gardens and farms into subcategories of top-down and bottom-up governances depending on who initiates and supports the garden or farm. Almost no community garden or farm is founded solely by a top-down approach. Some gardens begin with a top-down process in their planning and implementation stages, but in management, they transition to community-oriented governances (Fox-Kämper et al., 2018). Bottom-up governances also have multiple models. Gardens and farms that receive professional help from organizations and education institutes in all planning, design, construction, and management phases are considered to be employing a “bottom-up with professional help” approach. During a “bottom-up

with informal help” approach, commoners receive less help from established organizations and associations, but they gain wisdom and voluntary support from various sources at different phases. Bottom-up processes can also be coupled with “political and/or administrative support,” which mainly come in early founding stages (Fox-Kämper et al., 2018). An open question asks which type of governance will a community garden or farm have? Some can clearly aim at one but transition into another. Some do not have a specific vision but will spontaneously follow a trajectory. In any case, all types of initiation and governance processes require the cooperation of multiple actors. Another decisive characteristic is that the garden or farm has an initiator and supporter who owns and operates the space. Landowner(s) and the staff can be the same or different for a project depending on the types of land tenure. Unified land ownership and land tenure mean that a group, an organization, or an individual acquires the land (likely from the city) and operates it as a non-profit organization. The majority of owners of community gardens and farms are cultural and neighborhood groups (Guitart et al., 2012), followed by schools, faith organizations, and hospitals. The separation of ownership from the land tenure happens when farmers and gardeners rent the land from private or public owners. Research has discovered that the presence of a community garden or farm tends to lead to an increase in property values of surrounding land parcels, buildings, and neighborhood housing prices (Guitart et al., 2012). In this respect, land tenure is not always guaranteed, as farmers and gardeners can be squeezed out by developers. The optimistic sign is that more organizations, governmental programs, charitable, and religious groups have begun to fund community gardens and farms to help them secure their land tenure (Birky, 2009). Models of multiple parties of owners have also appeared. The shift to multiple owners and sponsors shows the opportunity of sustaining community farms and gardens in the long run and lowering the risks of sudden collapse (Birky, 2009), which is particularly promising for impoverished initiators and participants. The previous two characteristics also affect the question of openness — who can participate in farming and gardening. Although all projects claim themselves as “community” gardens and farms, the community varies from case to case. Memberships, fees, volunteer opportunities, and physical boundaries can all set limits on the “community.” A completely open-participation garden or farm does not require a formal membership agreement and has no prerequisite to engaging in activities (Göttl & Penker, 2020). The middle-ground of openness is a mixed membership and volunteer system, where some days, events, or areas are open without any requirement. Certain areas or plots are exclusionary only for members. The highest level of closure is “closed gardens and farm groups.” They are almost private gardens, as an obligatory membership and fee are required (Göttl & Penker, 2020). Closed garden and farm groups are often those with fences and gates and adhere to the most original allotment gardens’ management. The number of closed community gardens grew in the late 19th and 20th centuries, and these gardens often lack participant diversity (Birky, 2009). In recent years, more and more open gardens and farms have emerged. Participant diversity is perceived as critical to the long-term viability of urban farms and gardens (Birky, 2009). Farmers and gardeners have started to value techniques, knowledge,

and dynamics that are brought in by the expanding, fluid, and mixed population of diverse ages, genders, backgrounds, and ethnicities. A more open social boundary also means a more robust supportive network in face of challenges (Göttl & Penker, 2020). Openness comes with risks. The threshold seems low for open participation gardens and farms, so responsibilities, withdrawals, and collective decision-making rights also need to be laid out (Göttl & Penker, 2020). These rules are created to better maintain access instead of limiting them. 4.4.2 Motivations and benefits

Figure 4.3 An actor-network analysis of food system (Zheng et al., 2019)

Numerous researchers agree that primary motivations for community farmers and gardeners include having access to and consuming fresh food, improving health, and enhancing social engagement and integration (Colding & Barthel, 2013; Colding et al., 2013; Draper & Freedman, 2010; Guitart et al., 2012). Other secondary but common motivations are to gain access to land, to obtain environmental education, to connect with nature and non-humans, to practice cultural exchange, to save or make money, and to immerse oneself in spiritual practices (Guitart et al., 2012). The benefits that people perceive from participation are more concentrated in environmental and social aspects. Economic and technological benefits are secondary. Environmental benefits are obvious, including increasing biodiversity; improving the microclimate; rehabilitating the soil, water, air; and providing habitats for animals. Economic and technological benefits are mainly 94

lowering expenses on food, adding supplementary income by selling the food, and improving infrastructure on or surrounding the site. Some also believe that increasing property values of either the farm or garden itself or the surrounding properties is an important economic benefit (Colding & Barthel, 2013; Colding et al., 2013), but this interpretation can be controversial. The socio-political benefits of founding, participating, and managing community gardens and farms are particularly important to reflect on because they are implicit but have the most profound impacts. Socio-political impacts of community gardens and farms include community empowerment, place-making in cities, education for all, community integration, intercultural exchanges, and democratic engagement (Colding & Barthel, 2013; Colding et al., 2013; Draper & Freedman, 2010; Guitart et al., 2012; Hou, 2017). Community empowerment, education, and social and democratic engagement are closely connected and are performed at various scales from daily project management to handling partnerships or conflicts with others. Even collectively deciding the use of a plant can be counted as a democratic action. Democratic values do not necessarily manifest in influencing political decisions or policies but can reside in trivial everyday activities. This social momentum is not built up in one day, nor is it inherent or intrinsic in these projects. It has to be actively nurtured and practiced, progressed, and enhanced alongside the making of the garden or farm, itself (Hou, 2017). 4.4.3 Challenges and conflicts Arguably, all benefits suggest challenges and conflicts. Community gardens and farms are positive in shaping social and ecological functions but also have to deal with many external challenges from the broader socio-economic context and internal conflicts among gardeners, farmers, and neighbors. Ecological challenges are typically solvable. For instance, soil contamination and lack of water are major issues that most farms and gardens would encounter (Wesener et al., 2020). Adding organic compost and complementing with certain detox plants can restore the soil in a few years. Rainwater collection methods, like rain gardens and rain barrels, and negotiation with municipal water supplies take some time to set up but could be sustainable solutions. Meanwhile, ecological barriers also allude to conflicts among natural resources and human beings that are rarely noted. Therefore, when considering solutions to these difficulties, minimizing the exploitation of natural resources should be prioritized. Unlike ecological challenges, socio-political barriers could be much harder to deal with. A rich literature has captured the tensions between community farms and gardens and external political and economic processes. Land disputes are particularly notable. Despite the fact that many farmers and gardeners are motivated by gaining access to land, insecurity of future land use is still recognized as the most common challenge that is faced by gardeners (Egerer & Fairbairn, 2018). Previous research has widely reported instances of gardens being shut down or demolished for development (Guitart et al., 2012). This explains why the rise in property value is a controversial benefit. The existence of community farms and gardens, the rise of property values, 95

and the attraction of new investors results in displacement of farms and gardens and could form a vicious gentrifying circle. The complexity in zoning and land tenure adds to the uncertainty of future land access (Wesener et al., 2020). In urban areas, some city laws regard food production and raising livestock as illegal while others might draft new policies to accommodate urban farms and gardens. Changing the cities’ zoning codes is possible. The City of Seattle set a precedent. In 2013, Seattle launched a Food Action Plan, which praised the positive impacts of the local food system on the city governance and most incredibly, made alternations in city zoning codes. All barriers to growing, selling, and consuming citizen-produced food were removed (Hanson et al., 2012). Internal tensions cannot be ignored either. Issues arise from the internalization of external pressures. Some are caused by spontaneous individual behaviors that, to some degree, attest to Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. Guitart et al. (2012) conclude that issues within farms and gardens include cultural differences, volunteer dropout, and participants’ incapacity. Egerer & Fairbairn (2018) then add more examples of internal conflicts, such as racial friction over the use of resources, theft of tools and produce, and disagreements among subgroups of participants. Internal conflicts are often self-solved or remain unsolved. When a collective of citizens has rights over a common resource, cases of friction are inevitable. Although this continues to be the largest challenge to the governance of community farms and gardens, from another viewpoint, conflicts have potential to shape social dynamics, enhance democratic mechanism, and foster long-term community cohesion (Hou, 2017; Kingsley et al., 2009; Alaimo et al., 2010). Although challenges and conflicts are widely stated, continuous evaluations of them and the pre-planning of sustainment strategies are often vaguely mentioned. ACGA provides the most comprehensive documents and guidelines to start and maintain urban farms and gardens. Instructions include steps to start a garden, contracts and examination documents, different growing techniques, and maintenance tips (ACGA, n.d.). As suggested in Greening Cities, Growing Communities, constant reflection and evaluation are important to sustain the gardens and farms (Hou et al., 2009). In most “starters kits” or “sustainable guidelines,” the technical management and evaluation of soil, paths, plots, planters, water, signs, compost, trash, tools, weeds, theft, and vandalism is well-established. Some research on urban agriculture mentioned the actor-network theory (ANT) as a method to measure the vertical stakeholders’ relationhips. The formation of multi-stakeholder networks is critical for grassroots groups to navigate the governance and politics of power in urban community gardens and farms as well as to respond to their survival challenges. The ANT originated in sociology and is used heavily in science and technology studies; the ANT captures dynamic conflictual or consensual relations in an organization or among organizations (Latour, 1996; Murdoch, 1997, 1998). The Transition Design framework also absorbed the ANT in visualizing the complex actors in a wicked problem. Actors can be human or non-human. Relationships can be strong or weak, in alignment or conflict (Figure 4.3). Some might think the ANT is flat and two-dimensional, which

is insufficient to show hierarchal relationships (Leitner et al., 2002; Ghose & Pettygrove, 2014). Hierarchal relationships indeed shape conditions for participation in community farm and garden networks (Ghose & Pettygrove, 2014). That ANT can sometimes be subjective. Different actors have their own interpretations of actors’ relations. Despite this, it is a useful tool to understand social dynamics in community farms and gardens and leverage further research. The ANT largely shapes the analysis of the up-scaling dimension in the analysis of the sustainment of the garden and farm case studies. Although some online resources or gardening associations’ guidelines would provide tips on communicating with neighbors and lobbying government officials and funders, the development of non-technical aspects is still inadequate. Most gardens and farms are provided with resources to measure their environmental and production performances. However, there is not a systematic framework for them to measure their socio-political and cultural performances, which are referred to as the deep-scaling dimension by the systems theory. In addition, the literature on community farms and gardens suggests that case study research can start with understanding the social, economic, political, and ecological aspects of community farms and gardens. Methods that are commonly used in researching community gardens are qualitative or mixed qualitative and quantitative, based off on social science methods including interviews, surveys, document analysis, case studies, and participant observation (Guitart et al., 2012). Conclusion This chapter discussed the motivation to situate the research in the area of urban agriculture. The issues of the capitalist food system urge us to explore possibilities to re-commoning the food system. Food sovereignty movements, alternative food networks, and permaculture were introduced as forms of food re-commoning that have existed and continued, co-forging an alternative food system. Lying at the intersection of urban commons and environmental commons, urban community farms and gardens are where re-commoning food practices begin to be realized. The review of previous community farm and garden studies reveals their characteristics, benefits, and challenges, and it sets a foundation for carrying out the coming focus case studies. Community gardens and farms are suitable as the practice domain of this thesis for various reasons. First, urban community gardens and farms’ material carrier or the most direct shared resource is food. Ever since I was a child, my elders told me a Chinese proverb “Food is the god for people ( 民以食为天),” meaning food is an absolute necessity for people. However, this essential sustenance is still in a precarious status from individual to systematic levels, despite the extremely advanced agriculture technologies in the 21st century. Food system problems and food supply chain issues are relevant to the everyday. Choosing urban farms and gardens as the main research target grounds the research in the everyday. Second, the exchanges and synergy among material forms (urban spaces and natural elements) and 97

immaterial forms (sociality and politics) along with non-designers’ design philosophies are worthy of in-depth research. We can see features of both traditional commons and urban commoning in urban farms and gardens. Material and immaterial common resources and processes are embedded in both, though new challenges and opportunities arise in their functions, stakeholders, power dynamics, governance models, and social organizations. Although community farms and gardens are only a small fraction of all forms of urban commoning, they project bigger pictures of commoning transitions and suggest possibility of the generalization of the research. Lastly, food, cultivation of food, and places for food cultivation are widely studied in ecology and agroforestry areas, yet not many studies have situated them in perspectives of urbanism and design. It is those perspectives that extend the practical and theoretical implications of food as commons and community farms and gardens as ways of re-commoning food. Ecological and technical challenges of urban farms and gardens have well-established methods and guidance to evaluate and address them. The non-technical challenges, such as the capacity of community engagement, political negotiation, and social connection, await a systematic framework to evaluate. Such evaluation needs theoretical support from the commons and design discourses.

4.5 Summary of literature review, research hypothesis, and the framework From the review of three key areas of this thesis — urban commoning, design, and urban agriculture — the research gap is identified and supports the articulation of the research hypothesis and guide the architecture of an overall theoretical framework. The first gap that the literature review on commoning identified is the insufficiency in the exiting criteria to measure the sustainment of urban commoning. When looking at implications for taking the commons as a processual and relational system in Chapter 2, it can be concluded that we need to define a framework that captures the organizational complexity and socio-political dynamics of the institutions of expanding urban commoning. While the temporal duration and out-scaling — the geographic or numeric disseminations — are inseparable and necessary for the discussion of managing urban commoning, they alone are not sufficient. To understand the sustainment of urban commoning, a systematic analysis of its multi-level scaling is essential. Our perceptions of what can be discerned as urban commoning’s sustainment are under-evaluated and simplified if we content ourselves with asking whether these projects last long enough or are able to be expanded and duplicated. Arguably, these criteria easily let urban commoning fall into the trajectories of gradually enclosing shared resources to maintain a static status and/or focusing on propagating their physical formats to maximize networked impacts. A structured approach for such analysis is so far lacking, and therefore forms an area for further research. This area of research is explored through the thesis hypothesis: Urban commoning is not only the management of a certain entity but a process through which people transform their worldviews and the quality of their social relationships. Because static institutions would make urban commoning fall into over-institutionalization, privatization, or gradual enclosure, the transitional and systematic concept of scaling is introduced to study the sustainment of urban commoning. Scaling has out, up, and deep dimensions. Existing studies emphasize the temporal and out-scaling dimensions of urban commoning while up- and deep-scaling dimensions are under-studied. Thus, to fully understand the sustainment of urban commoning, up- and deep-scaling dimensions need to be foregrounded. These scaling processes and their co-development are partially identified and narrated, but they are more often under- or unnoticed by initiators, organizers, and participants of urban commons. In addition, I propose that more attention should be given to the coexistence and correlation of the scaling processes and the role of design in these co-formation processes. The processes of such combinations are where design and designers can intervene, promoting the pursuit of more sustained urban commoning.

The literature review on design suggests that to design for the sustainment of urban commoning, designers must shift from design for users, to design with and by users. Urban commoning involves diffused design, where commoners’ designerly role needs further examination. At the same time, the research on the sustainment of urban commoning is a wicked problem that needs a holistic perspective. The perspective can be drawn from areas including sustainable design, design for social innovation, and transition design. The design hypothesis that this thesis tries to attend to is: Design for the sustainment of urban commoning requires a comprehensive understanding of its multi-dimensional scaling processes, and then, it takes a paradigm shift from design as form-making and problem-solving to design as process-enabling and relation-sustaining. Designers that facilitate urban commoning’s sustainment need to prioritize catalyzing the up- and deep-scaling processes. The research hypothesis will be explored in the context of urban food commoning. A literature review on urban community gardens and farms identified the last gap of research and shed light on the reason to work with this type of urban commoning — while material aspects of urban gardens and farms can be measured by quantitate standards and vertical relationships between stakeholders can be measured by the actor-network theory, there lacks a method to evaluate other immaterial aspects. As mentioned in the hypothesis, the sustainment of urban commoning needs to be viewed from all out-, up-, and deep-scaling dimensions. To better clarify, a multi-dimensional scaling framework is proposed to be applied in case study analyses. Further explanations of each scaling dimension are provided in the context of urban commoning. The first dimension of out-scaling is the expansion, replication, or multiplication that generates new iterations (Van den Bosch & Rotmans, 2008). Expansion can be commonly noticed as the increase of size, users, and production. Manzini (2015) points out that out-scaling is not a simple replication of ideas but the design of a new and locally appropriate solution. To summarize, out-scaling of urban commons consists of three possible forms. First, with the original project at the center, urban commons can expand concentrically, showing an increasing size and impact circle. Second, urban commons could scale out by geographic and numeric disseminations. Each duplicate has a similar function. Third, deepening the second scaling out type, each duplicate adapts to its own context and adjusts to new urban commons that respond to specific local needs. Up-scaling often refers to the transition from niche to regime and/or landscape in the MultiLevel Perspective (MLP) theory of Transition Design. The MLP is a three-level framework to consider when managing innovation or transition for systematic change (Moore et al, 2015). Two conceptual understanding of up-scaling derive from different emphasis of niche development when compared to connections between niches and regimes. The first thread interprets up-scaling as an accumulative process of niche scale practices and eventually leads to a regime and even

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landscape shift. Westley et al. (2014) refer to up-scaling as the organizational effort to address the broader institutional or systemic roots of a problem. In this case, up-scaling requires an ultimate influence on higher-level institutions through policy or legal changes. The second thread sees up-scaling as a translation of a niche-level practice into the mainstream regime- or landscape-level practices. Up-scaling in this sense is not the activity itself but a spread of “cultures, practices and structures” (Van den Bosch & Rotmans, 2008, p.33). This understanding emphasizes the impact of a marginalized or unnoticed practice’s rise into a dominant position. Here, my definition of scaling up builds on the first understanding to highlight the cross-sectoral impact as it ultimately can facilitate the second type of paradigmatic spread. Up-scaling for urban commoning is the process of a niche-scale project gradually building its impact and intentionally acquiring crosssector partnerships to intervene in higher-level social and political systems. According to Manzini (2015), up-scaling requires the local organization to connect and coordinate vertically with larger actors to trigger changes on various scales. It crosscuts the multiple levels of stakeholders, from grassroots commoners to policymakers. The idea of hierarchy and horizontality is often conceived as a hegemonic organizational structure (Harvey, 2013, p.70). However, I want to acknowledge that from a perspective of efficiency, up-scaling is not a top-down hierarchical structure; instead, it is a structure that allows more agency and helps niche-level actors to pool resources from higher levels. The horizontal scaling is a bottom-up empowerment process. Out- and up-scaling are both observable and mensurable, but both face certain limitations. Therefore, we return to the nature of urban commoning as a social practice and attend to the intangible and incommensurable factors that might influence urban commoning’ sustainment and resilience. The intangible factor can be traced back to Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City idea (Howard, 1965), where he already recognized that the value of urban spaces is not from the intrinsic worth of the land and buildings but from the people and activities that take place there. In Governing the Commons, Ostrom mentions the “norm” as an important part of the institutional change of the commons. Norms, unwritten social behavior rules, can evolve entirely internal to an individual. In the commons, norms can be developed in co-forming actions that are frequently not represented at all (Ostrom, 2014). Moore et al. (2015) echo this observation and further develop the idea of scaling deep, as shifts in “beliefs, ideas, and narratives of dominant social structures” occur. The earlier work by Van den Bosch & Rotmans (2008) also touches upon the requirements for durable changes, including the transformation of people’s hearts and minds, values, cultural practices, and the quality of relationships. The deep-scaling of urban commons can thus be defined as a learning and regenerative process. Through the activities of urban commoning, new norms, worldviews, beliefs, and social relationships are generated. The stronger and more interactive social relationships generated by urban commoning are essential to the resilient governance of it (Stavrides 2016). This governance entails mutual support and learning from peers and knowledge generation through collaborating on common resources. Meanwhile, deep-scaling reinforces the notion of commoning in Peter Linebaugh’s (2009) definition — the act of (re)producing in common. Additionally, deep-scaling is

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ubiquitous but invisible. It is always ongoing, but organizations do not intentionally notice it, and they fail to track, evaluate, and actualize it. As a result, we rarely see urban commoning projects articulate their future visions with a goal to scale deep. Since there is not an established framework to consolidate the deep-scaling dimension, this research attempts to develop one based on relevant social, design, and commoning theories. Max-Neef’s needs and satisfiers, Gibson-Graham’s 24-hour clock and well-being scorecard, and Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation have been discussed in previous chapters and begin to render the deep-scaling dimension. Needs and satisfiers unpack motivations and benefits at the individual level. From basic needs such as subsistence and protection to higher-level needs of participation, creation, and freedom, degrees of satisfaction can be considered as the depth of urban commoning at the individual level. Main needs that are satisfied at the organizational level can be represented with the need wheel that comprises the needs and satisfiers table into a pie chart diagram. The 24-hour clock and well-being scorecard also evaluate the invisible impacts on individual commoners. A diversified 24-hour clock and better-balance five elements of well-being suggest a deeper engagement with commoning activities. The clock and scorecard are more effective to compare the before and after to understand the impact of commoning on people’s everyday lives. Finally, the ladder of citizen participation assesses the level of democracy of the commoning project. Higher levels of citizen participation correspond to more decision-making power and freedom in shaping the commoning process and thus represent a deeper-scaling process. These three theories begin to form a richer measurement framework for the deep-scaling dimension. I borrow the multi-dimensional transition model by Geels & Kemp (2000) to illustrate the three types of scaling in Figure 4.4 and to summarize an explication of out-, up-, and deep-scaling dimensions explicitly for urban commoning: · Out-scaling: the geographical and horizontal expansion and duplication of urban commoning from one site to a larger site or multiple satellite sites in different locations. · Up-scaling: the vertical expansion through an accumulative process of power from local small-scale urban commoning to a higher regime or landscape level of engagement with a wider socio-political agenda. · Deep-scaling: the internal development of urban commoning to influence participants’ worldviews and quality of relationships which ultimately forms a reciprocal self-learning and self-growing mechanism in the organization itself. The out-scaling analyses of the focus case studies in Chapters 6 and 7 will be descriptions of the evolution of the project’s growth in size, temporal duration, duplication, etc. The investigation of the up-scaling dimension relies on the actor-network theory and its expansion into specific network

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exchanges. Together with the deep-scaling components mentioned above, they serve as the structure for the focus case studies in Chapters 6 and 7 and a reference for our latter explanation of research findings. This initial scaling framework makes the incommensurable sustainment of urban commoning more tangible in fieldwork research and data analyses.

Figure 4.4 Multi-dimensional scaling framework (Based on Geels & Kemp, 2000; van den Bosch & Rotmans 2008)

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Chapter 5 Research Methodology

Introduction This chapter presents theoretical considerations that are relevant to the research methodology. According to Crotty’s (1998) four basic research process elements and the “research onion” model developed by Saunders et al. (2019), elements of research methods are discussed, including epistemological stance, research philosophy (or theoretical perspective), methodology, methods, and tactics. Social research (Crotty, 1998) and research design (Creswell, 2009) provide the epistemic frame, while research methods in architecture, design, and ethnography are referred to in choosing methods and tactics for acquiring and processing data. The research conducted for this dissertation is carried out primarily within a constructionism and interpretivism paradigm. Research methods used in the fieldwork of Chapters 3, 6 and 7, including curatorial research, interviews, case studies, and observations; their advantages and limitations, are explained in this chapter.

· · Figure 5.1 Chapter structure: this thesis’ research onion (Based on Saunders et al., 2019; Melnikovas, 2018; Crotty, 1998)

5.1 Research philosophy, methodology, and rationales This research takes a constructionism and interpretivism epistemological stance and employs abductive reasoning and qualitative approaches. The epistemological stance, research philosophy, approach to theoretical development, and methodological choice (four outer layers of the research onion) influence the overall framing of the research in regard to knowledge generation.

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5.1.1 Epistemological stance and research philosophy According to Creswell (2013) and Crotty (1998), an epistemological stance refers to the theory of knowledge that defines what kind of knowledge is valid and legitimate in a researcher’s study. The objectivism stance embraces realism, which means it believes that the truth and meaning reside in external objects, and appropriate methods of research will ultimately lead to accurate and certain knowledge (Crotty, 1998; Saunders et al., 2019). Alternatively, a stance based on subjectivism is mainly embedded in the work of artists, craftspeople, and designers, and this stance claims that social reality is created from the perceptions and actions of people. A subjectivist stance is closely related to personal, tacit, non-verbal, and embodied knowledge (Feast & Melles, 2010; Saunders et al., 2019). All ontological, epistemological, and axiological assumptions of researchers fall on the spectrum of objectivism to subjectivism. The constructivist stance lies between objectivism and subjectivism. The constructivist stance, also known as ‘constructionism’ or the ‘social constructivist worldview’ (Creswell, 2013), puts forward the assumption that the reality and individual understanding of the world are constructed through social interactions. Crotty (1998) notes that constructionism is the view that all knowledge, and therefore all meaningful reality as such, is contingent upon human practices, being constructed in and out of interaction between human beings and their world and developed and transmitted within and essentially social context. (p.53) This dissertation takes a constructivist stance to understand and interpret people’s commoning behaviors and governance activities, so specific design strategies can be discovered that can promote the sustainment of commoning practices. From the constructionist viewpoint, the objective world of commoning already exists and my research’s purpose is to reveal subjective meanings. Therefore, rather than employing subjective or objective stances, this research constructs meaning by bringing objectivity and subjectivity together (Crotty, 1998). Because of the close marriage of objectivity and subjectivity in the constructivist stance, the relationship between immaterial experiences and material objects is essential. No experience can be analyzed without its situated context, nor can any artifacts be understood in isolation from their experiences. For this reason, in my dissertation, all the analyses of shared material resources are tied to the users, as the users give common resources meaning, and together, they enable commoning practices. Meanwhile, the constructivist stance recognizes that different people construct meaning both in different ways and in relation to different places and cultures (Feast & Melles, 2010). This means that research of things or experiences is not 100% repeatable from pre-existing projects. When we enter a social milieu, the historical, cultural, and institutional external systems have long existed, so these systems precede our advent and unavoidably influence our perceptions. This

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framework aligns with my exploration of the other worldness of commoning. The research situates commoning practices in their culturally variable contexts and takes their external socio-political environments into account. Constructionism is often combined with interpretive and phenomenological approaches (Table 5.1). On the contrary to the positivist approach that prevails in natural and physical science research, the interpretive approach “looks for culturally derived and historically situated interpretation of the social life-world” (Crotty, 1998, p.79). Interpretivism studies meanings that different people construct when they each have different backgrounds and different circumstances (Saunders et al., 2019). For my research, organizational structures of commoning groups will be examined from the perspectives of different groups of stakeholders. Different organizational roles and social roles would provide different perspectives towards the same commoning project. The richness of different experiential realities can be reduced if the researcher focuses on general experiences that are shared by all research participants (Saunders et al., 2019). Interpretivism can be observed especially in the micro-level analysis in my research. which discusses individuals’ motivations and backgrounds to participate in commoning processes. Table 5.1 Crotty’s research process framework and its relation to design research (Crotty, 1998; Feast & Melles, 2010; Lockton, 2013) Epistemology

Theoretical perspective

Relevant perspective in design research

Objectivism

-Positivism -Post-positivism

Design research as a rational, universally applicable problem-solving process; discrete empirical facts generate rigorous logic and principles.

-Interpretivism · Symbolic interactionism · Phenomenology Constructionism · Hermeneutics -Critical inquiry -Feminism

Subjectivism

-Postmodernism -Structuralism -Post-Structuralism

Design research as descriptive and reflective practice towards phenomena in the social context and towards the process of the making of artefacts.

Design research as direct making; the experience, intuition, and non-verbal embodied practice-based knowledge matter most in the making of things.

As all knowledge and experience are linked to phenomena, the phenomenological approach, one of the key aspects of interpretivism, further emphasizes the connection between external objects and internal subjects (Moustakas, 1999; Saunders et al., 2019). This area of study denotes 107

an approach of collecting participants’ lived experiences and interpreting those experiences. A phenomenological approach necessitates revisiting our immediate experience of phenomena and the meanings that emerge from the witness of the phenomena (Saunders et al., 2019; Crotty, 1998). This approach also calls for a reflection on what is taken for granted and a deeper understanding of previous meanings. In this thesis, there are three levels of reflection to examine the commoning phenomenon: the literature review to understand the existing meanings and gaps; the focus case studies to look for empirical evidence; and the comparison and discussion of the case studies to deepen the reflection. On one hand, such a phenomenological process allows a commitment to thorough descriptions of the whole, original, and complex commoning experiences. On the other hand, this process provides the foundation for the explication of the phenomenon in terms of its possible meanings in practice. 5.1.2 Abductive and qualitative methodology The initial structure of this research is formed through literature review, past empirical knowledge, and on-site observations. Hence, the approach is not a linear deductive or inductive one. Instead of moving from theory to data (as in a deductive approach) or data to theory (as in an inductive approach), my research takes an abductive approach which moves back and forth, integrating deductive and inductive reasoning (Saunders et al., 2019; Melnikovas, 2018). A deductive process of inquiry seeks cause-and-effect explanation whereas an inductive process of inquiry seeks clarification of multiple critical factors affecting the phenomenon. However, the process of this research includes the collection of data to explore a phenomenon, identify themes, and deepen existing theories through subsequent analyses. Therefore, it is an abductive reasoning process (Figure 5.2). In his book Design Thinking, Nigel Cross (2011) notes that abductive is “a type of reasoning which is the necessary logic of design.” Abductive reasoning is associated with a complex working process where the researcher only knows the desired end value, but the data and theoretical principles that lead to the desired end value can be completely open to the researcher’s exploration. This form of reasoning is the professional expression of “intuition” and has more flexibility. In this thesis, review of the literature leads to a hypothesis and a conceptual scaling model of commmoning practices. Then, interviews and observations are structured according to the hypothesis, space is allowed for new themes and issues to emerge. After analyzing the data from the fieldwork, the conceptual model will be further advanced or adjusted. Instead of comprehensively planning each step of the research, and only knowing the desired end value is an adjusted theoretical model, this abductive process is formed naturally during the research course. Chapters 6 and 7 constitute the fieldwork of this thesis. As the epistemological stance and research philosophy already suggest, the data are gathered mainly through a qualitative method in a longitudinal (over two years) study. Research methodologies, including quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods, offer specific directions for research design procedures (Creswell, 2009). The 108

Figure 5.2 Abductive methodology in this thesis

description, interpretation, verification, and evaluation of complex situations prevail in qualitative methodology. Although some quantitative data, such as geographic information and production statistics, are used in this research, a qualitative methodology still prevails, as the qualitative methodology contributes significantly to this research in three ways: 1) discovering problems and gaps within the existing research areas of interest; 2) gaining new, situated data and insights about the particular phenomenon; and 3) fostering advanced theoretical perspectives and conceptual models (Muratovski, 2016). Since qualitative research is open-ended, determining a specific methodology for every step of the process in advance could be difficult. As a result, when research questions advance over time, so will the methodology (Creswell, 2009; Groat & Wang, 2013). In section 5.3, qualitative research methods that are used in different stages of the research will be further explained.

5.2 Research “into” and “through” design The relation between research and design is captured by Frayling (1993) in his paper Research through Art and Design. He distinguishes three ways in which doing research could be related to design: research into art and design (including historical, aesthetic, or perceptual research as well as research into theoretical perspectives on art and design), research through art and design (including materials research, product development, and action research), and research for art and design (where research thinking is embodied in the end artefact) (Table 5.2). There is a clear alignment of this PhD work with research into design. In previous chapters, by examining the design principles and theories used in historical and existing commoning projects, the research forms interdisciplinary perspectives (spanning architecture, design, sociology, etc.) on commoning design rationales. Research through design begins by identifying the problem and confirming that it necessitates a design inquiry rather than an engineering solution. Artefacts, design theories, conceptual frameworks, novel research methodologies, etc. are all possible outcomes of this strategy (Frayling, 1993). Based on Frayling’s point, most design researchers prioritize design through research as 109

doing design (of artefacts or prototypes) as part of doing research. However, Stappers & Giaccardi (2005) expands the notion of research through design to include “designerly ways of doing research that ultimately play a formative role in the generation of knowledge.” In this sense, design through research becomes an effective approach for this thesis. I identified the challenges in sustaining urban commoning through the literature review and concluded that besides the lack of external material support, ignorance of internal design thinking negatively affects the sustainment of commoning projects. The purpose of this research is not to design artifacts or prototypes to improve the situation. Instead, in order to explore an improved theoretical framework, this thesis focuses on the designerly ways of building connections with target projects and gathering empirical evidence to inform the knowledge generation. We can notice a significant overlap between research through design and practice-based research. Practice-based research, in comparison with theory-based research (research without practice) and practice-led research (research led wholly by practice), is an investigation undertaken to gain new knowledge, partly by means of practice and the outcomes of that practice (Candy & Edmonds, 2018). This research involves the analysis of productive processes of art and design projects, leading to the creative generation of solutions, ideas, and insights (Scrivener, 2002; Biggs & Büchler, 2007). The research described in this dissertation is practice-based research into and through design, in the sense that design practice — gaining new insights in situated practices and scaffolding new practical and theoretical futures — is central to the inquiry.

Table 5.2 Definitions of design into, through, and for art and design (Frayling, 1993, p.5; Pontis, 2010) research into art and design

research through art and design •

•

Historical research

•

Aesthetic or perceptual research

•

Research into a variety of theoretical perspectives on art and design • – social, economic, political, ethical cultural, iconographic, technical, material, structural…

•

Materials research: researching stimulus material for use.

research for art and design

The gathering of reference Development work: materials for design thinking developing certain design that is embodied in the end artifacts or prototypes and design results, in form of communicating the results. visual, iconic, or imagistic Action research: an inquiry communication instead of process that is conducted verbal communication of by taking actions like knowledge. experiments and involves evaluation and critical reflection on the action.

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5.3 Research methods, tactics, and their limitations This section describes the research methods used in this dissertation: curatorial research, interview, observation, and case study (Table 5.3). Curatorial research informed two exhibition projects described in Section 3.6. Ethnographic methods of interview and observation generated data for the two focus case studies described in the following two chapters. 5.3.1 Curatorial research Curation is a term usually applied only in the art profession. Over the four years’ expansion of this PhD research, I have been engaged in the curation of two exhibitions which are both closely connected with the theme of commoning practices in different cultural contexts. I am an exhibition researcher and assistant for the traveling exhibition An Atlas of Commoning and the co-curator of the digital exhibition A dialogue must take place, precisely because we don’t speak the same language (see details in Section 3.6). Both exhibitions are within an architectural context and interact heavily with visual elements. I have been enlightened to the value of curation as a research method through the new connections and insights that have arisen from the curatorial process. Like other qualitative research methods, curatorial research requires the researcher to make sense of data, identify themes and construct a concise theme or narrative for the public, and lastly, promote new questions for both the audience and curators for further exploration (Persohn, 2021). Corresponding to Friis-Hansen’s (2001) seven-step process of museum curation — collect, research, thematically conceptualize, select, contextualize, strategically arrange, and interpret — my curatorial experiences are condensed into a four-step process as follows: 1. Collect and research. Through the online search of case studies, project websites, books, and publications, a list of prospective projects and contributors was compiled. The three basic elements of the commons — the resources, the community, and the form of governance, were collected, and they worked as an initial filter to the list. Then, the list was shortened by the number of available materials and the relevancy to architectural forms. A database of the literature, images, existing materials, and contacts was established along with the list. 2. Thematically conceptualization (mainly used in An Atlas of Commoning). A short description was created for each prospective project which contours the overall exhibition theme. Three major themes of commoning are pre-defined by the curatorial team. A few brainstorming sessions were held to explicitly narrate the themes and categorize case studies into the themes. 3. Contextualize and actualize. The exhibits were realized by individual contributors and put together by curators at the end. Contributors contextualized their work within the exhibition theme and offered their own interpretations. For case studies, contacts and research materials were provided to individual contributors as references. Contributors were also given visual templates and text formats to ensure consistent representations. The curatorial team would carry out a round 111

of fine-tuning of all contributions and take charge of the final display. 4. Reflect. The previous three steps complete the physical or digital exhibitions. Both exhibitions were accompanied by workshops, symposiums, or discussion sessions. In some sessions, contributors would be invited to discuss their work and have a conversation with the public audience. In these sessions, the audience, curators, and contributors all reflected on their experiences and processes from different perspectives, which resulted in mutually enhanced reflections about the curation. Curatorial results opened the opportunity to invite different audiences to explore and engage with the content, igniting continuous discussion of relevant topics and creating evocative moments that gave rise to new materials and research questions for this thesis. 5.3.2 Intertwined case studies and ethnographic research Case studies, interviews, and observations are qualitative methods used in this research. Ethnographic interviews and observations feed into two focus case studies. Ethnographic research entails an in-depth systematic study of groups by observing or participating in their lives (Madden, 2010). Fieldwork based on thorough observations, participation, and interviews is typically used in ethnography to study social interactions, behavior, beliefs, and perceptions (Muratovski, 2016). Ethnographic fieldwork initially and primarily is a branch of the discipline of anthropology that studies individual and collective cultures systematically. It has been gradually recognized and adopted as an important research method in design and architecture research. Design ethnography aims at unpacking the social and cultural panorama of design. This method is used to understand users’ activities and relations, thus their needs, and evaluate the performance of design systems (Crabtree et al., 2012). Interviews and observations form an adaptive form of ethnographic research in this thesis. They provide first-person perspective data for two focus case studies, while the rest of the data are from secondary research. Data Collection Case study is a strategy of inquiry in which the researcher explores in depth a project, process, or event (Creswell, 2009). For architectural and design research, case study is a qualitative strategy that investigates a complex phenomenon or setting by using various data (Groat & Wang, 2013; Muratovski, 2016). Two focus case studies in this thesis offer the chance to take a close look at every level of the topic with direct in-person experience. In framing the focus case studies, three types of data sources are identified: (1) archival research to ascertain the background, basic social and financial structures, missions and goals, and geographical information of the projects; (2) on-site observations of the projects’ social interactions, everyday management, spatial layouts, and urban environment; (3) semi-structured interviews with project participants and staff, who are active parts of the projects. Two case studies emerge from the data collected through ethnographic methods. Two case studies are included in this thesis instead of a single case study or multiple case studies 112

because of various reasons. First, the theoretical examination of the commons evolves from an Anglo-Saxon perspective to a pluriverse perspective, which necessitates a comparative case study in a non-Western context as an illustration. Secondly, two case studies in different locations but within the same commoning category (community farm) offer a chance to compare how various aspects, such as political contexts and cultures, affect commoning. Lastly, in the practical sense, the geographic proximity and my personal connections with project initiators make the two case studies more accessible than other candidates. Table 5.3 Methods, datasets, and tactics in this dissertation Method

Datasets •

Curatorial research

Interview

•

2018-2020 Traveling exhibition: An Atlas of Commoning 2020-2021 Digital exhibition: A Dialogue Must Take Place, Precisely Because We Don’t Speak the Same Language

2019-2022 Ten semi-structured interviews. Interview transcripts and 24-hour clock sketches. •

Case study

Tactics

Observation •

In the process of connecting contributors and defining themes, the research-based curatorial process generates new knowledge.

Free-flow and open-ended interviews and everyday conversations with commoners, project founders, and volunteers.

2019-2020 Knowledge & Innovation Community Garden, Shanghai (Photos, In situ study of urban contexts videos, short blogs, and and everyday operations with the sketches) researcher’s role known. 2020-2022 Garfield Community Garden, Pittsburgh (Photos, videos, and sketches)

Observation is the most intuitive and primary approach of qualitative data collection. According to Madden (2010), participant observation requires the researcher to engage with activities and routines of the people that are being observed while eye-witnessing and recording the observations in a systematic manner. Through observation, the researcher intends to comprehend the group’s knowledge, norms, values, social structure, materiality (physical structures and settings), and immateriality (behaviors and interactions) (Muratovski, 2016; Madden, 2010). Casual conversations would also happen during observations and help frame interview questions. I was a workshare volunteer at the Garfield Community Farm and therefore take a stand of “participant observation” where the researcher’s role naturally overlapped with an insider’s perspective. Although I was not

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able to volunteer in the KIC Garden, I was part of the Seeding Campaign and participated in all the online activities that were self-organized by home gardeners. I began to notice how commoners interact with each other and their shared resources, and I observed places that design could enhance or intervene. Thus, the data from observation feed into the research’s goal of seeking intervention points within the system. Observational data are documented by photos, videos, and sketches, and later integrated into case study reports. Informed by field observation and experiences, semi-structured interviews were carried out. The questions were pre-designed and grouped into topics (Appendix E). Questions are open-ended and can be adjusted according to the interviewee’s role in the commoning project. Interviewees were asked to respond to the questions individually (Jamshed, 2014). The recruitment for interviewees was mainly through connections with two projects’ founders and staff. The staff and volunteers from both groups would extend the connections to other commoners which include citizen participants, commoning researchers, and other commoning projects in similar areas. Both in-person and virtual Zoom interviews were conducted. Video and audio recordings were used in all sessions and were only accessible to the researcher because of confidentiality concerns. Recordings were transcribed into anonymous texts for analysis (Appendix C). Datasets generated from interviews included audio recordings, video recordings, their transcripts, and additional references offered by interview subjects. Data analysis Data from interviews, observations, and case studies are qualitative data such as documents, text transcriptions, images, audio, videos, and sketches. The data analysis follows a qualitative data analysis approach and is carried out in the following steps (Muratovski, 2016): 1. Organize materials. All visual, auditory, and text data acquired from individual cases, interviews, observations are first organized in chronological order. 2. Categorize the data. Data are further classified into micro, meso, macro scales in relation to research questions. Some materials could belong to multiple scales or questions. 3. Interpret and represent the data. Mind mapping boards (Miro or physical whiteboard) and Atlas.ti software are used to code the information. Affinity maps, relational diagrams, digital architectural models, and sketches are tools used to index, aggregate, interpret, and represent data. 4. Identify themes. Coding the data leads to the discovery of common themes and threads. Comparing multiple interviews and cases allows findings to emerge — where participants agree with or differ from each other.

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5. Synthesize findings. Ultimately, the aforementioned processes bring about new insights that can help adjust the theoretical hypothesis and framework. Empirical findings that promote the design of more sustained and plural commoning processes are ideal end results. Data analysis in this thesis involves a detailed investigation and comparison of the two focus case studies. This analysis offers significant insights into the research question and allows me to answer the questions of “what” and “how” while taking into consideration how particular commoning decisions are influenced by their context. This complex form of investigation is not easy to report in a concise format, but in the following chapters, the case studies’ processes and findings are synthesized in a manner that both informs the academic research and reports back to the participant projects. 5.3.3 Strengths and weaknesses of qualitative research The work of Groat & Wang, Maratovski, Moustakes, Madden, and Flyvberg all conclude the strengths and weaknesses of different qualitative research methods from various viewpoints. Based on their arguments, this section sets forth the most relevant and experienced pros and cons of each method for this thesis. Overall, qualitative research has the capacity to include rich and holistic views of real-life circumstances (Groat & Wang, 2013). The flexibility in research design allows tactics to be adjusted as the research develops. Most importantly, this research captures the immaterial values and meanings of the phenomenon. In the meantime, qualitative research generates a large amount of entangled data. The flexibility it offers is a double-edged sword. I had to utilize a trial-anderror method to form the research procedure. Observation has various strengths. For instance, I had direct experience in the observation. Data are documented synchronously. Some sensitive conversations (which would otherwise have to be included in interviews) can be avoided and acquired through observation instead. The weakness of the observation method is that getting access to project sites and the trust-building process were time-consuming. The most outstanding benefit of the interview method is that the researcher can take control of lines of inquiry and ensure first-hand information is obtained. However, the researcher’s presence might cause biased responses, or the interview subjects might hold-back on certain topics. The quality of the data collected also heavily relies on the interview subject’s abilities of articulation. Case study takes localized context into consideration. It produces rich data and thick descriptions. Case study, as the most used method in academic research, has great potential to generate themes and theories. However, framing questions in different contexts can be tricky because some topics are sensitive and discomforting, making adequate data difficult to retrieve. There is also difficulty in synthesizing complex data for case studies, as they come from various sources and in various formats. The method of case study is often criticized for its ability to be generalized into theory or contextualized in other settings (Groat & Wang, 2013; Flyvbjerg, 2006). I argue that the 115

intention of case studies in this thesis is not to generalize but rather to identify the complexity of commoning practices. The case study approach itself can be continuously developed and applied on other projects. This capacity, to some extent, is the generalizability of the case study method.

5.4 Validity and reliability If practice-based research is thought of as different from established models of theory-based research in academia, it is understandable that the validity and reliability of the research need to be articulated by text instead of by numerical measurables. Reliability is concerned with the consistency of the measurements of findings and the stability and accuracy of the research tool (Groat & Wang, 2013; Fusch & Ness, 2015). The data collection of cases in this research cannot be performed under strictly identical conditions and yield completely comparable results as in scientific research. However, the selection of case studies and the structure of interview questions enable a reliable comparison. Key interview questions and topics are consistent in all interviews. Transcripts are checked to make sure that there are no obvious mistakes made during transcription. Validity, in general, refers to the quality of being credible, just, authentic, and well-planned (Whittemore et al., 2001). In qualitative research, assuring validity is the process whereby “ideals are sought through attention to specified criteria, claims to knowledge are made explicit, and techniques employed to address the most pressing questions” (Whittemore et al., 2001, pp. 527-528). Internal validity concerns whether the key concepts and operations of the study are trustworthy representations of the goal of the research (Groat & Wang, 2013). The core research question in this dissertation — what constitutes the sustainment of commoning — is first stated, followed by the definition of sustainment from a scaling perspective. Subsequently, a rationale for the correspondence between the research question and the definition is provided (Section 4.4). This logical connection enhances internal validity. Another criterion to establish internal validity is data saturation. According to Fush & Ness (2015), data saturation is achieved when additional data add no new information to the research goal. When familiar arguments, themes, and findings appeared repeatedly in the literature review or the case studies (Muratovski, 2016), a level of saturation was considered reached. External validity requires ensuring the outcomes of the study are valid and applicable to the larger contextual domain (Groat & Wang, 2013). However, in qualitative research, the results can often be compromised due to unpredictability. Instead of exhausting possibilities and experiments in various contexts, this research intends to compare the data of the case in the U.S. with that in China to validate the findings to the greatest extent possible within the research constraints. In addition, the research methods, findings, and paper drafts have been reviewed periodically with 116

advisors, colleagues, and scholars in the fields, and they have been examined in department progress reviews to guarantee validity and trustworthiness in a broader academic context.

Conclusion This chapter has described the epistemological stances, research philosophy, and research methodology adopted in this thesis. This thesis adopts a constructivist stance with a phenomenological perspective. The chapter continued by explaining the methodological choices of abductive reasoning, qualitative methods, and the design research perspectives. The research methods and their detailed processes were then presented, along with their advantages and limitations. The use of qualitative methods in reference to ethnographic approaches echoes Buchanan’s (2001) call for more diverse fields of learning and action beyond theoretical investigations in contemporary design study. This chapter concluded by explaining the validity and reliability of the research. The reflection of methods contributes to situating the researcher’s role in research design and connects the theories to practices. The following chapters present case studies generated by these research methods.

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Chapter 6 Focus Case Study I: Knowledge and Innovation Community Garden in Shanghai, China

中国民众缺乏一定的公共精神，因为现在城市中很多问题不是政府一声令下就能做到的，在民间也需要有非常扎实的基础，这个基础就是需要长期的去培育公共精神。城市权利是一个特别大家都特别喜欢说的一个概念但是光给人赋权是没有用的。如果人没有这个能力、知识、技能去提意见，你给他权力是没有任何意义的。所以我感觉就是首先教育民众，让他们有做理性城市空间决策的能力，否则盲目的参与反而是破坏性的。 Chinese people lack the so-called public spirit. Many our current urban issues cannot be solved if we only rely on government commands. We need strong civic foundations, which will take long-term nurturing of the public spirit. The right to the city is a concept that people all like to discuss, but this empowerment is not unconditional. If our citizens do not have the ability to make appropriate suggestions and decisions, ignorant participation can only lead to chaos. — Founder of the KIC Garden

Introduction This chapter presents the first case study — the Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) Garden in Shanghai, China. This case study and the second case study in the next chapter follow the same documentation structure to ensure their comparability. Interviews, observation, and secondary research data are used for the analysis in this chapter. The sustainment problem of the KIC Garden lies in two aspects. One is the balance of commoning quality with the dependence on external actors, like the government and private companies. Another is its governance transition from designer-led to completely citizen-controlled. This chapter begins with an introduction to the project context. Then, the project is analyzed based on micro, meso, and macro perspectives including aspects of staff and volunteers’ roles and motivations, the programs, spatial layout, and broader impacts (Section 6.2). The analysis of the out-, up-, and deep-scaling processes in Section 6.3 leads to the mapping of the scaling trends, the explanation of scaling order, the extrapolation of key sustaining strategies, and design insights.

6.1 Background The Knowledge & Innovation Community (KIC) Garden is located in the Knowledge & Innovation Zone in the Wujiaochang Business District, Yangpu District, Shanghai. The Knowledge & Innovation Zone is a central mixed-use area that includes university campuses, technology companies, and residential areas, jointly built and managed by Yangpu District Knowledge & Innovation Zone Investment Company and Shui On Land Limited (Liu et al., 2019; Liu & Kou, 2019). The Knowledge & Innovation Zone is a high-tech, complex community. Being part of the Knowledge & Innovation Zone and also developed by Shui On, the gated neighborhood on the east side of the KIC Garden is made of high-end apartments and stacked villas. The area opened for sale in 2012 at a price of ¥40,000/m2 ($583/sf)1. Most of the residents are middle-aged people working at nearby high-tech companies. On the west side of the KIC Garden is an old residential area built in the 1990s by the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics to use as university faculty and staff dormitories. Over time, apartments in the university workers’ neighborhood have changed ownership several times and become aging market-rate housing with many migrant renters. Before the KIC Garden was established, the two communities were completely separated by a two-meterhigh wall. According to surveys conducted before the inception of the KIC Garden, residents in both neighborhoods experienced a series of problems: mental stress from living in a high-density urban environment, social fragmentation among surrounding neighborhoods, disconnection from neighbors, and little public community space, especially space for children (Liu et al., 2017). Consequently, the KIC Garden was created to 1) promote urban farming knowledge and practices in underutilized urban land with low-cost techniques; 2) establish interactions among individuals and communities of different ages, occupations, and places of origin, as well as organizations, The data is from Baidu Baike pages of 创智天地 (Knowledge & Innovation Zone) and 江湾翰林 (Jiangwanhanling Luxury Apartments). 1

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businesses, and governmental bodies of different interests; and 3) advocate for the parallel restorations of social and environmental relations. The KIC Garden occupies an area of 2,200 square meters (0.53 acres) and is categorized as “街旁绿地 (roadside green space)” based on urban green system legislation in China (Figure 6.1) (Liu et al., 2017). The roadside green space is defined as the green space between buildings and the road redline. This space meets residents’ recreational needs, and its service radius is around 500m (0.31 miles)2. The land was originally underutilized due to the major municipal pipelines which run underground. It had been temporarily occupied by workers’ sheds or utilized to dump construction waste. In 2016, as the local government was promoting the open neighborhood policy (in contrast to the gated community convention), the Yangpu District Knowledge & Innovation Zone Investment Company and Shui On Land Limited decided to convert the vacant land into a community garden. The KIC Garden was first financed by the Shui On company. The Clover Nature School, a landscape design and education non-profit, was hired to execute the design and implementation. The aim was to create a public garden with integrated ecological and social functions and ultimately, a citizen-run community garden (Liu et al., 2018; Jing, 2021). As the first community garden in Shanghai, the KIC Garden created a partnership model of business, government, and civic engagement that has now spread across the city.

Figure 6.1 Aerial view of the KIC Garden (Source: Clover Nature School)

The definition is based on the Urban Green Space Classification Standard in China (CJJ/T85-2002). Original texts:“街旁绿地”是散布于城市中的中小型开放式绿地，虽然有的街旁绿地面积较小，但具备游憩和美化城市景观的功能，是城市中量大面广的一种公园绿地类型。 2

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6.2 Micro, meso, and macro level structures 6.2.1 Micro level: Clover Nature School team and individual participation The gardening techniques and day-to-day operation of the KIC Garden are largely managed by the Clover Nature School. The non-profit organization is dedicated to nature education, sustainable design, community engagement, and fostering community empowerment in place. The KIC Garden is one of the earliest projects in which Clover Nature School was actualizing its aims through urban agriculture and urban gardens by integrating permaculture design principles, public engagement programs, and the restoration of vacant urban land. In the early stages, the Clover Nature School undertook all major tasks of the preliminary community survey, the overall landscape design, the arrangement of community engagement events, and the construction coordination. The organization also serves as a bridge between the local government, the investor company, and residents to negotiate conflicts in legislation procedures, budgeting, and demands from the community. At present, a “留耕文化 (localizing farming)” branch team of the Clover Nature School still oversees the KIC Garden. The team is responsible for maintenance tasks like fixing broken structures, finding collaborators and donors, and organizing large programs and events. At the same time, residents from surrounding neighborhoods use the garden as a recreational park, like other city parks and green spaces; the difference is that community residents have gradually gotten involved in events and daily maintenance of the garden over the years. Individuals’ participation in the garden is mainly in forms of “认养 (adopting)” and volunteering. Categorized as public space, economical activities such as “renting” are not allowed on the site; instead, the euphemistic rhetoric of “adopting” is used. A voluntary contribution of money or labor to take care of a part of the garden is required. Plots that are adopted are scattered around the garden area. “一米菜园 (One-meter gardens)”, which have a similar function as an allotment garden, are 1m-by-1m plots for individual and family adoptions (Figure 6.2). The KIC Garden offers a curriculum for adopters to ensure that residents have the knowledge and skills to take care of their plots, knowing how to select, plant, maintain, and harvest any produce they would want to grow. Besides farming, individuals participate in various other ways. A lawyer living in the east-side neighborhood personally funded a piece of garden and named it “the law garden”. A designer created a graffiti door on the wall that is the boundary of the garden and separates the two communities to call for community connection (Figure 6.3). A retired man who is a photography lover came to the farm to document the garden and post the photos on social media to help recruit more participation in its activities. Some of these individuals became community champions. They have inspired other like-minded residents to get involved. Gradually, self-organized community groups started to emerge, including a flower club, mainly consisting of the elderly, and a little volunteer group, mainly made up of children and youth. The emergence of community groups showed that the garden has the potential to transition to resident-governance. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Clover Nature School staff team and resident volunteers were planning to advance the KIC Garden’s community participation by establishing a resident 121

Figure 6.2 One-meter garden

Figure 6.3 Graffiti door

self-governance committee to take over the daily management. The plan was interrupted by the pandemic, but it is likely to continue in 2022. Meanwhile, the progress has continued to build micro-level individual autonomy. 6.2.2 Meso level: spatial layout and programs Spatial layout The long triangular-shaped garden has five zones in reference to permaculture zoning principles: (1) the facility zone, (2) the public activity zone, (3) the permaculture and one-meter garden zone, (4) the community garden show zone, and (5) the open farming zone (Figure 6.5 and Figure 6.6). Zone 1, the facility zone, which is located in the center of the garden, is a mobile building converted from three containers. Floor-to-ceiling windows and glass doors are installed on both long sides of the containers. The container building’s façade was painted blue, so it also has the nickname of “the little blue house” (Figure 6.4). Rainwater from the building’s roof is collected. The building is equipped with a kitchen, a restroom, and mobile tables and chairs. All furniture is flexible, as the space is designed to host different activities. With a capacity of up to 20 people, it can serve as a classroom for educational activities or a conference room for farm staff, volunteers, and community residents. Residents and volunteers who come for daily maintenance often gather in this space for tea and conversation. It has become a community center. Zone 2 (public activity) is the plaza and kids’ sandpit outside the container building. The plaza is the main entrance in the middle of the garden, and it connects to the street. This zone is intensively utilized and functions as bicycle parking, a farmers’ market venue, a children’s playground, and a community gathering. The northern edge has a food waste sorting facility and displays exhibits made by moss artists. The creation of the sandpit was an experiment of parent and children co-construction.

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Figure 6.4 The outside and inside of the container building “little blue house” (Source: Clover Nature School)

On the north side of the container is a strip of permaculture garden and a one-meter garden (zone 3). This zone is the major production area, showcasing permaculture practices and hosting hands-on educational demonstrations. It includes raised beds, a spiral garden, lock hole beds, banana ring beds, tire planters, a sheet mulching experiment area, a rainwater barrier, composting bins, and small greenhouses. The functions of these elements are similar to those at the Garfield farm. The KIC Garden does not have animals due to city regulations. The one-meter gardens meet the cultivation needs of urban residents, who find it difficult to grow their own food in the tight quarters of their homes. Adopters are given the access to manage one plot of 1m2. They can choose food that fits their diet based on guidance from the staff. The garden provides seeds, tools, and fertilizer, and residents can harvest all the crops on this plot for their own use. The KIC Garden invites professional farmers and gardeners to teach one-meter garden adopters about seeds, soil, tools, and composting. Adopters are required to pay a fee to participate in these classes. The one-meter gardens reduce some of the cost of managing the entire garden, and they initially ran on a renting model. In the past year, as the financial situation of the KIC Garden has become stable, the one-meter gardens abandoned the rental model, and they are now lent to long-term volunteers for free. The community garden show zone (zone 4) was created for the first community garden show and continues to be used for other outdoor events. The community garden show invites nurseries, organizations, or individuals in fields of horticulture, landscaping, and community service to exhibit their products and services if they are suppliers and supporters of community gardens. Some exhibits are on-site micro garden landscapes, such as a small field of rice, a wooden pavilion, and a wetland. These exhibits stayed in the KIC Garden and were later adopted by residents. This zone has become a multifunctional area that is used for the reoccurring show, for small community gatherings, and to continuously display farming techniques and products.

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Figure 6.5 Zones of KIC Garden (Based on Liu et al., 2019; Kou et al., 2019) Except for the one-meter garden, most spaces of the garden are open farming areas (zone 5) that allow for public participation. Elements such as food forests, compost bins, rain gardens, and rest benches are distributed in this zone. Plants in open farming areas are mainly local fruit trees, herbs, vegetables, and crops, presenting an idyllic countryside landscape. Fruit trees (pomegranate, cherry, kiwi, etc.), herbs (rosemary, lavender, mint, thyme, etc.), vegetables (onion, garlic, beans, kale, green leafy vegetables, etc.), and crops (wheat, rice, and canola) are planted all year round in different areas and seasons according to their growth rhythms. There are two rain gardens in each of the north and south parts of the garden, which retain rainwater and increase biodiversity with wetland plants. Programs Programs in the garden are diverse and changing, most of which are out of educational and community outreaching purposes. The KIC Garden has developed a system and rules of garden management and event organization to regulate access to venues and event hours. In the early years, the weekend farmers’ market was a popular program. It worked with individual farmers from the suburbs. On weekends, the garden was used as a venue for farmers to sell their organic food to urban residents. On weekdays, farmers’ products were displayed for sale in the little blue house. This program shortened the urban-rural food supply chain and provided farmers with a broader market. However, as neighborhood grocery stores and online food delivery services developed rapidly in recent years, this program lost its attraction and was discontinued. Targeting children and families, the educational program has existed since the garden’s founding. Like one-meter garden courses, the educational program takes advantage of both indoor and outdoor areas, engaging children and parents in hands-on farming activities and teaching children about native plants, composting, and garbage sorting. The KIC Garden invites agriculture educators to host at least one themed session per week. Themes include current farming activities in the garden, nature science, cooking, and natural arts. The program is promoted on WeChat and neighborhood notice boards (Figure 6.7). A fee is charged to compensate for material costs and educators’ remuneration. In addition, the KIC Garden offers a Permaculture Design Course and a series of courses on community garden planning, design, implementation, maintenance, and management. These courses attract adults and contribute to part of the garden’s regular income.

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Figure 6.7 One-meter garden, reading event, and 诗经花园 (The garden from the Book of Songs) event are promoted on community notice board

Figure 6.8 The chalkboard with event ideas from residents

Figure 6.9 Night public lecture event (Source: Clover Nature School) The public lecture program fosters residents’ awareness of participation (Figure 6.8). Scholars and practitioners in the field of community design are invited to share their knowledge and experiences in civic engagement and neighborhood design. The “plant floating” program encourages people to transplant their own plants into the garden or to “float” seeds of their own plants into the seed library located in the little blue house. With guidance from the staff, people can also exchange their own plants with plants in the garden. The programs mentioned here are only a small part of the past and existing programs in the garden. On a chalkboard in the little blue house, visiting residents are asked to write down what are events they would like to host or participate in (Figure 6.9). Engaging ideas are waiting to be realized in the future, such as a barefoot jumping event, bubble tea hangout, a laying-flat event, and many more. 125

Figure 6.6 Axonometric of KIC Garden (Based on site plan provided by Clover Nature School)

6.2.3 Macro level: phases and financial structure The implementation of the KIC Garden had four phases (Figure 6.10). The first phase of initiation was the negotiation between Shui On Land Limited and the Wujiaochang district municipal office to decide the parcel’s ownership and use rights. The project was initiated and financed by Shui On while the land was owned by the government. The common interest of both the government and the Shui On company was to create a public space to enhance the quality of surrounding neighborhoods, so the land was eventually classified as a public roadside green space. The Shui On company was given the right to construct on the land and manage the garden. The subdistrict government had the responsibility to assist and supervise the project. In Shanghai and the rest of the country, the KIC Garden is a rare model of a participatory community garden built by private company on the public land. Because of the relatively large size of the land, the complex surrounding environment, and generally weak participation culture in the area, Shui On decided to introduce a third-party design organization to lead the following phases. Clover Nature School was hired as the third-party to lead the design, implementation, and maintenance phases of the KIC Garden. In the design phase, designers and researchers from Clover Nature School conducted research on the Knowledge & Innovation area in terms of demographics and existing infrastructures. The information was compiled to provide a basis for the design of the community garden. At the same time, using surveys and interviews with surrounding business owners and residents, the design team was able to find people who expressed their willingness to further participate in the following phases and began to build a network of potential network of commoners. People living in surrounding neighborhoods identified that their main concerns were the isolation of individuals and families in apartment communities, the disconnection among different neighborhoods separated by the wall, and lack of public spaces for children. The feedback informed the design team of target users and spatial layouts. On one hand, the design phase started to involve and familiarize residents as early as possible. On the other hand, residents’ lived experience contributed to inform the design. In the implementation phase, enterprises, government officers were mobilized to participate in the construction together with residents. The Shui On company covered the cost of materials and technical labor. Government officers assisted the Clover Nature School team to recruit residents to participate in the construction. Some residents that had gotten in contacted in the previous phase actively invited more neighbors to join. All key stakeholders collaborated in the construction. They not only co-built the space but also shared their needs and expectations for the garden with each other during construction events. The fourth and current phase is the maintenance of the KIC Garden, which relies on a team of the Clover Nature School, especially in terms of guided tours, education courses, and community events. The management team has fostered several community champions as pioneers to advocate for more residents’ participation. However, due to the complexity of the garden’s maintenance

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and the limited time and energy that residents can devote to it, a systematic self-governance network has not yet been achieved. The design team planned a fifth phase for the KIC Garden, in which a resident self-governance committee will be established, and full resident self-governance is in place with other actors such as the Shui On company, Clover Nature School, the subdistrict government, and the neighborhood committee consigning to supporting roles. The first three phases were funded by the Shui On company and some governmental funding, which also made them dominant decision-makers in these phases. In recent years, as the operation of the garden plateaued and other community gardens built by Clover Nature School gained mass attention, 70-80% of the KIC Garden’s income comes from long-term large group tours and classes reserved by local and national corporations, organizations, and civic groups. Several groups collaborate with the garden to host their employees’ training of nature science. They have long-term contracts with the garden which generates around ¥150,000 ($20,000 USD)/group annually for the garden. These charges include the salaries of docents and course instructors, material costs, and site fees. The remainder is used for the garden’s daily maintenance of facility repair, cleaning and sanatory, hardware and equipment update, landscape and crop maintenance, volunteer training, and other expenses. The other 20-30% of the garden’s income comes from the single group tours and donations. The participant fee for community events and the adoption of plants and one-meter garden has been gradually reduced to free. The crop production of the garden basically generates no monetary income, as most food is taken home by adopters and volunteers. Extra produce is all donated to community residents at no cost.

Figure 6.10 Phases and financial structure 129

6.3 Scaling analysis 6.3.1 Scale out

Figure 6.11 Out-scaling process of KIC Garden/duplications of community gardens in Shanghai (Based on data from Clover Nature School) The KIC Garden was constructed within six months, and its size and production have not changed evidently since then. Its out-scaling process happens as duplications, based on Clover Nature School’s increasing community garden projects in Shanghai. Between 2016 and 2021, Clover Nature School built over 200 community gardens in Shanghai (Figure 6.11). These community gardens are not direct duplications of the KIC Garden. They have different scales, financial structures, and social needs, so their initiation, construction, and maintenance processes are led by different actors. The similarity of all community gardens is the formation of partnerships and empowerment of citizens. Whether they are financed or initiated by a private company, a neighborhood committee (neighborhood governmental office), the Clover Nature School, or a group of residents, there are always intersectoral collaborations, and the ultimate goal is that citizens can participate and take control of the gardens. The founder of Clover Nature School has an ambition of building 2,040 community gardens in Shanghai by 2040. “Community gardens”, he says, “are islands of all sizes floating in our city, which sooner or later will connect into a green oasis.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, the KIC Garden initiated a Seeding campaign to facilitate community trust-building. The campaign encouraged people to share plant seeds and homegrown produce in non-contact ways (Figure 6.12). Conversations among neighbors were facilitated along with the material exchanges. The Seeding campaign’s purpose was not only to advocate for self-sufficiency in a crisis but also to reconnect neighbors in the time of physical separations (Yang 2020). The campaign started as a small group of people based around the KIC Garden in January 2020 and expanded into a network of over two hundred people in Shanghai by the end of that February. Gaining even wider social attention during the months of March to July, more and more activists and home gardeners across the country participated in Seeding 130

Figure 6.12 Seeding station in KIC Garden (Source: Clover Nature School)

Figure 6.13 Satellite duplications of the Seeding campaign across China (based on the information provided by the Clover Nature School)

activities. Initiators in Beijing, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Chengdu called for the collaboration of local organizations to set up satellite Seeding projects one after another (Figure 6.13). The accessible participation requirements of Seeding determined the ease of its spread. The satellite Seeding projects in other cities copied the same rules of the initial campaign in Shanghai. Participants can physically share seeds and vegetables with neighbors, share home-gardening experiences online, or attend workshops hosted by host organizations. These low-threshold activities enabled the Seeding campaign to quickly scale out as a typical example of the geographic duplication of urban commoning.

Figure 6.14 KIC Garden’s out-scaling trend

The out-scaling trend of the KIC Garden is mapped out in Figure 6.14, which lays out both the garden’s self-level out-scaling and its duplication in Shanghai on the timeline. The diagram depicts a general tendency of the KIC Garden’s out-scaling. Out-scaling within the garden’s physical boundary almost reached the limit when the construction was completed. The peak of the inner out-scaling was not drawn to the maximum production limit because the KIC Garden’s spatial layout offers abundant space for recreational purposes instead of fully dedicating to food production. The food production and maintenance labor have also been stable since then. On the contrary, the duplication type of out-scaling shows a rapid upward trend after 3 years of the implementation of the KIC Garden. According to Clover Nature School, 15 community gardens were built in 2018, 60 in 2019, 110 in 2020, and 200 in 2021. The speed of duplication increased significantly after 2019, and by the end of 2021, the duplication seemed saturated in the central urban areas and began to reach suburban areas. The rate for the out-scaling based on duplication is expected to maintain in the next few years but will ultimately reach saturation in the greater Shanghai area. 6.3.2 Scale up

Figure 6.15 Actor-network and up-scaling process of KIC Garden The initiation and implementation of the KIC Garden was a top-down process. Shui On Land Limited, Clover Nature School, and regional and local level government officers were playing decisive roles (Figure 6.15). The project touches on jurisdictional areas of district and subdistrict governmental departments (Yangpu District and Wujiaochang Subdistrict’s Green Space 132

Management Center and Committee Offices), street offices, and the neighborhood committee. The higher-level governmental sectors supervise and approve all green space implementation according to the city’s green space regulations and ensure all landscape indicators of the garden meet the requirements of the city. The street office, a branch of the district government, exercises on-site territorial management of several neighborhoods’ areas. In the KIC Garden’s case, the street office supplements the funding for hiring the long-term management team “留耕文化(localizing farming)” of the Clover Nature School. A neighborhood committee by law is a resident organization but in practice acts as a highly localized governmental branch. Neighborhood committee officers are people who know the community and the residents best. They played an important role in the early phases to promote the project and connect active residents to the garden. The KIC Garden is surrounded by Fudan University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Tongji University. University professors and students also contribute their expertise in fields like education, architecture, social design, and sustainability to the garden. Some student volunteers have become garden tour guides or facilitated educational events. In fact, the KIC Garden is eager to scale down. Clover Nature School’s design and management team has spent the most time catalyzing people’s interests and awareness in self-governing through intellectual and physical activities. Residents are expected to care for not only the garden but also their own community. The awareness of being a steward of community spaces has to be fostered and continuously practiced. With the community capacity built by the KIC Garden, another small community garden in Wujiaochang area was initiated completely by residents. Residents crowdsourced the initial funding of ¥6,000 ($940) and the street office offered another ¥10,000 ($1,564) to encourage the continuous development of the resident-led project (Mao et al., 2021). This demonstrates that the down-scaling process of KIC Garden triggered an out-scaling process and in turn, is leading to another up-scaling process. More pop-up community gardens and participatory neighborhood renewal projects like the KIC Garden caught the attention of regional and city authorities. At the government level, officers began to rethink the problems in the top-down urban planning and neighborhood design processes. The top-down approach overweighs community spaces’ performance based on regulations and statistical indicators. This approach also means the government dominates linear investment, decision-making, implementation, and management procedures. The ignorance of residents’ needs deepens the conflicts and mistrust among residents and the government. To facilitate cooperation between residents and the government, based on the practice of the KIC Garden and other projects created by Clover Nature School, a new neighborhood participatory design model is proposed (Figure 6.16). This model suggests two links in the planning system — the community planner system and the co-governance platform 百脑汇 (meaning “crowdsourcing ideas”). This proposal interrupts the original top-down procedures and added two residentoriented links to broaden the citizen participation channel. A community planner is a resident who is familiar with the neighborhood and desires to learn more about community participation and urban design methods. The role resembles a citizen designer and is a representative voice of

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Figure 6.16 Proposed commons-civic-government collaboration model (Based on Mao et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2017) residents. The co-governance platform is an intermediary between residents and local government officers where residents can bring their proposals regarding improvements of neighborhood public spaces. Officers, residents, community planners, and sometimes Clover Nature School’s designers can discuss how to realize those proposals. Finalized proposals will be implemented by residents. Community planners act as project managers. This model is still in its infancy and remains to be fully realized. Whether the co-governance platform will evolve into another formalism community engagement platform as the neighborhood committee or actually bring the top-down and bottom-up actors together in shaping community spaces is still to be observed. What is certain is that the KIC Garden is scaling up to intentionally intervene in the wider socio-political agenda. Figure 6.17 is a general trend of the up-scaling process of the KIC Garden, which demonstrates a steady increase. Stakeholders in the initiation, design, and implementation phases are limited to the Shui On company, local government, Clover Nature School, and some enthusiastic residents. In the middle and current years, up-scaling has become the prevailing goal for the KIC Garden. More actors from diverse social sectors such as private company groups, religious organizations, schools, and citizen participants contribute from multiple angles. The KIC Garden’s focus on up-scaling is assumed to have a close relationship with the national and local political propaganda. The Thirteenth Five-Year Plan of China (“十三五”, national development guidelines) promulgated in 2016 highlighted key words like “eco-friendly” and “sharing” and emphasized a vision of green urban growth and citizens’ needs-oriented urban renewal. These guidelines were reaffirmed in 2018 Shanghai Master Plan, providing favorable political conditions for the KIC Garden’s up-scaling.

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Figure 6.17 KIC Garden’s up-scaling trend The KIC Garden’s duplication and up-scaling are co-related. As it gains increasing attention from various social and political sectors, as well as mainstream social media, community gardens are becoming familiar to politicians and citizens. The vertical influences have inspired large numbers of citizen self-organized groups or neighborhood committees to demand their own gardens. Therefore, the KIC Garden is satisfied with the mutually dependent duplication and up-scaling trends that seem to continue upward. However, the fast vertical and horizontal growth could also threaten its sustainment in the long term. From my point of view, the threat could exist in two aspects. First, fast duplications of community gardens work like an assembly line production, whether designers (in this case, the design team from the Clover Nature School) have designed case by case according to localized situations is questionable. Also, government officers and residents who requested design assistance may not have been given enough time to consolidate their governance roles, as most projects have a short turnover period. For both reasons, the first threat could be hidden deficiencies in everyday governance that would only be exposed in the future. Another potential threat is that as more impactful governmental sectors are brought into the up-scaling process in order to realize the commons-civic-government collaboration model, the government could over-intervene in the self-governance. Citizens’ hands could be tied when leveraging governmental support and the right to self-governance. 6.3.3 Scale deep The deep scaling dimension of the KIC Garden is analyzed through three theories — the 24-hour clock and well-being scorecard, needs and satisfiers, and the participation ladder. The 24-hour clock and well-being scorecard explores the depth of engagement and the impacts of commoning on different life qualities at the individual level. Needs and satisfiers inspect community demands and the project’s responses to meet these demands. The participation ladder identifies the power 135

distribution at the organizational and individual levels. A more diversified 24-hour clock, higherranking well-being scores, more co-existing and synergetic needs and satisfiers, and higher tiers of participation represent deep-scaling processes. 24-hour clock and well-being scorecard Interviewees were asked to talk about their daily distribution of the 24 hours and were told to rate their well-being before and after joining commoning activities. One participant shared her experience in the Seeding campaign: I have been an outsider (migrant from another province) to Shanghai, and Shanghai has always been a strange city to me. Even though I managed to settle here, a sense of wandering and distancing is always deep in my heart…In 2016, right next to our neighborhood, the KIC Garden was built. I took my children to the garden and let them play around. My children said that they smelled freedom, and I smelled the familiar scent of the soil in my memory. The scenes of my childhood, growing up in the countryside, flashed by. I felt familiar and intimate…I am an active member of the KIC Garden, and before the pandemic, I was preparing a community New Year’s Eve dinner and the kids’ winter camp…I don’t think the KIC Garden is just a place to host events. To be precise, it’s a co-creation space, which might sound baffling for those who have never been. The core of this place is for the meeting, linking, and co-creation of people. This space is not about possession but about sharing, mutual assistance, and autonomy. I have watched this place turn from a vacant, trashed place into a beautiful garden. I realize it is not only about loving this place, but also having a more rational understanding and planning like how to take better care of the flowers and crops and how to convey the open attitude of the garden to more community residents. We need more people to join our efforts. Another participant of the Seeding campaign shared his processes of initiating and expanding Seeding activities in his apartment building during national quarantine. He wrote in his Seeding blog: I created a seeding station on the staircase of our apartment building. The station has a few growing seedlings and a bottle of seeds. On cardboard, I wrote the rules of caring for the plants together or claiming some seeds to grow in one’s own home. When the quarantine is over, we will plant all the seedlings in our shared community spaces outside. There is also a cardboard sign with post-it notes to leave comments or communicate with neighbors. A few days after I initiated the station, I saw my neighbor from the 2nd floor added her soybean seeds to the station. Then, a few other neighbors left encouraging words on post-it notes. I

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also ran into our building resident leader who lives on the 6th floor. We went to check the station together. The building leader shared the station’s story with our community committee officers. The community committee became interested in promoting this exchange in other buildings so that more people can join and form a mutual-support system in quarantine. A third participant, living in a distant neighborhood from the KIC Garden, has been following the garden’s updates for over three years and had traveled across the city to attend events. She said: I live in a neighborhood of over 300,000 square meters and nearly 3,000 households, but the number of people who I can occasionally visit or talk to is no more than a hand’s count (meaning less than five) … I spent over 11 hours a day working or commuting to work. Besides going to school, my son spends most of his time in the neighborhood but often feels bored by the delicately designed landscapes and driveways. Other parents seem reluctant to let their kids play with others, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak. The community we live in today is no longer a place where we watch out for each other. It is an uncaring place. So, I signed up for both my son and myself up for the KIC Garden’s activities, including the Seeding campaign, and encouraged my son to share our vegetables and seeds with neighbors — the woman who manages a small snack store, the community committee officer that we thought might ban our exchanges, and the security guard that my son has always been a little timid of. It turned out that everyone was kind and accepted our little kindness. I hope more of these community actions can bring us closer to a sense of belonging. There are many similar stories of individuals in relation to the KIC Garden. Based on them, sets of the 24-hour clock and wellbeing scorecard are compiled to reflect a working adult’s 24-hour clocks before and after they joined the KIC Garden’s Seeding campaign (Figure 6.18). Many participants reallocated two or three hours of work and commuting to community or home gardening activities. The commoner gardened with their children and shared seeds and vegetables with neighborhoods, which combined parenting with community building, physical workout, and mental wellness improvement during quarantine. The change on the clock of diversifying activities led to the increase of social, community and physical scores. This change also reflects the positive implications of having synergistic endogenous satisfiers. Hours of commoning activities meet several needs synchronously such as subsistence, affection, understanding, leisure, and identity.

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Figure 6.18 KIC Garden volunteer 24hr clock and well-being scorecard before and after joining the Seeding campaign

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Needs and satisfiers

Figure 6.19 KIC Garden’s needs wheel

Fundamental and dominant needs in other community gardens like subsistence, protection, and leisure are not the primary needs that the KIC Garden satisfies. Shanghai’s complete urban infrastructure system plan is committed to the establishment of all types of infrastructure in residential areas. Grocery stores, public parks, and gated communities have ensured most basic needs including purchasing fresh food (subsistence), finding a recreational place (leisure), and having secured housing (protection). The KIC Garden meets deeper needs of affection, understanding, and identity (Figure 6.19). From interviews and research, the KIC Garden’s participants were mostly concerned about children’s education and the alienation between neighbors. Accordingly, major needs are to build connections with others in the community; to find their belonging in the city; and to create a diverse environment for children to live, learn, and play. The KIC Garden meets these needs simultaneously. In other words, it generates synergistic satisfiers. Taking a common situation of parents taking their kids to the one-meter garden to work as an example, the subsistence need of producing food is met first. Meanwhile, for children, the garden is a playground, a place to meet other kids, an opportunity to use their imagination to organize the garden and learn hands-on knowledge. Needs of leisure, creation, affection, and understanding are satisfied together. For parents or adults, the garden satisfies their need of building stronger relations with their children (affection). Some recall their childhood memories with their parents when farming with their children (identity). They are also able to meet, socialize, and develop friendships with other parents in the community (affection) and become a part of the community (identity). The KIC Garden creates synergistic satisfiers at multiple levels — in oneself, in social groups, and with the environment.

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Participation ladder

Figure 6.20 KIC Garden’s and the proposed collaboration model’s ladders of citizen participation The KIC Garden began with clear differentiation of powerholders and the powerless. The Shui On company and the government officers were taking the lead and determining the ways that citizens can participate. As mentioned earlier, the KIC Garden has encouraged different citizen participation levels at different phases (Figure 6.20). The planning phase was almost a top-down “informing” process with no direct participation from the citizens. In the design phase, citizens were invited to share their opinions and needs, which contributed to the design of the garden. This phase moved towards the “consultation” level of participation. However, it remained as a type of tokenism because although citizens had the opportunity to voice their opinions and were informed of decisions about the garden, all final decision-making rights were in hands of powerholders. The citizens could be regarded as data providers. The consultation phase could have become a hypocritic participatory procedure if the project did not seek to deepen its participation level. Fortunately, the co-construction and current management phases have shifted to the sixth rung of “partnership.” Major actors (the Shui On company, Clover Nature School, local government, and residents) have overlapping interests in the garden and are able to form a partnership in managing it. The intent of top-down forces has weakened, as residents have a better grasp on everyday maintenance and decision-making. Some residents have begun to take the lead in garden organizing events and repairing facilities in the garden. During the pandemic, a family, who live in the neighborhood, spontaneously took on tasks like cleaning the little blue house, preparing for children’s classes, and distributing donations of sanitizers. Besides, the Seeding campaign 140

elevated the KIC Garden’s participation level to “citizen control” for the first time. This campaign was not dependent on the garden’s physical space but dispersed around the neighborhood and even had satellite projects elsewhere. Citizens had full control of the rules and processes of the campaign. It showed the possibility to realize a fully citizen-control future of the KIC Garden. In parallel, Clover Nature School’s up-scaling plan, from a broader and meta-design level, is trying to push the citizen participation in the urban planning process of the city to higher rungs. Conventional city planning in Shanghai (or in all Chinese cities) is a technocratic-led and completely top-down process. Citizens are viewed as laypeople with no knowledge of design and should, at best, be “consulted” or “informed” in urban planning decisions. Even in nominal public hearing sessions, residents are mostly listeners, being educated, or mandated to agree with powerholders’ plans. Therefore, with the emergence of community gardens and the awakening of civic participation as leverage points, a fundamental shift in the urban planning system is proposed. By introducing the “community planner system” and the “co-governance platform”, community designers are committed to pushing the participation level in the urban planning process in Shanghai towards the higher rungs of the ladder.

Figure 6.21 Integrated deep-scaling analysis

The deep-scaling analysis of needs, well-being, and participation level begins to show that these three frameworks can be integrated since they all present different degrees of deep-scaling and have interrelated elements (Figure 6.21). Higher levels of the citizen participation ladder suggest higher degrees of deep-scaling. The needs wheel can be unfolded into a vertical bar chart that shows the degree of satisfaction of each need. Similar to the 24-hour clock, more diversified everyday activities suggest more types of needs are satisfied and more balance of all aspects of well-being. Following the well-being scorecard’s system, well-being scores, diverse 24-hour

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activities, satisfaction degree, and participation level are proportional to the overall degree of deep-scaling. If we assign each of them points as in the well-being scorecard, a deep-scaling score can be calculated as by this equation: Individual deep-scaling score (6-69) = participation ladder tier level (1-8) + needs sum (0-45) +24-hour activity diversity (0/1) + well-being sum (5-15) Organization deep-scaling score (6-69) = participation ladder tier level (1-8) + needs sum (0-45) + average 24-hour activity diversity (0/1) + average well-being score (5-15) As the organization is made up of individuals, a higher organizational deep-scaling score relies on higher individual scores. This integrated rating system allows a rough measurement of the deep-scaling dimension (more details of the rating system are explained in Section 8.1). Based on this, a deep-scaling trend of the KIC Garden is also diagramed on the timeline (Figure 6.22). The deep-scaling of the KIC Garden has risen slowly and is expected to keep increasing. The increasing rate is predicted to be low because although both degrees of citizen participation and needs to be satisfied like protection, creation, and freedom are likely to increase, it takes a longer time to shift the deeply inherited cultures and beliefs behind these elements. Also, due to the political conditions, reaching higher levels of citizen control is expected to be difficult.

Figure 6.22 KIC Garden’s deep-scaling trend

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Conclusion In the KIC Garden, food production, garden spaces, gardening knowledge and skills, and civic participation awareness are shared. Commoners are individual neighbors, private company supporters, governmental officers, and the design and management team. Its sustainment faces the challenge that commoners lack the awareness of civic engagement. The KIC Garden has already put in place diverse programs and activities to facilitate citizen participation. The reliance on governmental and private sources of funding, regulation, and intervention also poses challenges for the garden to be privatized or over-institutionalized in the long run. On one hand, to reduce the dependency on external funding, the garden has been selling its educational classes as a product to private companies and social organizations to generate enough income. This exchange raises another concern of putting too much emphasis on the monetary exchange and neglects the true purpose of building the community and citizen accesses, although this concern is still minor at this point. On the other hand, the up-scaling goal to expand the collaboration network to a political procedure of multi-party negotiation might be difficult to secure the self-governance right of the garden. The intention to further the up-scaling is benign, but as more similar projects start to gain popularity among citizens, the government will concern that bottom-up forces could challenge the control position of the government and intervene in the self-governance processes.

Figure 6.23 KIC Garden’s multi-dimensional scaling trends

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All three dimensions of scaling co-exist in the KIC Garden (Figure 6.23). The garden scales out by duplicating in other locations. Different collaboration models of community gardens have been derived from these duplications. The Seeding campaign also had a national out-scaling impact. In parallel to the out-scaling, the need to make the multi-stakeholder collaboration model official came to the foreground. The garden’s future priorities involve scaling up. The goal is to figure out a long-term commons–civic–government collaboration platform and procedure to regulate bottom-up processes in the urban planning system. Its intentions are to challenge the longestablished assembly-line style urban development in China and push the citizen-led urban agenda forward. Another aspect of the up-scaling of the KIC Garden is in fact “down-scaling”, which is the further empowerment of citizens. The foundation for the garden to scale out and up is to properly engage the citizens and give the decision-making right to them. The “down-scaling” is intertwined with deep-scaling. The premise for attracting more individual actors is the deepening of individuals’ understanding of farming and nature, awareness of citizens’ responsibilities and rights, and desires to connect and collaborate with other. Deep-scaling of the KIC Garden also focuses on education. Because both elderly and middle-aged participants are concerned about children’s education, the KIC Garden offers nature education to children as the cornerstone to engage all age groups and expand the agency to foster citizen participation awareness. In short, the sustainment of the KIC Garden has been relying on its out- and up-scaling dimensions. They are effective for the time being but need the underlying deep-scaling to prepare for the limits and risks of its out- and up-scaling processes. In understanding the sustainment and multi-dimensional scaling of the KIC Garden, the analysis highlights the following strategies: 1. Fast duplication 2. Connecting into a larger network by developing a commons-civic-government collaboration model 3. Incremental up-scaling and citizen empowerment processes 4. Prioritizing the education of future generations to bring children and adults together 5. Permaculture enabled deeper understanding and collaboration with natural systems The KIC Garden began as a top-down project. Initiators had an explicit vision of dripping down the rights to catalyze and expand the bottom-up power. The project was led by professional designers who adopted a participatory process and planned to phrase out from the project. The designers’ role is indispensable in this project, and I will argue that for most commoning projects in China to sustain, the designers’ intermediary role is essential as well. So far, all purely citizeninitiated community gardens in Shanghai remain at small scales like pocket gardens. In larger projects where multiple stakeholders are involved, although community committees are supposed 144

to be the intermediary, they lack design awareness and engagement tools. Some community committee members also have long-standing grievances with residents. Residents are historically discouraged from participating in their communities and need a long time for trust-building and re-establishment of a participation culture. Designers might have fluid roles as leaders, facilitators, or observers in different phases but still have a consistent overview of the project and bridge the skill and knowledge gaps among multi-stakeholders.

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Chapter 7 Focus Case Study II: Garfield Community Farm in Pittsburgh, USA

The urban farm is not just about someone growing food and making a living selling food. It’s really about a community. It’s about developing community around a space. — Founder of the Garfield Community Farm

Introduction Using the same structure as Chapter 6, this chapter examines the sustainment problem of Garfield Community Farm in Pittsburgh, USA. To sustain, the Garfield Farm focuses on keeping up with the production while aiming to give back to the community. This chapter begins with an overview of the project; explores the farm’s development and structure from multiple levels; and documents aspects like the history, staff and volunteers’ roles and motivations, programs, the spatial layout, and impacts (Section 7.2). The preliminary analysis involves the collection and synthesis of interview scripts, participatory observations, and secondary research. Then, based on a scaling lens, the analysis in Section 7.3 reflects on how the project has self-sustained over time. This case study expands on the spatial deep-scaling analysis section more than the KIC Garden case study because its location allowed me to be physically present and acquire more data. The farm’s scaling trends, its strategies for the sustainment problem, and design’s role in this project are woven throughout the chapter and summarized in the conclusion.

7.1 Background Founded in 2009, the Garfield Community Farm has turned three acres of deteriorated urban land into a fully operational urban permaculture farm that is home to perennial fruit and nut trees, berry shrubs, annual gardens, bio shelters, an herb labyrinth, and more (Garfield Community Farm, 2021; Kim, 2017). The farm now holds a non-profit status and has three staff: an executive director, a community engagement coordinator, and a production manager. Through permaculture practice, educational programs, and localized collaborations, the Garfield Community Farm has restored the productivity of the land, brought organic food to surrounding residents, and created a wider impact as a social and spiritual place in the neighborhood. The Garfield Community is in the middle of an urban food desert. The neighborhood of Garfield is located in the northern section of Pittsburgh’s East End. Unlike residents living in the southern part of the neighborhood that have easy access to multiple bus lines and the Penn Avenue business corridor, residents of the northern area live in extreme poverty1 and are much more isolated because of the hilly geographical location (Figure 7.1). The farm is next to Garfield Commons, mixed-income public housing units with over 1000 occupants owned by the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh (The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project, 2019). The northern part of the Garfield neighborhood was identified as one of the six Healthy Food Priority Areas (HFPAs) in the great Pittsburgh area (FeedPGH, 2020). Designated by the City of Pittsburgh, HFPAs are places that have a higher level of food insecurity and are prioritized for actions against food insecurity (FeedPGH, 2020). In this area, a lack of public transportation access, a low homeownership rate, and a high poverty rate coincide with a lack of grocery stores and a significant amount of dietrelated health issues (FeedPGH, 2020; Smith et al., 2020). Before the farm was planned and before According to the 2021 data from US Census Bureau, northern Garfield has a median household income of $27,019 while southern Garfield’s median household income is $33,494. 1

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Figure 7.1 Aerial view of Garfield Community Farm and the surrounding Garfield Market (which is two blocks away from the farm) opened a few years ago, there was no access to food or grocery stores on the steep slope. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, food deserts are city neighborhoods or tracts that are more than a mile from a grocery store. The Northern Garfield neighborhood was a true food desert (Dutko et al., 2012; Maccart, n.d.). In this context, the main survival problem for the Garfield Farm was to produce enough food for the food desert and find financial income to support the farm and make their food affordable to their neighbors.

7.2 Micro, meso, and marco level structures 7.2.1 Micro level: staff and participant roles and motivations The Garfield Farm has only three long-term staff members. Executive director J.C. is also the founder of the farm and an associate pastor at the Open Door Church. When he first joined the church as a pastor, he was thinking about how to benefit the neighborhood. As he was observing the vacancies in the neighborhood, the idea of producing food on vacant lots came to him

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intuitively. Therefore, the farm was originally created with the support of two churches — the Open Door Church and the Valley View Church. To date, the Open Door Church still owns the three city blocks (consisting of 25 lots originally) where the farm is located. Since the inception of the farm, J.C. recruited experts and volunteers to build the farm from scratch and was involved in all affairs on the farm, regardless of their size. He only transitioned to the role of executive director in recent years, as the production of the farm has gradually stabilized, and he now is mainly responsible for strategic planning, working with the board of directors, and more hands-off with everyday operations of the farm. Nonetheless, J.C. still comes around on the farm to help harvest crops or organize mobile markets. As director J.C. gradually reduced his daily production hours, production manager E.L. joined the farm and is now in charge of all food production. E.L. oversees every inch of the land and every stage of all crops. She has comprehensive plans for when and where to plant, fertilize, water, or harvest the crops, and she trains volunteers or runs mobile markets. Although her hours on the farm change with seasons, she spends the most hours on the farm during the weekdays. Community engagement coordinator AJ.M. lives just a few blocks away from the farm. Working on the farm since 2014, AJ.M. has been dedicated to community outreach. She often comes to the farm to lead educational sessions, tours, or summer camps but also assists with harvesting or planting. Besides her understanding and know-how about farming practices, her enthusiasm for teaching hands-on growing and farming techniques to children and young people in the community is one of the most precious resources of the farm. Most everyday maintenance and harvest work on the farm is done by volunteers. The workshare program offers a Community Supported Agriculture bag weekly or bi-weekly in exchange for volunteers’ 2 or 4 hours of help on the farm. A handful of consistent volunteers also come to help. Consistent volunteers and workshare people are trained to do chores or harvesting, so they can complete these daily tasks independently. Volunteer evenings on Thursdays are open for anyone to show up and help on a given task. Part-time interns are hired to reduce production and sales pressures in busy seasons. Interns work closely with the staff in all areas, similar to farm apprentice experience. 7.2.2 Meso level: organizational structure and spatial layout Programs The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program on the Garfield Farm has the same model as most CSAs. Over 20 subscribers receive a weekly bag of over $20 worth of produce for 20 weeks from summer to fall. CSA subscribers pre-pay either $400 or what they can afford before the season. The uniqueness of the Garfield Farm’s CSA bags is the variety of produce that is not found in other CSA bags, such as Jerusalem artichoke, rhubarb, horseradish, etc. (Figure 7.2). 149

The pre-pay system allows CSA income to support the start of the new planting season and the preparation of the mobile market. Although the farm’s CSA intended to serve people living within one mile, the staff team very soon noticed that most CSA subscribers were not from Garfield but surrounding neighborhoods, so the mobile market was built to better connect with neighbors in Garfield. In 2016, the Garfield Farm received a grant to build a mobile farmer’s market to upgrade the original stationary market. The market on the trailer has the advantage of bringing fresh produce directly to neighbors’ doors in the steep neighborhood. In production seasons, the trailer is parked in front of the Valley View Church for sales (Figure 7.3). Individuals and families come to the market to look for specialty produce. A notable proportion of Garfield’s population, especially elders, grew up growing their own food. The farmer’s market attracts many intergenerational families as a place where younger generations, as well as their parents and grandparents, learn about healthy food and farming from the farmers. Education is one of the most important missions of the farm. Over the years, members have built an expanding educational network. Educational sessions, after-school programs, and summer camps in partnership with local schools and organizations have served over 130 youth. Children are taught how food is planted, harvested, and prepared, as well as about nutrition, soil, pollinators, and more. The staff utilizes the materials on the farm. Sometimes children are guided to help take care of raised beds, or they are taught to use the plants on the farm to make nutritious food like herb water and tomato basil pizza. The educational programs are also available to adults. The Permaculture Design Course was initiated in 2019 and reoccurs every summer. The course is certified through the Permaculture Institute of North America and co-taught by the farm director J.C., manager E.L., and renowned permaculture educator Darrell Frey. The two-week course introduces permaculture principles around soil, air, irrigation, pest control, plants, animals, buildings, and fungus. It requires participants to design a set of site analyses and a complete permaculture design that utilizes what they have learned. The course provides the participants with hands-on experience by engaging them in many farm activities. This low-threshold course allows people without any knowledge in farming or design to enter the field of urban farming and sustainable agriculture techniques. Produce outlets The Garfield Farm’s produce has five outlets. Besides the CSA program and mobile farmer’s market, the produce is also sold to local restaurants, saved for community events and educational programs, and donated to Valley View Church’s food pantry in partnership with the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank. The food pantry distributes produce surplus monthly to community members in need. Over 150 people show up at the church to pick up food from the food pantry every month. Since the food amount is variable, sometimes not all people’s needs can be met.

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Figure 7.2 CSA bags (Source: Garfield Farm staff)

Figure 7.3 Mobile farmer’s market (Source: Garfield Farm staff)

A few local restaurants purchase salad greens, microgreens, and sometimes tomatoes and fruits from the farm to create unique organic menus. A decent amount of income is from restaurant sales, as the produce that the farm offers them is more delicate. These sales allow the farm to maintain the financial balance and still make donations to the food pantry. Spontaneous and incremental decision-making The Garfield Community Farm has adopted a spontaneous and incremental decision-making process. A board of directors was formed under the Open Door Church. All decisions for the farm ultimately need to pass through the board. On a day-to-day basis, changes and plans for the farm are collectively decided by the staff members. Many ideas also come from workshare people, volunteers, and neighbors. The wider community is able to offer input on major decisions. For instance, E.L. came up with the idea of building a bio shelter to house more seedlings. The rest of the staff supported the decision, and a contractor from the permaculture cohort helped build the structure with untreated wood. There are more structures or areas on the farm that are incepted, designed, and realized incrementally, with ideas, material, labor, and financial contributions from different people, groups, and organizations. There is no specific rule for decision-making on the farm, and very often, it takes a few group meetings and a consensus from all involved people. The social contract for the farm participants is straightforward. The following rules are written on a board at the entrance: · Treat everyone with the love and respect that they deserve as fellow children of God.

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· In order to protect the plants, only walk on the pathways and not the garden beds. · In order to protect the plants, do not smoke in the garden or spray any harmful substances such as chemical weed killers. · Make sure to close all the gates behind you, so that the deer cannot eat the vegetables and flowers. · Do not harm any plants or any structures that are on the farm. · Do all you can to help keep this space safe. · Enjoy your time here. It is a beautiful example of God’s creation. We love this farm, and we hope you do too. Spatial layout and feedback loops The farm occupies three city blocks on a hill. From the top to the bottom, three blocks are called the upper garden, the middle garden, and the lower garden (Figure 7.4). In between the lower and middle gardens is Wicklow Street, where the main entrance is located. In between the upper and middle garden is an inner area that has a row of compost bins and entrances to both gardens. The lower garden is composed of an orchard and a greenhouse, usually referred to as “the high tunnel.” The middle garden is divided into four sections — an herb labyrinth, a gathering space, a hügelkultur garden, and another garden surrounded by fruit trees and berry trees. The upper garden also has multiple functions. On the south side of the bio-shelter is a large contour garden. On the other side is a food forest. A chicken coop is attached behind the bio shelter. At the upper north-western corner is the newly-built greenhouse. Beekeeping and biochar making also have their dedicated spaces on the farm. The farm has formed relations with a beekeeper and a biochar maker. They have their equipment on the farm, and they give honey and biochar to the farm in exchange for the use of the space. The herb labyrinth is home to a vast number of herbs and flowers (Figure 7.5). It is used for culinary purposes, and it attracts bees, bugs, and butterflies to pollinate plants on the farm. The herb labyrinth is also aesthetically pleasing, so it functions as a meditation space. Behind the labyrinth, a community gathering space was just built in 2020. Benches along the grounds and the clothes canopy create an open yet shaded space for church worship, educational events, and group meetings (Figure 7.6). On the perimeter of the gathering space, there are three structures: a small pavilion with tables and benches, a cob oven built with natural materials, and a tool shed. Another key structure on the farm is the bio shelter greenhouse (Figure 7.7). It is a passive solar design with solar panels on the rooftop and a rainwater collection gutter that downspouts from both sides of the roof. The insulation of the structure captures the heat (thermal mass created by solar energy), so the bio shelter can continue to produce food throughout the year. The warm temperature lets the bio shelter host various delicate or sub-tropical plants like bananas, 152

Figure 7.5 Herb labyrinth

Figure 7.6 Community space

Figure 7.4 Axonometric of Garfield Farm (Based on the model by Jianxiao Ge; updated according to the spatial layout of 2021)

Figure 7.7 Inside and outside of the bio shelter greenhouse

Figure 7.8 Feedback loops diagram pomegranates, figs, goji berries, microgreens, and seedlings. The high tunnel in the lower garden is another greenhouse that takes on winter production of hybrid tomatoes, peppers, and various types of greens. The chicken coop and chicken run behind the bio shelter connect to the food forest. A food forest has different layers of plants growing together and benefiting each other. In this one, black locusts, pear trees, blueberries, mulleins, red currants, and hazelnut trees share the space, along with a rabbit cage. The diverse functionality on the farm forms several feedback loops (Figure 7.8). During the day, chickens and ducks can leave the coop and run into the food forest. Chickens love the black locust leaves. On the backside of the chicken run, there is another fenced garden. Whenever the garden is changing for new crops, chickens can go inside to fertilize, scratch around, and eat bugs. Like Bill Mollison’s chicken-greenhouse example, chickens and ducks stay inside the bio shelter at night, and their body heat warms the space. Plants and birds exchange carbon 156

dioxide and oxygen. Biochar is used to reduce the birds’ smell and absorb ammonia and bird nutrients. When waste from the chicken coop and rabbit cage is acquired, it goes into compost piles and is turned into soil fertilizers. The compost connects to another circle. Community members bring food scraps to the farm. A nearby coffee shop also contributes its coffee grounds to composting. Rotten crops, half-eaten food, leftover produce, fallen leaves, and tree branches also furnish the compost. After weeks’ turning and cooking, waste materials become fertilizers that enrich the farm soil. Feedback loops like these exist everywhere on the farm, enhancing exchanges among all actors within the micro and regional ecosystem.

7.2.3 Macro level: external supports Initiation process The 25 lots that the farm occupies originally had 25 blight homes, which were slowly torn down. When the farm was founded in 2009, the last vacant house that was going to be torn down was on the same lot where the herb labyrinth now grows. The first several years of work on the farm involved cleaning the site and restoring the soil as the house debris was crushed into the land. Vacant lots were owned by the City of Pittsburgh and the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Then, all ownership was transferred to the city to become one leasable entity. The city allowed the farmers to work on the farm before ownership was transferred to the churches. The Open Door Church purchased half of the land directly from the city in 2011, and a few years later, through the Adopt-A-Lot program and with the administrative help from the Bloomfield Garfield Corporation, the other half of the land was ultimately all purchased by the church. Referring to the Adopt-A-Lot program toolkit, we can have a comprehensive overview of the initiation process of the farm (Figure 7.9). Aside from the paperwork, getting the license (land ownership) requires multiple rounds of soil tests and ground inspection (Danko et al., 2015). The land acquisition could take months and even years, which is the most challenging step to start a farm. Other utilities were figured out along the way. The irrigation relies on rainwater collection in rainy seasons, but when the precipitation is low, the farm uses city water. The city offers a water fee discount to the farm. Similarly, solar panels provide most of the electricity for the bio shelter, and they are supplemented by the city electricity. There is still no garbage pickup around the farm. People usually pack their trash out. Occasionally, a neighbor kindly helps to dump the trash.

Financial structure The farm’s regular income comes from the CSA program, the farmer’s market, and restaurant sales. Annual funding and donations are from local churches, local foundations (i.e., the PNC charitable trust, the Sprout Fund, and the Small and Mighty Fund), family foundations, and individual 157

Figure 7.9 Initiation process (Based on Danko et al., 2015, p.10-11)

Figure 7.10 Financial structure

donations. The farm gives back to its funders with food produce. Church and family foundation donations are more consistent throughout the years. Large foundations and individual donations can be more fluid and unstable. Separate grants have also been awarded to build or improve different projects on the farm. For instance, the bio shelter was built with three different grants. The 2019 Pittsburgh Foundation’s Small and Mighty fund granted $15,000 to the farm, which made hiring a full-time production manager possible. In 2021, another grant was acquired to build a workstation in front of the bio shelter to wash and prepare food. The farm’s financial structure has diversified its income and expenditures, so it is more resilient to minor changes (Figure 7.10). After understanding the farm from all scales, I noted some sustainment challenges as well as some potential solutions to those problems. The Garfield Farm has a small staff team which results in a high demand for volunteer labor. Attracting enough volunteers is the first difficulty. Though the goal of the farm is to support the Garfield community, very few residents in the neighborhood could initially afford the CSA. To address this problem, Garfield Farm created a “pay-as-you-can” CSA option to increase the affordability and introduced a mobile market to bring food closer to the neighbors. In contrast to the lack of labor, the farm has a relevantly large area to maintain. In addressing this, it employed incremental decision-making and implementation strategies to reduce the amount of labor and financial investments needed to maintain the space. In the meantime, to maximize the productivity of space in respect to both food production and social production, spaces on the farm have been designed to meet multiple needs. External forces have also shaped the farm, as its initiation and revenue generation depend on support from and collaboration with other organizations and foundations. Although the farm has slowly developed a stable financial model, the commitment needed to maintain daily production has deprived it of its ability to expand further. In the following section, these sustainment problems are further investigated under the scaling framework. Hidden strategies and opportunities are further explored.

7.3 Scaling analysis 7.3.1 Scale out The farm has been steadily scaling out since its inception (Figure 7.11). From the onset, space expansion, ecosystem improvements, infrastructure upgrades, and program expansions have been carried out incrementally. The garden started with the earliest two small pieces of vegetable gardens and has slowly grown into the full three-acre that is used today. Over the years, new areas have been designed and utilized. Most of the early increments of planting plots were to meet the needs of food production (subsistence needs). After food production was stabilized, more spaces for education, recreation, and community services were added. By 2015, around 80% of the property was in use for either food production, storage, or community spaces. As the arable area and production expanded, the amount of labor needed had to be increased as well. Incremental out-scaling also needs to recognize the time it takes to remediate the land. Some

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Figure 7.11 Out-scaling process of Garfield Farm areas had healthier soil that can be used immediately, but most of the land had contaminated materials that needed to be rehabilitated. Rehabilitation could take months to years. Almost all the continuous out-scaling processes are to respond to new needs. One benefit of incremental expansion is the flexibility to meet needs and invest financially along the way. Compared to the one-time all-in-one design approach, which is typically used in most urban projects, gradual design and implementation on the farm both lowered the initial cost and design threshold to start the farm and left flexibility for future programs. Inadvertently, incremental out-scaling also leaves space for more people to engage with the design and implementation processes, as the social network and participatory awareness have built up gradually. Design principles of permaculture have been able to direct some of the spatial zoning and plantation arrangement. At the same time, the Garfield Farm’s out-scaling is also a process of trial and error. For instance, spacings between rows of crops were made narrow to increase productivity. However, the number of volunteers increased, and new volunteers who were unfamiliar with the layout would frequently trample on the plants. With the experience gained over time, the staff and people who are responsible for seeding have increased the width of paths to avoid the issue. The Garfield Farm has continued to scale out, but the farm does not plan to grow beyond the three city blocks (Figure 7.12). The unhurried inner out-scaling mode provides opportunities for the farm to seek funding and resources step by step in parallel to recruiting voluntary labor and building up community engagement. New uses and construction have continued through the past 160

Figure 7.12 Garfield Farm’s out-scaling trend decade, but the three city blocks have not been fully utilized. This means there are still abundant spaces and opportunities for the farm to increase food production and expand its functionality in the following 3-4 years before it reaches the out-scaling limit. From a long-term perspective, the Garfield Farm’s out-scaling is likely to go in one of three directions. First, it will take full advantage of the three city blocks, reach the maximum production, and stop out-scaling. In this case, it will only rotate gardens annually and update facilities. Second, since there are plenty of vacant lots available in the city, Garfield Farm can potentially duplicate in other locations. However, the lack of labor, expertise, and funding could make this option difficult. The current staff and funds are completely invested in maintaining the status quo, so developing entirely new sites would involve more work. The third direction — shifting out-scaling to up-scaling and deep-scaling — would be more feasible in the long run. When the inner out-scaling plateaus, the farm could connect with other regional urban farms or create educational and community programs to deepen its food, health, and land rights advocacy. 7.3.2 Scale up In the previous section, exchanges of labor, space, and materials among staff, volunteers, the beekeeper, and the biochar maker have been mentioned. These are the farm’s network at the selflevel. The up-scaling of Garfield Farm connects it with other stakeholders at the local and regional levels (Figure 7.13). At the local or neighborhood level, the farm is partnered with community development corporations, churches, restaurants, coffee shops, schools, and residents in Garfield as well as nearby communities. At this level, partnerships are also based on exchanges of material, knowledge, or money. Restaurants and coffee shops receive fresh organic produce from the farm 161

Figure 7.13 Up-scaling and actor-network of Garfield Farm

and in return, send cash to fund the farm as well as food waste and coffee grounds to be used for composting. Churches make annual donations to the farm and sometimes occupy the herb spiral and community space on the farm for their worships and events. At the regional level, the farm collaborates with regional organizations and institutions. The Garfield Farm is open to university students and classes, so students can learn hands-on knowledge on the site; sometimes, the farm also gets technical and consultation support from university scholars. Regional foundations and grants provide funding to the farm based on proposals submitted. Other organizations and companies have been coming to the farm for tours, educational sessions, or group volunteer sessions, and they see the farm as a base for building ecological knowledge. The collaboration with the Permaculture Institute of North America (PINA) can be a breakthrough for the up-scaling process, as the farm is starting to be part of a nested system that potentially can lead to systematic changes. In the past two years, the farm starts has started permaculture course under PINA. As PINA strives to build a national network of permaculture, the Garfield Farm, a living showcase of permaculture design, has become a local hub. The staff has a vision

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Figure 7.14 Garfield Farm’s up-scaling trend to promote permaculture both as a tool for a sustainable farming system and as a mindset that adjusts thinking to respond to uncertainties. The team has concrete, long-term visions to tap into the regional and national permaculture networks and to apply low-cost, low-tech ways to do greater good for people in need. The largest system that the farm collaborates with is nature. Earth care is one of the key principles of the farm, encompassing treating the soil, water, air, and plants as equal to humans and giving back to them by increasing biodiversity, restoring soil fertility, and conserving natural resources. Overall, the up-scaling of the farm has not touched upon any agenda in policy change or land legislation. It concentrates on ensuring its own survival within the existing market and political environment, strengthening current partnerships, and keeping an open mind to new opportunities. The Garfield Farm’s up-scaling experienced steady growth and a gradual slow-down (Figure 7.14). In the first few years, it established collaborations with many local individuals, organizations, schools, and restaurants. The established collaborations are robust and are mainly used for securing funding resources, generating revenue, and expanding educational impacts. As mentioned in the out-scaling section, the farm currently does not intend to scale up to strengthen the local bottom-up initiative network and influence political decisions. The Garfield Farm’s current strategy can be considered as passive up-scaling because it focuses on leaving collaboration opportunities open but does not actively scale up beyond its survival needs. If the Garfield Farm continues to passively scale up and does not have a long-term strategic plan, there is a chance that it will be overwhelmed by the market. This is not an unfounded inference. The nearby East Liberty neighborhood is experiencing gentrification, introducing big box retail and high-end apartment 163

buildings. The property values and rent in the Garfield neighborhood have been influenced and raised in recent years (Smith et al., 2020). While the neighborhood is slowly revitalizing with returning businesses and homes on the main street, the hilltop part of the community still suffers from poverty and vacancy. It is a vulnerable place and could attract large investments at any time. By then, the farm will have to face competition from large retail stores, increasing land prices, and changes in the surrounding demographics. More active up-scaling that increases the farm’s capacity to negotiate with the market can prepare it for potential gentrification. 7.3.3 Scale deep If you ever talk to someone on the farm or take part in volunteering, you can immediately notice the influences that the farm has on individuals. Often, people are not cognizant or closely attuned to their worldview and value changes, but these subtle, subjective, and implicit deep-scaling processes can still be interpreted. Beginning with the needs and satisfiers theory as well as the 24-hour clock and well-being scorecard, the individual level of deep-scaling can be made visible. Then, the participation ladder illustrates the political and organizational deep-scaling which needs to build upon on individual deep-scaling and respond to the question, “Who can design what?” Lastly, the spatial structure based on observations of human flows in the space is examined to find out the spatial manifestation of deep-scaling. Needs and satisfiers Most interviewees mentioned multiple simultaneous satisfiers, and all satisfiers are endogenous (Figure 7.15, Appendix A, Table 7.1). Three types of needs are most commonly cited. The first is the basic food need. Food production, the increase of production, and providing fresh organic food to people satisfy both subsistence and protection needs. One of the staff members indicted the synergistic relationship between the subsistence, understanding, and affection satisfiers in the interview: We try to meet what the community needs. Having a certain level of production, being able to produce enough vegetables to donate or meet other commitments. Decisions about what type of vegetables you grow and you are able to grow come from knowing the community that you are serving so that you can have the infrastructure, space, or knowledge to be able to grow those particular crops. The second type of need that was referred to most frequently is building connections. Connections are made between people and the land, people and the natural environment, and the individual and their community. Those connections are intertwined and involve the fulfillment of various needs. Restoring toxic land and rebuilding biodiversity are actions that connect people and the land. The rehabilitated land then provides a base for learning and continuous preservation of the natural environment (understanding). The environment is also a container for socialization, 164

Figure 7.15 Garfield Farm’s needs wheel for individuals to find community, and for the community to have a place to emerge (identity and affection). Spiritually, the farm satisfies the needs of learning about nature and human behaviors’ impact on the environment (understanding) as well as reflecting on citizens’ right towards land and citizens’ communal responsibilities (identity and freedom). One of the interviewees mentioned: Just thinking of how the state of the world is right now, how do we get people involved and caring about not only the planet as a whole but just like a community? I kind of had reached the conclusion that gardening was a really good way to start that. The third most mentioned need is care for the future generation. Staff, volunteers, partner schoolteachers, and families who come to the farmers’ market all agree that the farm provides in-situ education that would not normally be taught in schools to younger generations. Younger generations usually meet their food needs through exogenous and linear satisfiers, like processed food, chain grocery stores, and fast-food dining. An outdoor classroom where groups of young people can plant, harvest, and cook creates synergistic satisfiers. Needs of subsistence, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, and creation are met at the same time. While teaching permaculture classes, one of the staff members said: We are reestablishing some cultural knowledge that will now last for hopefully more generations that somehow disappeared, so just trying to bring back the concept of gardening, food production, and biodiversity into the community, especially to the children, seems like the long-term projects that hopefully have a lasting beneficial impact. 165

24-hour clock and well-being scorecard For stable volunteers, their 24-hour clocks and well-being scorecards are summarized in one diagram (Figure 7.16). Most of them are full-time employees, students, or housewives. Their everyday schedules are normally dominated by a single type of work. The bulk of their time and energy is focused on either earning enough financially to support personal and family material needs or achieving professional and academic progress. On average, volunteers rate their material, occupational, and physical well-being as sufficient and their social and community well-being as poor or sufficient. They volunteer on the farm for one to four hours per week. Another set of 24-hour clock and well-being scorecards is created to reflect their days on the farm. Compared to days without any commoning activities, all of them reported that taking a few hours out of the day to work on the farm significantly improves their social, community, and physical well-being. They also think that material and occupational endeavors are not disrupted; the refreshment on the farm improves other work and life productivity. For staff members whose work itself is commoning practices, they describe the time on the farm as an enjoyable career. The production manager spends 30 hours per week (6 hours per day) during growing season and 10-15 hours per week (4-6 hours per day for 2-3 days per week) during the winter season. Although the job may not be as well paid as other nine-to-five jobs and can sometimes be physically exhausting, it creates a satisfying balance between physical and emotional labor because it involves care work for plants, animals, and other people. The output of the work also includes both material and social production. Overall, all five aspects of wellbeing are balanced and given medium-high scores (Figure 7.17). Participation ladder Overall, the decision-making and managerial aspects of the farm belong to the top levels of Arnstein’s participation ladder (Figure 7.18). In the farm’s initiation phase, if we consider the founder and long-term staff members as citizens and the government or the dominant food market as power holders, this phase can be discerned as a “partnership” level participation. The farm went through the Adopt-A-Lot program, which was developed by and city and Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) to allow residents to rent or purchase vacant properties to build community gardens. To legally access vacant lots to farm, the Adopt-A-Lot program requires an application process to go through the City’s Real Estate Division. An open space specialist (OSS) is assigned by the Pittsburgh Department of City Planning to maintain a database of available properties and help applicants navigate through the application process (Danko et al., 2015). The Garfield Farm formed a partnership with the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation (BGC), the local community development non-profit. The BGC helped the farm negotiate with the city and come to the agreement with the city to go through the Adopt-A-Lot procedures and resold the land for $1 to the farm (under Open Door Church’s ownership). The land was basically purchased with $1 plus all the soil tests and administrative fees (around $20,000 in total). At that time, the Adopt-ALot program was not mature, and the negotiation among the governmental program, the BGC, 166

Figure 7.16 Garfield Farm volunteer 24hr clock and well-being scorecard

Figure 7.17 Garfield Farm staff 24hr clock and well-being scorecard

Figure 7.18 Garfield Farm’s ladder of citizen participation

and the farm founders made the claim to the land possible and easier. In this partnership, citizens were held accountable for realizing the project and could bargain for the ownership of land. In the farm’s management, there is an intention for the staff members to eliminate hierarchical power relations. The everyday operation of the farm belongs to the “citizen control” or “delegated power” rungs. If we have to differentiate powerholders and the powerless in this context, the powerholders are the staff members, as they have the final decision for any major changes on the farm. In some cases, major changes and designs of the farm are proposed by residents or volunteers, who can be considered as powerless. Therefore, whenever people demand access to decision-making, it is always open for taking. The powerless or the outsiders can be a part of the rulemaking, decision-making, or management. An interviewee, who was also a summer intern, affirmed the power dynamic on the farm by saying: It’s really conducive to eliminating hierarchy to some degree. There is the valuable authority that the staff team has inherently because they have more skills and experience, but others’ input is requested a lot. As an intern, I’m given a good deal of responsibility to make certain calls in areas that they perceive me as qualified for. The delegated power format manifests particularly in volunteering. Each volunteer can negotiate with staff members about their tasks. According to the individual’s time and skills, each volunteer takes on a certain task. The delegation of tasks forms some small groups among all volunteers, 168

like the chore team and the harvest team. The powerless (volunteers) still have the right to decide the “what” and “when” based on the negotiation with the powerholders (staff) on the “how”. Spatial structure The farm’s space can first be understood in a tree structure. The diagram (Figure 7.19) depicts the farm’s spatial units and subunits. Each unit has its own function, and some of them are further divided. The upper garden is for production purposes, containing a contoured swell garden, terrace beds, and a small, fenced garden. Similar to the entrance space, it is divided into an herb garden, a bench, a canopy area, a mud oven cooking area, and a pavilion. We can list all structural elements on the farm with the tree structure, but when naming some elements, we can find a tree structure is not sufficient to describe the space. For instance, although I call the pavilion structure “a pavilion,” it can have various descriptive prefixes. It is the CSA bag preparation pavilion, the staff meeting pavilion, the volunteer break pavilion, and more. There are also vague elements that are hard to place in the tree structure. The path in front of the bio shelter always has several random objects — some wood pallets, muddy planting trays, a few buckets, and a pile of soil and straw (Figure 7.20). People who have never been to the farm would think of those as disorganized items, but this spot turns out to be the most active intersection on

Figure 7.19 The first spatial investigation using a tree structure

the farm. Wood pallets can be stacked together to stand on or work on. Planting trays are kept handy for transplanting seedlings. Buckets are used to transport the compost. Here, many people working on the farm pass often and encounter each other. You can observe visitors talking with the staff or leaving their coffee on the wood pallets. Volunteers stand around the pallets, cutting microgreens and playing music. Kids jump into the straw pile, lying there and watching the trees. In fact, most people who are new to the farm will feel disoriented and confused by its messy appearance. Many spatial elements and the connections they generate have flexible functions. Therefore, the farm is not a tree structure.

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Figure 7.20 The intersection with seemingly random objects

After adding users’ trajectories to the space, the farm is a semilattice structure (Figure 7.21). The hard outline is the farm’s property line. Colored lines mark users’ paths (or what Alexander calls users’ units). There are a few notable discoveries from the semilattice structure. First, like Alexander’s observation, those paths do not coincide or disjoint; instead, they overlap frequently. Furthermore, where they overlap, interactions happen. Those interaction hotspots are where processes of commoning reside, like the pavilion and intersection in front of the bio shelter. Whether the users’ trajectories create those hotspots or the design of those spaces catalyzes interactions is unclear, as either could come first. What is certain is that the spatial design for a commoning project needs the intention of designing a semilattice structure or the intention of predicting users’ paths. To sustain those interactions, we can assume a more sophisticated, appropriate semilattice structure is required. For instance, the diagram also shows the footprint of chickens and ducks. These birds not only lay eggs for people to consume but also are a key reason that children are enthusiastic about learning about the farm. However, they are under constant threat of coyotes and were locked in the coop after an attack. If we do not prioritize human beings’ activities in this space and consider that the deep-scaling of this farm also includes the well-being of non-humans, the spatial unit for animals might need to be designed to avoid overlapping with the wild and prioritize intersecting more with children’ paths. The deep-scaling of the Garfield Farm is captured with the same integrated analysis and trend diagram in Figure 7.22 and Figure 7.23. The depth of the Garfield Farm’s sustainment strategy

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Figure 7.21 Users’ paths generate a semilattice structure

Figure 7.22 Integrated deep-scaling analysis resides in implicit aspects, including satisfying understanding, identity, affection, and freedom needs, distributing decision-making power to interns and volunteers, spreading cultural farming knowledge, and increasing chances of social interactions in spaces. The Garfield Farm still has much potential in deep-scaling. It can delegate more power to volunteers, so the overall participation level can be increased. At the same time, the gentrification

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Figure 7.23 Garfield Farm’s deep-scaling trend

threat mentioned in the up-scaling section also suggests deep-scaling opportunities in meeting more needs of freedom, identity, creation, and protection. In an interview of Garfield residents on NEXTpittsbutgh (Tolliver, 2016, para. 16), an African American resident says: I own my home [in Garfield]; my partner owns his. We chose to live in Garfield after graduating from college. And the white people that are moving in now, they could not care less (about its past)—they’re out jogging, walking their dogs, their children. I don’t see it as completely gentrifying a community or neighborhood. What else would be here if that was not? The desire to maintain local African American businesses and culture is also expressed by Rik Swartz, a staff member of Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, and Darrell Kinsel, a local artist, in their interview with the Harvard Graduate School of Design research team. They say: We believe that, at the end of the day, people need to be involved in shaping the future of their communities. By being involved, being able to have a place at the table for the long term in those communities…We need to retain Garfield as a working-class community, which it has been historically…For culture, oftentimes justice or rather injustice and gentrification, its goal is to erase culture. (Smith et al., 2020, p.37) A volunteer/intern on the farm who is a white person growing up in the neighborhood shared

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similar thoughts: I’m really inspired by groups of people that are trying to shift ownership gaps. That is the kind of work that I’m looking to do. I’m also interested in learning about building intentional community and from black and brown farmers. I’m thinking about inspiring a way to not do it in an escapist way but rather being here, being in the city, and not relying on the government to make for policy changes to happen. Both voices of the community and the analysis result show us the significance and potential for the Garfield Farm to scale deep in the way that the local black community can be further empowered. The farm currently appears to be governed by three white staff members, and to some people, they seem like taking a saviors’ stand to “educate” the African American community. However, the African American volunteers I met in community events and the children who were in educational sessions all expressed their affection for the farm. They do not consider themselves as being educated but rather are given the opportunity to shape their own community. What the farm can do to further such empowerment might be to introduce cultural plants and food in either the gardens or programs. As noted at mobile markets, many African American elders in the community have grown their own food. The Garfield Farm is the place for these traditions and tacit knowledge to be passed along. The deep-scaling process can enable Garfield residents to take part in shaping their own community and preserving their own culture, and in turn, when more people take ownership of the farm, it will gain more support when facing sustainment challenges.

Conclusion On the Garfield Community Farm, food production, farm spaces, and permaculture knowledge and skills are shared. Commoners on the farm are individual and group collaborators, the staff, interns, volunteers, and neighborhood participants. In its self-sustainment, one challenge is the basic survival needs. It has to maintain the economic balance and productivity to meet subsistence needs. In the early years, customers of the farmers’ market and the CSA subscription were from nearby wealthy neighborhoods like Bloomfield and Friendship, so the farm is concerned about truly serving the Garfield Community instead of other nearby wealthy communities. While spending almost all energy on these challenges, another problem arises that the farm is short of the capacity to envision and strategically plan for the long-term future. In response to these challenges, the farm has already begun developing and enacting solutions. The farm worked to increase productivity and improve ecological benefits by following permaculture principles to catch and restore energy, integrate systems, form feedback loops, and gain a desirable yield. Contributions from churches and foundations, along with the sales income and individual grants, were developed into a financial model to economically sustain the farm and plan its new seasons ahead. To attract volunteers and more collaboration opportunities, compensation by 173

means of food produce and access to certain decision-making processes are provided. The farm lowered the CSA threshold, and the mobile market was built to replace traditional farmers’ markets in other neighborhoods in order to reach more neighbors in Garfield. In addition to these solutions, the analysis of scaling also uncovered more strategies, remaining problems, and opportunities. All three dimensions of scaling co-exist in this case study. The farm is scaling out within its property boundary and has not demonstrated any ambitions to absorb new property or duplicate at other locations. Its up-scaling remains dependent upon the collaborations with individuals, organizations, and businesses in the local Pittsburgh region. Its purpose is not to challenge the market or the government; rather, the farm is content with the co-existence of its current position and prioritizes the formation of a larger knowledge network based on permaculture. The most invisible but the most invested and successful dimension is its deep-scaling. Through farming, teaching, community outreach, open space sharing, and even everyday conversations, the farm has impacted implicit needs and values like people’s mental health, social connections, ecological literacy, and their sense of community. In the overall scaling diagram (Figure 7.24), 3-4 years after the initiation of the farm, its out-scaling began to slow down and will likely reach a limit. Around the same time, the up-scaling and deep-scaling increased and manifested more strategies to sustain the farm from these two dimensions.

Figure 7.24 Garfield Farm’s multi-dimensional scaling trends In understanding how the Garfield Farm sustains and scales at different dimensions, the multilevel analysis of the Garfield Farm sheds light on its key self-sustainment strategies, including: 1. A stable give-and-take system and openness to communication and collaboration 2. Connecting into a larger network by collaborating with other groups and PINA

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3. Incremental decision-making, design, and implementation 4. Education for younger generations and adults to build up the community capacity in understanding healthy food and ecological farming 5. A financial model with diverse income sources and expenditure outlets 6. The employment of permaculture principles, enabling a deeper understanding of nature and working with the rhythm of nature 7. Multifunctional spaces of a semilattice spatial structure that increase social interactions Staff, interns, and some volunteers consider themselves farmers instead of designers, but the non-designers’ designerly tactics and thinking are worth studying and translating into the design and governance of other commoning projects. The Garfield Farm’s citizen designers have an acute awareness of problems in their neighborhood. Before the design of the project, they had already immersed themselves in the design problem and users’ needs. In developing specific design ideas, the community’s input is weighed in. The staff commits to self-learning of tools and methods to improve the execution of design ideas and the functionality of the project. Additional design insights from both case studies will be discussed more in the final chapter.

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Chapter 8 Findings and Conclusions: Scaling for Sustainment

The hypothesis of this thesis consists of three arguments that are built upon each other: [1] Urban commoning is not only the management of a certain entity but a process through which people transform their worldview and the quality of social relations. Because static institutions would make urban commoning fall into over-institutionalization, privatization, or gradual enclosure, the transitional and systematic concept of scaling is introduced to study the sustainment of urban commoning. Scaling has out, up, and deep dimensions. [2] Existing studies emphasize the temporal and out-scaling dimensions of urban commoning while up- and deep-scaling dimensions are under-studied. Thus, to fully understand the sustainment of urban commoning, up- and deep-scaling dimensions need to be foregrounded. [3] Design for the sustainment of urban commoning requires first, a comprehensive understanding of its multi-dimensional scaling processes, and then, it takes a paradigm shift from design as form-making and problem-solving to design as process-enabling and relation-sustaining. Designers that facilitate urban commoning’s sustainment need to prioritize catalyzing the up- and deep-scaling processes. Chapters 2 to 4 provided theoretical support to the hypothesis, especially the first and third arguments. Case studies in chapters 6 and 7 were intended to offer empirical evidence for the second and third arguments. First, this chapter summaries templates that are used to analyze each scaling dimension in the case studies, especially an integrated deep-scaling score framework that converts immaterial aspects to measurable indicators. Then, similarities, differences, and scaling trends of the two case studies are compared under this overall scaling template. Scaling relations, sequences, limits, and opportunities associated with their sustainment are explained. In addition, key sustainment strategies are discussed in relation to existing design principles of commoning. These analyses, comparisons, and findings lead to a reflection and overall explanation of the second argument of the research hypothesis. In response to the last argument of the hypothesis, an adjusted design research workflow is proposed for research of the sustainment of urban commoning. Insights for commoning designers are concluded as meta-level suggestions. The second half of the chapter concludes the entire dissertation and describes the contributions to knowledge and future research areas.

8.1 Scaling analysis template In the two focus case studies, out-, up-, and deep-scaling dimensions are analyzed separately according to the multi-dimensional scaling model. Each dimension of the case studies can be read in parallel to understand their similarities and differences but to allow the generation of 177

deeper insights, an overall template refined from separate analytic elements is described below. This template can be applied to different phases of the project to show scaling trends and uncover relationships and sequences. This overall template, applied repeatedly on the timeline, let another layer of analysis emerge, which makes the comparison more direct and explicit and allows inferences of scaling tendencies. Out-scaling can be analyzed from urban commoning’s physical size, duplication, invested time and labor, and material production. These elements can be represented by statistics and diagrams. Two case studies in this thesis suggest two types of out-scaling — expansion and duplication. Duplications can be seen as the expansion that exceeds the project’s property boundary. The analysis of out-scaling can start with identifying which type the project belongs to and supplement with statistics representing time, labor, and material production. Placing the out-scaling analysis on the temporal scale creates the out-scaling trend, which shows visible changes. The template for up-scaling analysis is a combination of the Actors Network and the Multi-level Perspective. It places stakeholders on self, local, regional, and other higher levels to identify vertical collaboration and impacts. In addition, civic, government, private, non-profit, and non-human stakeholders are the main categories that often interact with commoning projects. Individual actors in these categories can disperse across levels, so the template annotates these categories to identify diverse actors more easily. The grouping is optional depending on the visual representation. Up-scaling can also be placed along the timeline and show changes over time. The trend should demonstrate whether the project evidently ramps up in influencing local and regional political agendas or trickles down to empower individual citizens. The 24-hour clock and well-being scorecard, the ladder of citizen participation, and the needs and satisfiers form an integrated deep-scaling score framework. Together these three theories begin to show interrelations between elements of each theory and the potential to form an explicit measurement of deep-scaling. Each theory suggests degrees of deep-scaling from different aspects. The well-being scorecard is already a rating system. If individual commoners have a higher well-being score, it means the commoning project creates favorable deep-scaling conditions to improve commoners’ well-being. The diversification of activities in the 24-hour clock correlates to well-being and needs. More diversified activities contribute to more balanced individual wellbeing and a higher well-being score. Socialization and commoning activities in the 24-hour clock, among all activities, meet several synergetic needs simultaneously. When needs such as identity, affection, participation, and understanding are met, social and community well-being are likely to be rated higher. Different levels on the ladder of citizen participation suggest the satisfaction of different needs in the needs wheel. Higher tiers on the citizen participation ladder indicate higher levels of citizen engagement from either an organizational or individual point of view. The needs wheel is unrolled to vertically illustrate needs from basic to deeper and horizontally illustrate the degree of satisfaction. A higher level of citizen participation meets more needs and deeper types of needs. For instance, complete citizen control often accompanies the freedom to

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Figure 8.1 Out-scaling types

Figure 8.2 Up-scaling template

Figure 8.3 Deep-scaling integrated score framework

make decisions; the establishment of group or personal identity; and the creation of new rules, spaces, and relationships. A lower level of citizen participation, such as informing, can only allow a low degree of participation satisfaction and limited understanding of the policies or rules that are going to be applied. Following the well-being scorecard’s system, well-being scores, diverse 24-hour activities, degrees of satisfaction, and participation levels are proportional to the overall degree of deep-scaling. If we assign each of them points, the deep-scaling dimension can be visualized in an integrated diagram (Figure 8.3) and a deep-scaling score can be calculated by this equation: Individual deep-scaling score (6-69) = participation ladder tier level (1-8) + needs sum (0-45) +24-hour activity diversity (0/1) + well-being sum (5-15) Organization deep-scaling score (6-69) = participation ladder tier level (1-8) + needs sum (0-45) + average 24-hour activity diversity (0/1) + average well-being score (5-15) By applying the equation on the timeline, the deep-scaling score changes during different stages of the project, thus creating the trend diagram. The score system is for the purpose of visualizing and comparing deep-scaling across case studies, and it can be applied in various real practice scenarios. This system is beneficial for a commoning project to self-evaluate deep-scaling processes in order to inform design strategies. It can provide solid evidence to prove the invisible development of urban commoning projects, so funders and donors can make their decisions not only based on

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the visible monetary return or temporal duration. However, the deep-scaling score should not be treated as a fixed and strict quantitative metric. The deep-scaling dimension is subjective and dynamic. Therefore, the indicators for the measurement can be flexible and changing. A complete, accurate measurement of deep-scaling likely does not exist, but this integrated score system begins to convert the immaterial and invisible aspects to explicit, measurable, and comparable indicators. These findings can highlight their importance in commoning practices and allow further scaling mechanisms to be discovered. Under this overall multi-dimensional scaling template, comparisons of the two case studies are illustrated and discussed in the following section.

8.2 Comparison of case studies and their scaling trends The four objectives of this thesis are 1) to develop a framework based on multiple existing theories for a holistic and systematic analysis of the sustainment of urban commoning, 2) to employ an interdisciplinary research methodology to investigate the research hypothesis, 3) to create detailed comparative case studies and provide empirical evidence to support or oppose the hypothesis, and 4) to conclude with design suggestions that contribute to the sustainment of urban commoning that can be used by commoners, designers, and researchers in their work in this field. So far, the first two objectives have been adequately discussed. In this section, the third objective of finding supporting or opposing empirical evidence for the hypothesis in the comparison of case studies is addressed by reading two case studies in Chapters 6 and 7 side by side. Two layers of comparison are generated from the case studies. Table 8.1 compares the two case studies’ basic information, scaling processes, key sustainment strategies, and scaling opportunities. This first basic layer of comparison indicates similarities and differences in the two case studies’ scaling processes, current governance prioritizations, and future plans. Furthermore, out-, up-, and deep-scaling trends are mapped out on timelines (Figure 8.4 and Figure 8.5). Since yearly data is incomplete, some analyses are based on assumptions, and the diagrams are generalized into initial, middle, and current phases to ensure visual comparability. This second layer of the scaling trend comparison intends to explore further questions: Do commoning projects follow a sequence of scaling? Is there a dimension of scaling that happens first or last, and what are possible reasons behind that? Do the sequence and correlations of scaling suggest the prioritization or negligence of certain dimensions? From scaling trends over time, what are the limitations and opportunities for long-term sustainment? The exploration of these questions will allow us to translate the theoretical analysis into practical applications.

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Table 8.1 Comparison of the KIC Garden and the Garfield Farm KIC Garden

Garfield Community Farm

Location

Shanghai, China

Pittsburgh, USA

Size

2,200 square meters (0.53 acres)

3 acres

Duration

5 years, since 2016

12 years, since 2009

Type of organization

Non-profit

Non-profit registered under Open Door Church

Land ownership

Public. Shui On company bought the land and donated to the public. It is categorized into public “roadside green space” by law.

Private. Open Door Church property

Gardening philosophy

Permaculture

Annual budget

¥190,000 ($25,000)

$40,000

Main motivations

• • •

Variables Basic information

Land stewardship Education Socialization

Food production Community building Education

Scaling processes Scale out

Duplication of over 200 community gardens across Shanghai that have a similar operational model.

Scale up

Developing a commons-civic-government Continuous collaboration with other local collaboration model that taps into the groups and joining PINA to expand the current planning system. permaculture network. • •

Scale deep •

Adding new arable plots and small projects within the three city blocks.

Restoration of social connections in • surrounding neighborhoods. Gradual transition to citizen control • of daily operation (shift the worldview of self-governing). • Education of children and youth to introduce sustainable concepts at an early age.

Eliminating hierarchy in decision-making. Multifunctional spaces to facilitate more community interactions. Education of children and adults to disseminate knowledge of healthy food and farming with nature.

Needs & Satisfiers

24 hr clock & wellbeing scorecard

• • •

Identity and affection Understanding Participation and creation

Volunteers and inspired home gardeners allocate 2-5 hours/day to gardening. Scores of social, community, and physical well-being are increased.

Participation Informing (planning phase) > ladder Consultation (design phase) > Partnership (implementation phase) > Delegated power/citizen control (longterm governance)

• • • •

Subsistence Understanding Identity and affection Freedom

•

Staff works 2-6 hours/day on the farm and overall has medium-high well-being scores. Volunteers allocate 1-4 hours/week on the farm and report an increase of social, community, and physical wellbeing scores.

•

Partnership (land acquisition) Delegated power/citizen control (everyday governance)

Reflections • • •

Key sustainment strategies

• • •

• Scaling opportunities

Scaling challenges

•

Fast duplication Connecting into a larger network by working with the market and the state and developing a commonsgovernment-civic model Incremental up-scaling and citizen empowerment processes Prioritizing the education of future generations Permaculture enabled deeper understanding and collaboration with natural systems

The current political environment favors its up-scaling plan. Raising awareness of civic participation in China in recent years.

• • • •

• •

Connecting into a larger network by collaborating with other groups and PINA Incremental design processes Stable give-and-take system open to communication and collaboration Prioritizing education of future generations Permaculture enabled deeper understanding and collaboration with natural systems Multifunctional spaces allow for increased social interactions A financial model with diverse income sources

Great potential to connect with other local farms, gardens, and organizations to share more resources and expand influence.

Over-institutionalization: government Basic survival is still the main concern, so intervenes too much and depletes its the priority is still to remain productive and decision-making rights. financially sustainable.

Figure 8.4 Scaling trends analysis of the KIC Garden

Figure 8.5 Scaling trends analysis of the Garfield Farm

8.2.1 Scale out KIC Garden scales out in an external duplication manner. The garden was completed all at once on a linear city block, and the inner out-scaling reached the limit very quickly. The labor and production needs have not changed much since its implementation. KIC Garden’s out-scaling, significantly different from that of the Garfield Farm, is the external out-scaling. It scales out by duplicating its operational model to over 200 community gardens in Shanghai. Each duplication is a new community garden with its own financial supporters and participants, but all share similar initiation processes and governance rules. The duplication type of out-scaling shows a rapid upward trend after 3 years of the implementation of the KIC Garden. The speed of duplication increased significantly after 2019, and by the end of 2021, out-scaling reached saturation in the central urban areas and began to spread into suburban areas. The out-scaling duplication rate is expected to continue in the next few years but will ultimately reach saturation in the greater Shanghai area. The out-scaling of the KIC Garden gained momentum to influence its up-scaling process because the duplicates form a network of community gardens in Shanghai. The Garfield Farm scales out by expanding its usable areas gradually. Its physical boundary has always been within three city blocks. Accompanied with the geographical out-scaling is the increases of food production and investment of human labor. The Garfield Farm’s out-scaling will reach a limit when all the available land is turned into productive gardens. The incremental out-scaling model provides opportunities for the farm to seek funding step by step in parallel to recruiting voluntary labor and building community engagement. There are still many spaces and opportunities for the farm to increase food production and expand its functionality in the following 3-4 years before it reaches the out-scaling limit. In the long run, the Garfield Farm will not be able to expand its physical boundaries and food production, which means if new needs appear, the farm has to reuse its current spaces or shift to other scaling methods. Both case studies reached a milestone 3-4 years after the gardens were created; the KIC Garden’s duplication began to increase, and the Garfield Farm’s inner expansion began to slow. We can infer that for urban farms and gardens, stabilizing food production and establishing governance mechanisms are priorities in the initial years. Whether this characteristic is universal to other urban commoning projects remains to be verified by more case studies. Although each case study represents one type of out-scaling, it can be assumed that more types of out-scaling exist, such as a combination of inner expansion and external duplication or an inner expansion that only increases the investment of labor and time to maximize production. 8.2.2 Scale up KIC Garden prioritizes up-scaling and has been involving more and more actors. Collaboration with the government is the key up-scaling strategy for the KIC Garden. The KIC Garden intends to institutionalize the community garden model by establishing a commons–civic–government 186

collaboration platform. Since 2019, the KIC Garden has been heavily covered by local news and promoted on mainstream social media. Many neighborhood- and district-level governmental officials in Shanghai and other cities in China were intrigued, wanting to reproduce its model in their jurisdictional areas. This fast up-scaling phenomenon and the motivation to establish the commons–civic–government model raise a few concerns and questions. First, although fast duplication signifies the success of urban commoning in Shanghai, whether these duplicates are carefully planned and executed to meet contextualized needs is questionable. An adaptive duplication would involve complex negotiations with local actors, politics, and sharing culture. We cannot rule out the possibility that some government officials desperately welcome those projects with the intent of embellishing their governance achievements. Second, interviewees implicitly mentioned that in order to realize these projects, designers or citizen participants need to polish their rhetoric and give credit to the local government to receive continuous support. The tension between the government and self-organized citizens has always existed because of the political ideology in China. The government has to make sure the power of citizens will not grow to a point beyond governmental interference. There is always a hidden threat that these projects will not be able to survive if they gain too much impact and are able to confront the government. Lastly, the up-scaling process of the KIC Garden might end up as an over-institutionalization of urban commoning. The decision-making power of citizen commoners could be depleted by bodies of the government , and thus the project would no longer be urban commoning. It is possible for the multi-party collaboration model to become only a disguised political proposition that is actually the same procedure as top-down city planning. In the future up-scaling of the KIC Garden, the threshold between an equal negotiation model and a centralized one where the government has veto power will be crossed. On the contrary, Garfield Farm has not shown any intention to work with the government to scale up. The Garfield Farm has been collaborating with local farms, non-profit organizations, and businesses, and the farm plans to tap into the permaculture network under the PINA to expand the capacity of education and collaboration among similar groups. It is more independent from government support, as the city of Pittsburgh does not have the budget for these initiatives and welcomes projects that solve the city’s vacancy problem. More stable donations from churches and individuals and flexible funding and grants from foundations are the diversified financial resources for the farm. Overall, it has been financially durable. The up-scaling trend shows a steady growth and a gradual slow-down. For the time being, the Garfield Farm is paying less attention to its up-scaling, but the lack of ambition in up-scaling exposes the risk of being overpowered by gentrification. The KIC Garden’s duplication and up-scaling are correlated. As duplication sped up, the vertical impacts also expanded. The duplication and up-scaling processes mutually reinforce each other and are expected to continue upward. The KIC Garden identifies up-scaling as the main scaling strategy in the years to come despite the potential challenges. Since the Garfield Farm does not intend to scale up to strengthen the local bottom-up initiative network and influence political decisions, its up-scaling trend has a similar tendency as the out-scaling trend. When basic conditions to 187

maintain stable production are met, both out- and up-scaling paces began to slow down. Both case studies demonstrate a correspondence of out- and up-scaling trends. The possible explanation is that out-scaling’s impacts on stakeholders, such as volunteers and funders, are also related to the up-scaling process. The two dimensions would likely form a mutual restraint or promotional relationship. 8.2.3 Scale deep From the perspective of deep-scaling, both the KIC Garden and the Garfield Farm influence commoners’ worldviews and social relationships and aim for self-learning and self-growing communities, but each has a different emphasis. Both case studies’ deep-scaling present a steady uptrend. The KIC Garden’s deep-scaling focuses on three aspects: 1) bringing neighbors in highdensity urban communities closer to each other to ease the estrangement among people, 2) training citizens to be able to realize self-governance gradually with reliable knowledge and skillsets, and 3) educating children to work with nature and others at an early age and diversifying parent-child activities in parallel. The KIC Garden is explicit with its deep-scaling goals and has been planning its activities respectively. The Garfield Farm is less expressive about deep-scaling and its specific plans, but it has actually invested the most energy into this dimension. It is dedicated to education for all ages and advocacy for the right to food and land through the practice of community farming. Food distribution and community activities have subtly influenced people’s willingness to participate, their understanding of food culture and ecology, and their engagement in social exchanges. Both cases’ deep-scaling also manifests in how they shape individuals’ long-term life and career choices. They all reported instances where volunteers in the projects decided to become sustainable designers, home gardeners, or farmers. Deep-scaling trends of both projects are expected to keep rising but at a low rate because it takes a longer time to shift the deeply inherited cultures and beliefs behind these deep-scaling elements. The KIC Garden might experience political limitations to further citizen participation but can aim at meeting more diverse and deeper types of needs from citizens. The Garfield Farm can further advocate for local food cultures and empower the African American community to scale deeper. Although deep-scaling trends have not shown obvious alignment or conflicts with other two scaling dimensions, both case studies have shown constant deep-scaling since the projects began. This might be an embedded characteristic of urban commoning projects, as negotiations, conflict-solutions, decision-making, participation, and collaboration always facilitate deeper-scaling processes. The different scaling processes of the two projects demonstrate distinct opportunities and challenges that they face in their future sustainment. The KIC Garden prioritizes up-scaling by establishing a platform that brings the government, the citizens, the designers, and potential 188

private donors together. The current political environment favors this strategy. Despite its major challenge of keeping up with food production, the Garfield Farm has the potential to weave local urban farms and gardens into a network. According to Grow Pittsburgh’s (2022) crowd-sourcing grower’s map, there are over 140 community gardens, farms, and school gardens in Allegheny County. They currently operate separately. The networking (up-scaling) opportunity for the Garfield Farm can both ease the production burden and form a resilient alliance to negotiate support from foundations, individuals, the market, and the government. Although out- and up-scaling still have many opportunities, deep-scaling is the foundation for all the other scaling processes. The KIC Garden can only scale up because the garden has increased citizens’ awareness of civic participation. The Garfield Farm can only meet production goals and host educational programs because of volunteers’ dedication. These projects can only accumulate trust and support through citizens’ shifting worldviews and understanding of land stewardship, making them able to respond to future risks like gentrification or over-institutionalization. 8.2.4 Correlation of scaling dimensions Both case studies suggest that the three types of scaling do not exist separately. A linear method of either out-, up-, or deep-scaling simply cannot be realized and will not be able to sustain the momentum of urban commoning. A study by the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation in Canada also shows that scaling does not happen independently and involves at least some kind of combination of out-, up-, and deep-scaling (Moore et al., 2015). Its observation of the co-existence of the scaling processes is as follows: “No single research subject immediately jumped to up-scaling or deep-scaling, and thus, we believe that large systems change involves at least a combination of the three types of scaling” (p. 80). This thesis’ focus case studies also validate this finding. The Garfield Farm only began to consider joining the permaculture network after the basic production is stabilized. It started with out-scaling; deep-scaling and up-scaling came afterward. The KIC Garden began with clear out-scaling and deep-scaling goals; up-scaling followed when it gained enough impact. In conclusion, urban commoning often starts with out-scaling but it plateaus after 3-4 years of operation. To sustain in the long run, urban commoning mustbuild up the capacity of collaborating with cross sectoral actors in up-scaling or shifting worldviews and social relations of commoners in deep-scaling. The combination of scaling strategies creates synergies which increase the opportunity of success for each form of scaling (Manzini, 2015). Connecting holistically to involve regional agendas (up-scaling) promotes the vertical expansion of the commons and provides more agency for participants to voice their needs (deep-scaling). Nurturing a deeper understanding of the shared resources, connections among participants, and awareness in actively claiming citizens’ rights to common spaces (deep-scaling) also contribute to the projects’ goals when they need to expand physically or build new connections (out- and up-scaling). Although a formula does not exist for how exactly their combinations perform best, we assume that the three types of scaling co-exist, mutually advance, and collectively contribute to the sustainment of urban commoning. 189

8.3 Discussion of sustainment strategies in relation with existing principles In the conclusions of the case studies, their key sustainment strategies were distilled. Strategies of sustaining commoning have already been discussed by some scholars. Ostrom (1990) calls them design principles of long-enduring common-pool resources. Helfrich (2015) names a few governance tactics when giving examples of commoning patterns. Katrini (2019) focuses on the spatial characteristics of common spaces and the development of a set of spatial patterns from these characteristics. The spatial patterns fill the gap in Ostrom and Helfrich’s work that physical spaces are not taken into account for design principles. In Christopher Alexander’s work, patterns are specific design processes that have been tested repeatedly and can be used directly to inform the design outcome. Here, Ostrom’s principles are meta-level design guidelines. Helfrich employs the pattern-developing process (context-problem-solution-pattern), but the patterns she summarizes are specific tactics that complement Ostrom’s principles. Katrini’s spatial patterns of commoning also follow Alexander’s pattern language method but are not tested by enough cases. The case study chapters used a problem-solution-strategy structure, but the strategies that emerged in the case studies of this thesis are not patterns, as they are not intended to be direct design instructions and have not been verified in multiple cases. Therefore, the strategies developed from the two case studies are between design patterns and design principles. These strategies are put in comparison with Ostrom, Helfrich, and Katrini’s findings to examine whether they align with, disagree with, or add to existing principles (Figure 8.6). Five strategies are shared by both the KIC Garden and the Garfield Farm: · Connecting into a larger network (up-scaling) · Incremental design processes · A stable give-and-take system and openness to communication and collaboration · Prioritizing the education of future generations · Permaculture enabled deeper understanding and collaboration with natural systems The first shared strategy corresponds to Ostrom’s last principle of nested enterprises for embedded commons in larger systems and is also mentioned by Katrini as “building a support network of organization” (2019, p. 255). Nested enterprises emphasize that when a common-pool resource is organized as part of a larger system, rules need to be established at different levels to manage divergent problems at each level (Ostrom, 1990). Both case studies are at their early stages of connecting into larger systems. Rules at the project scale have been established, but rules for larger networks, the PINA in the US or the community farm network in Shanghai, are still in exploration. As they tap into larger systems and follow the systemic rules, their project-level rules might change. A remaining question is how the governance structure and rules will shift under 190

Figure 8.6 Comparison and annotation of urban commoning’s sustainment principles

the influence of establishing nested enterprises. The “incremental design processes” is not mentioned in existing principles and is carried out differently in the two case studies. The Garfield Farm employs an incremental plan, design, and implementation process while the KIC Garden transitions its governance responsibility incrementally to citizens. This principle can be applicable to many early-phase commoning projects, as their finances are not secure, and the governance structure is experimental. Section 8.5 will speak to this strategy further from the design angle. The third strategy of developing a stable give-and-take system and remaining open to communication and collaboration matches several existing conflict-resolution and decision-making principles. Both Ostrom and Helfrich emphasize the importance of making decisions transparent, valuing commoners’ contributions and rights, and being communicative in conflict-resolving. The findings from case studies confirmed these points. Both projects have clear rules around how commoners can get involved and how they can benefit from their involvement. In tackling internal conflicts, both have a mechanism of putting problems into discussion and respecting the interests of stakeholders to the greatest extent. 191

The other two shared strategies are more relevant to urban farms and gardens that integrate permaculture practices. They are commonly found in many other urban agriculture commons. Education of younger generations is the key to spreading values of urban commoning and enables sustainable practices to continue. Permaculture provides an actionable approach to realize educational purposes. Besides the shared strategies, each case study has unique strategies that were not found in the other project. The private-government-commons collaboration model of the KIC Garden was discussed in the previous section. It is a strategy that probably can only be applicable in places where the government is likely to intervene in citizen initiatives. The Garfield Farm’s spatial characteristic of having multifunctional spaces that facilitate more social interactions is one of Katrini’s spatial findings. Multifunctional spaces on the Garfield Farm were mainly inspired by the permaculture design principle of integrating diverse systems to maximize synergy. This strategy aligns with Katrini’s (2019) argument that adaptive multi-purpose spaces are associated with more diverse activities. Another distinguishing strategy of the Garfield Farm is its financial model, with diverse income sources and expenditure outlets. Helfrich (2015) mentions specifically the benefits of making the financial situation transparent. In addition, the Garfield Farm’s financial model ensures its stability; even if one source of income is insecure, the system will not collapse. This strategy also resonates with the living theories (section 3.4), where diversified links can stabilize a system. Most shared strategies of both case studies align with and add additional annotations to existing principles. Strategies related to the specific gardening and permaculture aspects of the case studies are informative for urban food commoning. Education that integrates natural science, permaculture, food culture, sustainability, and food security expands the deep-scaling capacity of community farms and gardens that might not be universal for other types of commoning. The context-based networking (up-scaling) strategy reveals the granularity of the nested enterprises principle. These strategies lay a foundation for proposing design tactics, and they are open for other case studies to support or challenge.

8.4 An overall explanation of the research hypothesis The first argument of the research hypothesis centers around the non-material processes of urban commoning and the necessity of scaling for sustainment; it is supported mainly by Chapters 2 and 4’s discussions around the enclosure, institution, and expanding institution; the temporality of urban commoning; and the challenges of current community gardens and farms. These theories indict that the “always-in-the-making” quality of urban commoning needs scaling to maintain. If an urban commoning project is content with fixed processes and rules, it risks running out of energy, becoming enclosed, or losing its productivity and reproducibility. Case studies in Chapters 6 and 7 further supported the first argument as all three dimensions of scaling demonstrate the governance of dynamic non-material processes. In both cases, skills, knowledge, collective decision-making, and experience of negotiating differences are common immaterial resources and 192

governance processes. The two case studies do not directly provide evidence for the necessity of scaling to sustain, but interview anecdotes concurred with the argument. The KIC Garden’s founder shared a few pocket garden projects in Shanghai that are completely citizen-initiated. People were excited and engaged at the beginning because the idea was novel. However, after working with the same piece of land and group of people for over a year, individuals began to drop out of the project for various reasons, such as being unable to invest enough time in it or having no new skills to learn. They believed there were no more negotiation processes or new relationships to build, as everything was established. Apparently, the excitement for commoning disappeared if it did not seek any kind of scaling. Lack of scaling could become the reason for losing energy and productivity. The second argument asserts that the focal point of existing research about practice of urban commoning is around the longevity and out-scaling dimensions, but up- and deep-scaling dimensions are more important and under-evaluated. In the literature review conclusion (Section 4.5), it was made clear that the sustainment of urban commoning is made up of out-, up-, and deep-scaling dimensions. The working definition for three scaling dimensions was provided: · Out-scaling: the geographical and horizontal expansion and duplication of urban commoning from one site to a larger site or to multiple satellite sites in different locations. · Up-scaling: the vertical expansion through an accumulative process of power from a local small-scale urban commoning to a higher regime or landscape level of engagement with a wider socio-political agenda. · Deep-scaling: the internal development of urban commoning to influence participants’ worldviews and quality of relationships, and ultimately form a reciprocal self-learning and self-growing mechanism in the organization itself. The focus case studies confirmed the working definition and added additional explanations or adjustments to it. The updated definition of each scaling dimension is as follows: · Out-scaling: the geographical and horizontal expansion and duplication of urban commoning from one site to a larger site or to multiple satellite sites in different locations. It includes increasing numbers of participants, amount of shared resources, and demanded labor and time investment. · Up-scaling: the vertical expansion through developing allies and accumulating capacity from local small-scale urban commoning to a higher regime or landscape level of engagement with a wider socio-political agenda. Up-scaling needs complex consideration of the favoring and limiting conditions associated with its political context.

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· Deep-scaling: the internal development of urban commoning to influence participants’ worldviews, degrees of participation, and quality of social relationships to ultimately form a reciprocal self-learning and self-growing mechanism in the organization itself. Out- and up-scaling dimensions already have explicit methods or theories that analyze them, but the deep-scaling dimension does not have many mentions in the commons discourse. To foreground this dimension, the integrated deep-scaling score framework was proposed to test the hypothesis (Section 8.1).

8.5 An adjusted design research workflow and design insights The last argument of the hypothesis is that the sustainment of urban commoning requires a paradigm shift in design from form-making and problem-solving to process-enabling and relationsustaining. After understanding scaling processes of urban commoning, designers need to prioritizing catalyzing the up-scaling and deep-scaling processes. The aim of the literature review and case studies was to identify and refine opportunities for deliberate design interventions that can facilitate sustaining urban commoning. Although specific design interventions are highly dependent on the context, an adjusted design research workflow and several overall insights for designers to research and navigate their interventions are found to be repeatable across case studies. The design research workflow and insights also meet the last objective of this research — to conclude with design suggestions that contribute to the sustainment of urban commoning that can be used by commoners, designers, and researchers in their work in this field. Designers can refer to the research process to understand the sustainment of urban commoning through scaling dimensions. Learning from the process of the case studies, I adjusted the research workflow and recommend a repeatable qualitative process (Figure 8.7). The multi-dimensional scaling framework on the right side of the research process diagram was discussed in Section 8.1; measurements of time, labor, and production were added to the out-scaling dimension. The analysis of the up-scaling process needs to take the external policies and planning procedures into consideration. Meanwhile, the development of the actors’ network can be examined alongside the timeline to understand the evolution of up-scaling. In addition, related criteria are connected to examine their correlations in order to identify how different scaling processes mutually influence each other. The core of the research objective is to develop criteria for the deep-scaling dimension to fill a gap: this dimension lacks means of measurement. This thesis constructed the deep-scaling dimension with existing theories from multiple disciplines. Among them, needs and satisfiers and the ladder of citizen participation appeared more effective in capturing the deep-scaling qualities of the case studies, while the 24-hr clock and wellbeing scorecard and the spatial analysis tended to have more general results. The adjusted framework leaves space for proposing additional indicators for analyzing the deep-scaling dimension.

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Figure 8.7 Proposed design research process

Based on the research process of this thesis and the limitations it has demonstrated, a workflow to research and design for the sustainment of urban commoning is proposed (Figure 8.3 left side). The workflow consists of research and design phases. The research phase is covered in this thesis. It begins with identifying the research target of urban commoning projects. Researchers can adjust the criteria to understand the scaling processes of the target according to their priorities. Under the scaling framework, respective qualitative data can be collected through secondary materials and ethnographic fieldwork. The research project’s scaling dimensions are mapped based on the data. The research phase can be repeated if time allows and if revisions of scaling criteria and fieldwork methods are needed. The research phase leads to design suggestions. Depending on the target sizes and data quality in the research phase, details of the design suggestion will vary. The design phase is also a repeatable circle to validate the suggestions with commoners and refine the process. The last step is to conclude a set of design recommendations for the targeted project(s) or for urban commoning projects that have similar contexts and processes.

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8.5.1 Design the visible to shift the invisible While out-scaling and up-scaling processes can be intentionally planned and enacted, deepscaling of urban commoning happens implicitly and is impossible to intervene in directly. For the same reason, project founders or commoners in both case studies are more articulate about out-scaling and up-scaling processes and prioritize them as ways to succeed, thus deemphasizing the importance of deep-scaling. Design provides an entry point where invisible deep-scaling is enabled through visible materials and activities. As an interview subject from the KIC Garden stated: “it looks like we are taking care of the plants in the garden. but we are actually learning how to negotiate the allocation of spaces and tools and building up our skills of communication with neighbors.” Visible activities generated invisible outcomes. The etymology of the word “ 设计 (shè jì, design)” in Chinese can be borrowed to demonstrate this argument. “设计 (shè jì, design)” originated in the military, meaning “to set up a trap for the enemy to fall into” (Yang, 1997; Lou, 2013). It was later simplified into “to establish a strategy”. “设 (shè)” is the action of manipulating things, and “计 (jì)” is the outcome or desired strategy. The first character of design in Chinese refers to the visible actions and materiality, and the second refers to the invisible purposes. Design for the deep-scaling of urban commoning coincides with the original meaning of design in Chinese — tangible materials, activities, spatial forms, and narratives can be “manipulated” to achieve intangible non-material purposes. 8.5.2 Design as a process-enabling practice Due to the “in-the-making” quality of urban commoning, design for its sustainment cannot be static. The goal is not necessarily to solve a problem since the survival challenge of urban commoning is constantly evolving. In the design for urban commoning, sense-making processes such as creating meaning for life, socialization, and generating values of the self and the community are prominent to make sense of what the design should involve. However, there is another primary purpose that is not captured in either problem-solving or sense-making — process-enabling. As Transition Design suggests, the outcome of systematic design might not be a product or service but rather a living system, a changing process. The design for the sustainment of urban commoning is not the pursuit of a specific successful status of the commoning project. It is about developing an awareness of the depth of the project and fostering a mechanism that empowers commoners to respond to sustainment challenges. To achieve up-scaling and deep-scaling, designers need to prioritize the process-enabling aim and think dynamically and in the long run. Enabling processes of scaling is demanding for designers. From the processual perspective, designers might assist urban commoning projects in the following ways: designers will be the bridge among stakeholders to reach consensus in conflict-solution, designers can facilitate strategic decisions about scaling steps, and designers can monitor the performance of the design strategy and intervene timely to (re)calibrate the process.

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To adopt a process-enabling design approach also means to accept open design results. Both the KIC Garden and the Garfield Farm took one step at a time and observed the changes before making the next move. The Garfield Farm kept tracking their production, the time that volunteers and staff invested, and the needs of neighbors to plan the next season and decide the expansion of spaces. The KIC Garden continued evaluating volunteers’ abilities and availability to decide the designers’ withdrawal from the project and form the resident self-governance committee. The design for the sustainment of urban commoning leads to the delegation of power to nondesigners, opens possibilities for changing strategies, and produces open-ended design results. 8.5.3 The changing role of commoning designer Along the same lines, the commoning designer’s role is no longer that of a product maker or service provider. As discussed in Chapter 3, commoning seeks a design created with and by users because of the context-specific needs. A commoning designer might have multiple or changing roles. In the case of the Garfield Farm, the designers are the staff. They are also citizens who learned design skills, especially permaculture design approaches. Citizen designers of the Garfield Farm were project initiators, leaders, participants, and users. The commoners are designers, and the designers are commoners. The KIC Garden had professional designers in its early phases. Designers were project leaders and participants. In later phases, designers handed the operation of the garden to citizens. By providing educational sessions to citizens interested in designing, the design team intended to transform citizens to designers. As citizen designers gained the ability to oversee the governance of the project, the original design team could withdraw from the project. The founder of the KIC Garden points out, “to empower citizens is not to give them the right to make decisions regardless of their ability but to provide design resources and knowledge that allow them to become designers or make designerly decisions.” Ultimately, the sustainment of urban commoning needs to be designed by users. Designers modulate their involvement in urban commoning in step with the project, shifting from leaders to facilitators to participants or bystanders. The designer stays long enough within the commoning context to be a commoner or to pass along the designer’s role to commoners.

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8.6 Conclusions 8.6.1 Summary of the research The aim of this research has been to explore what is the sustainment of urban commoning and how design can facilitate the sustainment of urban commoning. At the outset of the thesis, the background of the commons was introduced and then narrowed down to governance structures and sustainment mechanisms in urban commoning practices (Chapter 2). The current discussions in this area and their limitations were reviewed. Scaling processes were identified as key approaches to sustain urban commoning and prevent the enclosure of it. The question of how scaling constitutes the sustainment of commoning and what is design’s role in this question were brought into Chapter 3. An overview of where the design for the sustainment of urban commoning is positioned on the design landscape was first provided. To understand the specific implications that design has on urban commoning, areas of design for social innovation, transition design, sustainable design, and pluriverse design were discussed. Relevant theoretical frameworks and methods were drawn from these areas to inform the formation of the overall research framework and methodology. Chapter 4 focused on existing trends in urban agriculture, especially urban farms and gardens, since they were the type of commoning that were explored in the fieldwork. The main reason for choosing urban farms and gardens as case studies was that they intersect with traditional natural commons and new urban commons. From the literature review, a research hypothesis and an overall scaling framework were developed to guide the case studies. The methodological stances and approaches were elaborated on in Chapter 5. Justifications of why case studies, interviews, and observations were used to investigate the research hypothesis were made, and the procedures and limitations of each method were also discussed. Chapters 6 and 7 provided thorough descriptions of two focus case studies: the KIC Garden and the Garfield Community Farm. Case studies were first illustrated from micro, meso, and marco levels then followed by a further analysis of their scaling processes and trends. Both chapters concluded with a reflection of key sustainment strategies and their embodied design thinking. Lastly, this final chapter began with an integrated scaling framework derived from the research and the comparison of the focus case studies scaling trends under this framework. It continued by revisiting the research hypothesis and further explaining it based on the evidence from the case studies. An adjusted design research process was developed to facilitate future research on other case studies. Meta-level design insights were drawn from the case studies and concluded. The last sections of the final chapter will summarize this thesis’ main contributions to the knowledge in areas of the commons, design, transition design, and urban agriculture and ends with identifying future research subjects. 8.6.2 Contribution to knowledge This study weaves multiple disciplines together, including the commons discourse, urban agriculture, and design research and practice (especially Transition Design). The commons has 198

mainly been investigated from economic and ecologic perspectives. Working with the commons through a design lens is novel. Therefore, before we discuss in more detail the contributions of this thesis to individual areas, the first overall contribution is that it is a transdisciplinary study that bridges multiple areas to explore the design for the sustainment of urban commoning. The research proposes a theoretical design research framework for the multi-dimensional scaling of urban commoning that is built from theories of transition design, sustainable design, and social innovation design. While design thinking and practice are infused everywhere in urban commoning, it has rarely been placed in a design research and practice. To reflect on urban commoning in a design worldview allows us to consolidate pieces of theories in the field of the commons and develop an actionable framework of analysis. The original contribution of this research to both commons discourse and design research lies in the analysis of urban commoning under a design theories-based scaling framework, which was never used in the research of the commons. Contribution to the commons discourse This dissertation departed from the survival challenges of urban commoning and incorporated a multi-dimensional scaling perspective to investigate the institution of commoning. Current research on the institution of commoning is represented by Ostrom’s design principles of CPR, which concerns long-term natural common resources. This thesis extends the research to urban commoning that is produced for a relatively short period of time. The literature review shows the lack of research into the relationship between the institution, sustainment, and the scaling processes of commoning. An original contribution to knowledge in the commons discourse is made by continuing the previous work of expanding the institution of commoning by making explicit connections between institutional sustainment and systematic scaling. A research framework based on multi-dimensional scaling was suggested for research into the sustainment of commoning. Two case studies were developed under the framework. Each case study’s sustainment strategies were analyzed from out-, up-, and deep-scaling dimensions and compared with each other and with existing design principles. The case studies contribute to the knowledge of the commons by carrying out empirical work with projects that have not been researched before (Phillips & Pugh, 2012). The empirical study discovered implicit up-scaling and deep-scaling processes of urban commoning, such as eliminating hierarchy by delegating power in decision-making, forming a private-government-commons collaboration network, and employing permaculture philosophy to propagate ecological education. It also identified context-specific opportunities and challenges for future sustainment through scaling. For commoners, who are active participants of citizen-led initiatives, and academics and researchers, who are working in the area of the institution of commoning, this thesis conceptualizes commoners’ everyday practices and provides recommendations for deepening their practices from a designer’s perspective. Another contribution of this thesis is that it challenges the one-worldness in the mainstream commons discourse. This point overlaps with Kothari et al. (2019) argument of the pluriverse of

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transformative citizen initiatives and Stefan Gruber’s (2020) contribution to A Dialogue Must Take Place, Precisely Because We Don’t Speak the Same Language that highlights the importance of undoing Anglo-Saxon epistemology of the commons. By introducing the pluriverse design theory, exploring diverse epistemologies of commoning in exhibition projects, and bringing in a nonwestern case study in comparison to a western one, this thesis reflects on the existence of multiple worlds of commoning and thus, different problems, practices, and responses to the sustainment issue. In particular, the comparison of the American and Chinese case studies suggested that the design for the up-scaling of urban commoning is largely influenced by external policies and cultures and needs to be adaptive according to local socio-political contexts. Contribution to design research This dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary research methodology that combines methods from design, architecture, and ethnography. Considering the limitations of using one method or methods from one discipline in researching the complex questions around the sustainment of urban commoning, research methods such as interviews and participatory observations from ethnographic research, systematic mapping from Transition Design, and architecture case studies are brought together. The interdisciplinary methods allow for a holistic analysis of research questions and are used differently according to target questions. For instance, participatory observation aims to discover micro-level individual motivations by acquiring everyday first-hand data that a mapping exercise based on secondary research cannot provide. The research methodology, being used alongside the theoretical framework, sets the foundation for future research of other case studies or related survival issues of commoning. Furthermore, the methodology can be modified and expanded by adding additional methods, like grounded theory and action research, that would further integrate interaction, reiteration, and participation into the research process. This dissertation also contributes to design practice with reflections on design and designer’s roles when working with urban commoning projects, which can be extended to the practice in social design and working with bottom-up, collaboration projects in general. It was suggested in Chapter 3 that either design for social innovation or Transition Design focuses on design with users. The result of this thesis’ analysis suggests an approach of designing by users. Design by users is a citizen-led approach that further empowers users than in participatory design or co-design approaches. It requires a longer term of trust-building with communities and shifting users’ design worldviews to make them citizen designers. The designer’s role might change over the course from a project leader, a facilitator, to a bystander. The withdrawal of designers and gradual empowerment of community residents in the KIC Garden case study facilitate future attempts to develop an in-depth design by users approach. The outcome of a design-by-users approach would be process-oriented instead of product or service-oriented. Those design considerations can be of value for commoning researchers and designers as they provide empirical evidence for investigating the design-by-users approach in the broader social design area.

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Contribution to Transition Design Employing Transition Design theories in the research of the commons presents a new possibility for the application of Transition Design. An original contribution is made through taking the theory and philosophy of Transition Design and applying them in the new area of urban commoning (Phillips & Pugh, 2012). Geels & Kemp’s (2000) socio-technical transition is a central theory in the Transition Design framework for the historical evolution of a wicked problem. However, another essential theory — the scaling of technical innovations, was not included in the core Transition Design framework for two main reasons. First, Geels & Kemp are mainly concerned with the multiple levels of the transition and the events’ movements on the temporal scale. Second, the Transition Design framework is designed for the analysis of larger-scale societal transitions and wicked problems instead of smaller-scale organizations. The multi-dimensional technical innovation scale model was identified as more appropriate for the research of urban commoning, as it is still a niche to regime-level social innovation. In Section 4.5, the model was scaffolded as the literature review suggested promising theories like needs and satisfiers, actor-network, and ladder of citizen participation to enrich the up-scaling and deep-scaling dimensions. A theoretical framework used to examine the specific sustainment question of urban commoning based on Transition Design and adopting Transition Design’s key philosophy is an expansion to the theories of change area in the Transition Design framework. Besides, the exploration of the deep-scaling and diverse epistemology of commoning in this thesis contributes to the mindset and posture area of Transition Design. As findings from the case studies noted, changing worldviews, values, and social relations are among the deep-scaling implications of urban commoning. One of the design recommendations from this research is to facilitate and design for the deep-scaling process more intentionally with the assistance of materials, activities, and narratives. This aligns with Transition Design’s argument that to design the external, we need to shift the internal (Irwin et al., 2020). This thesis not only agrees with the Transition Design’s argument but also provided empirical support for it. Transition Design has lacked actual projects to validate the mindset and posture changes in design processes. Focus case studies in this thesis were attempts to experiment with Transition Design theories in practice and encapsulate worldview and posture changes in the deep-scaling analysis. Contribution to the research of urban agriculture Research on urban agriculture has concentrated on its environmental impacts, public health values, agrotechnology, and relevant policies and programs. This research brings attention to urban farming’s socio-political values, accessibility in everyday practices, and micro-organization and politics. This thesis offers a commoning and design angle that surfaces the design thinking in urban agriculture to be able to respond to challenges if policies and governmental supports are not in place. Two case studies investigated growers’ individual needs and motivations, decision-making 201

processes, and stakeholder relations that would not be included in the study of urban agriculture in disciplines of geography, agriculture, and ecology. Findings from the case studies showed that as a type of commoning, urban farms and gardens have unique deep-scaling strategies that are dependent on working with nature and disseminating gardening knowledge and skills to future generations. Also, by tapping urban farms and gardens into the commons discourse, this dissertation provides a new vision of scaling urban agriculture practices up to work in concert with other commoning projects and respond to social issues such as disparities in communities, indifference among urban dwellers, and loss of traditional food cultures. 8.6.3 Subjects for future work Some areas could not be fully explored in this thesis because of limitations in time, research scope, resources, and methods. Limitations are unavoidable, but for the purpose of further contributions to the field, I identify and consider them as future research directions. More case studies in various commoning categories and contexts This thesis argues that urban commoning’s sustainment in relation to its scaling processes is influenced by its situated culture and political environment. The proposed framework to analyze urban commoning’s scaling processes could be tested in multiple categories of commoning practices and in various cultural contexts. This thesis only includes two comparative case studies of one type of commoning. The reason for this decision was explained in Chapters 4 and 5. By choosing two case studies in one category, numbers of comparative variables were controlled. For the purpose of this thesis, similarities and differences in scaling strategies were found to be valuable. Nevertheless, if the research framework can be tested with more case studies that belong to different commoning categories such as housing, care work, and mobility, a nuanced comparison across categories could be developed. The cross-category comparison could discover scaling patterns of each commoning category. Also, multiple case studies from the same category in different cultural contexts could uncover epistemology-related differences that in turn could be used to guide localized design tactics. This will inform commoning designers with culturally situated research and practice and the importance of design with the pluriverse of urban commoning could be fully substantiated. Further development of design strategies and testing in practice Future work into the design for the sustainment of urban commoning involves shaping design strategies in action. The design contributions made in this thesis are at a meta-level, as actionable design methods and processes are not fully developed and tested. Thinking of designers who are part of the initiation of commoning projects or commoners who might encounter the sustainment challenges in their field operations would benefit from more hands-on design guidance. It will take time and commitment to collect existing tools, like participatory facilitation methods and 202

conflict management tools; use them to facilitate the sustainment design problem in workshops or everyday commoning situations; and identify their advantages and limitations. As argued in Chapter 3 and Section 8.5, interventions to influence people’s knowledge, worldviews, and values are difficult and require long-term practice and feedback. Moving beyond the meta-level has difficulties in increasing stakeholder participation and tracking changes at the deep-scaling dimension but would yield constructive results. The main steps of this research involved one round of research planning, data collection, and result finding. It followed a complete qualitative research process and achieved desirable results. However, to advance the development of design strategies, these steps can be carried out in multiple rounds. As an action research methodology suggests, the research could take a spiral of steps where each circle is an iterative round of planning, action, and result finding to allow deeper analyses of the research question (Lewin, 1946). Interviews and observations can be designed and iterated to improve the efficiency of data and push the inquiry further. Insights from the previous circle of action could inform the following round. Especially paired with the above-mentioned expansion of case study numbers and types, the adjustment to multiply research circles will be effective in distilling findings from a larger body of research data. Study on social justice issues and women’s roles in urban commoning As discussed in Chapter 2, urban commoning concerns social justice issues, like the right to housing and urban spaces, access to healthy food, the inequality of race and gender, etc. Chapter 4 engages with specifically the right to food and green spaces in parallel with the environmental justice issue in the food industry. The fieldwork of this research consolidated the implication of urban farms and gardens on the citizens’ right of access to the land, food, biodiversity, and ecoliteracy. Admittedly, interviews and observations demonstrated other social justice issues were taking place, such as commoning caused gentrification and displacement, lack of engagement with minority groups in some projects, and the possibility of shifting women’s roles through commoning. At the Garfield Farm, all of the staff is white, even though it is located in a black community. In some literature, permaculture was also criticized as taking a white savior attitude and neglecting indigenous people’s contribution to its farming methods. The attempt to facilitate racial equality and revitalize indigenous knowledge from Indian groups like the Delaware and Susquehannock tribes in the Pittsburgh region deserves another in-depth study. In both case studies, the observation was made that most volunteers are female, and many of those women are housewives. Their engagement in food commoning is their resistance to the given roles of “mother” and “stay-home wife.” These preliminary findings provide great opportunities for future research, in which caring and designing for the communities of minority, women, and low-income people would suggest more strategies to enhance the depth of commoning.

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Chapter 6 Jing, J. (2021). Urban renewal through community gardens. Retrieved from https://thecityateyelevel. com/stories/micro-urban-renewal-community-gardens-in-high-density-central-city-shanghai/ Kou, H., Zhang, S., & Liu, Y. (2019). Community-Engaged Research for the Promotion of Healthy Urban Environments: A Case Study of Community Garden Initiative in Shanghai, China. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(21), 4145. https:// doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16214145 Liu, Y., Fan, H., Wei, M., Yin, K., & Yan, J. (2017). 从可食景观到活力社区—四叶草堂上海社区花园系列实践[From Edible Landscape to Vital Communities: CLOVER NATURE SCHOOL Community Gardens IN SHANGHAI]. Landscape Architecture Frontiers, 5(3), 72. https://doi. org/10.15302/J-LAF-20170308 Liu, Y., Yin, K., Wei, M., Fan, H., Yan, J., & Ding, S. (2019). 中国上海：高密度中心城区社区花园实践探索 [Shanghai, China: Exploration of community gardens practices in high-density central cities]. 上海手册[Shanghai Manual]. p.46-60. Liu, Y., & Kou, H. (2019). 上海社区花园参与式空间位更新微治理策略探索 [Study on the Strategy of Micro-renewal and Micro-governance by Public Participatory of Shanghai Community Garden]. 中国园林[Chinese Landscape Architecture], 2019, 35(12): p. 5-11. Liu, Y., Yin, K., & Ge, J. (2018). 公众参与，协同共享，日臻完善——上海社区花园系列空间微更新实验 [Community Participation, Co-sharing, Approaching Perfection—A Case Study of Shanghai Community Garden Space Micro-regeneration]. 西部人居环境学刊 [Journal of Human Settlements in West China], 33(04):8-12. Liu, Y., Yin, K., Yin, K., & Fan, H. (2017). 高密度中心城区社区花园实践探索——以上海创智农园和百草园为例 [Community Garden Practice in High-density Central Cities — A Case Study of KIC Garden and Herb Garden in Shanghai]. 中国园林 [Landscape Architecture], 2017(9): p. 16-22. Mao, Y., Sun, T., Liu, Y., & Wang, R. (2021). 面向社区生活圈的绿地空间共建机制 [Co-construction Mechanism of Green Space in Community-life Circle: A Case Study of Wujiaochang SubDistrict, Shanghai]. New Architecture, 2021(4). Yang, J. (2020). Urban Home Gardening Takes Root Amid Epidemic. Shanghai Daily. https:// www.shine.cn/news/metro/2002262834/?fbclid=IwAR1cDp6qNN7–Sv5dPHdnl2P– Kpcb2jtlt3dhGlW8vQvs3386aWQIEgMBT24. Accessed 26 Feb 2020. Chapter 7 Maccart, M. (n.d.) Food desert: Mapping hunger in Pittsburgh. Post-gazette. https://newsinteractive. 222

post-gazette.com/food-deserts/ FeedPGH (2020). Understanding food insecurity in the city of Pittsburgh. The City of Pittsburgh. https://apps.pittsburghpa.gov/redtail/images/16669_FeedPGH_Print_Version_11.18.21.pdf Garfield Community Farm. (2021). Garfield Community Farm. Retrieved November 12, 2021, from https://www.garfieldfarm.com/ Smith, L-R., Greenberg, L., & Griffin, T.L. (eds) (2020). Patterned Justice. Just City Lab. Kim, R. (2017, April 24). Transition Design Case Studies — Transition Design Spring 2016. https://medium.com/transition-design-case-studies-transition-design/ transition-design-case-study-fcb814757431 The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project. (2019, March 1) Retrieved Oct 18, 2021, from https:// pittsburghneighborhoodproject.blog/2019/03/01/garfield-a-neighborhood-profile/ Tolliver, S. (2016, August 22). Living in Garfield, the comeback neighborhood. NEXTpittsburgh. https://nextpittsburgh.com/current-features/why-garfield-is-attracting-more-residents/ Dutko, P., Ploeg, M. V., & Farrigan, T. (2012). Characteristics and Influential Factors of Food Deserts. 36. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45014/30940_err140.pdf Danko, S., Gastil, R. W., Pazuchanics, A., Ervin, G., Newman, M., Waddell, W., Butcher-Pezzino, J., Manheim, M., Butcher, A., & Sing, E. (2015). VLTK Pittsburgh Vacant Lot Toolkit Resource Guide. https://apps.pittsburghpa.gov/redtail/images/1760_VLTK_FINAL_10-28-15.pdf Chapter 8 Geels, F., & Kemp, R. (2000). Transities vanuit sociotechnisch perspectief. Maastricht, MERIT. Grow Pittsburgh. (2022). Grower’s Map. Accessed on Feb 9, 2022: https://www.growpittsburgh. org/garden-and-farm-resources/growers-map/ Gruber, S. (2020). A Dialogue Must Take Place, Precisely Because We Don’t Speak the Same Language. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://adialoguemusttakeplace.org/ABOUT-1 Helfrich, S. (2015). Patterns of commoning: How can we bring about a language of commoning. In Patterns of commoning. Bollier, D., Helfrich, S., & Commons Strategies Group (Eds.). CSG - Commons Strategies Group. Irwin, T., Tonkinwise, C., & Kossoff, G. (2020). Transition Design: An Educational Framework for Advancing the Study and Design of Sustainable Transitions. Cuadernos Del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación, 105. https://doi.org/10.18682/cdc.vi105.4188 223

Katrini, E. (2019). Creating the everyday commons: Spatial patterns of sharing cultures. [Doctoral dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University]. Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaris, F., & Acosta, A. (2019). Pluriverse: A post-development dictionary. Tulika Books. Lewin, K. (1946). Action Research and Minority Problems. Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), 34–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1946.tb02295.x Lou, Y., Valsecchi, F., & Diaz, C. (2013). Design harvests: An acupunctural design approach towards sustainability. Mistra urban futures. Manzini, E. (2015). Design, when everybody designs: An introduction to design for social innovation. The MIT Press. Moore, M.-L., Riddell, D., & Vocisano, D. (2015). Scaling Out, Scaling Up, Scaling Deep: Strategies of Non-profits in Advancing Systemic Social Innovation. Journal of Corporate Citizenship, 2015(58), 67–84. https://doi.org/10.9774/GLEAF.4700.2015.ju.00009 Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press. Phillips, E. M., & Pugh, D. S. (2012). How to get a PhD: A handbook for students and their supervisors (5. ed., repr). Open Univ. Press. Yang, Y. (1997). Design, art history and theory, Taipei, Garden City Cultural Press.

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Appendix

A. List of figures B. List of tables and needs and satisfiers tables for Chapters 6 and 7 C. Interview transcription exemplary excerpts D. Atlas. ti. coding examples E. Interview participant consent form and IRB approval forms

A. List of figures Figure number Title

Page

Figure 1.1

In a community design discussion session, a resident attendee diagramed the talk by a community committee member and my talk on urban commoning together

Figure 1.2

Research stages and thesis structure

Figure 2.1

“What is the commons” sketches

Figure 2.2

Four quadrants of the commons categorization

Figure 2.3

A tree structure, a semilattice structure, and a semilattice of a neighborhood

Figure 2.4

R-Urban in Colombes, 2015

Figure 2.5

Petition to save R-Urban

Figure 2.6

Developer hires security guards to evict farmers

Figure 2.7

Mapopo farmers

Figure 2.8

24-hour clock and well-being scorecard

Figure 2.9

Citizen participation ladder

Figure 2.10

Relationship of the sustainment, institutions of expanding commoning, and scaling

Figure 3.1

Design mode map

Figure 3.2

The landscape of human-centered design research and practice

Figure 3.3

Three types of designer-user relations: user-centered design, participatory design, and diffuse design (design for, with, and by users)

Figure 3.4

Design for urban commoning and relevant fields of design on the 59 design landscape

Figure 3.5

Transition design framework

Figure 3.6

The atlas in Miller ICA in Pittsburgh

Figure 3.7

Exhibition website, displaying the essay “大同 (Da-tong): the great community”

Figure 4.1

Looking towards a new urban development that was once arable land from a suburban farm

Figure 4.2

Chicken-greenhouse exchange diagram

Figure 4.3

An actor-network analysis of food system

Figure 4.4

Multi-dimensional scaling

103

Figure 5.1

Chapter structure: this thesis’ research onion

105

Figure 5.2

Abductive methodology in this thesis

109

Figure 6.1

Aerial view of KIC Garden

120 227

Figure 6.2

One-meter garden

122

Figure 6.3

Graffiti door

122

Figure 6.4

The outside and inside of the container building “little blue house” 123

Figure 6.5

Zones of KIC Garden

124

Figure 6.6

Axonometric of KIC Garden

126-127

Figure 6.7

One-meter garden, reading event, and 诗经花园 (The garden from 125 the Book of Songs) event are promoted on community notice board

Figure 6.8

The chalkboard with event ideas from residents

125

Figure 6.9

Night public lecture event

125

Figure 6.10

Phases and financial structure

129

Figure 6.11

Out-scaling process of KIC Garden/duplications of community 130 gardens in Shanghai

Figure 6.12

Seeding station in KIC Garden

131

Figure 6.13

Satellite duplications of the Seeding campaign across China

131

Figure 6.14

KIC Garden’s out-scaling trend

131

Figure 6.15

Actors network and up-scaling process of KIC Garden

132

Figure 6.16

Proposed public-commons-private collaboration model

134

Figure 6.17

KIC Garden’s up-scaling trend

135

Figure 6.18

KIC Garden volunteer 24hr clock and well-being scorecard before 138 and after joining the Seeding campaign

Figure 6.19

KIC Garden’s needs wheel

Figure 6.20

KIC Garden’s and the proposed collaboration model’s participation 140 ladders

Figure 6.21

Integrated deep-scaling analysis

141

Figure 6.22

KIC Garden’s deep-scaling trend

142

Figure 6.23

KIC Garden’s multi-dimensional scaling trends

143

Figure 7.1

Aerial view of Garfield Community Farm and the surrounding

148

Figure 7.2

CSA bags

151

Figure 7.3

Mobile farmer’s market

151

Figure 7.4

Axonometric of Garfield Farm

154-155

Figure 7.5

Herb labyrinth

153

Figure 7.6

Community space

153

Figure 7.7

Inside and outside of the bio shelter greenhouse

156

Figure 7.8

Feedback loops diagram

156

Figure 7.9

Initiation process

158

139

228

Figure 7.10

Financial structure

158

Figure 7.11

Out-scaling process of Garfield Farm

160

Figure 7.12

Garfield Farm’s out-scaling trend

161

Figure 7.13

Up-scaling and actors’ network of Garfield Farm

162

Figure 7.14

Garfield Farm’s up-scaling trend

163

Figure 7.15

Garfield Farm’s needs wheel

165

Figure 7.16

Garfield Farm volunteer 24hr clock and well-being scorecard

167

Figure 7.17

Garfield Farm staff 24hr clock and well-being scorecard

167

Figure 7.18

Garfield Farm’s participation ladder

168

Figure 7.19

The first spatial investigation using a tree structure

169

Figure 7.20

The intersection with seemingly random objects

170

Figure 7.21

Users’ paths generate a semilattice structure

171

Figure 7.22

Integrated deep-scaling analysis

171

Figure 7.23

Garfield Farm’s deep-scaling trend

172

Figure 7.24

Garfield Farm’s multi-dimensional scaling trends

174

Figure 8.1

Out-scaling types

179

Figure 8.2

Up-scaling template

179

Figure 8.3

Deep-scaling integrated score framework

180

Figure 8.4

Scaling trends analysis of KIC Garden

184

Figure 8.5

Scaling trends analysis of Garfield Farm

185

Figure 8.6

Comparison and annotation of urban commoning’s sustainment 191 principles

Figure 8.7

Proposed design research process

195

B. List of tables and needs and satisfiers tables for Chapters 6 and 7 Table number

Title

Page

Table 3.1

Matrix of needs and satisfiers

Table 5.1

Crotty’s research process framework and its relation to design research

107

Table 5.2

Definitions of design into, through, and for art and design

110

Table 5.3

Methods, datasets, and tactics in this dissertation

113

Table 6.1

Needs and satisfiers of KIC Garden

230

Table 7.1

Needs and satisfiers of Garfield Farm

231

Table 8.1

KIC Garden and Garfield Farm comparison

182-183

229

Table 6.1 Needs and satisfiers of KIC Garden Fundamental Human Needs

Satisfiers (identified from interviews and secondary resources)

subsistence

o planting and harvesting vegetables o exchanging seeds or home produce with neighbors

protection

o helping neighbors and strangers

Interview quotes

“我觉得我对别人能有所帮助，我的生活也更愉快了。” “社区花园里的各种活动让家长和孩子在劳动中体验都市田园的乐趣。”

affection

o knowing neighbors o making friends o spending time with family o taking care of plants, the nature and common spaces o sharing spaces, produces, knowledge and life

understanding

o being curious and educated about farming skills and nature science o attending educational sessions o forming a learning community o parenting as learning

participation

o participating in construction and management o proposing events and express opinions o having responsibilities to take care designated pieces of gardens o cooperating with others for events

leisure

o taking a walk in the garden o watching plants and insects o playing games (children) o enjoying rural-like scenes and tranquility

creation

o learning new farming techniques o co-designing areas of the garden o participating in mapping workshops o activating kids’ imagination

230

“这里是秘密花园，沙坑里有宝藏，池塘里有宝藏，花草树木里都有宝藏，这里是自然的森林幼儿园，可以种菜、玩泥巴、看鸟，还有小朋友可以一起打水仗。” “这里是我童年的乌托邦，在这里可以尽情地玩爽和欢笑，也可以放松地学习，可以看到花花草草，还能和社区里的同龄人一起说说话。” “我们哪里只是想教大家种花种菜呀！我们希望带给你的是温柔看待世界的方式，尊重和照顾每一个生命。”

“闲暇时候我也会来农园种菜，参加手作活动，很放松。” “互助会、妈妈团，会在居委会备案，然后自行组织一些活动。” “大部分时间，我来到农园就感觉很放松。” “平时上下班我都会走过，看到繁花似锦，小桥流水就会觉得安心、内心宁静。”

“社区营造是营造人与人的关系，而经历真正的艰难困苦，关系才有机会得到锤炼，那些和生命无直接关系的身外之物，在最后的危难关头，都不重要了。这是一种深度的链接，根植于内心，与权力和钱财无关。”

identity

freedom

o sensing of belonging to the neighborhood and the city o committing to neighborhood businesses o recalling memories of childhood o finding self-values in farming o reflecting on one’s work-life balance

o having a true sense of ownership of where one lives o developing awareness in speaking up for one’s citizen’s rights

“对于上海来说，我只不过是个外来人员… 心底一直隐藏着些许的漂泊感和距离感。在创智农园仿佛回到小时候和妈妈一起劳动的情景。” “种菜对于我来讲，其实是获得内心精神坦然安定的小伎俩，这与中国人做事情希望达到的一种理想状态有关，叫做‘天时、地利、人和’，这最早的出处，还真就是古代农夫种地的策略。做到这三件事，你就不会再耿耿于这一季或者这一盆菜的成功或失败。人生不也如此吗？” “社区花园是一个比较容易入手的方式，先从社区花园让大家看到绿色的希望，建立起居民与社区规划的关系，才能逐步让居民参与的社区规划成为一种民间体系。我们对未来的理想在不断地描绘、探索。”

Table 7.1 Needs and satisfiers of Garfield Farm Fundamental Human Needs

subsistence

Satisfiers (identified from interviews and secondary resources)

Interview quotes “We try to meet what the community needs. Having a certain level of production, being able to produce enough vegetables to donate or meet other commitments. Decisions about what type of vegetables you grow and you’re able to grow comes from knowing the community that you’re serving so that you can have the infrastructure, space or knowledge to be able to grow those particular crops.”

o Growing and having food o Feeding people living in the food desert o Restoring abandoned land and increase biodiversity to improve the environment

“Through farming, we can help restore a physical space to previous health before it was made unhealthy.”

protection

“We would still argue that this area is the poorest of the neighborhood that can be considered a food desert because of the geography of the neighborhood. we hope to build a new greenhouse, grow more food for more people in our neighborhood, increase our production.”

o Responding to food insecurity problem o Helping those who cannot afford food (“pay as you can”, donations to food pantries)

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affection

understanding

participation

leisure

“This is a lot of quality time spent with like-minded people and there’s new story about an interaction every week because it’s really a place where we’ve curated a good environment and we all have a lot in common and we like to speak about the future and things that we’re excited about.”

o Making new friends o Developing relationships with nature o Having spaces of togetherness (for groups of volunteers, local residents and church members) o Respecting people’s abilities and time o Being generous in supporting others and donating food

“Just thinking of how the state of the world is right now, how do we get people involved and caring about not only like the planet as a whole but just like a community. I kind of had reached the conclusion that gardening was a really good way to start that.” “I feel comfortable to ask the things that I’m wondering that I want to learn, and I’m being willingly taught. it’s a true apprenticeship where I’m continuously learning and then being trusted to like act on that learning to make decisions.”

o Teaching kids, youth and adult about food, farming and permaculture o Offering summer camps, educational sessions/courses, and free online classes o Learning about the nature and restoring food culture through farming o Getting expertise support from individuals, universities and other organizations

“we’re in reestablishing some cultural knowledge that will now last for hopefully more generations that somehow disappeared, so just trying to bring back the concept of gardening, food production and biodiversity into the community seems like the long-term projects that hopefully have a lasting beneficial impact.” “We want to do more work with kids in the neighborhood who need this sort of space, need to get their hands dirty, get outside and experience nature, right here in their neighborhood.” “It’s really conducive for eliminating hierarchy of some degree. there’s valuable authority that the staff team has inherently because they have more skills and experience, but others’ input is requested a lot.”

o Taking on individual and collective responsibilities o All have the rights to express opinions and make suggestions

“I’m given a good deal of responsibility to make certain calls in areas that they perceive me as qualified for.”

o Mediating/having spiritual activities in herb garden o Having community gathering spaces o Neighbors like taking a walk and watching the plants and animals

“We enjoy coming to the farm today, enjoy the animals, enjoy the flowers, learn a lot about planting flowers, and what animals like to eat.” “It’s super quiet and almost like meditation. You would have no idea you’re in the city. You think you’re out in the countryside.” 232

creation

o Children learn to make food and doing creative artwork o Different groups help build parts of the farm

identity

o Committing oneself to pay back to the community o Reflecting on oneself about one’s futures, self-land and self-community relations

freedom

“Everyone that I work with on the farm has become a mentor for me, so I spent a lot of time asking them about decisions that I’m trying to make or things like that and they have good advice and guidance for me.” “We had a mission that was not just focused on growing food but a mission on restoration and relationships actually having Garfield farm be a physical example of how when we’re good stewards of environment.”

o Food justice-oriented practices o Being responsible for land stewardship o Having rights to produce healthy food o Keeping an open mind for participations and collaborations

“Everyone I know on the farm is justiceoriented. It’s a place dealing with land and food sovereignty issues. Building a relationship in the community is a pivotal mission. It’s complicated but we have been thinking and discussing how to give back to the community. And I personally am very interested in movements for land and food sovereignty for black and brown folks, and that’s motivating for me to work here.”

C. Interview transcription exemplary excerpts [Interviewee 1] 从一开始我们就没有交租这个词，因为在中国我们的土地都是公有的，所以说成是公益性质的。它属于公园绿地，我们是把它叫做认养。我们采取的做法是如果你认养一块地，我们提供相应的课程。这个课程是一年比如说有12节，就每个月有一节课，这节课大概价值是150 块钱。这些课程教大家怎么去进行相关的种植，包括培土、育苗、堆肥、收获和打理。其实是一个园艺的课程。课程收费是按照我们的成本，由老师带教，有一些物料的成本，那么我们折算下来就是12次课程一年的话是1800块钱。一个最新的动态就是我们从今年的这个暑假开始，我们经过5年了，也逐渐形成了稳定的资金来源，目前大家都不需要付费来认养一米菜园了。对这30多块地我们从暑假开始做了一个改革，成了一个免费的认养，我们义务的提供一些课程。面对的对象长期以来作为我们农园志愿者的一些伙伴们。我们两边的社区有一些家庭有小朋友或者也帮社区做志愿者工作的人，这些居民就能得到免费认养的名额。我们是在2016年的7月1号开始第一批认养，现在整好5周年了，那么之前的认养到期之后呢我们就逐渐过渡到了免费认养，给到一批有劳有获人，参与共创共建的人，相当于是一个福利吧。取消了金钱的模式之后，人们还是需要贡献时间、知识或者是劳动力。

其实我们走的这个自下而上的路径就是我们虽然是技术切入，但是要让这个技术成为大家有力的 233

武器。并不是说要去挑战技术人员或者政府，而是成为一股巨大的社会力量。我们其实一直在做的就是发动民间的这样一种做法，最后所产生的这样的一种力量就是让大家要很谨慎、很认真。不能因为原来民间的人是原子化的，民间的居民不懂专业，所以你作为设计师就骗他，蒙混过关就过去了。我们想教会居民怎么去看这个预算、怎么去评价一个方案的好坏。我们给街道干部、社区书记培训重点也是一样。我觉得这个很有意义就。大家都讲城市权利，但是不能光给人赋权，这是没有用的。如果人没有这个能力、这个知识、这个技能去提意见，你给他权力是没有任何意义。他没这个意识，然后你给他这个权利，像一个孩子，你给他一个巨大权力去做主，他怎么可能做得了主，是吧。他做的主反而是破坏性的。所以我们其实做了这么多的工作其实，包括我本人参加一些讲座或者和大众媒体的一些交流，是花了大量的时间得。我认为这些时间就是让那些普通居民看到这个信息，他会觉得我们也有规划的权利。我其实这几年做了大量的工作其实就是在做一个规划或者说城市空间权力的一个普法吧。很多人认为这个权利就是提出一些非理性的想法，比如说把所有的树砍掉对，都要做成停车场等等。大家都会提很多非理性的想法。就体现了我们的群众缺乏一些公共空间的公共精神。那么公共精神不是说你想建立，政府一声令下就能做到的，必须有民间非常强烈的、非常扎实的基础。长期的社区参与才会促成公共精神。 [Interviewee 2] 参加SEEDING活动，我自己绘制了海报、楼栋图、邻里互助倡议书，用废纸壳制作了“种子驿站”的初级版本“种子停车场”，在晚上偷偷安置在1楼的楼道窗台处，第二天正式启动楼栋SEEDING行动。第二天，我为楼栋里的11户邻居制作了“种子方舟”，并附带一斤豌豆尖放在了每户邻居的家门口，中午201的邻居写了留言参与行动，想组建楼栋微信区互帮互助并送我一个自己做的台历，我把台历也一并放在“种子停车场”那里让楼栋的邻居们一起欣赏。傍晚，601的楼组长敲门进行交流，对SEEDING行动进行鼓励和支持。第一次分享一点却收获更多，体会到了分享的快乐。201的邻居找来自己的种子一起放在了“种子停车场”，601的楼组长带我认识了楼栋里的其他邻居并且还送了一个红礼包以示鼓励。我因此把34楼楼道窗台处的“爱心帮帮椅”擦拭干净让上楼的叔叔阿姨休息一下，也让这一层的窗台作为1楼“种子停车场”满员后的新“种子停车场”的选址。我把楼栋里所有的年轻人都组建成了我们楼栋的微信群，从而发挥年轻人的能力还帮助邻里。为此201的邻居还邀请我一起进行“城市行走”活动。我还将SEEDING行动推荐给了党支部，以此来让更多人参与到这项行动中来。我将周末采购多出来的蔬菜装进一个纸箱里放到“种子停车场”旁边，让邻居免费拿取并鼓励他们一起参与SEEDING行动并留言。后来只有蔬菜被领取了，但是留言和种子都没有新增，说明用物质奖励SEEDING行动并不奏效，需要让行动本身更具魅力，让参与者得到体验和社交上的满足而非物质上的获取。在社区中心花园健身步道旁边，结合废纸壳和201邻居赠送的收纳盒制作了编写精美防风防雨的“种子停车场2.0”，将网购的种子也放进去，放在了社区中心花园健身步道旁边的椅子上，希望健身的人能坐下来参与SEEDING行动。后来当我去户外“种子停车场2.0”满心欢喜期待收获更多行动者加入的时候却发现“种子停车场2.0”和种下去的鲜花不见了。SEEDING行动受阻，打击很大。新做了“种子孵化站”搬到了原先“种子停车场2.0”丢失的地点，结果中午邻居拿走了4个鸡蛋，晚上就只剩1个鸡蛋在蛋托里了，不知道这些鸡蛋是被拿走了还是会装着种子回来。这种情况说明“种子孵化站”的选址需要选在有人流量又没有太多人停留的地方。而楼道里的“种子孵化站”得到了201与601邻居的支持，新增了5位“种子选手”。早上给户外的“种子孵化站” 234

补了5个鸡蛋，中午一位设计师老前辈特地拨打了“种子孵化站”上的电话找到我，鼓励我的行动，让我特别受宠若惊。晚上回收的时候少了3个鸡蛋，昨天的鸡蛋还没有回来。室内的“种子孵化站”在楼组长朱阿姨的推动下又新增了2名“种子选手。” 户外的“种子孵化站”没有新的进展，估计之前的鸡蛋也回不来了，看来户外的“种子孵化站”想要让拿走鸡蛋的邻居用蛋壳装种子回来还需要进一步设计。而楼道里的“种子孵化站”在楼组长朱阿姨的进一步推动下基本满员，室内的“种子孵化站”活动非常成功！整个行动过程中从个人的社交技巧、设计能力到真实邻里关系我都有很多收获，列下来主要为下面几点：性格更开朗更勇敢了。以前的我只喜欢宅在家画画玩游戏，偶尔需要到户外与人沟通交流（尤其是发问卷和传单）会感觉特别吃力跟难受。在这次行动中，在楼道里行动时我跟楼组长朱阿姨学到了如何与邻居们沟通，怎样敲门聊天能让邻居敞开心扉；在户外行动时又学会了如何跟邻居介绍和交流。认识了很好的邻居，也让邻里之间变得更加和睦了。在这个行动过程中我和201的海姣姐、老王一家，601楼组长朱阿姨，设计师前辈姚叔叔成为了朋友，还遇到了很友善的邻居502的施奶奶、402的冯叔叔、301的党员张叔叔、马里奥、sarah妹妹、种花的阿姨、还有隔壁楼栋的小朋友们。而这一切在之前都是我不敢想象的，租住了但半年都没认识1位邻居在这短短的1个月就和邻居成为了朋友。SEEDING的不仅仅是植物，还有邻里之间人与人之间的和睦的关系。认识到了现实中的困难。在行动过程中，我也遇到了其他小伙伴遇到的挫折：比如种下的植物、装置、鸡蛋丢失，努力去鼓励与亲近的邻居并没有参与行动的想法和热情。这些情况是真实又正常的，因此通过SEEDING行动建立的美好的邻里氛围才显得尤为珍贵。在最初的行动开始之前，我们大家都觉得这个行动成功的可能性不高，但就在我咬牙迈出第一步之后（把”种子停车场1.0“摆到楼道中开始），之后的一切都变得水到渠成。整个行动的材料都是身边的物品以及邻居给的可回收物，邻居们给的友善的互动以及意外的小惊喜都给与了我继续行动的动力，而我精心的行动又会激励我的邻居们，整个邻里氛围就在这样的良性循环中逐步萌芽、开花、升华。之前不可能的一切都变得可能。 [Interviewee 3] We grow a lot of micro sprouts, microgreens that usually has mustard, basal, pea, sprouts and buckwheat. This year since I’ve been here in the spring, we saw a lot of radishes which were a big crop and salad greens and then kale and chard, big crop, some peppers, eggplants. We have tomatoes in here now that should survive a couple frost and keep producing a little longer but mostly, we grow salad greens in here. We’ve had like neighbor interns so place of employment for people, a place to get organic food that they can afford, and we take every form of payment so that’s accessible to them. We don’t grow like fancy weird things and expect people to buy. You grow what people are going to buy and then just a place of education and learning. We’ve had many people come up, just as you know chickens are always the biggest asset. I’m about to open the chicken coop but we want to give them some greens. We have 11 chickens they eat it to eat the green, so we give them and look at a dozen eggs every two days probably.

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They have access we’ll see inside the bio shelter, so they have a part of the farm ecosystem. They recycle nutrients to provide us eggs and then in the winter to help bring heat and carbon dioxide into the bio shelter. A bio-shelter as a solar greenhouse it’s managed to have an indoor ecosystem, so the chickens live inside the greenhouse and they give carbon dioxide a lot of times when a greenhouse is closed up through the winter. The plants can use up all the carbon dioxide on a sunny day if there’s not enough ventilation so having chickens in there and people inside helps keep the air exchange of the plants stay healthy and yeah solar panels on the roof to provide most of the electricity for the greenhouse. The rain gutters are set up either to go in the rain barrels or overflow into the garden beds. This is a year’s accumulation of compost from mix of coffee grounds and weeds and stuff people bring in from your kitchens. You need like a 30 to 1 ratio of carbon heavy things and nitrogen heavy things generally when people are explaining the first time, they’ll say browns and greens because usually your brown things like your leaves your dead grass anything that’s dead or dying or dry. They have lots of high carbon content and then living things vegetable scraps have high nitrogen content. I felt like we’re in reestablishing some cultural knowledge that will now last for hopefully more generations that somehow disappeared, so just trying to bring back the concept of gardening, food production and biodiversity into the community seems like the long-term projects that hopefully have a lasting beneficial impact. [Interviewee 4] The urban farm is not just about someone growing food and making a living selling food. It’s really about a community. It’s about developing community around a space. We chose Garfield because it’s our neighborhood. This is our space, and we really want to see something good happening in a space where not much what’s happening and that’s I think why most urban farms are popping up. It’s people who see potential in places that have been neglected and abandoned. The bio-shelters is simply an ecologically designed and managed greenhouse so it uses insulation instead of fossil fuel heat source it uses compost and other things that create heat naturally to help heat the inside of the bio shelter. It takes advantage of the site position that’s on top of a hill. It’s facing southwest gets the maximum amount of Sun that it can throughout the year. It’s being built currently into the hillside so that the back of the hillside acts as a temperature regulator so in the summertime, that soil will be around 55 degrees and will cool the bio-shelter. In the wintertime, it’ll be around 55 degrees and will warm the bio shelter. Huge amounts of natural gas and other fossil fuels are used on a single greenhouse that a farmer wants to keep warm through a wintertime, so this is a greenhouse that uses other ways. We’re looking at it to serve multiple roles. It’s going to be a place where we can grow some of the things that we like to have on our plates throughout the year like salads. There’s also going to be space for seedlings so in the late winter when we need to be starting our summer crops in our early spring crops and all those things will have a space to do that. It’s going to be a great space for education, educating both kids, families and school groups that come through about the importance of food systems, biodiversity and sustainability and this is a great opportunity to provide a field trip classroom. There was a huge swath of land here that was open and available and through looking at opportunity, we were able to see not the abandoned mess of the place so much as we were able to see hope for something new and something that could be a be a real statement of renewal on a community.

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We are a nonprofit organization. We’re actually at our nonprofit status as of now funded under the Open Door Church. We are kind of a branch of the Open Door Church. we’re set up to be able to get our own 501C3 status, but we have not, we’ve not done that yet. We haven’t needed to do that yet. Our income we have church support, so there are seven churches that support the farm financially. And that comes to approximately $30,000 for us that comes from church donations. That’s the largest chunk of money each year that’s donated. So that’s more money on an average year than we get from grants or from individual donations. Most of the donated money that we get is from those seven churches. And it’s kind of cool because all of those churches are from Pittsburgh. Some of them are, are very, very close to the farm. So they’re very involved with the farm and they really understand what we’re about and what we’re trying to do. Whenever there’s a project, that’s kind of a one-time thing. We write grants and, you know, a few years back, we wrote a grant to build the bioshelter. We actually, I think that two different two or three grants that, that helped us finish the bio shelter. So, so, so w we’ve gotten grants for a variety of different things over the years, but usually those are project-based with most of the granting organizations. When we go to them, they don’t want to just give us money to, to meet our bottom line. They want to fulfill a specific need. So that’s, that’s not, that’s consistent, those grant moneys. And then the third area where money comes in is through earned income from CSA and farmer’s market sales, restaurant sales and also kind of a new thing is we’re doing more educational events and classes. + individual/organization fundraising [Interviewee 5] It’s technically that the Open Door Church owns the land. they have a board of directors so any decisions that are made ultimately passed through them, but the way is that we function on a day-to-day level is that we are very open with each other. we get a lot of input both from the staff members and from the greater community both just the neighbors down the street whoever stops by and the church group. we open up big decisions for input from the wider community. It’s only three of us and we’re all very open people and all three of us are great communicators. we have weekly meetings where we sit down and discuss what’s going on. John has been really open to suggestions both from me and from the workshare people about all kinds of things and he values my input. We’d all say that I’m interested in doing this, what do you think? This year we’ve taken on in the spring we did a big plant sale so we started growing vegetable seedlings to sell but also elderberries and pop hot reason persimmons and things that aren’t typically found at at the other organic farms in the region so we expanded in that direction and we started some partnerships with there’s a i think it’s a nonprofit called plant 5 for life that their mission is for every person born in the region they want to plant 5 trees that’s a very ambitious goal and we partnered up with them to grow some of the trees that they’re going to plant and also help with some of its designs for where they’re going to plant them and thinking about having them be food producing plants as well so not trees fruit trees so that’s been fun. We have a bunch of partnerships with individuals. We collaborate with a beekeeper. The beehives are in this corner of the garden, so she tends to these, and it is her project. She takes care of

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them but we get it so hitting it we could provide lots of herbs and Flowers for the trees and water different areas and help to pollinate our crops and then in exchange for allowing her this space to have the bees she gives us plenty every year so that’s one partner steps and we have another one over in this area there start a biochar business so fire char is burning would really hot and fast so that it doesn’t all go to ash when you get chunks of charred wood and it’s extremely porous so you can take that and put it in into a compost system and put it in the animals and that would charge it with nutrients then you could take it and put it in the garden which will slowly release nutrients over a long time. he’s just started getting up and running and he wants to practice and get a good system though, so he makes fire turn here. he built a shed on this property to store his wood and he has a barrel where he burned the bio char makes it here and in exchange for this space. he gives us some of the biochar for us could use here. there’s another fellow who his name is TJ. he has a business with mushrooms where he wildcarded and cultivate his own mushrooms, but he also created a network of foreigners in the region and connected to outlets in Oregon, California, and Washington. we’re allowed foreigners harvest mushrooms and then he buys them wholesale and then he distributes them to restaurants so he has a few should talky mushroom logs over on the property over here. it’s a place for people that are just starting out wanting to experiment with different agricultural businesses.

D. Atlas. ti. coding example

Code tree

Scaling dimensions and related codes

Needs and related codes

E. Interview participant consent form and IRB approval forms Carnegie Mellon University Consent Form for Participation in Research

Study Title: Designing for More Resilient Urban Commoning Processes Principal Investigator(PI): Chun Zheng, PhD Candidate, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University(CMU) PI Contact Information: czheng1@andrew.cmu.edu ⏐ +1 412-880-7945 Faculty Advisors: Peter Scupelli, Nierenberg Associate Professor, School of Design, CMU ⏐SJV#DQGUHZ FPX HGX

Stefan Gruber, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, CMU ⏐ VWHIDQJUXEHU#FPX HGX

Purpose of the Study

Designing for More Resilient Urban Commoning Processes is a study on bottom-up sharing practices of urban spaces and resources. The main research questions in this study are: 1) How participants make decisions in commoning processes? 2) how participants interact with the shared resources and one another and how the interactions ramify? And 3) what are the forces and trends that affect commoning processes as a whole? Urban Commoning refers to a group’s collective process of co-create and co-manage shared urban spaces. Types of urban commoning projects that are involved in this study include community gardens, community farms, selforganized community organizations, cooperative housings, etc. This study explores individuals’ incentives and endeavors of everyday commoning practices and in turn, the experiences of participating in commoning processes’ influence on individuals’ well-being. It also tries to understand the transitional and incremental processes of urban commoning projects and hopes to identify emerging social and spatial patterns. 2

Procedures

The study includes three major parts: interviews, photograph documentation of spaces and activities, and focus group. Participants will all participate in interviews. If the participants are project initiators or managers, they will help the PI with the photograph documentation processes. The focus group sessions are optional. Participants can decide whether they want to join in focus group sessions. All interview and focus group sessions will be audio and video recorded for the PI to revisit and transcribe.

a) Interviews The interview will be a free-flowing interview. All discussions are related to the participants’ own experiences with the associated project. Due to COVID-19 circumstances, any procedures that involve interpersonal communications will be conducted via ZOOM or Tencent VooV Meeting. When the pandemic situation is eased, interviews will take place on the project sites. The interview can be replaced by a questionnaire if the participant prefers not to conduct the oral interview. The PI will ask the participant if a group interview is acceptable before scheduling the interview. When 4-5 participants express their willingness to do the interview together, a group interview will be planned accordingly. The main topics in interviews, questionnaires, or group interviews will remain the same. The individual interview will last around 30-40 minutes. Filling out the questionnaire with equivalent content will take 20-30 minutes. A group interview of 4-5 participants will last 40-80 minutes. 240

b) Photograph documentation of spaces and activities Photograph documentation of spaces and activities allows the PI to take a close look at the spatial and social aspects of the project. Once the PI can physically visit the project site, the participant will be asked to open doors and allow the PI to take photos of the spaces and ongoing activities in the spaces. Only participants in the study who previously consented and provided the accompanying consent form will appear in the photos. The photograph documentation process will take 30-60 minutes so that the PI can take detailed measurements and notes. Participants will be present when the PI conducts this documentation process.

c) Focus group The last part of the study is a review and feedback on the data that the PI has obtained. The PI will send an invitation to the participants for a focus group session where the participant has the opportunity to look through transcribed and synthesized documentation materials. 4-5 interviewees will join the group feedback session together to take the best advantage of time. A focus group session lasts around 40 minutes. In the session, the participant can review materials and further validate them. Either written or oral feedback is welcomed. This last step also ensures that the participant is comfortable with all the information to be shared and referred to in the PI’s future study and publications. 3

Participation Requirements

All participants of this study are required to be at least age, in adulthood declared in law in both the U.S. and China. 4

Risks

There is a minimal risk of participating in this study. There is a slight risk of breach of confidentially associated with participation in the study. The discomforts you might encounter in this study are no greater than those ordinarily encountered in daily life or during normal conversations, which may include boredom, confusion, or hesitation. The researcher will take every precaution to protect all personal data, and actively create a comfortable and engaging conversational environment. To protect confidentiality, please do not say anything that is both identifiable and private about yourself or others during the interviews and surveys. 5

Compensation & Costs

There will be no cost or compensation to you for your participation in this study. All participation is completely voluntary. 6

Confidentiality

With participants’ permission, the interviews and workshops will be audio and video recorded in order to be transcribed and revisited. Photos taken on-site or sent by the participant will be de-identified, unless the participant agrees the photos to be made public. To maintain confidentiality, your data and consent form will be kept separate. The access to the data, the recordings and the consent form will be limited by passwords that are only available to the Principal Investigator and the listed-above PhD advisory committee members of the PI. All references to your full name or contact information will be removed from the transcripts and recordings of the session. Your name, address, contact information and other direct personal identifiers in your consent form will not be mentioned in any such publication or dissemination of the research data. Note that per regulation, all research data must be kept for a minimum of three years. 7

Optional Permission

I understand that the PI may use quotes or short excerpts from the audio and(or) video recording for referral and illustrative purposes in presentations of this study at a conference, or in a classroom. All presentations will only be out of scientific and educational purposes. I give my permission to do so as long as important personal information is anonymous. 241

PLEASE INITIAL HERE: _______YES 8

________NO

Rights

Your participation is voluntary. You are free to stop participation at any point. Refusal to participate or withdrawal of your consent or discontinued participation in the study will not result in any penalty or loss of benefits or rights to which you might otherwise be entitled. You also have the right at any time to have your data removed from the database. 9

Right to Ask Questions

If you have any questions about this study, you should feel free to ask them now. If you have questions later, desire additional information, or wish to withdraw your participation please contact the PI by mail, phone or e-mail in accordance with the contact information listed on the first page of this consent. If you have questions pertaining to your rights as a research participant; or to report objections to this study, you should contact the Office of Research Integrity and Compliance(ORIC) or Institutional Review Board(IRB) at Carnegie Mellon University. Email: rcr-education@andrew.cmu.edu or irb-review@andrew.cmu.edu. Phone: 412-268-7166 or 412-268-5460.

Voluntary Consent and Authorization By signing below, I agree that the above information has been explained to me and all my current questions have been answered. I am encouraged to ask questions about any aspect of this research during the course of the study and in the future. I certify that I have read all pages of this form and I understand and agree to its contents. I will receive a copy of this form. By signing this form, I agree to participate in this research study.

PARTICIPANT’S PRINT NAME _____________________________________ PARTICIPANT’S SIGNATURE _____________________________________ DATE _____________________________________

Certification of Informed Consent I certify that I have explained the nature and purpose of the research to the above-named individual, and I have discussed the potential benefits and possible risks of study participation. Any questions have by the individual have been answered and the Principal Investigator will always be available to address any future questions as they arise.

SIGNATURE OF PERSON OBTAINING CONSENT _____________________________________

DATE _____________________________________ 242

Carnegie Mellon University 研究参与同意书

研究课题：为更可持续的社区共治而设计主研究人：郑纯，博士生，卡耐基梅隆大学设计学院主研究人联系方式：邮箱czheng1@andrew.cmu.edu ⏐电话+1 412-880-7945⏐微信 FKXQ 导师： Peter Scupelli, 副教授，卡耐基梅隆大学设计学院 ⏐ SJV#DQGUHZ FPX HGX

Stefan Gruber, 副教授，卡耐基梅隆大学建筑学院 ⏐ VWHIDQJUXEHU#FPX HGX 1

研究目的

为更可持续的社区共治而设计是一项关于自下而上的城市空间和资源共享实践的研究。本研究的主要研究问题是：1）社区共治的参与者在参与过程中如何做出决策？ 2）参与者如何与共享的资源进行互动，以及参与者彼此之间如何互动？ 3）影响社区共治项目的外界因素是什么？社区共治指一个团队共同创建和共同管理共享城市空间的集体性过程。本研究涉及的城市共治项目的类型包括社区花园，社区农场，社区自治组织，合作社住房等。本研究探索了个人日常共治实践的动机和付出，也反之探索参与社区共治的经验对个人的幸福健康产生的影响。本研究还意在了解城市共治项目的过渡和渐进的过程，并希望能发现这些过程中出现的社会的和空间的规律。 2

研究流程

本研究包括三个主要部分：访谈，空间和活动的照片记录以及焦点小组。参与者都会参加访谈。如果参与者是项目发起人或者管理人，则会协助主要研究人进行空间记录。焦点小组由参与人自己选择是否需要参加。

a) 访谈访谈将是自由对话的形式。所有讨论都与参与者对其参与的社区共治项目的体验有关。由于新冠疫情，任何涉及人际交流的程序都将通过ZOOM会议或腾讯会议进行。新冠疫情缓和后，采访将在项目现场进行。如果参与者不愿意进行口头访谈，可以用问卷代替访谈。在安排访谈之前，主研究人将询问参与者是否愿意进行小组访谈。当4-5名参与者表示愿意一起进行采访时，将相应安排小组采访。访谈、问卷调查或小组访谈中的主要问题都是相同的。单独采访大概需要30-40分钟。填写问卷需要20-30分钟。4-5人集体采访需要大概 40-80分钟。访谈会被语音和视频记录。

b) 活动和空间的照片记录空间和活动的照片文档可让主研究人进一步了解项目的空间和社会方面。带注释的照片可以记录人们彼此之间的互动过程以及共享物质资源的情况。如果主研究人可以实际参观项目现场，将要求参与者为主研究人开门，并允许拍摄其空间和空间中正在进行的活动的照片。所有的照片拍摄会在取得入照的人和场地所有者的同意后进行。主研究人进行详细照片记录需要30-60分钟。在此期间，参与者可不必一直在现场。 4 243

c) 焦点小组研究的最后一部分是对主研究人获得的数据的回顾和反馈。主研究人将向参与者发送邀请以进行小组回顾和反馈，参与者将有机会浏览转录和整理过的资料。4-5位受访者将一起参加焦点，以充分利用时间。焦点小组会议持续大约40分钟。在会议中，参与者可以查看材料并进一步验证它们。参与者可以提供书面或口头反馈。这一步也确保参与者对主研究人未来对所获取材料的进一步研究和出版物中要共享和引用的所有信息都放心。 3

参与条件

年满18周岁的法定成年人。 4

危险

参加这项研究的风险很小。只有轻微的信息泄漏的风险。在这项研究中，您可能会遇到的不适感不会超过在日常生活中或正常对话中所遇到的不适感，其中可能包括无聊，困惑或犹豫。研究人员将采取一切措施来保护所有个人数据，并积极创建一个舒适的、积极的对话环境。为了保护机密性，请不要在面谈和调查期间说出任何关于你自己或他人的可识别且私密的内容。 5

补偿及付出

参与这项研究不会对您产生费用，也没有对您金钱上的补偿。所有参与都是完全自愿的。 6

保密性

在与会人员的允许下，采访将被录制下来，以便研究人日后转录和回看。在现场拍摄或由参与者发送的照片上如有身份信息，将被模糊处理，除非参与者同意将照片公开。为了保密，您的数据和同意书将分开保存。对数据，录音录像和同意书的访问将受到密码的限制，该密码仅主研究人和首页列出的导师所有。与您的全名或个人联系方式有关的内容都将后期编辑模糊。在同意书中出现的您的姓名，地址，联系信息和其他直接个人标识符，在出版物或研究数据日后的发表中均不会提及。另外请注意，根据规定，所有研究数据至少被保留三年。 7

选择性同意项

我了解，主研究人可能会在会议或课堂上文字引用本研究中的采访内容或摘取采访片段，以进行参考和说明。所有使用内容仅出于科学和教育目的。只要重要的个人信息是匿名的，我同意主研究人这样做。如同意，请签名：_______同意 8

________不同意

参与者权利

您的参与是自愿的。您随时可以停止参与。拒绝参加或撤回您的同意书或中止参与研究不会导致您受到任何惩罚或利益损失。您也有权随时要求从数据库中删除您的数据。 9

提问权

如果您对此研究有任何疑问，请立即向主研究人提出。如果您以后有疑问，需要更多信息或希望退出本次研究，请按照本同意书首页上列出的联系信息，通过电话或电子邮件与主研究人联系。如果您对自己作为研究参与者的权利有疑问；或要投诉本研究，您应该与卡内基梅隆大学的研究诚信与规则办公室（ORIC）或机构审查委员会（IRB）联系。电子邮件：rcr-education@andrew.cmu.edu 或 irbreview@andrew.cmu.edu。电话：412-268-7166 或 412-268-5460。

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自愿同意及授权在此同意书上签字即表明研究主导人已经向本人解释过所有此文件中的信息。本人对此研究的疑问也已经由研究主导人解答。本人认可在整个研究过程中，研究主导人积极鼓励我向她提问，并且知道如果未来有任何关于此项研究的问题也可以继续询问研究主导人。我证实我已经阅读并认可此文件的所有内容。此同意书会一式两份，由参与者和研究主导人双方保留。签署这份同意书表明本人同意参加这次研究。

参与者的真实姓名 _____________________________________ 参与者的签名 _____________________________________ 日期 _____________________________________

知情同意我证实我已经向参与者解释过此项研究的性质和目的，并且告知参与者参加这项研究可能存在的利弊。研究主导人已经回答过参与者的任何提问，也会回答参与者未来会提出的问题。

主研究人的签名 _____________________________________

日期 _____________________________________

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Institutional Review Board

Federalwide Assurance No: FWA00004206 IRB Registration No: IRB00000603

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

APPROVAL OF SUBMISSION May 12, 2021 Type of Review: Initial Study Title of Study: Designing for More Resilient Urban Commoning Processes Investigator: Chun Zheng IRB ID: STUDY2021_00000046 Funding: None Documents Approved Participation Consent Form Interview questions Recruitment texts Non-exempt IRB Protocol Translation certification_signed Interview alternatice questionnaire The Carnegie Mellon University Institutional Review Board (IRB) has reviewed and granted APPROVAL under EXPEDITED REVIEW on 5/12/2021 per 45 CFR 46.110(7) and 21 CFR 56.110. You will be asked to update the IRB on the progress of your study at the assigned "Check-In" date of 5/12/2023. Unanticipated problems and adverse events must be reported to the IRB within three (3) working days. Any additional modifications to this research protocol or advertising materials pertaining to the study must be submitted for review and granted IRB approval prior to implementation. The Investigator(s) listed above in conducting this protocol agree(s) to follow the recommendations of the IRB of any conditions to or changes in procedure subsequent to this review. In undertaking the execution of the protocol, the investigator(s) further agree(s) to abide by all CMU research policies including, but not limited to the policies on responsible conduct of research and conflict of interest. Sincerely,

Anita Woolley, Ph.D., IRB Interim Chair

246

人文研究伦理审查批准书 Ethical Approval for Research with Human Subjects

本研究实践方案经过本人审查，符合中国伦理审查委员会相关规定，予以通过。该研究方案的相关信息如下: The research protocol listed below has been reviewed and granted approval according to the Chinese Institutional Review System regulations:

课题名称

为可持续共治而设计

Research Title

Designing for More Resilient Urban Commoning Processes

申请人 Applicant

郑纯 Chun Zheng

职称

郑纯 Chun Zheng

职称

课题负责人 Principle Investigator (PI)

Title

卡耐基梅隆大学设计学院博士候选人 PhD Candidate, School of Design, CMU 卡耐基梅隆大学设计学院博士候选人 PhD Candidate, School of Design, CMU

邮箱 Email

czheng1@andrew.cmu.edu

邮箱 Email

czheng1@andrew.cmu.edu

卡耐基梅隆大学设计学院副教授 Peter Scupelli 指导老师

职称

Faculty Advisor

Title Stefan Gruber

申请日期 Application Date

Nierenberg Associate Professor, School of Design, CMU 卡耐基梅隆大学建筑学院副教授 Associate Professor, School of Architecture, CMU

pgs@andrew.cmu.edu 邮箱 Email stefangruber@cmu.edu

2021年2月

计划执行时间

2021年4月–2022年3月

Feb 2021

Period of Study

Apr 2021–Mar 2022

247

Designing for More Resilient Urban Commoning Processes is a study on bottom-up sharing practices of urban spaces and resources. The main research questions in this study are: 1) How participants make decisions in commoning processes? 2) how participants interact with the shared resources and one another and how the interactions ramify? And 3) what are the forces and trends that affect commoning processes as a whole? Urban Commoning refers to a group’s collective process of co-create and co-manage shared urban spaces. Types of urban commoning projects that are involved in this study include community gardens, community farms, self-organized community organizations, cooperative housings, etc. This study explores individuals’ incentives and endeavors of everyday commoning practices and in turn, the experiences of participating in commoning processes’ influence on individuals’ well-being. It also tries to understand the transitional and incremental processes of urban commoning projects and hopes to identify emerging social and spatial patterns. 本研究包括三个主要部分：访谈，空间和活动的照片记录以及焦点小组。参与者都会参加访谈。如果参与者是项目发起人或者管理人，则会协助主要研究人进行空间记录。焦点小组由参与人自己选择是否需要参加。 a) 访谈

研究流程 Study Procedures

访谈将是自由对话的形式。所有讨论都与参与者对其参与的社区共治项目的体验有关。由于新冠疫情，任何涉及人际交流的程序都将通过ZOOM会议或腾讯会议进行。新冠疫情缓和后，采访将在项目现场进行。如果参与者不愿意进行口头访谈，可以用问卷代替访谈。在安排访谈之前，主研究人将询问参与者是否愿意进行小组访谈。当4-5名参与者表示愿意一起进行采访时，将相应安排小组采访。访谈、问卷调查或小组访谈中的主要问题都是相同的。单独采访大概需要30-40分钟。填写问卷需要20-30分钟。4-5人集体采访需要大概40-80分钟。访谈会被语音和视频记录。 b) 活动和空间的照片记录 248

空间和活动的照片文档可让主研究人进一步了解项目的空间和社会方面。带注释的照片可以记录人们彼此之间的互动过程以及共享物质资源的情况。如果主研究人可以实际参观项目现场，将要求参与者为主研究人开门，并允许拍摄其空间和空间中正在进行的活动的照片。所有的照片拍摄会在取得入照的人和场地所有者的同意后进行。主研究人进行详细照片记录需要30-60分钟。在此期间，参与者可不必一直在现场。 c)

焦点小组

研究的最后一部分是对主研究人获得的数据的回顾和反馈。主研究人将向参与者发送邀请以进行小组回顾和反馈，参与者将有机会浏览转录和整理过的资料。4-5 位受访者将一起参加焦点，以充分利用时间。焦点小组会议持续大约40分钟。在会议中，参与者可以查看材料并进一步验证它们。参与者可以提供书面或口头反馈。这一步也确保参与者对主研究人未来对所获取材料的进一步研究和出版物中要共享和引用的所有信息都放心。 The study includes three major parts: interviews, photograph documentation of spaces and activities, and focus group. Participants will all participate in interviews. If the participants are project initiators or managers, they will help the PI with the photograph documentation processes. The focus group sessions are optional. Participants can decide whether they want to join in focus group sessions. a) Interviews

The interview will be a free-flowing interview. All discussions are related to the participants’ own experiences with the associated project. Due to COVID-19 circumstances, any procedures that involve interpersonal communications will be conducted via ZOOM or Tencent VooV Meeting. When the pandemic situation is eased, interviews will take place on the project sites. The interview can be replaced by a questionnaire if the participant prefers not to conduct the oral interview. The PI will ask the participant if a group interview is acceptable before scheduling the interview. When 4-5 participants express their willingness to do the interview together, a group interview will be planned accordingly. The main topics in interviews, questionnaires, or group interviews will remain the same. The individual interview will last around 30-40 minutes. Filling out the questionnaire with equivalent content will take 20-30 minutes. A group interview of 4-5 participants will last 40-80 minutes. For all interviews, both audio and video recordings will be made for the PI to transcribe and revisit. b) Photograph documentation of spaces and activities

Photograph documentation of spaces and activities allows the PI to take a close look at the spatial and social aspects of the project. Once the PI can physically visit the project site, the participant will be asked to open doors and allow the PI to take photos of the spaces and ongoing activities in the spaces. Only participants in the study who 249

previously consented and provided the accompanying consent form will appear in the photos. The photograph documentation process will take 30-60 minutes so that the PI can take detailed measurements and notes. Participants will be present when the PI conducts this documentation process. c)

Focus group

The last part of the study is a review and feedback on the data that the PI has obtained. The PI will send an invitation to the participants for a focus group session where the participant has the opportunity to look through transcribed and synthesized documentation materials. 4-5 interviewees will join the group feedback session together to take the best advantage of time. A focus group session lasts around 40 minutes. In the session, the participant can review materials and further validate them. Either written or oral feedback is welcomed. This last step also ensures that the participant is comfortable with all the information to be shared and referred to in the PI’s future study and publications. 研究对象 Participation Requirements

有社区参与经验的年满18周岁的成年人 Adults (Age 18+) with community engagement experience 参加这项研究的风险很小。只有轻微的信息泄漏的风险。在这项研究中，参与者可能会遇到的不适感不会超过在日常生活中或正常对话中所遇到的不适感，其中可能包括无聊，困惑或犹豫。研究人员将采取一切措施来保护所有个人数据，并积极创建一个舒适的、积极的对话环境。为了保护机密性，请不要在面谈和调查期间说出任何关于你自己或他人的可识别且私密的内容。

危险 Risks

补偿 Compensations

There is a minimal risk of participating in this study. There is a slight risk of breach of confidentially associated with participation in the study. The discomforts participants might encounter in this study are no greater than those ordinarily encountered in daily life or during normal conversations, which may include boredom, confusion, or hesitation. The researcher will take every precaution to protect all personal data, and actively create a comfortable and engaging conversational environment. To protect confidentiality, participants won’t be guided to say anything that is identifiable or private about themselves or others during the interviews and surveys. 参与这项研究不会对参与者产生费用，也没有对参与者有金钱上的补偿。所有参与都是完全自愿的。 There will be no cost or compensation to participants for their participation in this study. All participation is completely voluntary.

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在与会人员的允许下，采访将被录制下来，以便研究人日后转录和回看。在现场拍摄或由参与者发送的照片上如有身份信息，将被模糊处理，除非参与者同意将照片公开。为了保密，数据和同意书将分开保存。对数据，录音录像和同意书的访问将受到密码的限制，该密码仅主研究人和首页列出的导师所有。与参与者的全名或个人联系方式有关的内容都将后期编辑模糊。在同意书中出现参与者的姓名，地址，联系信息和其他直接个人标识符，在出版物或研究数据日后的发表中均不会提及。另外请注意，根据规定，所有研究数据至少被保留三年。保密性 Confidentiality

With participants’ permission, the interviews and workshops will be audio and video recorded in order to be transcribed and revisited. Photos taken on-site or sent by the participant will be de-identified, unless the participant agrees the photos to be made public. To maintain confidentiality, the study data and consent form will be kept separate. The access to the data, the recordings and the consent form will be limited by passwords that are only available to the Principal Investigator and the listed-above PhD advisory committee members of the PI. All references to participants’ full name or contact information will be removed from the transcripts and recordings of the session. Any name, address, contact information and other direct personal identifiers will not be mentioned in any such publication or dissemination of the research data. Note that per regulation, all research data must be kept for a minimum of three years. 参与者的参与是自愿的。参与者随时可以停止参与。拒绝参加或撤回参与者的同意书或中止参与研究不会导致参与者受到任何惩罚或利益损失。参与者也有权随时要求从数据库中删除参与者的数据。

参与者权利 Participant Rights

如果参与者对此研究有任何疑问，请立即向主研究人提出。如果参与者以后有疑问，需要更多信息或希望退出本次研究，请按照本同意书首页上列出的联系信息，通过电话或电子邮件与主研究人联系。如果参与者对自己作为研究参与者的权利有疑问；或要投诉本研究，参与者应该与卡内基梅隆大学的研究诚信与规则办公室（ORIC）或机构审查委员会（IRB）联系。电子邮件：rcreducation@andrew.cmu.edu 或 irb-review@andrew.cmu.edu。电话：412-268-7166 或 412-268-5460。 Any participation is voluntary. Participants are free to stop participation at any point. Refusal to participate or withdrawal of the consent or discontinued participation in the study will not result in any penalty or loss of benefits or rights to which the participant might otherwise be entitled. Participants also have the right at any time to have their data removed from the database. If participants have any questions about this study, they should feel free to ask them during the study. If they have questions later, desire additional information, or wish to withdraw the participation, please contact the PI by mail, phone or e-mail in accordance with the contact information listed on the first page of this consent. 251

If participants have questions pertaining to their rights as a research participant; or to report objections to this study, they should contact the Office of Research Integrity and Compliance(ORIC) or Institutional Review Board(IRB) at Carnegie Mellon University. Email: rcr-education@andrew.cmu.edu or irb-review@andrew.cmu.edu. Phone: 412-268-7166 or 412-268-5460. □ P 符合人文实践道德伦理要求，可以进行实践 Meet human subject research ethical requirements, Approval 审查意见 Review Result

□ 调整方案后，重新提交审查 Resubmit after modification □ 不符合人文实践道德伦理要求, 不可以进行实践 Violate human subject research ethical requirements, Rejection

审查人姓名 Print name of the reviewer __________常莹_Dr Ying Chang______________

审查人单位及职称 Affiliation and title _____Assistant Professor, Deputy Programme Director, Department of Urban Planning and Design, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China_________

审查人签名 Reviewer signature

______________

___________________________

日期 Date __________March 14th, 2021________ 252

Design for the Sustainment of Urban Commoning Based on Multi-dimensional Scaling Processes

March 2022 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA