The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach
The book reconceptualizes the field of urban sociology through a critique of the literature of urban sociology (and urbanization) and an attempt to lay the Marxist bases for a reconstructed urban sociology.
Performing the common city: On the crossroads of arts, politics and public life
Pascal Gielen, art theoretician from Belgium, writes about the contemporary city, its shift from the space for the bourgeois class to the current trend of privatisation of public spaces and the role of arts in these processes. His analysis is based on theories and practices of Haussmann, Michel de Certeau, Chantal Mouffe, Saskia Sassen and others, while going through different conceptions of the city as the common space: from Haussmann's urban structure in 18th century to Florida's creative city to the common city.
Taken literarly
The authors revisit the evolution of regulation of ownership in the field of intellectual production and housing as two examples of the historical dead-end in which we find ourselves.
Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)
The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved.
The Role of the State in Governing the Commons
In Ostrom’s central concept of polycentrism, local decision making groups must often be ‘‘nested’’ within state structures at a higher level, so that the higher structures can provide the coercion and other resources that make local negotiation efficient.
Think like a commoner
The book explains how the commons: is an exploding field of DIY innovation ranging from Wikipedia and seed-sharing to community forests and collaborative consumption, and beyond; challenges the standard narrative of market economics by explaining how cooperation generates significant value and human fulfillment; and provides a framework of law and social action that can help us move beyond the pathologies of neoliberal capitalism.