The Urban Commons in India - Transformations in Norms, Imaginations and Practice

More than half of the world’s population currently lives in cities – this proportion is expected to rise to 2/3rds by 2050. We can no longer think of commons as exclusively concomitant with rural landscapes. Urban commons are gaining increasing prominence in research, policy and practice, as cities struggle to come to grips with changing social and natural environments. The rapid growth of many cities across the world has placed incredible pressure on their ecosystems and environment, leading to the degradation, decay and disappearance of forests, lakes and rivers, grasslands, even wooded streets from most cities. Yet these ecosystems constitute essential urban commons, important for the survival and resilience of cities as well as their people. The tale of urban commons is not only a lament for commons lost however – it is also a song of promise about commons found, claimed, and reshaped. Citizen groups across the world have begun to form commons associations focused on a range of issues. While doing so, they encounter challenges very different from the rural commons landscapes. Little researched, the topic of urban commons demands much greater research attention. Based on long term research in the fast growing city of Bangalore, India, this talk describes what we know about the new urban commons in the global South. Drawing from our diverse experiences as researchers, educators and commoners, we describe the transformations in norms, imaginations and practice that underpin the birth, growth and reproduction of the new urban commons.