Our interest in this issue is what it means to call a space “public” and how can actual communities determine how a place is used. “Public” space is never a collectively determined space. It is better thought of as a space available for trivial social activities (strolling, bench sitting, and people watching). But what does it mean when people wish to determine how they are part of the world? The concepts of public and private fall short here. We would like to suggest that we need to re-engage with the idea of the commons. While the commons is well understood in a classical sense of the old village commons, or in the sense of big shared resources, how does a place become a commons? What is most interesting is that a commons is not what pre-exists — but it is what is made. People negotiate commons into being. And in reality it is more than people who negotiate a commons into being — other species are always involved… For us the question is simple: how does Central Park (or Zucotti Park) become an emergent multi-species commons? Perhaps this begins less by protest and more by an interspecies curiosity and meeting?

Let us forage a commons into being!

Others far out to sea as part of investigations:

For a season we ran a series of three pop-up restaurants (before the term existed!) These were astonishing sites of experimentation into ways of cooking (algorithmic meals), foraging + gleaning, food politics, community production, and the commons:

Cooking has also been part of classes and workshops. (We even where in Italy to “teach Italians how to cook”).

Recently we where up in Nome looking at hunting, foodways and the commons. (We made a little restaurant as a headquarters for this):

And quite often food is simply part of the pleasure of life that surronds projects:

So — here’s to adventures in food, cooking, foraging, gleaning and the commons — please drop us a line in 2012!

Also join spurse for a discussion of their work and methods over a drink on feb. 10th. For more information please follow this link.

Hunt Point Fieldwork

Oyster Politics

NJ Meadowlands

1. Whose Cosmos

2. Development and Equity?

3. Critique and Becoming?

Foraging at the Hunts Point Food Market

ON FORAGING:

As part of our Live Feeds program we have been doing quite a bit of foraging, collecting all sorts of green leafy plants found in unexpected places, from outside the huge transnational food market at Hunts Point in the Bronx to the traffic islands on Houston St. right in front of the Lab. We even picked some catmint for our cat from the Lab’s flower bed! It is summer and the bracing bitterness of dandelion is refreshing…

So why not think about “urban comfort” by connecting our appetites to what is right under our feet? Surely when we think about the massive footprint of our food systems and their toxicity — which produce such global discomfort — the seemingly simple answer would be to bypass all that and just  begin eating  as the urban rabbit does. Nothing could be simpler than foraging. You are walking along and you kneel down to pick a weed. That is it!—nothing more–and of course you can begin to eat as you continue walking…

But what is in this act? Yes, it is a convenient way to get lunch, save money, and it is wonderfully enjoyable. But more than that (and don’t get us wrong, we love this part of picking weeds!) what is going on? We started to investigate this with a group of our citizen researchers as part of our Live Feeds Fieldwork and here is some of what has interested us so much:

You cross a threshold to be of the world.

Think about it: when you pick and eat a weed on the street, you are eating all the nutrients and all the toxins it has absorbed thus far, both healthy and dangerous. Your well-being joins with another creatures well-being and your futures have become interwoven, you with this plant’s but also you with this street and so on. You are no longer able to skip over parts of your environment by choosing where is worth preserving and where is not, where is worth keeping clean and where is not; it is now much more entangled than that. Our carefully cultivated modern sense of mobility and personal freedom from being of our world becomes less tenable.

Could killing and eating something “help” it? Funny, right? What happens when we pick an apple, walk down the street eating the apple and then toss the core into the next lot? Sure, we are littering and need to be fined, but–joking aside–have we not become the propagation system for the apple? in simple terms, its sex organs? its reproductive mechanism?

And who is really “in charge” when we eat the apple in the first place? Us, because we picked the apple? Perhaps our traditional models of understanding who is in charge and how things happen are getting in the way. The apple has developed a storable, durable package of tasty goodness designed to meet our tastes and interests such that it is even ready to travel with us. It has communicated with us in such a manner that causes us to cross a threshold, break the fruit free from the tree, and eat it. Once ingested, it lets bacteria break the whole apple down except for the seed. So in reality it is more the apple that guides us and we that follow. Following this logic back into the deep history of our species you would see that it is more accurate to say that fruits made us (yes, all of us mammals) rather than we who made them.

It all begins with you and a weed sharing a future in eating.

(How does this extend to animals? We will return to this in a future post. It is an important question).

You build a community.

You might be thinking at this point that foraging from your own streets sounds good in theory, but would be quite dangerous in practice. Sadly you would be right. Our streets are toxic to plants, people and many other critters, but in re-linking your future to your local ecosystem’s future you are forming a new multi-species community with shared needs and concerns. Your concern for your own well being is interwoven with those of your ecosystem. What an interesting community it is: not only plants, animals (that includes us), insects, bacteria, but also ideas, habits, practices, environments and objects that are all co-forming and co-shaping it.

How does one recognize the shape and logic of such a community? This is the tricky and interesting thing. It cannot be done by just looking. You have crossed a threshold of action and become of a world by effecting something and that cannot be passive.  A community only recognizes itself when one part requires something of another that involves real change in the state of things. Picking a plant — eating the apple — this is what is critical.

The funny thing is that we are always part of such communities, we’ve just developed complex systems, such as shopping, to ignore their existence. When we shop at a grocery store we hop out of our local environment in preference for an alternative reality–maybe a far off forest that has been cleared for organic lettuce—and our habits of eating and shopping allow our neighborhoods to  become safely worse as we continue to colonize further and further out into our ecosystems.

What if everyone started foraging in the parks and streets? Will nothing be left?  Will our parks will be stripped of every plant, tree and animal? The concern that common areas will be overused by certain individuals is classically called “the tragedy of the commons” but there is quite a bit of research and writing on how this actually rarely happens. (This research can be found if you google “the fallacy of the tragedy of the commons”, or look at the work of people like Elinor Ostrom). Following the logic of the tragedy of the commons which continues to guide top down policies everywhere, NYC Parks Department has recently banned foraging. Thus we are allowed to have public spaces but only if we agree not to be of them and “take only pictures; leave only footprints”. And here we come directly to the questions of the occupy movement and the shocking realization that public space is not a form of space open to community use and decision making. “Public” defines in actuality a very narrow set of limited ways we are allowed to use common space. (More on this below).

We often act in a way that does not understand how we have actually already become or might become a community. For example, when you are out foraging you meet someone who is curious. You explain what you are up to, and so they join in. Now the two of you are negotiating and speculating:  how much should we take? How much does this tree produce? Are there others who rely on this tree? This might not happen directly at first (perhaps you just think these ideas). But at some moment you all become guardians of this tree. If you see someone else picking you start talking with them… Slowly agreements evolve, some unspoken and some more concrete. As well, you will probably find you are not the first to forage and their are already ongoing communities of concern and agreement, even those that link across many species. A shared community is growing that helps prevent over-use, helps each other, and spreads a sense of shared values and conviviality.

You are developing a commons.

Commons are those parts of the world that are either not private, or should not be privatized. We all have some sense of this. The word itself has such a wonderful and direct sensibility: common, commons. What is common? Air and  water are examples of the commons. The use of the word goes back to directly refer to that part of a community that was a shared pasture. Most towns still have something called a “commons” — such as the Boston Commons. Ivan Illich describes the logic of a commons quite beautifully:

People called commons those parts of the environment for which customary law exacted specific forms of community respect. People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households. The customary law which humanized the environment by establishing the commons was usually unwritten. It was unwritten law not only because people did not care to write it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs. The law of the commons regulates the right of way, the right to fish and to hunt, to graze, and to collect wood or medicinal plants in the forest.

An oak tree might be in the commons. Its shade, in summer, is reserved for the shepherd and his flock; its acorns are reserved for the pigs of the neighbouring peasants; its dry branches serve as fuel for the widows of the village; some of its fresh twigs in springtime are cut as ornaments for the church – and at sunset it might be the place for the village assembly. When people spoke about commons… they designated an aspect of the environment that was limited, that was necessary for the community’s survival, that was necessary for different groups in different ways, but which, in a strictly economic sense, was not perceived as scarce.    (Ivan Illich, Silence as a Commons)

The traditional idea of the commons focuses on the pasture, but we, like Illich, are interested in how everything is a type of commons. Putting aside conventional notions that delineate private and public space, let’s look at how we are really part of a shared community whose different peoples and creatures are constantly in a process of negotiation. We can start by picking and eating a weed.

(If you have a moment see our posting on the commons).

You are no longer a consumer.

You do not stop being a consumer by eating a weed on the side of the road, but foraging does come from a very different ethos than the practices of consuming. A weed growing does not have a “purpose” or a “utility” like a set of resources called “food stuffs” that have been cultivated to meet our caloric and nutritional needs. Wild plants growing on the edge of a street probably don’t seem like a resource for us in the same way that a bunch of dandelions at a farmers market or in a megastore do, being positioned in an environment that presents them as resources and products, ready to serve our desires.

We can resist the view that reduces all reality to either resources or waste (a non-resource), and distills our lives down to a reality that is driven by meeting our need for more resources. What then might comfort, beyond a logic of “needs”, “resources” and “waste” and beyond our normal habits as consumers look like? What is comfort that is of the world? These are the questions that are critical for us now.

Petia Morozov of spurse introducing the Live Feeds research program (D. Held Photo)

WEEK THREE — AN UPDATE:

It is already week three of our eleven week research program and we are delighted to report that much has happened. We have had large turnouts of participants for our public sessions. This has been exciting and very productive since our Live Feeds research program works as a type of “crowd sourcing based research” in which we all become citizen researchers, sleuths, speculators and producers. For us it has been wonderfully gratifying to be engaged in collective work beyond podiums and polemics. We would like to extend a big thanks to all of you who have come out and joined the work on concrete issues and the development of new tools, practices, concepts and communities around the question of “confronting comfort”. We really look forward to your continued collaborations to help this research evolve — it cannot happen without you.

Live Feeds week 2 workshop: Beyond Gentrification

What are the outcomes so far?

We get asked this all the time. It is a reasonable question. The honest, simple answer is that there are no big concrete outcomes to report. For us, this is something important and positive. Research is not about quick answers–it is refreshing to avoid sound bites, black and white questions, and the context free simulations that make up so much of our world– and we are striving to make sure Live Feeds does not fall into these traps. We are committed to taking on the question of comfort in a serious and experimental manner and are delighted by the actuality of this work being messy, full of tangents, happy accidents (think of penicillin), frustration, curiosity, wonderment, serious debate and occasional insight.

The philosopher Michel Foucault speaks beautifully of the importance of this seemingly useless state of perplexity and curiosity:

“Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggest something quite different for me. It evokes “care”; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off the familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing… I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means; the desire is there; So what is our problem? Too little: channels of communication that are too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate. We mustn’t adopt a protectionist attitude, to stop “bad” information from invading and stifling the “good”. We must rather increase the possibility for movement backwards and forwards…” We certainly hope that Live Feeds works from this spirit of curiosity and care.

Field Work discussion at the edge of the Hunts Point Fish Market

Are we asking the right questions?

So while we have not solved any of the world’s big problems  – and we are not yet certain we will — things have happened and we will have separate postings on each of these shortly. But in brief: (1) We have developed a great team of collaborators; (2) We have evolved a method/way of working; (3) we have conducted three weeks of research (see below); and (4) most importantly we have evolved a framework of questions and problems.

More about this framework: We knew going into this that we would begin by asking the wrong questions. In “confronting comfort” what are the right questions to ask? And what are the problems worth having? We have come to realize through our collaborations that the framework of “the commons” is key to asking the question “what should comfort ask of us today?”. We have begun to gather some material on this and speculate about this here. We will be saying much more about this soon, but the conceptual logic of the commons is becoming our working framework to “confront comfort”.

Experiments with producing a commons at the Hunts Point Food Market

Mindsets and Frameworks:

For us it is clear (and from discussing this with many of you who have collaborated with us, it seems surprisingly obvious) that our  first-world forms of comfort have come at a huge global cost and are ultimately impossible to universalize without using all of the worlds resources seven times over. Our forms of comfort are an ecological disaster, a human rights issue, and undermine the very possibilities of democracy or justice.  For us, to confront comfort is to confront the need for real forms of change. To begin to recognize real forms of change is to break with deep set habits of thinking, acting and doing. We need to confront ideas of the need for economic growth, global development, and consumer solutions (just to name a few). It is a question of developing new modes of living — from mindset to practices — new forms of joy, wonderment, curiosity and action.  Is economic growth something that is actually good? Is development the framework for global progress? We need to ask these questions — but to do so we need to begin with the premise that our form of comfort “leaves its imprint not only on politics and economics, but on our minds as well”. How do we dig deeply into our mind-set? What does it require for us to change? Is it good enough to speculate about how developers might make low income housing possible? Or about how hi-tech responsive clothing will make our lives easier? Or if the BMW Guggenheim Lab will become a park or a prison in the future? We think not. We are curious about how a worldview (or paradigm) of the commons might allow us to move towards an alternative framework for comfort, well being, justice and our shared urban futures.

Some Research:

Here are some brief notes of the first few weeks of research (look for more detailed posts in the near future — our apologies for being so brief!).

Hugh Carola of the Hackensack Riverkeepers leading a team into the Saw Mill Marsh

1. We have been conducting fieldwork in the NJ Meadowlands (in wonderful collaboration with the Hackensack River Keepers and NJ Meadowland Commission). It is a site where NYC dumped massive amounts of “waste” illegally for over 30 years. What interests us here is how the site has evolved beyond a system that can be understood by our classical ideas of “waste”, “pollution”, “nature”, etc.

As part of our research program we took members of the international press on one of our fieldwork sessions at the Opening of the Lab. This involved boating down the Hackensack River to rethink waste. (We will be doing another fieldwork session on the Hackensack during the last week of August. Please join us).

2. During the first week of our research we began with the seemingly simple question: What is a thing? This led to the development of a set of very useful conceptual tools (and this great skeptical work of journalism).

3. Last week our field work took us to Hunts Point (the worlds largest food market). One of the participants, Gil Lopez, wrote a great report.

As ever we are interested in your feedback and participation, please do not hesitate to email us and join us in this work.

Part of our realization from the first two weeks of research is that the concept of the “commons” is crucial to the process of answering the core question of the Lab, how we confront comfort. Here are some notes on this, with more to come as we continue:

The Lab began with the issues of Global/Local + Gentrification as its conceptual framework for the first three weeks. This is a reasonable place to start, but one that also emerged from a deep set of assumptions that need to be unpacked and scrutinized. How useful are the concepts of global and local? What scales and forms of action are missed by seeing reality at these polemic scales? Does a focus on gentrification overly predetermine our framework for urban change? Does it deal well with the internationally distributed costs of our systems of comfort?

Our first three weeks have been a parallel research that took us in a direction other than focusing directly on gentrification, to research on the developing and testing of possible logics, practices and tools for uncovering, protecting, expanding, and most importantly, producing the commons.

What is the Commons?

This essay offers a good overview of the commons: Defending and Reinventing the Commons. In addition the work of Elinor Ostrom allows us a way to understand how commons and communities can be self organizing in powerful manners: link.

Last week, we conducted a fieldwork session out at Hunts Point to test some our initial, collectively generated ideas of the commons. The field work session was titled Co-opting Place and one of the participants wrote up a good overview of the process: here is a link to this. As part of this field work session we asked our participants and fellow researchers to read this essay by Ivan Illich: Dwelling. It is a wonderful piece of bracing writing that critiques the world of planners and architects. More importantly for us, Illich argues that understanding urban space in public and private terms fails to recognize that lived space is organized around the axis of dwelling + commons instead. It is well worth a read, and our group’s critical engagement with it is helping to shape our next phase of research.

A Multi-Species Commons:

We find that much of the important work on the commons has a very human-centric viewpoint. Commons are not something produced and maintained or invented by just one species (especially not us). Commons are forms of multi-species negotiations, enjoyments and battles. To get a great and pleasurable sense of this it is worth looking at Michael Pollan’s Book: The Botany of Desire or the PBS Documentary by the same name. Here is a review of the book that gives a great sense of his perspective. We are delighted by insights such as this: “Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule,” Pollan writes. ”Without flowers, we would not be.”

Another book that lays out how complex and intertwined our lives are with our fellow creatures is Virginia Anderson’s Creatures of Empire.

We like to push this idea much further: the self is already a muti-species commons. We are not a singular organism. We are actually 90% other creatures by cell count. This matters greatly on so many levels from politics to basic health. (In regards to health take a look at this recent article on cancer. In regards to politics and social action we would suggest the work of Lynn Margulis and Dona Haraway but also this important article on the present status of the individual). Great and potent stuff.

“These shifts in perspective, occurring throughout cellular biology, can seem as dizzying as what happened in cosmology with the discovery that dark matter and dark energy make up most of the universe: Background suddenly becomes foreground and issues once thought settled are up in the air.”

Yes — we still have to figure out what an individual is…

The Commons Must be Made:

It is easy to fall into the trap that the commons is already out there. It is the air around us, and the fields we might have once walked in… The commons is not a set of neutral resources. It is always the actual negotiated dwelling place of creatures and things. It is something that is made. Today we have to both resist the continued privatization of the commons and invent future commons. What does this mean? One of our favorite examples is how a new commons of the street opens up with the invention of skateboarding. Public stairs and handrails emerge redefined through new practices and new tools. The documentary “Dog Town and Z Boys” is an excellent primer in the production of the commons. But so is the evolutionary history of how the wing developed or how the fin became a leg. But this will have to wait for another post on “Exaptation” and the production of the commons…. Emergence, surprise and the commons — delight and wonderment.

Trying to keep it simple, our research curiosity is: perhaps one way to begin the question of the commons is to ask “not what something is, but what can it do”?

As always we would love to hear from you and collaborate with you as part of our Live Feeds Program. Please be in touch.