The Commons and Urban Agriculture

Photo of Boston Commons

Desk of Jac Smit
August 21 2008

Prior to the industrial revolution every village town and city had a commons for food production and marketing. In the 21st century the commons is regaining popularity and applications. My personal experience of the spatial commons is the Boston Common and Garden, a both glorious and cordial public space. My second is the Calcutta Maidan, from Hooghly River to the New Market. It incorporates fishing, goat grazing, horse racing, religious festivals and much more.

Urban agriculture exploits the commons more than rural agriculture, and is increasingly doing so, in some places. The best known application is Community and Allotment Gardens. Community or Cooperative aquaculture is significant in ponds, and bays. Less well known is aquaculture in urban waste water lagoons. Community Forest Gardens in Nepal and Kenya are deservedly receiving attention as women’s cooperative ventures. Community irrigation, neighbors deciding who gets how much water when, is well documented in Spain and Taiwan. Urban farmers’ collaboration in production within utility rights-of-way is worldwide and particularly noted in Brazil and the Ivory Coast. In African towns cow share is widespread.

See Jac’s complete article here.

Urban agriculture, commons and commoners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the case of Sudbury, Suffolk

By H. R. FRENCH
British Agricultural History Review
Volume 48 Part II 2000 pp. 171-99

Abstract Urban agriculture and town commons have been largely overlooked in the existing literature, and have never been systematically surveyed. This study lays out a typology of urban commons, citing examples from across the country. It focuses on the uses and users of one urban common, in the cloth-producing town of Sudbury, Suffolk, between 17m-28. It details the occupational profile of commoners, distinguishes differences in their use of the commons, and compares them with those freemen who did not common animals. The study explores corporate management of this resource, in response to economic uncertainty, and in the context of wider urban agriculture. It concludes that the importance of urban agriculture and agrarian resources has been under-estimated, as has their survival and significance into the ‘modern’ period.

Link to complete paper here.

Urban common rights, enclosure and the market: Clitheroe Town Moors, 1764-1802

By H. R, FRENCH
British Agricultural History Review
Volume 51 Part 1 2003
p.40

Abstract
The social and agrarian impact of parliamentary enclosure is again in dispute. However, the effects of enclosure on urban agriculture and commons have yet to be examined. This detailed case study of the small borough of Clitheroe, Lancashire, examines the usage and the social profile of users between 1764 and 1779. It also depicts the local enclosure process, and argues that little redistribution of land or extinction of rights occurred. Access rights and stints had been subverted before enclosure by the creation of a ‘market’ in entitlements that reflected the distribution of property and resources in commercial agriculture beyond the commons. Urban sources provide unique detail to illustrate how fundamental change could occur in the management of commons before their abolition by enclosure.

Link to complete paper here.