Abstract
Commons, collective action and practices, shared rules and models of organizing to take care of the elements of a region and the community are often overlooked by the capitalist and extractivist economic doctrine on regional development. Commons are often invisible economic practices, which cannot be accounted for in the current performance indicators of development, such as the GDP. Current economic recession, inequitable revenues and resource sharing, unfair organization of work, destruction of ecosystems, anthropogenic climate change, made even more explicit by the current Covid-19 pandemics, pave the way for the need for new frameworks for imagining and building the future of regions of the world. Commons are one of the possible frameworks available to transform the habitats and the future of regions into more sustainable, equitable and resilient ones.
Commons can be defined as a collective response to shared needs and desires expressed by a community. Practices that promote more inclusive habitats and communities, which self-regenerates and takes care of their own territory and landscapes, made of people, other human beings, resources, spaces, goods and services for the community. This concept might refer to different fields such as local economy, landscape, architecture, environmental design, social sciences and be connected to topics like community, habitat, spatial, social, cultural and natural resources, built heritage, just to mention a few. Research has been conducted on the relevance of the commons for societies and economies of rural areas, from different perspectives and using different approaches and concepts. For this reason, there is the need to link and create synergies among the various academic fields and the non-academic and practitioner world, to enable a concerted recognition of the commons for the present and the future of rural and mountain regions.
With this paper and the methodology adopted in the research activities, we aim to raise imaginaries on how commons enable desirables and equitable presents and futures in rural areas. We have adopted a research by design, interdisciplinary approach, based on the engagement of collective action groups in the conceptualization, design and organisation of the first Rural Commons Festival and a literature review, which together contribute to pave the way towards a Manifesto for the Rural Commons. What are emerging commoning practices in such regions? What are resources, ideas, needs, services and goods that should be taken care of through the commons? Which pillars and values should commons be based on, in order to contribute to such vision?
With this paper we aim to contribute to the common scholarship with new methods and a new interdisciplinary and explorative approach, based on the engagement and co-design with community groups, and a transmission approach to commons thanks to the adoption of two tools: the festival and the manifesto. We also aim to contribute with a specific framework, definition and exploration of cases/examples in rural and mountain regions.