Sheila Foster penned an op-ed in The Huffington Post’s World Post on Pope Francis and the urban commons.
On his first visit to the United States, Pope Francis curiously chose to spend his time in three of our largest cities–New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. As a Pope deeply concerned with social and economic inequality, perhaps this was no coincidence. The most populous cities in the United States have the highest levels of income inequality in the country and this inequality will only get worse as more and more of the population move into cities, as is the current trend. In fact, according to a report released earlier this month by the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, the three cities visited by the Pope are among those with the highest level of wage inequality.
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The claiming of land, buildings, homes, and other urban infrastructure as essentially a “common good” is a direct response to the displacement of long term tenants, small businesses, community gardens, and significant cultural and social institutions brought about by the confluence of the economic downturn and profit-maximizing development decisions. The growing global movement for the urban commons begs the following questions. How do we maintain the dynamism of cities, allow them to grow and change, while not degrading or destroying those goods and resources vital to the ability of different classes and types of people to live and thrive in cities? How do we allocate the finite resources of cities so that a variety of users and uses have access to them and can share them?
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If cities are the places where most of the world’s population will be living in the next century, as is predicted, then we will need a different framework for developing cities that are both revitalized and inclusive. The urban commons framework recognizes that there are resources in cities in which residents have a common stake and that decisions about those resources should not be left solely in the hands of local governments, whose tendency is to accommodate the preferences of powerful economic interests in development decisions. This is not just about claiming and protecting common goods, but about securing our common future in a rapidly urbanizing world.